Torment - Lauren Kate [113]
Luce stiffened in her white iron chair.
“I wasn’t being sarcastic, Luce. So maybe, I don’t know, Daniel’s been involved with other people. It’s all pretty nebulous. The take-home message, like I said before, is that there was never a question in his mind that you were the only one that mattered.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“I don’t claim to be in the business of making you feel better, I’m just trying to illustrate a point. For all Daniel’s annoying aloofness—and there’s plenty of it—the guy’s clearly devoted. The real question here is: Are you? As far as Daniel knows, you could drop him as soon as someone else comes along. Miles has come along. And he’s obviously a great guy. A little sappy for my taste, but—”
“I would never drop Daniel,” Luce said aloud, desperately wanting to believe it.
She thought about the horror on his face the night they’d argued on the beach. She was stunned when he’d been so quick to ask: Are we breaking up? Like he suspected that was a possibility. Like she hadn’t swallowed whole his entire insane story about their endless love when he’d told her under the peach trees at Sword & Cross. She had swallowed it, in one single believing gulp, ingesting all its fissures, too—the jagged pieces that made no sense but begged her to believe them at the time. Now, every day, another of them gnawed at her insides. She could feel the biggest one rising up in her throat:
“Most of the time, I don’t even know why he likes me.”
“Come on,” Shelby groaned. “Do not be one of those girls. He’s too good for me, wah wah wah. I’ll have to punt you over to Dawn and Jasmine’s table. That’s their expertise, not mine.”
“I don’t mean it like that.” Luce leaned in and dropped her voice. “I mean, ages ago, when Daniel was, you know, up there, he chose me. Me, out of everyone else on earth—”
“Well, there were probably a lot fewer options back then—Ouch!” Luce had swatted her. “Just trying to lighten the mood!”
“He chose me, Shelby, over some big role in Heaven, over some elevated position. That’s pretty major, don’t you think?” Shelby nodded. “There had to be more to it than just him thinking I was cute.”
“But … you don’t know what it was?”
“I’ve asked, but he’s never told me what happened. When I brought it up, it was almost like Daniel couldn’t remember. And that’s crazy, because it means we’re both just going through the motions. Based on thousands of years of some fairy tale neither one of us can even back up.”
Shelby rubbed her jaw. “What else is Daniel keeping from you?”
“That’s what I plan on finding out.”
Around the terrace, time had marched on; most of the students were heading to class. The scholarship waiters were hurrying to bus the plates. At a table closest to the ocean, Steven was drinking coffee alone. His glasses were folded up and resting on the table. His eyes found Luce’s, and he held her gaze for a long time, so long that—even after she stood up to go to class—his intense, watchful expression stuck with her. Which was probably his point.
After the longest, most mind-numbing PBS special on cell division ever seen, Luce walked out of her biology class, down the stairs of the main school building, and outside, where she was surprised to see the parking lot completely packed. Parents, older siblings, and more than a few chauffeurs formed one long line of vehicles the likes of which Luce hadn’t seen since the car-pool lane at her middle school in Georgia.
Around her, students hurried out of class and zigzagged toward the cars, wheeling suitcases in their wake. Dawn and Jasmine hugged goodbye before Jasmine got into a town car and Dawn’s brothers made room for her in the back of an SUV. The two of them were only splitting up for a few hours.
Luce ducked back into the building and slipped out the rarely used rear door to trek across the grounds to her dorm. She definitely could not deal with goodbyes right now.
Walking under the gray sky, Luce was still a guilty wreck, but her conversation with Shelby had left her feeling a bit more