“I think you should go back to sleep now or you’ll be late for your flight tomorrow.”
“I was against your relationship with her from the beginning. But you proved yourself. You proved your worth. But I guess I should’ve trusted my gut. I should’ve known that a girl would make you lose focus and screw up everything that we’ve worked for. I’m not going to let you kill your father again, do you hear me? He’s not going to die again because you were foolish enough to lose your focus. Do you understand me? Do what you have to do so you can go back and fulfill your father’s dream,” she says and leaves me in darkness.
My father’s dream.
To play in the European League. The dream that remained unfulfilled because he died.
As I step into the night, I fish out cigarettes from my jeans pocket. I light one up and puff out a huge cloud of smoke into the sky.
Sometimes I wonder if my father hadn’t seen that dream with his own eyes, would it have become mine?
Sometimes I wonder if… if I could ever have other dreams. My dreams.
Or if every son inherits his father’s dreams by default.
There’s a little mailbox outside his office.
It has a thin slot where you can slide the letters and internal office documents and memos in. It also has a little lock on it, a shiny silver lock where he can put his key in to open the box and retrieve all the mail people have left him.
That’s where I plan to leave him a note – a tiny little note – on Monday before classes start.
It’s the first note in a long series of notes that I’m hoping to send him. Notes designed to weaken his resolve.
And seduce him.
Yes, I’ve never seduced anyone. Or at least I hadn’t, not until the night we kissed.
The kiss that rocked my world and turned me into a horny, greedy girl who also humped his leg and came like a firecracker.
But that’s beside the point.
The point is that I don’t really know the art of seduction. Whatever I did that night was pure instinct.
That’s what I’m going to do now too.
I’m going to follow my gut and seduce him by leaving him little notes. That seems like the obvious, most natural choice, right?
I’ve written him letters for years.
I’m used to telling him things on paper, and there are a few things that I’d like to tell him now as well.
Things like he can use me for whatever he wants and that won’t make him an asshole. Or the fact that if he just tells me what he wants in a perfect rebound girl, I’ll give it to him.
But there’s a problem.
Which doesn’t occur to me until I rush upstairs to the second floor where his office is, with the letter in my pocket.
The problem that I’m basically seducing my soccer coach.
The other problems, I was aware of. Problems like my sister would freak out if she knew. She’d call me names and she’d hate me. But she already hates me, doesn’t she?
Or the fact that Leah might have an objection as well.
She loves Sarah and Arrow together, as evidenced by her dinner plan. So she’s not going to like that I – the bad, rule-breaking sister – am planning to seduce her son. It was a miracle she didn’t see us kiss in her backyard, for which I’ve been thanking my lucky stars for the past two days.
But somehow, it had escaped my mind that Arrow is on faculty here at St. Mary’s – however temporarily, but faculty nonetheless – and I’m his student.
Seducing a teacher is definitely against the rules. And for a crime this big – even bigger than sneaking out and harboring secret cell phones – they might definitely lock me up somewhere.
Which makes me realize something else too.
The letters under my bed.
They’re all addressed to Arrow and after years of writing them, suddenly they have become even more forbidden, haven’t they?
As I walk toward his office, the tiny note sitting heavy in my pocket and people giving me more than a passing glance because I’m the principal’s ward, I decide that I’ll hide those letters. The old ones are locked up in my suitcase but the ones that I’ve been writing him now are under my bed. Maybe I can hide them all in the third-floor bathroom where Poe’s cell phone is or something.
I’m not afraid of being punished but I