The Favorites: A Novel(57)

“We should eat something,” he said. “Maybe there’s still food left at the party?”

“Or we could be antisocial and order room service.”

The party guests were probably too wasted themselves to notice the state we were in, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

Garrett tucked my arm through his, and we staggered up the beach together to collect my shoes. As I reached down to retrieve them, his suit jacket slipped off my shoulder, dragging in the sand. He pulled it back into place and wrapped it tighter around my shoulders. I felt warm and cared for, closer to him than ever. If I hadn’t seen him with Ellis earlier, I would have given serious thought to kissing Garrett at midnight.

“What sort of food should we order?” he asked as we continued toward the hotel.

“Something with cheese.”

Garrett laughed, knocking into my side. He slipped his arm under the jacket to hold my waist. “You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of th—”

He stopped. Someone stood ahead of us, blocking the path.

Heath.





Chapter 37





“Rocha.” Garrett dropped his hold on my waist. “We were just—”

“Down on the beach together,” Heath said. “You’ve always loved the beach, haven’t you, Katarina? Couldn’t get enough of it when we were younger. All those long nights by the lake.”

I glared at him. “Are you finished?”

“I suppose I am.” Heath stepped out of our way with an exaggerated sweep of his hand. “She’s all yours.”

Garrett shook his head. “No, no. It’s not like that.”

I could see the warring emotions on his face, the weighing of options. I knew what he was about to do—and I couldn’t let him. Not for my sake.

So once again, I chose Garrett. I stood beside him, I took his hand. I turned on Heath and spat, “What right do you have to be jealous? You’re nothing to me.”

“Kat,” Garrett said, tugging on my hand. “Let’s go.”

But I couldn’t stop. The champagne gave me the courage I hadn’t had earlier in the evening. How dare Heath try to shame me. How dare he imply that I’d belonged to him, that he was somehow ceding his claim to Garrett. I didn’t belong to anyone.

“Did you really think,” I said through gritted teeth, “you could spend three years God knows where, doing God knows what, and then we’d go back to the way things were before?”

“We can never go back to the way things were.” Heath’s voice was low and dangerous, his eyes frozen over with fury. “You made sure of that, didn’t you?”

“You disappeared!” I was shouting now, voice echoing off the hotel’s elegant facade. “You could’ve been dead, for all I knew. Where were you?”

“There you three are.”

Bella. She’d come from the party, wearing a shimmery gold bandage dress that looked like a sexier version of the Cleopatra costume.

“They want all the skaters by the rink,” she said, “for the champagne toast at midnight.”

We didn’t move. Unspent tension crackled in the air. Bella planted her hands on her hips.

“Okay, what the hell is going on?” She rolled her eyes. “If this is about the kiss, I—”

“Not everything is about you, Bella.”

She flinched at my words, looking genuinely wounded, even though I was only repeating what she’d said to me mere hours before.

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Heath said.

“You used to say a lot worse about her.” I looked at Bella. “He always hated you, do you know that? And I always defended you.”

“I never hated Bella,” Heath said. “I hated who you became around her.”

The countdown had begun. The party guests raised their champagne flutes and chanted.

Ten, nine, eight—

I dropped Garrett’s hand and stepped toward Heath. Close, my lips at his ear.

Seven, six, five—

“You hated that I was better than you,” I whispered. “You hated that I didn’t need you.”

Heath’s nostrils flared and his fists clenched.

Four, three, two—

“You hated yourself, because you knew you weren’t enough for me. You still aren’t.”

I pulled back. Heath’s eyes locked on mine. Bella and Garrett were there too, flanking us like seconds in a duel, but they might as well have been ghosts.

All Heath and I could see was each other.

One.

Happy New Year!

Fireworks strafed the sky. People cheered and clinked and kissed as confetti rained down. The string quartet struck up “Auld Lang Syne.”

Two thousand and six, the year of the Torino Olympics. The year all my dreams would come true.

The year I would make Heath Rocha regret everything.





Garrett Lin: Everything changed after New Year’s Eve.

During a practice session a few days before the 2006 U.S. National Championships in St. Louis, Missouri, young ice dancer Frannie Gaskell and her partner, Evan Kovalenko, are working on their Ravensburger Waltz when Katarina Shaw and Garrett Lin cross paths with them.