Page 113 of The Fine Art of Faking It
“Why can’t we make this work?” he asked.
How could this be happening?They’d united with the express purpose of exacting revenge on the Beautification Committee, not proving those Cupid-complex imbeciles right.
She shook her head. “Look, Davis. It’s nothing personal, but wecan’twork. We’ve got fifty years of bad blood between us.”
“Don’t you think it’s time we put a stop to a half-century of idiocy?” Davis demanded. “How many people have told us how relieved they are that we’ve ‘changed our town’s karma’ by not fighting like our parents and grandparents?”
“That’snota reason to be in a relationship, Davis.”
“Agreed. But to you, it’s a reasonnotto be in one.”
Eden sputtered. She wasn’t prepared to argue this. They’d both known the score. There was no future for them.
“That’s not the only reason. It’s just the obvious one.”
“Fine. What are the less obvious reasons?” he demanded.
Eden was silent for a long minute.
He grabbed her hand, squeezed it. “You feel it. I know you do. We work, Eden.”
She let out a long sigh. “I’m not looking for someone right now.” The words sounded lame.
“You don’t have to be looking to find something,” Davis insisted. “I love being with you. You’re smart. You run a crazy successful business that you’re obsessed with. You’re so beautiful sometimes it hurts my eyes to look at you. You make me laugh. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t wait to talk to you about my day, about your day. We may have started this as a fake relationship, but what we’ve got now is real. And I know you feel it, too.”
Eden squirmed in her seat. “Idohave feelings for you,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I can see us being… friends. But how would us staying together teach the Beautification Committee anything? They’d see it as a victory and just line up the next victims, start their next fire.”
Davis’s jaw clenched and released. “That’s your priority?”
“It’sourpriority! That’s what started this whole thing. I don’t want to quit until we’ve achieved what we set out to do. Teaching them not to meddle in people’s lives. We’re saving an entire town from well-intentioned arson.”
“I get that. Just like I get that you’re looking at this as a way to kind of rewrite your own history.”
“That’snotwhat I’m doing,” she argued.It was exactly what she was doing.But he owed her. Because of him, she’d spent her entire adulthood thus far trying to prove herself to an entire town who was content to think of her as a vindictive teenage arsonist.
It was her turn to have people like her, appreciate her, believe in her. And if that was selfish of her, then so what?
“Eden, who really wins in that scenario? I still won’t have my house rebuilt. You’ll be a victim in the eyes of the whole town. And the Beautification Committee will implode after one blemish on their record. But, if we give us a real shot, don’t we both win? We have something here.” He lifted her hand to his mouth, kissed her knuckles.
“You haven’t thought this through,” Eden began. “Things are complicated. Do you want to reward the Beautification Committee for pulling strings and setting fires? Do you want to bitterly disappoint your parents? Because I’m guessing that my parents are a walk in the park compared to yours. And what if I say yes? What if I’m all in, and then your parents come home and you change your mind?”
“I was eighteen, Eden. I was stupid and immature. I know better now.”
She sat up straighter. “Do you? You tiptoe around your father every day. Planting secret grapes, lying to him to protect his fragile health, banking good ideas for the one day that he might be open to hearing them. You’re no better at standing up to your parents now than you were at eighteen.”
Davis looked down at their joined hands and slowly withdrew his. The abandonment hurt her heart. But he had to hear her.
“Can they recover from the disappointment, the betrayal? Could we? Because I know what will happen. If you choose me now, our families will find a way to make us regret it. And eventually, we’ll resent each other for it. Am I worth hurting your family over?” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Because I don’t know if you’re worth hurting mine.”
His jaw clenched. He needed to understand. This wasn’t the plan. They weren’t in the cards.
“If that’s what you want,” he said flatly.
“It’s whatwewant,” she said, hating the fact that she missed his touch already.
“So, we’re breaking up,” he said, leveling a long look at her.
“It’s not like we have to go back to being mortal enemies after HeHa. I mean, we’ve already done that,” she joked.
