Page 73 of Love By Design

“Do we?”

“You don’t take me seriously,” I reminded him. “You didn’t even congratulate me after getting my article published.”

“Of course I did.”

“You threw it in the trash. Marshall is the one who congratulated me.” My voice hitched at the use of Marshall’s name, my throat not quite used to saying it at a normal cadence and not a moan anymore.

“I need your bid, Silas.”

I shrugged. “I don’t have it.”

My dad worked his jaw back and forth and cursed under his breath. His entire body swayed, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay in the doorway, come in, or go out. The clock on the wall ticked closer to five, and I scratched the back of my neck, waiting for him to decide so I could pack my things up and leave.

“You don’t understand what you’ve done,” my dad muttered, shaking his head.

“If the answer is that I didn’t waste my time on a fruitless endeavor, I know exactly what I did.”

“I was going to use your bid, Silas.”

He was so quiet, I barely heard him.

“Sorry, what?”

“I was going to submit yours for the final.” He cracked his knuckles, shoved his hands into his pockets. “You were going to win us the job.”

“You were going to submit mine?” I scoffed, pushing up out of my seat and grabbing my laptop. “You’ve done nothing but talk down to me about my design ideas since I graduated. You weren’t going to use mine.”

“Yours is the only design that will beat Covington.” Marshall’s last name rolled out of his mouth with a surprising bite of animosity. “We had to beat him.”

“I can’t decide if you’re being real with me right now or not.”

“Of course I’mbeing real.” It was almost a sneer, and I reeled back, putting more space between us.

“Be so fucking for real right now.”

“Language.”

“Language,” I snapped back at him. “You refused to accept any of my ideas through the whole design process, and you submitted your work for the initial review period. Your design is the one that got us into the final round. Why would you change it to use mine at the last minute?”

“Because I wanted to win.”

“You wanted to win.” I sighed, tucking my laptop under my arm and trying to ignore the way my fingers trembled. “A month ago, I would have been so excited that you wanted to listen to my ideas finally, but now…now I just want to know what Marshall did to make you hate him so much that you’d even entertain the idea of listening to my ideas.”

“It’s not about him.”

“Well, it’s not about the project.” I wanted to get out of the room, but my father was still in the doorway and the door was the only escape. “Or you would have collaborated with me in the first place. You would have read the article. You would have at least pretended to be proud of me instead of throwing my work into the literal garbage.”

Marshall was proud of me. He’d offered me a job. And with the way this conversation was going with my dad, I might have to take him up on it after all.

“You really didn’t put anything together?” he asked, scratching the side of his neck.

“I really didn’t put anything together.”

“You’ve just put us out of business.”

A laugh gurgled up out of somewhere inside of me, terribly loud and horribly ill-timed. I tried to slap my freehand over my mouth to cover it but was half a second too late.

“You’re laughing,” he said.