I raise my head wearily. “What?”
“What really happened between Chelsea and me.”
A chill runs down my spine. “It’s none of my business. All that matters is it’s over.”
“Nothing stays a secret between friends, though, does it?” He starts walking toward me, and I stand instinctively.
“Sure it does. I don’t want to know.”
“Yes, you do. You need to know everything. You always have to be in the center of everything. You’re the hostess.” He says it mockingly. “You make the seating arrangements. The sleeping arrangements. You decide who eats with who. Who talks to who. Who sleeps with who.”
“God, Ryan, stop. I don’t want to know.” I hold my hands up, but he presses forward like some nightmare zombie creature, and I edge backward until I’m up against the side of the boat and he’s pressed against me. I want to scream for Chase, but my voice feels stuck. I’m so thrown off, so taken aback, it feels like the world has turned completely upside down. Ryan is the quiet one. Chelsea’s weird-secret-psychic-bond person. He’s not the one who pushes you against the side of a boat and says creepy things. I have to be misinterpreting this. I have to.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason I get so mad at you is because deep down I’m in love with you?” It’s so cold I start shivering. I shake my head. “Good,” he says. “Because it’s bullshit.” He grins.
I duck under his arm. “You’re an asshole.” I try to gather all my anger, bottle and bury it. We’re not alone out here. Asshole or not, I can’t let my anger put him in danger.
“Now you know how it feels,” he says.
But my head aches and my heart pounds, and the cold is already seeping in.
I turn. “How it feels? You’re a foot taller than I am, and you cornered me in the dark. On a boat. Far from help. Today you’ve slapped Chase, given Mila a bloody nose, and pushed Chelsea into the lake, which she’s terrified of. You have no idea how it feels.”
He nods slowly. “Okay. But Kennedy? I don’t care. Because I don’t like you.”
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. It’s a stunning thing to hear, especially from someone you’ve spent so much time with for so many years. It’s literally breathtaking.
“You play power games,” he goes on. His face is so still, his voice so low and calm. “You control people. It’s all a game to you. Everything is a game. Playing house. Playing friends. Playing life. No consequences for golden boy and gossip girl.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” That shit. That ungrateful shit. The amount of terror and isolation and exhaustion I’ve lived with to protect them. All of them.
But he’s not done. “You always win. I hate that, too. Chelsea—”
“Chelsea isn’t a fluffy toy at a carnival. She’s a person.”
“She sees through you,” he says with a slanted smile. “Sooner or later, she’s going to be gone. Or is she already? It’s hard to tell sometimes. When we were—you know.” He averts his eyes in an unconvincing display of modesty.
I glare at him, blood beginning to pulse loudly, pounding an angry rhythm in my ears. “I told you, it’s none of my business.”
He bites his lip and smiles, gazing up. “I’ll leave it up toyour imagination. She had a lot to say about you. I was pretty shocked when you got back together, I’ll put it that way.”
“Well. Guess you don’t know her very well.” I keep my face placid. Now he looks furious.
“I know her better than you ever will.”
“Excuse me?”
“Why do you think we got together in the first place? Because neither of us could stand the rest of you. On the surface, sure. We’ll always care about each other. But underneath, she resents you every bit as much as I do, because you don’t respect her, you treat her like an outsider, and no one, no one in the world, wants to feel like that. You make Chelsea feel bad about herself. So you can drop the smug true-love act. She may not want me, but you’re bad for her.” He stares at me derisively as my heart goes cold in my chest. The worst words, the ones that cut like knives, are ones dipped in the subtle poison of truth. And I don’t want to believe him, but I can see in his eyes that he believes, and I feel in the pit of my stomach that there might be some truth to it. Do the words we use to describe Chelsea—quirky, random, unique—make her feel less special and more like an outsider? When I say offhand things like her ability to silence a room, does it make her feel like she doesn’t fit in with the rest of us?
“I’m not bad for her,” I whisper. But the squeezing feeling in my chest grows tighter.
“Then why did she come to me when you tossed her aside?”
I try to make sense of what he’s saying. “I didn’t toss her aside. It was complicated.”
Ryan shrugs. “No, it wasn’t. You wanted Chelsea at the lakehouse, in our little world, where everything was under your control. Back at school you had to deal with the real world. Judgment. Reputation. You don’t belong with a Chelsea, do you? You belong with someone like Chase. You can’t tell me that never went through your head. Can you?” His eyes meet mine, and they are so devoid of emotion, I want to smack him in the face. No. That’s too little. Child’s play.
“I don’t give a shit what people think.”