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At least the separation in our surnames was just enough that I was getting settled back in my seat by the time Axel’s name was called. He ate the distance between his seat and that symbolic certificate up in milliseconds, like there was nothing ahead of him but a life of tremendous achievement—like he wasn’t trying to get it together with a girl who was throwing that perfect life into mild disarray. Just watching him move made me shiver, and it definitely wasn’t fear in the usual sense.
For Elliot’s sanity, I did try to keep my own eyes to myself as we waited through the rest of the certificate-delivering and a really tedious speech by Mrs. Hitchens that seemed to have the general theme that we were going to continue to be just as mean, lazy, and stupid going into our future lives as we’d been at Burgundy. But every so often I would look just a little too far to the left, and most of the time I’d catch Axel failing not to peek at me.
When Mrs. Hitchens finally let out her last sigh and said, “Okay, you can go,” nobody stood in the way of the two of us rejoining one another. Axel put a careful arm around my waist like he was afraid too much provocation would have me ripping off my clothes in public again.
Honestly? We hadn’t had much of a chance to be alone in a salacious sense since the formal, and Axel seemed to realise that being pushy was probably not the best approach at that time, but I was feeling a little more comfortable with the idea of certain activities than I had the last time we’d been intimate. There had only been one occasion since the formal of Axel being a bit shifty, when he’d tried to keep me from getting involved in the release of his silly gizmo. I’d called him out on it right away and he’d apologised and told me of course he was going to be eager for my assistance in the final stages of bringing things to market, since I was the one who’d helped him get there in the first place and besides he was still paying my dad some stupid amount of money from his trust fund or whatever so he could stand us up for dinner and go romance whatever woman was top of his list at the moment.
Well, according to Axel it was pennies in the grand scheme of what he stood to gain, but still. It kind of relieved me that he was capable of making a mistake. That told me he wasn’t being so careful around me at the moment that I couldn’t trust this was really representative of his future behaviour.
I gave Callie an accidental shoulder-check while we were on our way over to the guest seating. I guess she was trying to find me. “Whoops, sorry Calista, I swear I don’t hate you quite that much yet.”
She squinted at me like she wasn’t quite sure. “Well, congratulations, Aileen, I just came over to ask if you wanted to come out with us tonight?”
Axel said we were definitely going to keep in touch with Lucas, obviously, because he was a g
ood guy to know. No beating him when it came to industry contacts. But my relationship with Callie and Tamara had definitely hit a point of no return—or, maybe it hadn’t. It had always been strange that I gravitated towards those two out of everyone in the class, when I was always going to be a third there.
Maybe not so strange. Like everyone else, I’d always seen that Tamara and Callie were standouts—and in a way the majority of our peers would not consider positive. So of course some of my targeting of them to make a friendship group had always been calculated to make a point, to try to transform them something like the girl from that movie Clueless, who couldn’t imagine anyone getting along as well as she did without her specific advantages.
Well, I’m prone to trying to make really dramatic points.
“Luc already let me know,” Axel told Callie, “and we’re going to have to pass on our apologies for this one sadly. Got a family thing.”
Callie’s smile never even wobbled. “That’s fine, another time. Hope you have fun!”
It was a bit too cynical to say I’d only gotten close to Callie and Tamara because they were unpopular, actually. There were many ways in which we were able to understand one another quite unlike others seemed to. We were all too quick to push down our distress, even when revealing it was what would set us free. But that was just the start of a close relationship. There had to be more to make the kind of close relationship that endured after you were no longer forced to see one another on a regular basis. I was much closer to having that sort of relationship with Matt, much to Axel’s annoyance. He didn’t believe men and women could be friends under any circumstances. This, of course, was an endorsement of the relationship as far as I was concerned.
“Did you want to go?” Axel asked. He was watching the way I had been staring after Callie as she left. My thoughts had already moved on from her specifically, but I guess it looked pretty much like mooning. “This is supposed to be our day, not my dad’s. He won’t mind if we decide to go out with them instead.”
I shook my head. I’d just spotted Dad in the crowd, powering towards us, and Axel’s father wouldn’t be far off. “Like Callie said, another time. I just want to switch off from school stuff for the moment, and that means school people.”
“I’m a school person,” Axel pointed out.
“Yes, and all the worst interactions we’ve had involved school. I can’t think of one that wasn’t terrible.”
Axel leaned over to whisper in my ear. I was still giggling when Dad and Axel’s dad showed up at about the same time.
Dad got the first word in, of course. “Aileen, great job walking. Would you like me to take your certificate home for you?”
I handed the thing over in its plastic sleeve. “I don’t think it’s good for anything at all, don’t worry about being too gentle with it.”
Dad wrestled with it until he was able to fold it in half, put it under his arm, and ruffled my hair under his palm. “I’d better be off now, got a hot date who won’t wait.”
“Thanks for the mental image,” I called as he made his dash.
Mr. Bennett was blinking after him for several seconds. “Is he…”
“Like that all the time, more or less, yes. It’s okay, I’m used to it now.”
“I was going to ask if he…” Mr. Bennett didn’t seem to be able to finish that thought, either.
Axel took charge before Dad could derail the whole afternoon without even being there. He was probably pretty used to Dad’s befuddling influence now, which was a strange thought. I’d always wondered how any guy I dated was going to get past that. “To the car, then?”
“To the car,” Mr. Bennett agreed. “That box you were expecting is waiting for you back home. I’m looking forward to seeing it if you don’t mind showing me at this early stage.”
Axel ended up carrying one of the damn things along with him to dinner, like he was five and this was his show-and-tell pick. He fidgeted with it in the car all the way there until I was surprised it wasn’t broken by the time we arrived. Spoke to the quality of wherever he’d gotten it manufactured, I supposed. His 3D-printed incarnation was already in tatters.
Once we were shown to a table at the restaurant that seemed like it ought to attract a special fee, Axel set the toy in the middle of the table and started taking it through its routine like it was a horse at a dressage show, talking his father patiently and with no self-consciousness through the different angles and shapes it could explain—the part of it covered by Dad’s damn patent. Well, he’d paid for it by being trapped as Dad’s boss for who knew how long. Even Axel with all his charm was going to find it inconvenient to break that arrangement.
