Page 85 of Let's Talk About Love

“Coming here helped me decide. I made a promise to myself that I’d tell them everything when I turned twenty-one.”

“Everything?”

Alice took a deep breath. “All of it.”

CHAPTER

28

Takumi in glasses made Alice giggle so hard she snorted diet soda out of her nose.

“Itburns,” she whined, still laughing. “Please take them off. The cute—I can’t.”

The round frames suited Takumi beautifully. They were academic chic—like he was two seconds away from defending a thesis.

(She always had a thing for super-intelligent people.)

“No.” He crossed his arms. “Let’s hear it.”

He had agreed to listen to her college plans before she went over it with her parents. “Okay, but can you at least stop looking at me like that?”

“This is myunimpressed dadface.” He glowered for a moment before unleashing what she had christened hisAlice Smile—full of teeth, victorious, and wide enough to cause a tiny dimple to form on the top of his left cheek. She saw it only when he was looking directly at her. No one else. “I spent the past hour perfecting it so we could do this.”

(The little things always snuck up on her.)

“For someone so serious, you are surprisingly ridiculous.”

“Only for you. Now stop stalling.”

“Okay.” She pulled up her bullet-point list on her phone. “Mom. Dad. As you know, I’ve been struggling with the decision to go to law school.… Okay, why is your dad frown intensifying?”

“Stop relying on filler. If you have to say ‘as you know,’ then they already know. Get to the point. Remember: clear, concise, and with conviction.”

“Right.” She mumbled the threec’s like a mantra before beginning again. “Mom. Dad. I don’t want to go to law school. My grades are good now, but I have to fight for them. I’m not the kind of student who would do well in a law school environment and I don’t have the desire to carry me through. I’m sure I’ll end up dropping out because I won’t be able to keep up.”

She took a heaving breath. The tension crawling across her shoulders made her back hunch, made her shrink in on herself. Her parents expected academic excellence. Year after year, that’s exactly what she gave them, but college had not been easy and she knew law school would kill her.

(If admitting that weakness to her parents didn’t get her first.)

“Good,” Takumi said. “Keep going.”

She nodded. “But I don’t want to drop out. I want to graduate. I want to be successful. I want to have a good career that I can be proud of, like both of you. It’s just taking me longer to figure out what I want to do, which, you know, isn’t a bad thing, because it’s super unfair that we’re forced to pick something to spend the next fifty years of our life on when we can’t even—”

Takumi knocked on the table. “Focus. Come back.”

Another deep breath. “Right. Sorry.”

“Start with what you want to do.”

God, her throat felt dry, and this wasn’t even the real thing yet. She’d probably start coughing up sand midway through her speech.

“Right. I’ve thought about it, really thought about it, and there’s one thing I’m good at and I’ve always been interested in. I made a six-year plan. Mom. Dad. I want to study interior design.”

***

“AND DO WHAT?Decorate rooms for a living?” Her mom had a thick vein that ran down the middle of her forehead. Whenever she got mad, it pulsated. Like now. “That’s ahobby, Alice.”

“It isn’t,” Alice insisted. “I researched it. My school offers it as a major.”