AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lane blinks at me, straightening in her chair. She’s wearing a strappy pink sundress, with a knitted cream cardigan bunching around her slender shoulders. Her blue eyes are wary, scanning me for signs of a lie.
“You know I understand this,” Lane repeats slowly. She grips the edge of the table, like she’s holding on for balance.
“Yes, obviously.” I have many flaws, but I’m not an idiot. “Why on earth did you tell your parents you needed help?”
“Ididn’t.” An agitated flush creeps over Lane’s cheeks, and her grip tightens on the table until the tips of her fingers go white. “I told them I understood everything just fine, and to trust me for once.”
There’s a beat of silence between us, which the clamor of the coffee shop rushes in to fill. Hissing steam, scraping chairs, clanging cups. The ring of the register.
My chest is tight. Is that a new symptom of caffeine withdrawal? How troubling.
“Yet here we are,” I say at last, not sure what else to say. Dealing with complicatedfeelingshas never been my forte, and Lane Rhodes clearly has a metric ton of family baggage.
“Yep. Here we are.” Lane sighs and slumps back, suddenly glum. “Maybe if you tell them everything’s fine, they’ll listen to you.”
“Perhaps.”
“I doubt it though.” Lane smiles, without humor. “They’ll think I sweet-talked you into saying that. Seduced you with my womanly wiles.”
Womanly—what?
My fingers blur over my laptop keyboard, and I clear my throat as I type, my face suddenly hot. Is it just me, or is the Brainy Bean an inferno today? Must be all the bodies coming in and out, simmering with student hormones. Plus the steam and the spring sunshine beating down on the glass windows. And this shirt.
“I’m emailing your father now.”
Lane rolls her eyes and finally,finally, tips back the last dregs of her drink. Thank god. Her mug thumps against the table, and the pink tip of her tongue chases a bead of coffee from her lower lip. It’s an effort to stay leaning back in my chair, like I wouldn’t desperately love to lunge forward and lick that bead away myself.
For the caffeine, of course.
“Don’t feel bad about taking his money when he insists you keep tutoring me.” Lane prods the napkins into a neater line, her nails painted mint green. “He could believe me any time, but hewon’t. Even when I show my parents my grades each semester, they assume I must have gotten lucky somehow. Flirted with the professors, or coaxed another student into writing my papers. No way could I have used my brain. God forbid.”
My fingers go still on the keys. My cursor winks at me from the laptop screen, my cranky email half-drafted. “I don’t understand. Why don’t they believe you?”
Lane points to her curled blonde hair, like that’s a reasonable answer. It’s really not.
“But it would actually be far more devious to cheat your way into good grades.”
“I know.”
“Even that would require a lot of cunning.”
Lane breathes a laugh. “Yeah.”
“They’re your family.You grew up with them, right? Surely they must know you better…”
Too late, I trail off, finally noticing the pinched expression on my student’s face. Lane Rhodes may be a beauty, she may look like some 1950s pin up model wandered into the Brainy Bean, but when her shoulders curl in and her chin drops, she looks tired and completely human.
Christ. I’m an ass sometimes.
“Space weather.” Slapping my laptop closed, I leave the email half-written. I’ll get to it later, when there’s no sad, gorgeous coed wilting before my eyes. “Tell me everything you know, and don’t bother trying to half-ass it. Iknowyou know a lot.”
Lane inhales sharply and raises her chin. Blue eyes flash at me, defiant.
Then my new student launches into a perfect answer, and I fight to focus on each word—never mind the coffee scent, and the clink of mugs, and all the other… distractions.
Three
Lane
