“That one’s just plain offensive,” I grumbled.
“There’s always a method to his madness.”
I sat up and pressed the heels of my palms deep into my eye sockets until I saw stars. “Will you help me hide his body?”
He chuckled again and I bit back a smile.
“Where is the dungeon master?”
I stretched my arms overhead. “Hiding in his office. Making me do all the work.” I was sick of sitting still. I needed to get up and moved around. “I’m surprised he didn’t strap me to the chair.”
“That’s next week.”
I shot my head toward him.
“Kidding, kidding.” He wrapped his finished apple in a paper towel. “Mostly.”
“I hate him, Jack. I hate Clifford B. Rutledge. What a stupid name.”
“You don’t hate him.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You hate that he’s challenging you. You hate that he’s not letting you distract him with your womanly wiles.”
I frowned because that felt a little too close to the truth.
“No. I hate that he’s an arrogant asshole that thinks if I knew the definitions to some four-dollar words then suddenly I wouldn’t be such a loser.”
Jack raised a sassy eyebrow at me. He hid a grin and I could tell he thought this was funny.
“It’s not funny, it sucks,” I said.
“I know for a fact that Clifford doesn’t think that way about you.”
“Then what’s his deal?”
Jack shrugged. “He has high expectations for people he cares about.” He raised an eyebrow as he let that sink in.
I opened my mouth to argue but then closed it again with a pout. High expectations? I didn’t know that I had ever been held to any expectations before. I think I’ve always had the opposite.
“What’s the word for the thing where everybody assumes you’re going to be a fuck up your whole life?”
“For me, that was called ‘childhood.’” He played it off as a joke but there was some deeper issue there. He changed the subject before I could dig. “At some point, you have to decide to stop letting other people define you and decide what you want to be for yourself.”
His words mirrored Ford's. It would be easy to raise my hackles and get defensive. It was my natural response. But maybe I really could decide who I would be. Maybe I really could choose to be a lady of class instead of a stripper from Green Valley that lights bikes on fire. Ford said I was a quick learner; he believed in me. Jack acted as if my success was a given. I wanted to prove someone right—rather than wrong—for the first time.
"Dammit." Despite the ache in my backside from sitting so long, I pulled the book back over. "Fine."
“Atta girl.”
"Six sick hicks nix six slick bricks with picks and sticks."
"There you go." He nodded with an impressed frown. "Now a hundred more times and maybe he'll let you leave the table.”
Chapter 12
Clifford
