3. Fletcher
Chapter 3
Fletcher
I could have completed the assignment on my own. With my eyes closed.
Because once, when I was younger, my father had told me to get good grades and that fell right under the third rule.
So, I could have done the assignment myself. I should have done the assignment myself.
I shouldn’t have asked Gideon for his phone number. Even though Gideon had only managed to somehow get more good looking over the months I’d spent ignoring him, my attraction to him wasn’t what had kicked me into gear. It was a burning hot rage toward my father and the video call we’d had over dinner where he’d laid out the details for the next eight years of my life for me.
“You’ll graduate top of your class at RHP,” he said, “and the same at RHU. Then you’ll marry.”
I hadn’t even managed a protest. Hadn’t gotten past opening my mouth, which was clearly too much of a response on its own. No sound had come out, but my father’s eyes narrowed just the same and that familiar cold fear raced through my bloodstream.
“And you’ll marry,” he repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
One day I was going to crack a molar for how hard he made me grit my teeth sometimes.
“Who do you want to marry, Fletcher?” he asked me next.
I licked my lips slowly, knowing there was a right answer and I needed to get it on the first try.
“Whoever you tell me to,” I said quietly.
“Even if it’s a woman?”
My breath caught in my throat, and I bit my lips together between my teeth wishing we were on a phone call instead of a video one. But my father was a calculating man and he knew how to read people’s tells, including mine. He always wanted the upper hand and he’d beaten the need for it into me at a very young age. The fact that I still slipped around him sometimes was my greatest weakness and we both knew it. My father made a habit of knowing everything about everyone around him, but I thought I’d at least kept that one revelation about my sexual preferences a secret.
“Whoever you tell me to,” I repeated.
“What if I want you to marry a woman , Fletcher?” His words burned as he sneered at me, the intensity of his hate pushing against me with every word. “What if I wanted you to fuck her on your wedding night and knock her up? Ensure the Sinclair family an heir.”
Choking on my spit, I blinked hard. “I’m a virgin, sir. I don’t?—”
He cut me off, raising a hand to silence me, even across state lines.
“I would strongly suggest you don’t stay that way for long. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
He dragged his tongue across the front of his teeth. “Your mother wants to hear about school now.”
And with that, I’d been dismissed.
After hanging up with my parents, I’d lost my appetite entirely and decided to instead pace my room until my heels ached. Years of biting back my feelings and my rage had narrowed down into a sometimes hours-long routine of talking myself off a figurative and sometimes literal ledge. It was nearly Saturday when the pain in my feet finally quieted the anger in my brain, and Gideon’s phone number burned a hole in my pocket, because even though I needed to get over myself and call him, I didn’t want to. If my father had any idea how his newest order to finish top of my class had fallen in direct contradiction to his steadfast demand of fuck the North family , he would have had me out of school so fast I wouldn’t have even known which way was up.
At least at school I was under his control, but not under his thumb. I had room to reset, room to breathe, even if it didn’t always feel that way. After all, I did have Gideon North’s phone number. Shoving my hand into the pocket of my navy blue chinos, I traced the tip of my finger over the frayed edge of his torn notebook paper. I didn’t need to look because I’d already committed the number to memory. If I closed my eyes, I could see him scrawling the digits on the corner of the narrow-ruled page, including the weird and backward way he wrote his 5’s.
I pulled Gideon’s phone number out of my pocket and shoved it under my pillow, then I dialed it. It rang through to voicemail and I called him again. He answered on the fifth ring, voice scratchy and tired with sleep.
Good.
I’d woken him up.
“Hello?” he croaked, and I tried to not imagine him in a bed that looked like mine in a room of the same dimensions. I didn’t allow myself to wonder what his pajamas looked like, his body.
“We should start this report,” I said.
He breathed into the phone, loud, like his mouth was pressed directly against the speaker.
“What time is it?”
“Time to start our report.” I was a bastard, just like my father. “I’m in room 703, Southern Annex.”
I hung up before he could protest.
At least I’d given him the courtesy of letting him hide his face.
Or maybe I’d just been trying to hide mine.