by Knox, Abby
“Well, this is unexpected,” Hunter says.
Is that all she has to say? Hunter Rydell, the school’s queen of melodrama and dramatic monologues, has nothing to offer except to point out the surprise of the situation.
Standing inside the heated tent surrounded by happy wedding guests, I roll my eyes and sip my pretty pink mocktail. “I know, I know. Just, like, accept my apology so I can move on with my life. My dad is having some kind of mid-life crisis or something and wants everyone around him to have ‘feelings’ or whatever.” With my free hand, I make air quotes around the word “feelings.”
Hunter squints at me. “All right. I accept your apology. But, Ridley, your dad is 39, that’s not quite mid-life, I don’t think.”
Hunter is really making it difficult not to revert back into bitch mode. Finally, I blink at her, and smile sweetly and giggle. “No, of course you wouldn’t want to think that.”
19
Crosby
My first experience with a Rushmore pulling all the strings is the day after New Year, when I receive a phone call from Mr. Rushmore himself.
“I’m prepared to offer you a job with my company.”
I know what’s going on here. Ridley called me as soon as her father found out about our relationship. He’s trying to draw me into the family and make it look like a business transaction.
“I’m sorry, sir, no disrespect, but I am in love with your daughter. I don’t want any part of the family business. I’d like to take care of Ridley completely on my own, and furthermore, your daughter has a lot of potential. Once she has her degree, she’s going to do exactly what she wants to do…”
“Son,” he interrupts. “I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t give a rat’s ass about your independence, and yes, I expect my daughter to get her education and get a job and eventually, one day, stop using my credit cards. I’ve been hassling her about this for months. I’m only offering you a job with the Rushmore Group so you can move here and be closer to my daughter. But if that’s not what you want…”
“I do want to be closer to your daughter.”
“Well, then how about I talk to the headmistress about a possible opening at Greenbridge Academy? The board has been discussing a game design lab. It may as well be you who helps us start it. What would you say to that?”
I don’t hesitate. “Yes. I’ll take it.” I give no thought to my current status as the chief designer at the giant game company that I helped get off the ground. None of that matters if Ridley won’t come to me.
“All right, I’ll have my assistant phone you later today to negotiate the salary…”
“I said I’ll take it. Whatever it takes to be with Ridley, I’ll do it.”
“Son, just keep in mind, no making out on the school premises. Try to keep it on the down low, as the kids say.”
“Why would she and I be making out at the high school?”
“I like your sense of boundaries. She may be nineteen, but not everyone in her senior class is aware of that, and it would look bad if anyone knew about your relationship.”
Ridley’s a senior? In high school?
This entire time…and then it all makes sense. Her reticence to discuss school with me. Her telling me she could not pick up and come with me to California. But why? Why wouldn’t she tell me?
My head is spinning, but I agree to show up for classes bright and early on January 5.
I call her as soon as I hang up the phone with Rushmore, both excited about the news and confused about the things that Ridley has been keeping from me. My call goes to voicemail, so I send her a text.
“Ridley, please call me. We need to talk.”
When she doesn’t answer, I text her. I tell her everything. That her father spilled the beans about her being a student at Greenbridge Academy; and that I’m—surprise!—going to be teaching there in no less than three days.
Still, I want to talk to her, to see her face, and hear her voice. But all I get in reply are breezy text messages.
She’s protecting herself again. Putting her guard up. Well, she’s going to learn soon enough, I can’t have that happening.
20
Ridley
He’s going to break up with me. He’s moving here to teach, he knows everything, and he’s breaking up with me.
Between his packing and me going to long hours of intense swim practice before the start of my final semester at Greenbridge, we play phone tag.
But on my end, I have to admit it’s a half hearted phone tag; I know he won’t break up with me over text.
Because Crosby is a better person than I am.
21
Crosby
The students at this school barely need me to tell them anything about game design. The students who chose my class are already so advanced for their age, we end up just shooting the shit for an hour about their favorite games.
If the rest of the semester goes this smoothly, I won’t feel good about taking the money.
But I’ll have to stick around. I mean, no way I would quit. I’d teach for free just to be in the same town as Ridley.
I mull over how I can make the class a little more challenging for all these little brainiacs while I study the vegan cheese selections in the school cafeteria. What kind of a school has more than one choice of vegan cheese?
I never had the opportunity to attend Greenbridge when I lived here. After Mom and Dad divorced, Mom raised me on a waitress’s salary plus the little bit of help from child support. She didn’t ask for much from my dad other than what was legally required. She managed to make ends meet but we were relegated to second-hand clothes for school, and I sometimes got the free backpack of donated school supplies.
When I began my senior year, it broke my mom’s heart to tell me we wouldn’t be able to afford for me to go away to college. Broke my dad’s heart, too, when it turned out I didn’t ask him for help. Instead I went to community college and then broke into the business fairly young. I got lucky. I worked hard, and still do, but mostly I feel lucky.
And now here I am, a successful game designer, my father’s about to marry one of the richest housewives in America, and I’m boning my future stepsister and the entire family is either sad or mad about it.
I move on from the vegan cheese and instead help myself to a veggie hot dog with mustard. As I navigate around some students with my tray, I nearly run right into a gaggle of what looks like the mean girls of the school. Perfect eyebrows, designer handbags, and pouty lips.
And right in the dead center of the pack, walking just a step ahead of everyone else with the haughtiest, most gorgeous face I’ve ever seen, is Ridley Rushmore.
She spots me immediately and our eyes lock.
Her expression is, of course, unreadable.
My feelings are all over my face. And that’s why I was a nerd in high school and she is the queen bee.
My eyes travel down to her uniform. Skinny plaid necktie, cardigan, and pleated plaid skirt hiked up just shy of what’s allowed. My mouth goes dry, my heart races, my hands sweat.
My head reminds my cock and my heart that she lied to me. But wait, did she actually lie?
One thing is for certain, we need to talk in private.
“Hi,” I say, barely hiding the fact that I’m a teacher, saying hello to his high school girlfriend.
She smiles brilliantly and rolls her eyes playfully. “Everyone? Meet my soon-to-be stepbrother, nerd extraordinaire.”
When her eyes meet mine, I see a flash of something. It’s barely detectable, but she’s telling me to go with the act.
Of course. If she’s a student here, nobody can know she’s been banging the newest teacher. Not to mention one that’s about to be related to her by marriage.
I suck both my lips into my mouth anxiously and give everyone an awkward wave. “I’m Crosby. I see you already know the ice princess.”
Everyone laughs, that is until Hadley elbows the girl to her right to shut her up.
“Ice queen, future prom queen, same difference.”
I watch her traipse over to a table and take a seat. I marvel. Everyone actually stops and waits for her to get seated before they sit. She really is a fucking queen.
But she’s my queen, and I won’t have her brushing me off like this.
“Can I talk to you a minute? It’s about your mom.”
Ridley laughs. “What does Bianca want now? To ask me to ask Daddy for her boat payment because she spent her allowance on Botox injections?”
Everyone laughs.
I dare to put a hand on her shoulder. She gasps and looks down at my hand and then up at me like she might just end me before I get out another word.
But I’m not having it.
Something comes over me, a possessiveness, a desperation, that I don’t recognize in myself. I never needed anybody, never wanted to possess a woman. I’m an enlightened, modern man. But Ridley and I have things to talk about and we need to talk about them now.
“Now,” I say through gritted teeth.
Ridley’s eyes tell me in the briefest second that my reaction has half scared her and half turned her on. She recovers quickly and sighs in an exaggerated, extremely put-upon way. “I guess this is what happens when your mom decides to marry a social climber. Everybody wants a piece of you. Excuse me, hoes.”
22
Ridley
Pissed off Crosby is hot.
He has me by the hand, dragging me down the hall and outside. The grounds are not exactly choked with students but it’s not abandoned either. Someone will see us, surely.
He doesn’t let go until we reach the greenhouses.
I don’t think he even knows where he’s going.
“Hey, gamer boy, if you’re looking for a secluded spot to make out with me, we can go to the theater building. It’s practically abandoned in January until they start auditioning for the spring—“
Crosby interrupts. “I’m not going to take you there to make out with you.”
“Oh?”
He turns and now drags me toward the auditorium. “Through there, back stage, down the stairs, prop room. That’s where everyone goes to—”
He cuts me off again. “And I sure as fuck don’t want to know how you know where the make out spots are in this school,” he growls.
“Well you said you weren’t going to make out with me so why do you care?”
Like he knows where he’s going now, like he has a homing device, Crosby pulls me down into the bowels of the auditorium, and finds the prop room, door ajar.
“Careful,” I say with a smirk. “You never know who you’re going to run into down here.”
“This school is so fuckin’ weird.”
I ignore this comment as I flick on the light for a second to make sure the coast is clear. When I’m sure it is, I go inside.
Surprisingly, Crosby follows me in and cuts the light switch back off. “But you said—”
But I don’t get to finish that sentence.
Crosby lays a deep, angry, claiming kiss on my lips. I know what’s going on here. He’s upset. He has every right to be. When he comes up for air, he talks to me like a changed man. Something is different about him.
He backs me up against the wall as he speaks. “You told me you were nineteen,” he says.
“I am,” I squeak. Fuck me. Why does my voice only squeak in front of this man? I am not a squeaker.
“Then what the fuck are you still doing in high school?”
I’m glad it’s dark because I have to bite back tears. “My parents held me back a year because my mother insisted. She said it would put me ahead of the pack when I started school. When I started kindergarten, they told me I could tell everyone I was a year younger just to fit in, even though the teachers knew.”
“Next question. Why did you let me think you were in college?”
“Because…”
“Because you thought maybe I wouldn’t fuck a 19-year-old who was still in high school?”
“No! Because I was scared you wouldn’t be interested in me. Because a lot of the nerds at this school graduate early, and I didn’t want you to think I was dumb. I don't want you thinking that I’m only at this school because of my daddy’s money.”
Crosby lolls his head back in disbelief but keeps his hands locked on the wall on either side of me. “What? Why would I think that? Why would you think that I would think that?”
His eyes bore into me but I can’t meet them. I look at the floor as if studying it for answers.
“Ridley,” he rattles out.
I don’t answer him. Instead I press my lips together in a firm line and switch my gaze to the ceiling.
Finally having had enough of me avoiding his gaze, Crosby grips my face in both hands. “Look at me. Answer me. Do you get to be the one to tell me what to think of you?”
I have to breathe in and out slowly to take the focus off the sting of moisture in the corners of my eyes.
“I want to know. Who gets to decide what I think?”
My breath comes out in a rattle when our gazes finally meet. “You do,” I whisper, squinting angrily. “Now let me get out of here.”
“No!”
I press my fists against Crosby’s hard chest but not forcefully.
He responds by coming closer. So close I’m sure he can hear my heart thundering in my chest.
“Eyes on me, princess. Listen to me. You are brave, and smart, and hilarious, and the best fucking kisser on the entire planet.”
“And a liar.”
He shrugs and looks up, as if he’s considering what I said. “Meh, I’d say more clever than deceptive.”
I hang my head and sigh, letting a tear fall behind my curtain of hair so he can’t see.
“And I love you. Now, kiss me,” he says.
I look up to meet his gaze and it’s almost too much. Every time he looks into my soul like that, I want to die of embarrassment or cry.
23
Crosby
“You really sure you love me?”
She says it as if this is somehow news. As if I hadn’t been telling her with my eyes, my body, my very breath since the moment we first kissed. “I do. I have. All along.”
She sucks in a breath and stares at me agog. “Wow. This is a first.”
“What?” he asks. “You’ve never noticed a hapless man throwing himself at your mercy?”
She smiles. “No, that’s not it. This is the first time I’ve ever—oh god, am I really saying this?—felt the same thing in return.”
Crosby shakes his head and he’s so close I can feel his breath on my cheek; his nose nearly brushes the tip of mine.
“Then say it,” he commands.
“I think I just did, Crosby.”
He’s so close now that the full length of his body presses me against the wall. “You know what I mean. Say it back.”
“OK, but only because you’re being super bossy. I love you too, Crosby.”
It feels like someone has squeezed all the juice out of my heart and left it only with an urgency not to waste another second of my life.
“Then that’s it. We’re together. You and me against the world. And who cares what anyone thinks.”
“Except you might get in trouble dating a student.”
“But you’re not my student.”
“Do you not remember how schools work? The whole student/teacher dynamic? I’m pretty sure my swim teammate Addie … or Maddie, is thirsting heavily for the swim coach, but if he so much as stepped one toe out of line, it’d be all over for the team. They would fire his ass so fast it would be out the door before the rest of his body.
“And I heard a rumor that Headmistress Moody actually met her husband when he was a student here nine years ago. But they couldn’t do anything about it, or at least she wouldn’t. She will destroy you if she knows what’s going on.”
“Well, then,” Crosby says. “How good are you at keeping secrets.”
24
<
br /> Ridley
Hadley stares at me like she’s hurt.
“Something is going on with you. Spill it.”
My best friend since kindergarten, Hadley may enjoy frequent shopping sprees with me courtesy of my daddy’s credit cards, but she does deserve some credit of her own.
She did warn me that Roland Peek was no good over a year ago.
“Hadley,” I say, my gaze landing on the door of Crosby’s classroom, my gut clenching at the same time my heart is expanding.
“Let’s walk,” I tell her.
“I thought we could get through the rest of my senior year without telling anyone apart from our parents. None of them are thrilled about our relationship, but as we’re adults, none of them can do anything about it.”
“What relationship?”
“Listen, Hadley, you cannot tell a soul.”
And then I tell her everything. And surprisingly, it’s not that bad. She swears she will keep it to herself, but then I find myself not caring so much if people do find out.
Winning a state swim championship in February doesn’t hurt my confidence, either.
As spring break approaches, things take a turn when I open my locker on Monday morning and see something that pulls all of the breath out of my body. It’s my mother’s Christmas card. There we are. And someone has scrawled in Sharpie, a line with arrows on either side, pointing between me and Crosby. And underneath the line it says “Hillbilly Love.”
“What the fuck,” Crosby says when I show him the picture after school, as we sit on the bench by the school garden.
“But my dad and your mom are not even married yet.”
I roll my eyes at him. “Really? Bullies don’t operate under a strict code of logic. Ask me how I know.” I cast a glance around to make sure nobody is listening. “So what do you want to do about this?”
