“You have my whole life written down in black and white right in front of you.”
“It doesn’t tell me anything about what’s going on in that pretty little head of yours. Did you think you’d hook up with the playboy Beau Rochester and get your picture in the tabloids? Precious little of that here in Eben Cape.”
My pulse speeds up. “What are you talking about?”
“Are you really saying you’ve never seen me on the news before?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you want to look in those pages so badly, look at my course load. All AP classes. Look at my hours at the diner and then at the grocery store. When would I have time to look up news articles about some random guy in Maine?”
He gives me a cynical smile, though I sense the derision is directed more at himself. “I didn’t always hide in the corner of the country. At one time I made more money than one man can ever spend in a lifetime—but I sure did try.”
“Doing what?” A memory of the drive up the mountain slams into me like a gust of wind. I remember seeing the wild sea. “Fishing?”
A bark of laughter. “You really have never heard of me.”
“Who are you?”
“Nobody. Absolutely fucking nobody.”
I glare at him. “Don’t mock me.”
He smiles. “I created a company. I didn’t really give a flying shit about shipping, but I saw there was an opening. It’s basically an Uber for commercial purposes. I didn’t care; just wanted the money. And I made it. That’s the dream, isn’t it? Make billions. Show the cheerleader back in high school that she missed out by not sucking my dick.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“If you think every man who tries to get rich doesn’t think about that, you’re fooling yourself. And I’m sure more than one man has imagined you that way.”
“I was no cheerleader.”
“No, but every boy who saw those lips thought the same thing that I do. You probably scurried through the high school halls, your books pressed to your chest to try to hide the fact that you were becoming a woman, but they could tell anyway, couldn’t they?”
I shift to stand up, but he’s somehow already in front of me. He looks down at me from above. I can’t see his expression. The firelight draws him in deep charcoal. My heart beats faster. I should be afraid of the way he’s standing over me, afraid of the way he’s blocking my only exit. Other men have done this. Other men have hurt me. I don’t want him to hurt me, but I want him to touch me. It’s a strange sensation. Something about hearing him say the word woman in relation to my body. I’m not a woman, not really. I’m something before that. A bud all tight and green and white, only the faintest hint of pink at the tip. That’s me. And he’s the heat from the sun, drawing me open. I look up at him, waiting to see what he’ll do next.
And what he does is run a finger across my jaw.
I shiver in the warm room.
It’s such a soft touch. A cannonball across the boundaries of what’s allowed between an employer and his employee, between the man of the house and the nanny. I hold my breath, waiting for him to tell me what to do. That seems like the real reward of this man, the upside of dealing with his meanness, that he will tell me what to do. Not like Noah, who looks and looks and looks. He wants me, but he doesn’t know any more than I do.
Mr. Rochester touches lightly along my shoulder. He reaches down to pick up my two hands, palms up. They look dark and gruesome in the firelight. The bleeding stopped after my shower, but the scabs look ugly. “These must hurt,” he murmurs.
“I don’t feel them,” I whisper. All I can feel is his hands holding mine from beneath.
“Because you’re hurting. Isn’t that right? You’re beyond hurting. You’re numb with it.”
That’s what I told him earlier. When you’re grieving like that, you can’t feel physical pain the same way. And it’s true. For years I’ve lived in this ice-cold space. He’s the only person who makes me feel anything. I want more of it even as I shrink away.
He lets my hands drop to my lap and walks out of the room.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My relationship with Paige Rochester blossoms after the day in the tree. We still spend most of our time playing with the kitten or playing Monopoly, but she’s way more willing to share her thoughts with me. She chatters endlessly about the characters in her game and makes up little songs about the kitten, who still goes by the name Kitten.
On a day when the weather is clear, we take a long hike down to the nearby beachfront shops in Newport, where we explore a coffee shop that sells empanadas in their bakery case, a fancy chocolatier with truffles shaped like little animals, and a toy store with an elaborate paper origami dinosaur flying beneath the sign.