Chapter 12
CHAPTER
TWELVE
MILES
“Hello, Miles!” Hannah greets me in an obnoxiously put-on voice. She sounds like a Barbie as she stands and juts one leg out from behind her desk to show me her glittery, pink, knee-height boot. “I’m Law Office Barbie and my favorite color is pink. What’s your favorite color?”
“Cute.” I’m almost tempted to laugh at her Barbie impression, clearly put on solely for my benefit.
If she has nothing else going for her, at least she seems to have a sense of humor. I manage not to give her the satisfaction of a laugh though. I don’t want to give her the impression I’m able to be won over.
“Thanks, I know I am.” She tosses her hair dramatically over her shoulder and bats her long eyelashes at me.
I shuffle around her desk, leaving a wide space between us. “Is my uncle in?” I ask even as I’m already heading for his door.
“Yeah.” She waits until my hand is on the doorknob before she says, “Hey, Miles?”
“What?” I reluctantly look back.
Hannah plops down in her seat and throws the Barbie impression out to seem human for a moment. Then she sticks out her tongue at me like a child. “I don’t have cooties, just so you know.” She sticks her tongue out at me again for good measure.
“Noted.”
The manic pixie, dream girl thing doesn’t work for an office setting but I respect a person who responds to getting shit by giving it back. She can hold her own and that makes her a little more tolerable to have around.
As long as she continues to roll with the punches, she might survive Uncle Luca’s bad attitude long enough to qualify for unemployment. Because no matter how fun she might be to have around, he’s inevitably going to want to get rid of her the moment he suspects he’s too attached.
“One more thing,” Hannah says.
“Sure, I don’t have anything better to do than stand here listening to you share your every waking thought. Have at it.” I cross my arms over my chest and ignore her smirk.
“He’s very mad,” she stage-whispers to me.
The door behind me tears open and Luca growls, “You’re damn right I am. Get your ass in here.” He stomps to his desk.
I salute Hannah and head in to face my fate. I mistakenly assumed Luca summoned me to cut me a check for next semester’s tuition, since that bill is posted now to my account. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up that things could be so easy. He’s about to ruin the easy Friday afternoon I had planned.
“What’s up?” I push the door closed and walk over to take one of the seats facing Uncle Luca’s desk. I cross my ankle over my knee casually and feign a yawn.
“Sit up straight and pretend you give a damn about the person paying your tuition,” Luca growls.
Not mad, then. Nuclear . We’ve surpassed the point of regular anger.
I drop my leg so that both of my feet touch the floor and I square myself up to face Luca with an almost militant posture. “Is this better, sir?” I goad him.
“You’re such a little shit.” Luca stands again and crosses to the bar along the wall where he pours a whiskey and brings it back to his desk with a death grip. He slams the glass down on the desk and places his palms face-down on either side, hanging his head and taking several deep breaths.
He never drinks the whiskey. He only pours a glass when he’s at his wit’s end and needs a reminder not to be like his dad. Luca, Lainey’s mom, and my dad all have a bit of asshole in them that they inherited from their father but none of them have ever reached quite the same darkness. I rarely hear stories about Grandpa Duffy because no one wants to tell them. The man was a monster by all accounts.
Grandpa Duffy drank whiskey.
Even I know when to finally shut the hell up and let the man say his piece.
Luca raises his head and stares me dead in the eyes. “We had an agreement. You stay involved in school so I know you’re staying out of trouble and I pay your tuition. One activity. That’s all I asked. Right?”
“Yeah,” I mutter.
“What the hell else do you have going on that’s so important?” He turns his computer monitor around so that I can see the author profile for M. Duffy on his screen. “Your last release was six months ago, and you haven’t even put up a preorder for the next book. So don’t tell me you’re spending all your free time writing.”
“We agreed you wouldn’t micromanage my writing,” I remind him, pushing to my feet. I need to get the fuck out of here if this is the direction this conversation is headed.
The stupid mystery novels I publish online make me enough money to pay bills. That’s all. I never meant for that bullshit to turn into an actual career. It was just a dumb idea for a creative outlet that turned into a joke I took too far.
Luca is one of the only people who know about my secret pen name project. He’s never supposed to bring my pen name up to me. We don’t talk about this. We don’t usually talk about much of anything serious except for where it relates to paying my tuition.
“This isn’t about micromanaging your writing. You’re a great fucking writer, but I don’t care if you never write another damn thing. I care about you becoming a decent, well-rounded individual who looks up sometimes to see the world happening around him.” Luca’s face is red and his chest heaving. He couldn’t run a marathon and get this kind of heart rate elevation.
“Tutoring some girl more interested in her marital prospects than her bachelor’s degree isn’t exactly going to teach me to care about the world.” Well, shit. I probably shouldn’t have said that so loud with Blue’s mom sitting right outside the office.
Uncle Luca’s face turns a shade of red so dark he looks nearly purple. Like a Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka shade of purple.
He lowers his voice to a harsh whisper. “Annie Kirkpatrick is an honor roll student whose home burned down eight months ago. The last thing she’s thinking about is marriage .”
“Fine.” I shrug him off. Blue is not my problem. She’s not. “Whatever. I’m tutoring her like you asked, so you can lay off me until the next time I prove to you I’m just a big disappointment.”
“Quit the pity party and don’t you stand in my office lying straight to my face. You were a no-show for your tutoring session on Wednesday. The tutoring center only assigned you one student to tutor to make sure you would follow through with your commitment and you’ve already fucked that up after two weeks. They’re going to wind up letting you go for this!”
“Are you spying on me? That’s a serious violation of trust, don’t you think?” I figured he would check up on me eventually, but I didn’t expect him to know I ghosted my session with Blue after two days. I thought I would have time to find some other stupid school-sponsored thing to fill the gap.
“Dammit, Miles!” Luca explodes.
He pushes off his desk and paces several angry steps toward the window. If I was drinking age, I would reach for the abandoned whiskey. As mad as Uncle Luca already is, I’m not going to add underage drinking to his tally of my fuck ups.
“I don’t have to bother spying on you when the woman you’re supposed to be tutoring is walking into my office to have lunch with her mom.” He whirls around to face me again, gesturing wildly at the door as if Annie might return to help chew me out. “That poor girl made the mistake of expecting more from you, and I guess I did too. Just get out.”
I want to call him out for being so invested in the life of his employee and her daughter. He’s wading into dangerous territory getting involved with someone who works for him. Now isn’t the time to point any of that out while I’m already in the dog house, so I bite my tongue.
“I’m serious. Get out,” Luca growls, pointing his finger from me to the door.
I hold my hands up in mock surrender with a smirk as I back away toward the door. Here he is expecting the worst from me; might as well commit to being the asshole he thinks I am.
Before I open the door, I ask, “What about my tuition check?”
“I would say you better get writing to be able to afford next semester on your own but since I’m not supposed to micromanage your writing, I’ll just say you’ll figure things out .”
Any retorts I might have made get swallowed the moment I hear him repeat the exact words I last said to Annie when I bailed early on Monday’s session. She didn’t just tattle on me for missing our Wednesday appointment—she threw me completely under the bus.
I’m fuming as I walk out, passing Hannah’s desk wordlessly. I don’t even glance her way. I don’t want to know if she heard my comments about Annie. I don’t care what the hell she thinks of me.
There’s only one person I’m interested in speaking to and I have a pretty good idea where to find her. Her douchebag boyfriend wanders around campus decked out in his fraternity letters. He’s impossible to miss since he’s made a full-time job out of staring daggers at me every time our paths cross.
Wherever that guy’s party is tonight, Annie is bound to be sitting in a corner somewhere playing the dutiful girlfriend. Let’s see how the goody-two-shoes handles me inserting myself into her life the way she’s just inserted herself into mine.