Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet (9781476763248) (37 page)

But I hadn't really gotten a chance to feel it toward him, had I?

“I know where he is.”

I heard her, but I wasn't sure. Or I didn't want to. I don't even know.

“What?”

“I know Darcy told him to stay away, but I wanted to make sure. I didn't want him to just show up back home or in New York and
surprise you, even on accident. So I've been keeping tabs on him every once in awhile.”

I leaned back against the arm of the couch. Too much was happening at once.

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked, more buying time to process all of this than anything else.

“I wasn't trying to keep it from you,” Mary assured me. “I just didn't want to bring it up and . . . set you back, I guess.”

I nodded. That made sense. I know I need to move past George, and that means not thinking about him all the time or wondering where he is or remembering what we were. And yet . . .

I still do. He's still always there, isn't he?

That hasn't changed just because I don't see his face every day.

He's the one thing that changed my life more than any other. Everything I've done and learned for the past however long stems directly from knowing him. And I'd never be able to move on from him, if I didn't know . . . why.

“Where is he?”

She looked down at her hands, but I could see her brow furrow before she responded. “Lydia . . .”

“Mary,” I kept my voice low, but steady. “I need to know.”

Her eyes finally moved back up to mine and she nodded.

“About an hour north of here.”

I know gasping at surprising information is such a cliché, but I did something close to that, at least. I couldn't help it. George had been that close the whole time? I tried to wrap my head around it. Why did he stay nearby when Darcy told him to leave? Why hadn't he contacted me? What was I going to do?

I straightened up, coming out of my thoughts. My eyes traveled up from the spot on the carpet where they had inadvertently fixated and settled on Mary.

“Lydia . . .” she started again, her voice holding a warning this
time. I almost grinned. She knew me too well now. I didn't respond and she sighed. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I need to do this.”

She raked her black nails through her black hair as she shook her head. “Your sister is going to kill me.”

“This isn't up to Lizzie,” I countered. “It's my choice. I need to do this.”

“All right,” Mary said, standing up. She snatched her keys up off the coffee table. “Let's do it.”

I stared at her, and when I didn't make any move to get up, she kept going.

“What? I'm not making you go see that jackass by yourself. Come on!”

“I missed you,” I said, unable to stop from breaking out in a smile for real this time. Mary was the weirdest cousin, but she was also kind of the best.

“Of course you did,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Ooh, careful, Mary,” I warned as I pushed myself up off the couch. “You're sounding a little like
moi
.”

She rolled her eyes. “You wish.”

I grabbed my purse off the floor where I'd dropped it, and Mary yanked the front door open.

“I'm driving,” she said.

“Sure.” I stopped in front of her in the open doorway. “You might wanna finish buttoning that shirt up, though.” Her face fell and I stifled a laugh as I left her once again fumbling with buttons behind me.

It's nice to joke around with Mary again. It's nice to joke around now at all.

Especially knowing that in an hour, the only joke will probably be on me.

Mary pulled the car over to an empty spot along the curb and pushed the gear into park.

We'd sat in silence almost the entire way here, Mary allowing the radio to meander through top forty pop hits and me compulsively checking the maps on my phone as if that would somehow make us arrive where we were headed faster. Or slower; I'm not really sure what I wanted. I'm still not. But here we are.

“It's the one up on the left, with the red mailbox.” Mary pointed to a two-story house with cream-colored stucco and big windows that were rounded at the top.

“Wow, he bought a house,” I murmured. The idea of George planting roots anywhere upset me a little, and I made a mental note to analyze the thought further when this was all over.

“Rental,” Mary corrected, and I felt a little better. Then I remembered Mary had said he'd been here the whole time, and the uneasiness returned.

I had tried to think about what I would say on the drive up, but nothing I'd thought about seemed right. I'm usually pretty good at this kind of thing, but I guess I usually had people pretty well figured out, which always makes it easier to imagine their side of the conversation. I'd thought I had George figured out, but it didn't seem that way anymore. I just knew things about him, and that wasn't the same. You could only predict so much of the future with the past.

“Just because we're here doesn't mean you have to do this,” said Mary. “We can always go back.”

“No, we can't.”

I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the car. Mary did the same.

“How far do you want me to come with you?” she asked.

“I'm not sure,” I told her, pushing the passenger door shut. “I'll let you know.”

She nodded and waited for me to lead the way. I stepped out into the street, crossing the pavement to his side. We reached the curb in front of his yard and I looked back at Mary, letting her know it was okay to wait here, for now. I eyed the door—so far away, it seemed—and thought of one more thing.

My hands shook as I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I swiped over the lock screen—the picture of me with Milo and Kat on my last night with them, that silly tiger on my head—and I remembered again how I felt when I was in New York. Unafraid. Unburdened. Unlimited. I wanted to be able to feel that all the time, not just when I was far away and mostly surrounded by people who knew nothing about me. I wanted to be free to be whoever I wanted, wherever I was. I needed this.

And I needed to include the other member of our relationship. The camera.

I tapped open the camera app and switched it to video recording. The phone chimed softly as I pressed the record button, and with one last deep breath, I started the walk up the path to the front door.

And stopped.

I saw his abs first, if you can believe it. The sun glinted off them like some commercial for men's cologne or gum or something equally ridiculous. He was walking toward me along the side of the house, watching behind him as he unraveled a garden hose.

My throat was dry, but I swallowed and readied his name. I wouldn't wait for him to see me; this was going to be on my terms.

“George.”

His shoulders tensed. The hose stopped unwinding. He cracked his neck to the side like I'd seen him do too many times and he reached around for a white shirt on his porch I hadn't noticed before. He turned toward me as he slipped it over his head.

There he was. George Wickham.

He looked the same. Same hair; same body; same mouth; same eyes. Only his eyes weren't looking at me, like they always used to. He glanced past me, to Mary, and then . . . at my shoulder, or something. But not at me.

“You shouldn't be here,” he said finally, no discernible emotion behind his words. He nodded toward the phone I still held in front of me, pointed at him. “What are you doing?”

“I thought you liked being on camera?”

The words came easier than I thought they would. George, on the other hand, said nothing, pushing his jaw around and still refraining from making eye contact.

“You never responded to any of my messages or calls or emails, so tracking you down was kind of the only way to get your attention.”

“Still thinking of me after all this time, huh?” There was no teasing in his voice, no mocking. It felt rehearsed, back to being some late-night cable film, and the actors had better places to be.

I let it go, and waited for something more. George was like me, in that way. He needed to talk to fill the silence when it got uncomfortable. And if you talk too much, eventually something true is bound to spill out.

“Anyway,” he continued after a moment, “I'm not exactly supposed to talk to you. Part of the terms of my deal with dear ole Darcy.”

“You don't get to decide that,” I echoed what I had said to Mary earlier. “Neither does Darcy. Or my sisters. Only I do.”

“Yeah, because your decisions have always turned out to be just super.” The sarcasm was there this time, strong, and it stung. I started to wonder if this had been a good idea after all, or if I was just hoping for closure I could never get.

But I had to know why. Why things went wrong. If there was ever anything or if everyone else had been right about us the whole time. If I should have been different. I had to know.

“Look at me.”

George finally turned his eyes up toward me after a moment of hesitation. I stared him down, trying to find answers without asking for them.

“What do you want, Lydia?” I'd never heard my name sound so cold.
This was not the George I knew,
I told myself. And yet it was. Only now he was talking about me with the same voice he'd used when he talked about Darcy, or Gigi, or even Lizzie, sometimes.

“You left, with no explanation. You betrayed me, with no explanation. You want to talk about what I want from you, George? Start with that.” I was quieter than I wanted to be. I wanted to be mad. I still wasn't mad. Why couldn't I get mad?

“Answers?” he laughed, and we stepped back into that stupid movie. “That's what you're here for? An
explanation
?
Justification?
” He exaggerated the words like I was nothing more than a silly child, and I almost felt like one. “Damn, I at least thought you'd ask for a cut of my money.”

“I loved you.”

I had this English teacher in high school who made us write an essay about a moment in which the entire world seemed to slow down to the point where we could make note of every detail around us—what the ground felt like, what the air smelled like, every sound that was idling in the background. It seemed stupid at the time, but now I understand the kind of moment she had been talking about.

I loved you—
the words slipped out of my mouth unprompted, and everything stopped.

A car sped past on a street nearby. Someone a couple of houses over was barbecuing in the backyard. There was a small rip in the sole of my right shoe I hadn't noticed until now. George had a scar running across the backs of two of his fingers that hadn't been there before. And his eyes weren't leaving mine, not now.

His lips parted and I saw him swallow, saw his tongue move as if trying to push out a word lodged in the back of his throat.

I instinctively took a step toward him and the moment broke.

He shook his head, the coldness returning to his gaze. “And I used you. It's what people do. Get over it.”

“I don't believe you,” I said, as uncertain as I suddenly felt. “What we had—”

“I don't care about you! All right? This was never about you. Get it through your freaking head. You and me were done before we even started! I got my money. Darcy got to play hero and triumph over the big, bad villain. It's how the story goes. You got caught in the middle, but hey, even the damsel in distress gets a long-awaited reconciliation with her neglectful and distant sister. That's what you wanted, right? It's a win for everyone. Take it and move on.”

I stepped back, thrown by the aggressive outburst. I expected him to keep messing around and dodging questions, but I hadn't expected this. At some point, I'd heard Mary step up onto the curb behind me, but she hadn't come any closer just yet. I tried to process his words, but something was off to me. Something was sticking.

By the time I'd refocused on the scene in front of me, George had moved back to the garden hose he'd dropped when he first heard me say his name.

“Good-bye, Lydia,” he called out resolutely, clearly more of an attempt to get me to leave than an actual good-bye.

But then I realized what he'd said.
A long-awaited reconciliation.
The only way he could have known about that . . . is if he saw it.

I hit the record button on my phone, turning off the camera, and slipped it into my pocket.

“Why did you watch the videos?”

He slowed and turned again, just like before, and I wanted to yell at him to stop trying to leave and just have a stupid conversation with me.

“What are you talking about?”

“Me and Lizzie. You know what happened with us, after . . .” I still couldn't bring myself to say what he did out loud to him, and if what
was happening right now wasn't more important, I knew I'd have been irritated with myself. “Why did you watch if you never cared?”

“I wanted to make sure my investment would provide a lucrative return,” he said after a beat. “Get people invested in the outcome, they're more likely to buy, right?”

“Bullshit.” I rolled my eyes. His jaw shifted and his muscles tensed under his shirt. I'd caught him now and we both knew it. And I know George, like I know myself. Prepping response for his deflection in three . . . two . . .

“Look, I don't have time for this middle-school confrontation—”

“You play the victim, like life has screwed you over, and now you're gonna do whatever you have to in order to get what you think it owes you. But you know what? There are more than just victims and heroes and villains caught up in the middle of some endless tragedy, George. People are just people. Trying their best to make something decent out of whatever crap has been thrown at them. Together. I hope you figure that out one day.”