Page 57

“You saw Landry tonight? At poker?”

Franny nodded again.

Jade’s face looked like it was about to crumple all over again. Then she seemed to stop herself, pushing some of the flyaways off her forehead before dragging her hands down her face. She stood up and strode out of the room, making sure to take Franny by the arm and drag her behind.

“Um, thank you for having me,” Franny called out to Jade’s parents just before she disappeared around the corner.

She was silent as Jade led her through a door and then down a flight of stairs into a basement that looked nicer and more outfitted than her own apartment. Pulling a set of sliding doors open, Jade took them across a path of big, flat stones set in mulch. In the huge backyard, nestled into a thatch of greenery, was a tree house. It was built around the wide trunk of a huge willow oak, a canopy of branches and leaves almost hiding the little wooden box from the rest of the world.

“Up,” Jade said simply, finally—regretfully—letting go of her forearm.

“Okay.” Franny’s tone was skeptical, but she gave a quick smile. “Just don’t look at my ass.”

It was cooler than normal for late July, though still hot, and while it wasn’t humid, the air felt like it was on fire.

Franny ascended the ladder carefully, opening the door to the little house to see a silvery string dangling above her. She pulled it, letting the small bulb filter light through the space. It was very rugged inside, nothing fancy, but there were a couple of beanbag chairs, a plush rug, and a bunch of books and magazines, even a little table. She would have killed for something like this as a kid.

“So this is what being an only child gets you, huh?” she said when she heard Jade close the door behind her.

“I built it with my granddaddy when I was a kid,” Jade said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I needed space for my little plots and schemes.”

Franny looked over at her and smiled, relief flooding her stomach when Jade smiled back at her—small as it was.

“Did you come here to tell me that Landry is going to let me go?”

“I came to see what’s going on,” Franny said. “I had a little talk with him tonight after the game, and he… he seemed really cut up about something. He wouldn’t tell me the details, but… he was saying some things that concerned me.”

“Some things about me?”

Franny nodded silently.

“And you came here to… what? Rub it in my face now that you’ve got the upper hand?” Jade’s eyes were on the ground, her jaw clenched tightly.

“I’m so sick of this shit, Dunn,” Franny ground out. “You’ve been in some kind of one-sided competition with me all summer.”

“Well, you’ve been playing along.”

“Yeah, because it was the only way to get you to pay any fucking attention to me, dude!”

“Don’t call medude,” Jade grumbled. “And that just… isn’t true.”

Franny shot her a look. “I’m not even convinced that I did anything to make you hate me, and I’ve spent literal days sitting around questioning myself on that. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that you’ve said more to me in the past two months than you have in two years.”

Jade’s dark eyebrows furrowed toward each other, making a deep wrinkle in the space between them. “Why do you care so much about whether I talk to you or not?”

Franny didn’t say anything as she stared the other woman down. Instead, she tried to convey everything with her expression. The exasperation, the frustration, the sheer fucking want.

Jade met her eyes for a few moments. It was the longest eye contact they’d ever maintained, even longer than when they’d fucked in the bathroom at the club. Franny’s insides twisted, her guts roiling like she’d eaten something spoiled. She felt afraid of the consequences of what she had just admitted, even if she couldn’t say it out loud yet. Largely because she felt no confidence that her feelings would be reciprocated.

With a heavy sigh, Jade practically threw herself down onto one of the beanbag chairs. “I have so many things inside me, Francesca.”

The sound of her full given name leaving the other woman’s lips made Franny shiver. Jade almost never used it. She could only recall her saying it in times like this, when they found themselves swept up in passion. In those moments, it felt like Jade forgot to keep up the walls that allowed her to at least pretend to hold Franny at arm’s length.

“I know everybody else does too,” Jade said. She sucked her bottomlip into her mouth for a moment before releasing it. “But my whole life, I’ve just felt this… pressure. It’s like there’s something sitting on my chest that won’t move. The only time I get relief is when something big happens and I feel like I’mnotfucking everything up. And right now, I know that I have definitely fucked everything up.”

Franny’s heart sank. To her, Jade went through it all so effortlessly. From the way her ponytail swung when she walked across the field to how she wrangled her students in during fire drills. There wasn’t a single part of her that seemed anything less than perfectly put together. Always. She should have known, though. Those kinds of people always seemed to have something simmering under the surface. A jitteriness, an anxiety that came inherently with desperately having something to prove, even if only to themselves.

“I don’t think you’ve fucked everything up,” Franny said, moving to sit in the big red beanbag next to Jade. Her lower back and knees immediately protested. “Landry was, well, definitely not happy about whatever it is you did, but I tried to talk him down.”