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So we did. My acting skills were put to the test because all I wanted was to be far away from this stage and from Betty. She continued on like nothing had happened, easily performing, not missing one line. I’d called Trish for three before the scene was done.
Then I hightailed it out of there. Betty had obviously accepted my apology for overstepping on stage. I should be grateful. Happy. Not surly as fuck because that fake kiss had obliterated my soul.
And it had meant absolutely nothing to her.
Chapter Nine
~BETTY~
“But Rochester should’ve trustedher enough to tell her the truth.” Caroline bent one leg underneath her and sat on her foot, leaning forward on her desktop. “It’s his fault that it blew up like that, so Jane had no choice but to leave him.”
Trace, sitting sideways in his chair, facing Caroline, stopped tapping his pen on the desk and frowned at her. “You actually believe that if he’d told Jane that he had locked his psycho wife in the attic, she would’ve just been like, ‘Oh, no problem. Let’s get hitched.’”
Caroline angled her body in his direction. “If she truly loved him. Yeah, I do.”
“You’re delusional. No chick is gonna accept that. She’d freak the hell out and run for the hills. Just like she did in the book when she found out.”
“Oh, so you think it would’ve been okay for him to marry her, making himself a bigamist and basically taking her virtue under false pretenses so she’d be forced to stay with him?”
“Exactly.” Trace shrugged. “Like you said, if she loved him, she’d forgive him. If she had to stay for the marriage, then he could’ve explained himself without her tearing across the country and abandoning him, breaking both their hearts.”
This was the exact kind of heated debate I longed to spark between my students in my literature classes. But I wasn’t prepared for the passion crackling between these two as they battled it out. I couldn’t tell if Caroline wanted to slap him or kiss him. I think maybe both.
“You are morally ambiguous,” declared Caroline haughtily.
Okay, slap him.
“Why would he be ambitious?” asked Emmitt, Trace’s friend, who wasn’t the brightest lightbulb in the box, bless his heart.
“Ambiguous, idiot,” said Sarah on the other side of Caroline. “Not ambitious.”
Trace ignored them, his focus still on Caroline. “Never said I wasn’t. I know right from wrong. And I know some things are worth fighting for, even lying for. Rochester looked at Jane and knew he’d found his soulmate, not that crazy woman his father saddled him with. He wasn’t going to let his past mistakes or the cruelty of fate or his asshat father take away what was rightfully his.”
Caroline and the rest of the class sat in silence. Trace’s face was flushed pink with emotion. Even though he’d kept his voice even and steady, there was an intensity in his words. I was sure he harbored some ill will toward his father, who’d abandoned them, and perhaps his feelings were tied up in the debate.
I could certainly empathize with those feelings. Though my father hadn’t abandoned us all at once, it felt the same. He slowly disappeared until I didn’t want or need him anymore.
He sent Mom a few checks that first year after the divorce, none of them enough to cover his child support payments. Then they dwindled to half that the second year then nothing at all. Not even a card on my birthday or Emma’s. He remarried and forgot about us.
I’d tried to reach out once or twice with half-hearted reception, then realized he was emotionally bankrupt, and I didn’t need that kind of man in my life. After I’d cried my eyes out and smashed my favorite picture of me sitting on his knee when I was five, that is.
When Mom found me sobbing in my closet that day, she hugged me close and whispered to me over and over how beautiful, amazing, and brilliant I was. That my father was an asshole who wouldn’t know a pot of gold from a bucket of shit if he saw it.
“After today, Beatrice, you will never cry over him again. He doesn’t deserve one more of your tears,” she’d said.
Heartsick but comforted, I’d told her, “I’m just sorry you have to live with the mistake of marrying him.”
“Oh, sweetheart, it wasn’t a mistake,” she’d said, cupping my cheeks and wiping my tears with love in her eyes. “I wouldn’t have you or Emma otherwise.”
One thing I learned from my father and strong-as-hell mother was that I didn’t need a man to take care of me. I’d gotten a job as soon as I turned sixteen and hadn’t stopped working since. I’d been doing just fine taking care of myself. Maybe that’s why I’d bristled so much at Bennett’s wealth.
Was it fair that it bothered me that he’d been born wealthy and with more advantages than me? No, of course not. But I was a human being with ocean-deep feelings about abandonment, independence, and self-worth. I couldn’t help that the privileged rubbed me wrong sometimes, simply because they were born. No matter how irrational I knew my feelings were.
Bennett…
No.I wasn’t going to think about him right now. Or that insane stage kiss that had fried my brain. It had taken everything in me to finish that scene like he hadn’t just rocked my world.
“Wow,” said Sarah on the front row, snapping me back to the present.
