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Leaning back, I crossed my arms. My eyes raked his body with condescension pasted on my face.
“You may dress in fancy suits, style your hair with thousand-dollar cuts, and look like a GQ centerfold, but nothing will change the fact that you are a miserable person.”
I’d done it.
I’d gotten myself fired.
Why couldn’t Ariana keep her mouth shut?
You are Ariana, dumb ass.
Great. I was quickly becoming my least favorite legend.
Instead of firing me, he lifted an amused brow.
“Are you flirting with me?”
Flirting?
He called that flirting?
If this was his idea of flirting, I didn’t want to know what his idea of foreplay was.
I shook my head, disbelief fueling every movement. “Never.”
A sniffle caught my attention from the restroom attached to the break room. I fled for the door. Tessie had gone in twenty minutes ago.
Had she heard us fighting? Why hadn’t I checked on her when she’d been gone for too long?
I kicked myself and her brother for distracting me as I swung the door open and took in Tessie.
She sat on the tiled floor, her shoulders hunched and quivering as her arms stayed wrapped around her bent knees.
I felt Bastian behind me, but I ignored him as I took a seat beside Tessie and leaned her head on my shoulder in a side hug.
“Oh, honey.” Pressing a kiss to her forehead, I wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “What’s wrong, Tessie?”
“Mommy said she can’t come, and Daddy won’t answer the phone,” she stuttered between sobs and shuttered breaths, and I swore, I broke for her.
Because I got it.
I understood how it felt to not see your mom or your dad and to have no one growing up.
It was almost worse that her parents were alive and she still felt abandoned by people who had the means to be with her whenever they wanted but chose not to.
It wasn’t lost on me that Bastian, despite his flaws (and there were many), always seemed to put Tessie first.
If anything, that was the one and only thing I admired about him.
I tilted Tessie’s chin up, so she looked at me. I couldn’t make her parents’ absence any better, but maybe I could distract her from it.
“Wanna know a secret?”
She hiccuped, her eyes wide and round and so damn sad. “Yes.”
“You’re the coolest girl I know.”
“No, I’m not.”
