Page 21 of Puck Me Twice Over

As I entered the long walk, the frames glinted. Huh. Knox hadn't let the place go to ruin, unlike the outside had appeared. Though that wasn’t entirely fair, seeing as how pretty the house appeared once the lights went on. Maybe it was simply my frame of mind tonight, after everything that had happened. But I was determined to push Garrett from my mind. Not when I was here with Knox, and all the memories that came with this place.

Shaking off the sensation of Garrett’s claustrophobia that came on whenever he was around—so much more obvious now there was distance between us, thankfully—I refocused on my goal. There. A door at the end of the hallway, to the right. An unlit door, naturally. Knox wouldn’t make this easy on me.

I resisted the urge to check over my shoulder, knowing he would give chase at some point. It had always been our favorite game, after all. I’d seek something and so would he⁠—

Me.

The slightest smile curved my lips as I traipsed the length of the portrait gallery. My finger tips trailed beneath the frames, not a skerrick of dust to be found. I glanced sideways at the last one, and found myself looking at my own reflection.

A squeal built in my throat, but as I jerked backward, the image in the mirror didn’t move with me at all. No, not a mirror—the last picture in the gallery was of me.

I’ll be… a moment. Tell me what you find.

Knox’s words, the last ones he uttered before I pranced off, blessedly lost in my own ignorance, went unheard. Until now.

The sensation of something horribly wrong brewed in my stomach. I took a step back, my eyes still locked on the woman who looked just like me, who stared back at me. This picture, the painting of me, couldn’t be more than a month old. My hair hadn’t been this long in years, and I bought that knitted sweater last month in a sale that Garrett bitched at me over for a full week until I returned it.

Or rather, I thought I returned the sweater. Because when I came home, it was in the back of my car, and I figured I made a happy mistake. Or that maybe somehow Garrett had forgiven my error in spending money that wasn’t mine to spend that week. Or… Something.

Either way, I kept it and he never said another word. Not that I flaunted the purchase in his face, more that he seemed to forget. Like a lot of things.

Oh, God. So many things.

The bracelet that he broke when he pulled it off my wrist in a fight that I thought was trashed but that I found in my tiny jewelry box a few weeks later. The boots I wanted from a catalogue that I never ordered, but that arrived. I hugged and kissed and gave Garrett make up sex for those. And now…

I blink down at the carpet that those same boots sank into now, knowing he never bought them. He’d seemed surprised and almost indifferent about the sex, robotic with the concept of intimacy as always. For all I knew, the man did accounting in his head while I was faking an orgasm for a man I thought I loved. Who I desperately pretended to love because this was the way a perfect home was supposed to work, because I needed to make our false front of a relationship succeed in the eyes of others.

Because for me it never did and he never seemed to care. As long as I was there.

“What did you do?” I whispered, blinking rapidly at the blurring carpet.

Before I raised my head, I knew. I knew what Knox had done for me all that time, and I knew what I’d find when I looked along the portrait gallery.

Instead of the women of his family, the interactions of mothers and sisters and aunts and grandmothers who I had loved to guess at their lives over decades and centuries of history, when I raised my head, I found a decade instead of my own face.

And one thing stood out.

The girl, right at the end, farthest from where I stood now, she looked… happy.

I knew that girl. She stood as though turned toward someone who wasn’t painted with her. That girl featured in a photo. I kept it in my purse still, right beyond my cards. She stood with a much younger conversion of Knox, before he was drafted for the Chimeras. Before we finished school, before college. When things were…well, not perfect, but back before all the dreams became realities for each of us.

A decisive snort transformed into a hiccup that I concealed poorly behind my hand clamped over my mouth. His dreams and mine took different paths. Some soared while others shattered. I left him to prevent my mundaneness—was that even a word?—from tainting his star, for fucks’ sake. And here we were, bonded together, anyway.

Neither of us could let the other go.

“Ah, you did find it.” The satisfaction that laced through Knox’s voice heated me in ways it shouldn’t. That wasn't the emotion I focused on.

“You utter, pig headed, asshole,” I muttered when he slid his arms around my middle from behind. “You were supposed to find a sweet cheerleader type at college and get married and have perfect babies and a home like this and— and—” I waved my arms and whacked him in the ear by mistake.

“Yeah, thanks,” He rubbed the side of his head while I apologized, still semi-ranting and glowing with embarrassment at the same time. “How much have I freaked you out?”

I stilled in his arms. “A lot?”

Light kisses decorated the curve of my neck, making it impossible to think. “Have you figured it all out yet?”

“Most of it,” I hedged. “I think? The boots, the jewelry, the— Stop that.” I batted at his hands when they wandered to the underside of my breasts, stroking gently. Sensation drifted over me in a series of shivers I couldn’t suppress. “I can’t talk and play,” I complained.

“You aren’t screaming,” he murmured.