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When Waylen Hornbill entered the classroom with the same casual ease of someone who always got what he wanted, Leo shifted in his chair, Emma on one side of him and Piper on the other. He had planted himself there on purpose, searching for some amount of control in a situation where he couldn’t take any action at all. The frown he was wearing would have made his mother or Abuelita say, “if you don’t stop, your face is going to stay that way,” but Leo could not have cared less whether he would end up with permanent frown lines. He was on high alert, watching Hornbill as he wrote out their business ethics topic on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. If he had permission, Leo would love to shove his textbook right up Hornbill’s ass where it belonged.
“Welcome back, everyone,” Professor Hornbill finally deigned to address the class with a smile most people found disarming, maybe even charming. As soon as the wool had been fully pulled from Leo’s eyes, that weird feeling he always got around Hornbill intensified. The smile wasn’t just discomforting anymore; it was blatantly manipulative. Leo frowned harder. Emma didn’t look up from where she was drawing something on a sketch pad, no doubt trying to do anything to get through the class. Piper’s hand twitched beside Leo when Hornbill turned his attention to their table. They had sat near the back, and Hornbill still made sure to single them out. “Emma, put that away, will you? You can finish your little art project later.”
Leo leaned forward and opened his mouth, ready to tell Hornbill that he was going to become a little art project if his show of superiority didn’t end soon. His knee-jerk reaction stopped abruptly when Piper’s hand found his leg under the table and squeezed. Instead, he took a deep breath and focused on tamping down his anger. Nothing good would come out of an explosion. Leo looked at Emma beside him, folding her hands on her sketch pad to comply, and was surprised to hear Piper speak up from his other side. “Actually, my brother said Harvard did a study on it, and doodling is proven to help students stay alert and retain more information.” The frown on Leo’s face broke. Piper was fucking brilliant. Her attack was calculated and factual, and given the dumbstruck look on Hornbill’s face, she had won the argument.
“Is that so?” Leo chimed in, slapping a notepad down in front of himself with gusto and turning to Emma conversationally. “Can I borrow one of your colored pencils?”
“Of course.” Emma nodded and passed three of them over.
“I guess as long as it’s not a distraction,” Hornbill said with another fake smile, one that wasn’t pleasant or cute like Piper’s. The intention behind it changed everything.
“You usually look at your phone thirty times during class, so maybe you should try doodling, too.” Leo cocked his head and attempted to give Hornbill a good-natured look, but it probably looked more menacing. He was better at telling other people how to act than doing the acting himself.
Luckily, Leo had never been particularly nice to Hornbill, so the man just chuckled and said, “Just don’t let your grades suffer.” Leo might have been imagining it, but he thought he caught a brief glance at Emma before Hornbill walked away. He knew he hadn’t imagined it when Emma took a shaky breath beside him and went back to drawing. Instilling fear. That was the entire purpose of Hornbill’s agenda, and his statement about grades was a warning. Not to Leo, but to Emma. The warning? Tell no one.
Leo scrawled out a note onto his pad before sliding it subtly closer to Emma. Not close enough that anyone could see it was for her, but close enough that she would know it was.
You okay?
On Leo’s other side, Piper was getting out her note-taking stuff and trying not to look over at him and Emma. He could tell by the way she had positioned her body away from them, but her eyes kept shifting down like she wanted to read the note. Emma didn’t respond, but a minute later, he could see the word fine drawn into the patterned flowers she was doodling.
The rest of the class passed without incident as Hornbill laid out what Leo was sure the man thought was the most scintillating stump speech on the nature of the corporation and its relationship to society. All of Leo’s attention was on his drawing, and contrary to what Hornbill had tried to spout earlier, he was paying attention, but the sunflower he was drawing seemed to spell out exactly who he was paying attention to, even with his total lack of drawing skills. He stole a peek at Piper’s paper at one point to see that she was taking notes on the lesson but had also made aggressive comments beside some of her notes targeting Hornbill, a small act of rebellion that made Leo unreasonably happy. Nothing might come of Piper writing “asshole” or “hypocrite” on her notepad, but Leo found solace in the fact that they both had found things to do while feeling helpless.
Emma was much more skilled at sketching than Leo and had drawn a rose with drooping petals and jagged thorns, the tips of her fingers black from where she had smudged the graphite. When Hornbill finally dismissed the class, she carefully flipped her sketch pad closed, rose from her seat, and left without a word. She did what she had set out to do. She had made it through class.
Forty-Four
PIPER
The line to the front counter stretched to the back of the on-campus coffee house, and Piper shuffled forward a few inches to make a little more room for the person behind her. Leo, standing at her side, didn’t move with her, a stone statue declaring his territory right where he was standing and not a millimeter farther. She still had zero idea why he was coming with her at all. If he wanted coffee, she could have just brought it to him. The smooth surface of the apatite stone in her palm was her best calming tactic not to overthink his presence.
“Next,” the heavily tattooed barista, a dark-haired guy with a septum piercing, called out.
“Hey, man.” Leo stepped up to the counter and set his hand on Piper’s lower back to guide her forward. Piper, marveling at how relaxed and cool the barista looked and how ridiculously plain she must have looked in comparison, had decided that he would take one look at her and immediately be annoyed by her drink order.
“What can I get you two?” The barista’s voice was chipper enough, but it didn’t stop Piper’s inner monologue from echoing in her mind.
“I’ll have a small peppermint latte,” Leo said and then looked at Piper with his eyebrows raised.
She was still reeling from the fact that he had ordered the exact thing she’d bought him the day before when she finally spoke up. “Yeah, make that two—”
“No,” Leo interrupted with a firm shake of his head. Piper blinked, confusion pulling her eyebrows together as Leo turned back to the barista. “Sorry. Piper, tell him what you really want.”
Piper looked behind her at the long line, feeling her anxiety flip in her stomach. “It’s fine, Leo. I’ll just get—”
“Piper, for fuck’s sake, order what you want,” Leo intoned in a low voice. He stared at her, his dark, defiant eyes piercing through her indecision like he could somehow burn it away with the intensity of his stare.
“We’re holding up the line,” Piper hissed, rubbing her thumb over the apatite stone again.
Leo bristled and spun around on his heel, spine straight and confident as he called out, “Does anyone have a problem with this girl ordering the drink she actually wants?” The line looked mostly confused and somewhat terrified of Leo’s menacing presence. Piper’s face heated with embarrassment.
“Leo, what the hell?” she whispered.
“You’re paying, so order that frilly-ass drink I know you want, and stop making yourself smaller on behalf of other people. If anyone gives a shit about how much chocolate syrup you want, then they live a bitter existence and should check themselves.”
“Hell yeah!” The girl behind fist-pumped the air in solidarity.
Leo turned back toward the barista and pointed at his name tag. “As long as you tip Jared appropriately, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t give a shit if you want extra syrup in your drink. Am I right?”
