A frown touches her lips. “Cooper, what is he talking about?”
The second she fixes her concerned green eyes at me, my mouth turns to sand. Acid rises in my stomach.
“No idea,” I lie.
I scare myself with how easily I can lie to her. How convincingly the words slide out of my mouth. Not the slightest flinch.
“Mackenzie, babe, listen to me.” Kincaid reaches out to touch her, and it takes a hell of an effort to not break his hand as I step between them. Mouth flattening, he drops his arm. “The weekend before school started, this guy picked a fight with me in a bar and I got him fired on the spot. Remember? I had a black eye when I helped you move into the dorm?”
“You told me you got it playing basketball,” she accuses with no small amount of venom in her voice.
“Yeah, okay, I lied.” He concedes the point grudgingly, hurrying to make his case as Mac’s crossed arms and lack of eye contact say he’s losing her interest quickly. “But I’m not lying now.”
“How am I supposed to tell the difference?” Nobody matches up to Mac in a battle of attrition. She’d argue all day about the number of clouds in the sky just to be right.
“Isn’t it obvious?” He’s losing his patience, tossing his hands in the air. “He’s only fucking you to get back at me.”
“Alright, that’s enough.” If I can’t put his face in the sand and end this here, I’m not sticking around to let him blow up my life. “You need to get outta here, man. Leave her alone.”
“Mackenzie, come on,” he pleads. “You’re not seriously falling for his BS, right? I know you’re young, but you can’t be this stupid.”
That does it. The thick accents of condescension trigger Mac’s last nerve, and her expression grows stormy.
“The dumbest thing I ever did was dating you for so long,” she retorts. “Fortunately, that’s not a decision I have to live with.”
She tears off toward our group, brushing past Evan. As the two of us fall in line behind her, I have a vivid flashback to the many times we got marched to the principal’s office by our teachers. I feel rather than see Evan asking me if we’re good, but I don’t have an answer until we reach our patch of sand and Mac spins on me.
“Out with it,” she orders.
“With what?”
Even as I stonewall her, I wonder if this is the moment I should come clean. Admit I had less than honorable intentions at first, but that things changed after we met.
She’d understand. Maybe even get a kick out of it. We’d have a good laugh and it’d become a funny story we tell at parties.
Or she’d never talk to me again, until I come home one day to my house on fire and a sign stuck in the ground with We should see other people written on it in ash.
“Don’t mess with me.” Mac sticks a finger in my chest. “What was he talking about? You two know each other?”
Once again, we have an audience, and once again, feeling our friends’ eyes on us, my courage abandons me. If I tell her the truth in private, there’s a chance I’ll lose her. If I tell her the truth in front of a dozen other people, losing her is a guarantee. She’d be humiliated in front of everyone. She’d never forgive me.
This time, the lies burn my tongue. “Everything I know about him I heard around town, or from you. Couldn’t have picked that guy out of a lineup.”
She becomes eerily still, barely breathing as she stares at me.
Panic churns in my gut, but on the outside I maintain a neutral expression. I stick to my story. I learned a long time ago, those who get caught are the ones who break. The key to a successful lie is to believe it. Then deny, deny, deny.
“Was there a fight?” Mac cocks her head as if she’s trapped me.
“Mac, they could fill football stadiums with the number of idiots who get drunk and start shit. If he was one of them, I honestly wouldn’t remember.”
Visibly frustrated, she turns to Evan. “Did Cooper really get fired?”
For a split second, I worry their new platonic romance might end me.
“He had a summer job at Steph’s bar.” With a shrug, Evan even has me convinced. Guess we’re still on the same side when it counts. “It was temporary.”
She looks past Evan to where Steph has resettled in her chair and picked up her book. “Steph?” Mac says. “Is that true?”
Without looking up from her book, Steph nods behind her thick black sunglasses. “It was a summer gig.”