Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye

Chapter 20

Dallas’sback yard is completely inaccessible except through the kitchen. Short of scaling the fence, I have to leave through the house.

I try to keep my head down, but instinct overrides and my gaze darts through the crowd as I move through the party.

“You’re a fuckin’ showoff, dude,” I hear someone laugh over the rest of the noise, and only then do I realize the music isn’t coming from the sound system, but from the piano in the corner of the living room.

Gunnar is playing one-handed, a huge smile on his face. And Aurelia sideways in his lap. She squeals when he leans over to reach the final high note, lifting her off her feet.

As the final note dies down, people laugh and cheer, and Aurelia tilts her head back, smiling, expectant. To my absolute horror, Gunnar meets her pouty lips with his own, already parted. I am frozen to the spot, watching them kiss, my hand pressed to my chest like the pain is physical.

She nudges his nose with hers, saying something with a smile. She bites her lip, then turns and looks right at me. And her face falls into an expression of disgust.

“What the fuck are you doing here, whore?”

It’s nice to know they have so many words to choose from when it comes to me.

I’m about to say something dismissive, probably smart, maybe even cutting, when ripples of shrieking laughter move through the party to the right.

I haven’t seen Ulla since I moved away to talk to Emile, and now I think I know why …

Logan tears through the crowd wearing nothing but a baseball cap, barking at people to move. His hands are over his crotch, and he’s sidling by. “Dallas,” he yells. “Get me some pants and get the fucking bedroom door unlocked.” People are still screaming with laughter. I cover my mouth with my hands, grateful for the interruption and feeling a rush of laughter threaten to bubble up.

I can’t believe she actually did it.

I don’t want all her hard work to go to waste, I decide, so I grab my new old phone from my purse and hit record. The quality isn’t great, but it works. “Logan Wright thought he was getting lucky,” I say dramatically, “but what girl in her right mind would want to sleep with him?” I catch a great shot of him seething, shoving his way through the crowd, knocking a short girl into the wall and spilling her drink.

There’s no way I’m not uploading this and tagging him later. Screw him.

Aurelia bumps me as soon as I shut my purse again. “Nobody wants you here,” she yells. Then, “Oops.” She slops white wine onto my shoes.

“I’m leaving,” I say, shaking one feet and then the other. I feel pretty bad for Dallas having to clean up this mess, but he does probably have a cleaner. “I don’t feel like being a cameo in another episode of your descent into evil.” I try to move past her. I really don’t feel like a confrontation with them right now. With that five-second footage of Logan, I feel like I have a little upper hand on them, and I want to keep it.

I also feel a lot like my insides were filled with heavy stones after my conversation outside.

Cole was broke. Gunnar probably knew all about it. If Cole wasn’t going to be able to head to college after all, I don’t know what he’d do. That was his whole plan. His only plan.

My hands are shaking. I clench them into fists and turn around, almost colliding with someone.

“Wait,” Ulla says, brushing her hands through her hair and resting her hand on my shoulder. Her lipstick is smudged, and she looks mad. Not at me. “Don’t you want to stay, and dance? These people like you. They want you here.” I am about to protest, but she points past me at the group. “Not them, but they are the minority. Don’t let them control you.”

She isn’t keeping her volume down, probably on purpose, and Gunnar stands up from the piano and steps out from behind it, shoving his hands in his pockets. He looks over us at the rest of the crowd, his expression tight — I bet that scene Logan just made pissed him off. It was weakness, and this is turning into a war. But then his eyes land on me. “People used to want her around, sure,” he says. “Not anymore.”

Ulla nudges me. “Tell him off,” she says. “Tell everyone about his tiny prick.” I bite my lip, and turn to Gunnar. I used to tell him off all the time, but it was friendly. I’d tell him he upset a girl without realizing, or he was being too loud. Bulldozing and controlling every situation. He’d always listen. This is different.

“What if I do stay?” I ask him. I’m aware the entire party is watching this unfold. I’d bet most people here know most of the story, even if much of it isn’t true. “What will you do to me? Break my stuff? Ruin my clothes? Burn my books? Leave me trapped somewhere? You’ve already done all that, and I’m still here.” I look right into his angry, beautiful eyes. “Just leave me alone if you hate me.”

His eyes narrow to slits. “I wish it was that simple, Andie,” he starts. “You need to leave this party right the fuck now, or—”

“Or what, asshole?” Hero yells, to my unending surprise. Someone in the crowd whistles. Gunnar isn’t put off for a second, though, like Logan might have been.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks, drilling his gaze right into Hero’s. There’s some unidentifiable power in his cruel tone, just a handful of words that effectively wring any confidence from her. She takes a step back as if willed to, blushing crimson, and I feel the sympathy in my gut. Alcohol and Ulla empowered her, and that was awesome. Then Gunnar stomped it right out of her again. He turns back to me.

“You might feel good about yourself, with your new shitty haircut and slutty dress, but this isn’t a movie, Andie. You don’t get to do what you did, then get a makeover and suddenly everything goes your way again.” He rears back and takes in the faces of everyone around him before he comes at me again. “No matter what shit you cake onto your face, by the way, you’re still a five.”

A few people laugh. Someone howls as if in pain. It’s petty, but it kind of tears a hole inside me. I just let my gaze drift past him, trying to look like that didn’t hurt me. I think my casual reaction works to annoy him, somehow, because I see the muscles tensing in his neck. The one thing he really, really hates is feeling powerless, ignored.

The biggest weapon in my arsenal is that he knows I know him. Every weak moment, every fear, every regret. The only way I could possibly ever hurt Gunnar Rayne is by making him think I think he’s nothing. The only person who ever really saw him.

“Make her go awayyyy,” Aurelia whines, rushing into his arms. Half of me waits to see a look of disgust on Gunnar’s face, but he catches her and holds her tight.

“Every day you stay in our lives is another day we will never get back,” he says to me.

He’s so calm. His jaw is set. His eyes are unblinking. He doesn’t well up with tears when he’s angry. He used to tease me for that. He used to hold me until it passed.

“Just do everyone a fucking favor and stop trying to subject us to whatever stage of loving and forgiving yourself comes next, because we don’t want to be a part of it. Get out of here.”

I really wish I could, but I can’t. It’s either because I’m rooted to the spot with something horribly like fear, or because I don’t want him to win. I think it’s both.

Everybody in the room is fully silent, watching him. He is magnetic. Charismatic. He always has been good at speeches. I just always thought he’d use that power for good.

“You can’t make her leave, Rayne,” someone pipes up, and just that simple sentence from some unknown source reminds me to breathe, and I start to regain control of my limbs. It’s kind of a bizarre occurrence. Usually people, well, just do what he says.

It’s as if, somehow, my defiance, my dissent, is forming a crack in the status quo.

“She brought so much beer, man, don’t be a—” Someone else starts to speak, but Gunnar turns his laser gaze on them, and they stop short of insulting him. Gunnar’s grip on Aurelia’s shoulder is white, and she mouths a noise of pain and squirms from his hold. He doesn’t even seem to notice.

“She brought Chris fucking Barkley, too,” Gunnar points out. “Don’t you think that’s a little crass, even for you?” There’s so much vitriol, in his face, in his words. For a moment he doesn’t even look like himself.

“Nothing happened,” I say, but no real noise comes out.

“What?” He cups his ear like an asshole.

“Nothing happened with Barkley,” I say again.

His face slackens with something a lot like disappointment. “Andie, you were seen,” he says clearly.

This is absolutely news to me.

“No, I wasn’t,” I start to say. How could I have been seen when I didn’t do it?

Why would somebody say they saw it? Saw what? Saw me riding Chris Barkley’s dick in some dark room of an abandoned warehouse? I know we weren’t even in a misleadingly compromising position. We were talking.

Who, and why?

“She said nothing happened, and nothing fucking happened,” Barkley’s voice booms through the room. “Lay off Andie. She’s a good person.”

Gunnar changes. There’s no other way to describe it. His chest is suddenly rising and falling. He’s clenching and unclenching his fists. His nostrils flare. “You—”

“Just cool it, Prez,” Dallas intervenes. “You’re kinda throwing off the vibe by like a bunch. And Andie’s been chill.”

“Yeah,” a voice I recognize as Emile’s pipes up. I let myself smile.

Gunnar points at me. “You really gotta go,” he says, but it’s almost different. For a second, it’s not a threat so much as it is a warning. Whatever it is, his veneer is cracking.

I remember the kiss, then. I remember that I can get to him. I throw him my best smile, and he noticeably bristles. He has no idea what to do when he doesn’t get his way. I don’t know if it has ever happened before.

“She’s staying, fatherfucker,” Ulla says, and guides me away from him with her hand on the small of my back. She leans in closer to me. “You didn’t really tell him off. But better than running, huh?”

I’m not so sure.

But Emile brings me a drink. Barkley stays close. And when the music starts up again, even though I can see Gunnar staring daggers at me plain as day, I start to dance.