Page 40 of Scarred Crown

“We did it together, yeah. There’s a difference between getting my best friend’s help and pinpointing the top judge’s weak spot.”

“Just means I’m smart—smarter than you,” Alex says, and he rises from his seat at the table to peer out one of the windows. “Jules is very helpful, isn’t she? Full of good ideas.”

“She’s clever, yes.” I’m not telling him she called Africa a country. One, rather large, slip doesn’t change her level of intelligence.

“Maybe someday she’ll take on some sort of position of authority on the island,” Alex muses.

If he’s hinting I might marry her, for once, he’s not barking up the wrong tree. When we’re thirty, if we’re both single, I’ll shoot my shot. That’s like fourteen years from now.

Fourteen years.

Can I hold out that long before I do something dumb?

###

It’s late when I get to Jules’s house, but I’ve been driving around the island solo on my bike for a while. We put so much work into the pitch that I don’t want to tell her we didn’t get it.

I park my bike just inside the gates after punching in the code and then I text her to meet me out back. Their patio furniture is actually more comfortable than ours, and I slouch into the couch and wait for her to appear.

The door creeks open behind me, and Jules plops onto the couch beside me. “You’re not happy, so I’m guessing Brice squeaked out a win?”

“Brice wanted to build a casino in Haiti.”

“Seems fitting, actually.” Julia laughs.

“I lost,” I say. “Or rather, we lost.”

“To Alex?”

I purse my lips and glance at her. “Who else? It’s always Alex. There was never any point in putting in all that work because I could have passed them the most brilliant plan ever, and they still would have listened harder, tried more to see Alex’s idea as having merit.”

“What was Alex’s idea?”

“Accessible housing for disabled vets on the island.”

Jules sucks in a breath. “There are only twenty vets in Bellerive who qualify.”

“Exactly!” I throw up my hands. “Local though. And military. There was no way my parents or my grandmother would reject it in favor of ours.”

We sit shoulder to shoulder in silence for a few moments, and I wonder if she’s as disappointed as I am.

“Brotherhood doesn’t have to be a competition, you know,” she says quietly, surprising me.

“Everything with Alex is a competition. Always has been.”

“Do you honestly think he feels that way?”

I rub my face and turn to her. “Yeah, I do. You know I do.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while and then she bumps my shoulder. “Someday, you and I’ll do our Tanzania school project, and it’ll be the best fucking thing the Bellerive Royals have ever done.”

I stretch my arm around her shoulder and draw her against my chest. She sinks into me, and the loss to Alex doesn’t feel quite so terrible. What’s he doing right now? Not this. He doesn’t have a Jules to lick his wounds, to make everything else in the world seem not so bad.

After I release a deep sigh, I say, “At least I’ve got you. No matter what, I know you’re always on my side.”

Julia

The crater is the stuff dreams are made of. Lush green grasses spread out between steep edges. On the way down, we stopped at a lookout, and the view took my breath away. Nick kept examining me as though he could crawl into my mind and reexperience the wonder of this place a second time. When I gave him a wry grin, he pretended he wasn’t staring. Can’t fool me. Though why he’s sometimes so focused on me and other times so… I don’t even know what, is a mystery.