The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2) - Rosie Danan Page 0,106
found our office number online.”
Naomi gritted her teeth. “Tell me you didn’t.” She indulged a certain volume of Clara’s meddling, chalking it up to misplaced affection, but this really took the cake.
“She said she’d invited you to present a seminar on the future of sex education but hadn’t heard back,” Clara continued, seemingly undeterred. “But I assured her that you’d love to come speak to her seniors at the first available opportunity.”
“Clara Annabelle Wheaton.” Naomi got to her feet. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Holy shit,” Clara blanched. “I didn’t know you knew my middle name.”
As if Naomi hadn’t done her research before they went into business together years ago.
“You are the most meddling, devious—”
Clara pulled an envelope out of her notebook and passed it across the desk. “They’re expecting you on Friday.”
“I’m not going,” Naomi said, even as she opened the envelope and pulled out the plane ticket inside. Begrudgingly, she found herself slightly mollified that Clara had sprung for first class on the cross-country journey.
“Yes. You are. Because I know you. I know you want those kids to be more prepared than you were for the realities of lust, love, and everything in between.” Clara pressed both palms to the desk. “I know you care about that even more than you care about the satisfaction of abandoning the institution that abandoned you over a decade ago.”
Clara leveled a steel gaze. “And look, we can sit here and go back and forth about it for an hour until I wear you down—and I will wear you down because I’m better rested and more hydrated than you are right now—or you can just agree up front and save us both the trouble.”
A thousand denials pressed against Naomi’s lips. Reasons she didn’t owe anyone anything. Ever. Promises she’d made to herself about erasing parts of her past, robbing her memories of any power they tried to wield over her.
Maybe it was the exhaustion. Or the heartache. Maybe she’d depleted all her reserves of strength walking away from Ethan. Maybe this was giving up. Or growing up. Moving on. Evolution. Whether she wanted it or not.
In any case, she found herself saying, “Fine.”
If she could save one person in the ways she wished she could save herself, she reasoned, that could be worth it.
“What the hell else did you put on that list?” Naomi said later, after she’d let Clara buy her fish tacos and two jalapeño margaritas. She couldn’t imagine how outrageous Clara’s fallbacks must have been, given her plan A.
Clara shook her head, looking guilty. “Trust me, you really don’t wanna know.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
WALKING THROUGH THE halls of her old high school reminded Naomi of trespassing in a graveyard. It sent the same chill down her spine, the one that warned of hovering too close to the line between things living and dead. It made her pay too much attention, in the same way, to her own footsteps. Each landing of her heels smacked sharp against the linoleum. The same sense of borrowed grief hovered across her shoulders.
The administration might have turned over, but the silver-haired receptionist currently leading Naomi toward the auditorium hadn’t changed much at all.
She squinted behind her glasses. Someone trying to place an actor in an infomercial. “You were a student here?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said, voice flat and tired. “My boyfriend leaked nude photos of me when I was a senior.” They’d changed the paint color on the walls. It looked even more like undigested oatmeal now. “It was a big, messy scandal. I came into the office while you were on the phone discussing how I was a slut who deserved it.”
The receptionist blanched.
“You probably don’t recognize me,” Naomi said, walking ahead. “I used to be blond,” she tossed over her shoulder. “And less of a bitch.”
Inside, the rows of the auditorium held restless seniors. In contrast to her usual audiences, they didn’t make any effort to hide their nervous giggles when she walked into the room.
Whispers sparked and spread, but for Naomi, they barely penetrated. After months of dreading coming back here and returning to the scene of her trauma, she now stood back and observed it as if through an old, frosted window. Detached. Disinterested.
“Ms. Grant?” A woman who bore a passing resemblance to the new principal’s online photo stood before her. “Are you ready to begin?” She gestured toward the microphone stand in the middle of the stage. It was the same one they’d used for the production of Hello, Dolly! the year