door open and close, and I count to ten before tiptoeing back out. I grab my phone, laptop, and books and bring them all back to my room, where I take a moment to let my pulse settle.
Sitting on the bed, my back to the wall, I try to focus on the words on my laptop screen:
Community protection, criminal justice assisting, criminology, legal system.
I read all these words out loud, and yet, something happens from my eyes to my mouth to my brain because nothing is sinking in. Suddenly, it dawns on me that my whole reason for coming here was so I could focus, undistracted. But now? Now that bullshit thing Lucy calls fate has thrown it all out the window and given me the greatest distraction of all.
There’s a light tapping on my door. “Leo?”
I close the laptop, throw it on the floor. There’s no way I’m getting anything done tonight. “Yeah?” I call out.
“Can I come in?”
I rub a hand down my face. “Sure.”
Mia peeks in first and then steps all the way into the room. Her hair’s still wet, the makeup gone, and she’s in those red plaid pajamas.
“Am I interrupting?” she asks, unsure, looking around the room.
She’s my Mia again.
And goddamn she’s flawless.
“No,” I tell her, sitting higher. “You okay?”
Her bottom lip tinges red when she clamps her teeth around it, nodding. She sits on the bed, her legs crossed, and what I wouldn’t give to clamp my teeth around those thick thighs of hers. I clear my throat, grab the bed sheet, and place it not-so-covertly over my lap. Her eyes trail every move, until she realizes what’s happening and looks away, her cheeks blossoming that beautiful pink that stains her pale flesh. “It’s so dark in here,” she mumbles, and I flick on the lamp on the nightstand.
“I like to work in the dark. No distractions, you know?”
Nodding, she says, “The talk with Holden helped a lot. We really needed it.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
Silence falls, and it’s… it’s almost comforting. Eventually, she moves to sit next to me, her side brushing mine. “You were right—about the whole me changing thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, kind of, but it’s more than that, too.” She scoots down until her head’s on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling. Her fingers splay across her stomach, tap, tap, tapping away.
I stay quiet.
“When I left last year and went back home, my dad set up a job for me in his company. He said it was good for college prep and transcripts.” Her eyes squint at the word “college,” but she doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask. “He put me to work with a bunch of paid interns, most of them in college. They were older and far more sophisticated, and they just seemed to have their shit together, you know?”
Not really, but I nod anyway.
“In the beginning, they didn’t include me in anything, and at first, I thought it was because I was the boss’s daughter. I felt like the biggest outsider. It kind of reminded me of being at your house.” She whispers the last part, as if she didn’t realize what she was saying until it was too late.
I press my lips tight.
“No offense,” she says, and again, I nod. “So, anyway, I started dressing like them and acting like them, and before I knew it, I had friends. And it wasn’t like the girls in the dorms who lived with me twenty-four seven and had no choice but to talk to me… I don’t know,” she chokes out, and the wobble in her voice has me sliding down the bed and lying on my side to face her. She drops her hand from her stomach, searching, and I take it in mine. “You know me, Leo. Out of everyone in the world, you know how much I’ve struggled with that stuff.” She turns to me now, her face only inches from mine. “I just wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere.”
“I know,” I murmur. “But I hate that you feel like you have to change to do that.”
She seems to process this a moment, then says, “Holden thinks I’ve sold out.”
“Sold out?”
She nods.
“How?”
“Because I use Dad’s money to create this… facade. He’s so filthy rich he doesn’t even realize the dent I’ve made on his credit card. Either that or he just doesn’t care.”
“How is that selling out?” I ask.
“Holden thinks that it shows that I’ve forgiven my dad. Like him throwing money at me makes the whole walking-out-on-his-family