From here, I can’t tell if it’s a frown of horror or mere confusion. Or—oh, God. My stomach clenches—if he’s interested.
Frick, frick, fricketty, frick-frick.
Do I even want to see what happens next? Can I look away?
Before I can flee (or not), Clive excuses us from the conversation with the dean and drags me away. His tone has the forced joviality of a cut-rate Santa—a sure sign he’s trying not to freak out.
As soon as we’re out of the dean’s hearing range, he hisses at me, “What are you saying? You think Lily is here for personal reasons? Not as a member of the selection committee?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “Maybe.”
“Why didn’t you say something before now?”
Clive’s face is starting to flush.
“I did. Literally every time we spoke this past week, I told you that we should take this slowly and not make a big deal out of it.” I gesture to the room at large, to the gathered university dignitaries, and the waiters with canapés. “And somehow this still happened.”
“I thought you were exaggerating.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you wanted an excuse to keep working with Ramsey, obviously.” He gives me a bug-eyed look and then adds, “Because of the personal nature of . . . whatever is happening between you and Max.”
There’s a pettiness in Clive’s gaze, as well as a flash of jealousy that I might not have recognized if I didn’t know him as well as I do.
It makes me a little sad—and a lot relieved—because his pettiness isn’t my problem anymore.
Which is probably a good thing, since I clearly have enough pettiness and jealousy of my own to deal with right now.
“I wasn’t exaggerating. My concerns about Lily McPherson have nothing to do with the personal nature of whatever is between me and Max.” Clive’s gaze narrows and I hastily add, “I mean, if there was something between me and Max. Which there isn’t. So it’s a non-issue.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Clive looks from me to where Max is standing on the other side of the room. Where he’s been standing ever since he arrived.
He’s barely glanced in my direction.
“Yes, I’m sure about that,” I snap. “Do you think I don’t know how ill-matched Max and I are? That I don’t know we would never work together?”
“Do you know that?”
Oh, sure, on Saturday, when I overheard him talking to Max about it, he made it seem like Max is the problem. Like Max is some kind of misfit. But I know Clive. That was just him hitting below the belt. Saying what he thought would hurt Max the most.
“Look,” I tell him now. “We both know I can’t keep up with Max intellectually. I know I’ll bore him or irritate him or whatever. I get that. I know that when he asked me to marry him, he was just being nice, but—”
“Back up,” Clive cuts me off. “He asked you to marry him?”
“Yes. Friday. Right before—” I stop myself mid-sentence and autocorrect. “Right before you showed up.”
“Tomarryhim?”
Clive’s incredulity says it all.
“Yes. As unbelievable as it is that someone would want to marry me, with my misfit pets and my application for Hoarders not even accepted yet, he did ask.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Clive protests.
I roll my eyes, because I know that’s exactly what Clive meant. Max and I are mismatched. I don’t need Clive to explain it to me.
