Aamee stopped in front of me, rolled her eyes, and pulled me into a hug.
And while I was sure afterward I would deny it upon threat of torture, I sank into her and clung.
D R E W
I sat on the couch surveying all the people who’d shown up to help Sophia, and I was immensely grateful for every one of them. While I’d been doing my best to appear calm, I was a riot of nerves on the inside.
What the hell would we do if Sophia got kicked out of school because she’d been helping Brody and me? How would I ever live with that guilt? How would she live with what we’d gotten her into? Why did everything always become such a mess?
“Sophia,” her dad said, pulling my attention to where he was leafing through papers on the kitchen table that had been moved into the living room so we could spread out more. “Is your name on any of these documents?”
“No,” she replied from her spot beside me on the couch.
“Then how did the dean even connect you to it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. I was promoting it, but I marketed it as being run exclusively by Brody and Drew.”
“That’s a point you have to keep driving home to the panel. There doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence that you were involved in the business beyond promoting it. And college kids promote things all the time. There shouldn’t be a penalty for you doing so.”
“But when I talked to the dean, I didn’t deny my involvement,” Sophia said, her voice small and defeated.
I slid my hand over her thigh and gave it a squeeze to remind her I was here for her. I hoped it was enough, and when she put her hand over mine and threaded our fingers together, I thought maybe it was.
“Doesn’t matter,” her dad replied as he continued to riffle through papers. “You can explain that away by saying you were concerned for your brother and boyfriend and didn’t want to point the finger at only them.”
Her dad managed to not sound repulsed when he called me Sophia’s boyfriend, and I gave him points for the steady delivery.
“But I don’t want to pin it all on them,” Sophia argued.
Mr. Mason opened his mouth to reply, but I beat him to it.
“Sophia, you need to do what you need to do. This is your education we’re talking about here. You are absolutely to save yourself in whatever way you can.” My tone brooked no room for argument, and I hoped Sophia, for once, didn’t give me one.
She looked ready to, but then Brody added, “Seriously, Soph. The school can’t do anything to Drew or me. Being a martyr won’t help anyone.”
Sophia still looked like she wanted to argue but took a deep breath and turned her attention back to whatever was on her phone.
Her lack of argument and Mr. Mason’s point made me feel hopeful. I remembered how Brody and I had tried to convince her to take some credit for her part in the business. Thank God she hadn’t listened to us.
“What did you guys find out about the people who emailed with a grievance?” Mr. Mason asked the room.
He’d asked us if we had a record of people who’d complained, and Brody had shown him the folder where we’d saved all of them. They were all small things: people bitching that their delivery was ten minutes late, an item hadn’t made its way into the box, we hadn’t offered them a refund for merchandise they’d already used. Typical shit.
But Mr. Mason hadn’t wanted to leave any stone unturned and sent us all to social media to stalk the people who’d emailed about the business in case we found someone who had a reason to target Sophia.
So far, we hadn’t found anyone with an ax to grind.
I turned my attention back to the Instagram account of some girl who’d whined that the soda we’d delivered wasn’t diet, even though she hadn’t ordered diet and had only complained after drinking what we’d given her.
Carter came over and plopped down on my other side, his phone in his hand. “This sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” I muttered.
“People are such shitheads sometimes. Here you guys are, just trying to provide a service to lazy students, and someone has to go and wreck it.”
I exhaled loudly and turned to him to respond, but an image on his phone caught my attention. “Hey, I know that guy.”
Sophia leaned over me so she could look at Carter’s phone.
“He’s a frat guy from Alpha Epsilon Mu,” she said. “Same frat as the guy who saw us out at Salvadore’s. How do you know him?”
“I’m not sure,” I murmured. “Brody!”
“Yeah?” Brody responded as he walked over to me.
“Is this guy familiar to you?”
Brody looked at the picture on the phone and thought for a second before snapping his fingers. “Yeah, that’s the guy who asked me to run that errand for him the night I had the idea for the business.”
“What did he complain about?” Aniyah asked.
Sophia grabbed her laptop and read through the emails. “He said the delivery guy was rude. We apologized and offered him fifteen dollars off his next purchase, but he never responded.”
“Weird,” Aniyah said.
“What’s his name?” Xander asked.
“Rob Cantrell.”
“Okay, give me a second,” Xander said, his hands flying wildly over his keyboard.
“Do we want to know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“Nope.”
We all waited with bated breath—even Mr. Mason—while Xander did who knows what on his laptop.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said after a few minutes.
“What?” Sophia asked.
Xander spun the computer around. “Looks like our boy Rob and his frat minions are looking to undercut your business.”
We all moved in to look at the computer. There were email messages as well as a mock-up of a website that looked very similar to ours.
“What do the emails say?” Toby asked.
“Basically that they feel they gave you guys the idea for the business, so they have a right to it.”
“That’s bullshit. How could they claim it was their idea?” Brody asked, anger clear in his voice. “And what does that even matter? It’s not like you can patent an idea like this.”
“They’re dumb frat bros,” Xander said as if it were obvious, and hell, maybe it was. “They see you guys making money and think they can do the same thing. But they have to get you out of the way first.”
“But that makes no sense,” Sophia argued. “Why would they put the business on the dean’s radar if they intended to do the same thing? They’re making it even harder on themselves.”
“Not necessarily,” Toby said. “If they get the panel to rule on your case, then they know the consequences, and they also know exactly how far they can push with their own business without getting into trouble. Your case will provide a blueprint of what not to do.”
“Those smarmy assholes,” Brody seethed.
“So what do we do? We can’t exactly turn all this over to the dean,” Gina said. “Not with the way Hacker Boy went about getting it at least.”
“What frat did you say it was?” Aamee asked.
“Alpha Epsilon Mu. Why?”
Aamee looked thoughtful for a second. “I have some calls to make. I’ll talk to you guys later.” She pressed a quick kiss to Brody’s cheek before bustling out of the apartment.
“She’s dating you?” Mr. Mason asked Brody.
“Yeah,” Brody replied on a lovestruck sigh.
His dad grunted. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
With the look Aamee had on her face, maybe there was hope for us all.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
S O P H I A
From the time I’d stepped into the small room, I’d instantly regretted my decision to wear a long-sleeve, light-green dress.
I’d never been much of a sweater. Even when I worked out, I’d leave the gym with little more than a damp sheen on my skin. Drew told me it was more of a glow, but I sure as hell wasn�
��t glowing now.
Sitting in front of these seven people who were assigned to decide my academic fate gave me a sense of doom that had my underarms drenched. For the last fifteen minutes, as they’d verbally itemized all my supposed wrongdoings while I sat across from them, I’d done my best to seem unfazed by all the allegations.
Maybe if I seemed confident in my innocence, they’d be confident too.
But my goddamn body had betrayed me, and I was sweating like…well, like someone who could get kicked out of college at any moment.
My dad had prepped me thoroughly—walked me through all the accusations and what my responses to them should be. And before I’d come here, I’d felt pretty good.
But the longer I listened to the jury of my collegiate peers cite each of Nite Bite’s transgressions, the more I felt like I was sitting opposite an academic firing squad who was deciding whether they would show me some mercy with a quick shot to the head or they should let me suffer a little while I bled out from a wound over time.
Either way, I was dead.
“Can we open a window?” I asked, already standing as I prepared to offer to do it myself, even though the windows were behind the members of the panel. The sunlight streaming in had made me feel like there was a literal spotlight on me in addition to the figurative one. “I feel warm. Is anyone else warm?”
“I’m not,” said one of the girls as she looked to the others, possibly to gauge their thoughts.
“I think we’re fine,” another said. “But you can crack one if you’d like.”
I thanked them, and as I walked to the other side of the room to pull open a window, I wondered how guilty it made me look that I was letting in thirty-degree air.
I remembered hearing about how our founding fathers had prepared to write the Declaration of Independence in the Philadelphia summer heat with the doors and windows to the room locked so no one could hear what they were saying in there. I don’t think I’d ever fully appreciated their sacrifices until now.
Once I’d returned to my seat, they delivered a few last words before addressing me.
“Would you like to speak about any of these matters?” one girl—I think her name was Mindy—asked.
“I would, yes. Thank you.”
A student who had introduced himself as Nelson Jones, a senior prelaw student, said, “The floor is yours, then.”
Clearly taking his role on the panel seriously, he was dressed in a suit and tie, which was more formal than most of the other people in attendance. He’d been fairly quiet for most of the meeting, appearing almost disinterested at times as he stared at anything other than me.
But now his dark eyes focused on mine. They weren’t warm, but they weren’t exactly intimidating either. I imagined they were the kind of eyes that would one day command the attention of a courtroom.
“Thank you.” I removed the paperwork from the folder I’d brought. My dad had gone over every detail of every paper with me. I knew this inside and out. I just hoped it would make a difference. “I have some documents here if you wouldn’t mind taking a look.”
Nelson held out his hand so I could place the documents in it.
He laid them down in front of him, spreading them out so all of them were visible and also probably so the other panel members could see.
“What are we looking at here?” he asked.
“They’re all the documents associated with the business, including a printout of the website home page.”
“I see that,” Nelson said. “But why are we looking at them? How does this benefit you?”
“It benefits me because my name isn’t on any paperwork as an owner or co-owner or owning any piece of the business in any way.”
“You live with Mr. Mason and Mr. Nolan. Is that correct?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m a partner in their business.”
A girl toward the end of the table with dark, flawless skin and an eye for fashion spoke up next.
“You’re part of Zeta Eta Chi, right?” She glanced up from her notes long enough to see me nod. “So why weren’t you staying at the sorority house?”
“Drew was in a bad motorcycle accident a few months ago, and he needed help recovering.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she replied. “How’s he doing now?”
“Better,” I said with a sigh, and she gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Thank you.”
“So you moved in to help him…” She gestured toward me to continue.
“Right. Yeah. That’s pretty much it. My brother was supposed to be in Europe, and Drew needed a place to stay. But when we got there, Brody was in the apartment. I didn’t expect Brody to be much help with Drew, but he surprised me. He did things for him when I was at school and even got a job delivering pizzas so he could help Drew with money. Anyway, I guess you didn’t need to hear all that, but the pizza job is how the idea for Nite Bites came about. Brody took Drew on some deliveries so he could get out of the apartment, and one night they came up with the idea to deliver other items too. I wasn’t even there for the inception of the idea. I heard about it from them when I came home and found them making the website.”
“I heard you created that website,” someone else pointed out.
I wondered just how she’d heard that exactly, but it didn’t do me any good to ask.
“I did. The design of it, anyway. Brody and Drew—the owners—” I clarified, “created the site, but I did the general design and layout as well as most of the information.”
“It says here you also promoted the company by distributing business cards and running the social media accounts,” Mindy said.
My dad and I had discussed this very topic, so I was prepared to justify my role.
I nodded. “That’s correct.”
“So you’d consider yourself an independent contractor, then?”
“No, I’m not an independent contractor.”
“How many websites have you designed for businesses before you made the site for Nite Bites?”
“None,” I answered slowly. I couldn’t make sense of their line of questioning. What did it matter if I’d done work for other businesses before this one? The only business ethics in question were those concerning Nite Bites.
“Did you get paid for any of the work you did for Nite Bites?” Nelson asked me.
“No, I didn’t. They offered to compensate me, but I told them to use whatever money they would’ve paid me to get their business up and running.”
A few other panel members noted something on their yellow legal pads.
I wondered if this was an “innocent until proven guilty” situation or if my fate had been all but decided before I’d walked through the door. They had all the statements and had, I assumed, spoken to the people directly. They must’ve felt there was a reason I should be sitting here, even if I didn’t understand what that reason was exactly.
“I’m not an employee of the company, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I added.
“Hmm,” Nelson said.
“I told them to keep the money because I was trying to be nice and not take money from my boyfriend and brother. I was happy to help them.”
Okay, maybe happy had been a bit of an exaggeration, but ultimately I’d been glad I’d done it, even if I hadn’t been thrilled at first.
It was the first time I’d seen either one of those two clowns this excited about something and the first time I’d seen my brother put this much effort into anything that could be classified as work. The fuck if I’d let a bunch of jealous frat boys not only get me kicked out of school but cause Drew and Brody’s love child to go under.
They were great dads, and I wasn’t going to let their baby die.
Though…it suddenly occurred to me that even if Rob and his buddies wanted a “blueprint,” as Toby had called it, so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes, getting me in trouble did nothing to take down Nite Bites. It could survive—and even thrive—without my role in it because the truth
of it was, I didn’t actually have one.
“So you were just being friendly,” Mindy said. “Volunteering your free time to make websites and post on social media and pass out business cards, among other things, I’m sure.”
“Exactly. Yes, that was exactly what I was doing. They had other friends helping too. They’re likable guys. People wanted to see them succeed.”
“What people? Other students?”
Not that any of the others would be in trouble for helping pack boxes or double-check orders, but this chick was out of her fucking mind if she thought I was going to name names. Especially when the person who’d made the app was also the person who’d burned down the school library. Well, almost burned it down.
“Look,” I said, “there isn’t much else I can say other than I was trying to be a good girlfriend and a good sister by helping Drew and Brody. I don’t make a profit from their business, and I don’t deserve to be punished for its success.”
I steadied my nerves, managing to keep my voice calm when my mind was anything but.
“I understand that you can’t have students distributing alcohol to minors or pushing pills on campus,” I added, “but I did neither of those things nor any of the other ones that you mentioned. And neither did Brody or Drew. If they had, we all know more than just the school would be involved here.”
A few eyebrows raised, and several students on the panel exchanged glances as I spoke.
I wished I were focused and perceptive enough to read their body language, but I was so caught up in my own words, I didn’t have a chance to decipher the silent glances being exchanged in front of me.
The room was quiet for a minute or so before Nelson’s voice cracked the silence. “Okay. Well, we have a lot to discuss. If you’ll excuse us for a bit, we’ll call you when we’ve reached a decision.”
“Of course,” I said before standing and gathering my things. “Do you have a time frame for your decision? How long do these things usually take?”
“Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours,” Nelson said. “Feel free to go home and come back when we contact you.”
Truth or Dare You (The Love Game Book 2) Page 21
