Page 23 of Try Me
“Do I look like more of an asshole than Barrett?” Mark demanded from behind me as we strode back to our office.
“Nope. You got me there,” I tossed over my shoulder. “But looks are also deceiving.”
Houston, Liza, Mark, and I shared a repurposed conference room with four desks instead of a massive table. Mark sped around me toward his. “You’ve still got that fucking smear on your cheek, by the way. Looks like…chocolate icing?”
I started to tell him to fuck off, then remembered the chocolate-glazed donut I’d grabbed from the lobby on the way up. Goddammit.
Digging through my desk drawers, I found an old napkin and swiped roughly at my chin and cheeks while Mark looked on with a smirk of pure devilry.
* * *
Midmorning,I decided to attack the stack of papers I was supposed to copy and headed down to the copy room, arms weighted with the files. Backing through the door, I turned around to find Mark. He beamed me a sardonic smile and smoothed a hand conspicuously down his tie.
“I thought you were in a meeting. I’ll come back,” I grumbled, eyeing the copier as it spit out sheet after sheet of legalese.
“I’m almost done.” He leaned back against a counter and sipped from a coffee mug. I hated to admit it, but he already seemed like a natural fit in this environment, posture loose and relaxed, an easy confidence in his movements.
I set down the files, then navigated around him to get a coffee for myself. “Why are you here?” I demanded. I didn’t mean it to come out as harshly as it had, though. I sounded snippy and defensive when I’d wanted to sound smooth and detached. But what I meant was why, of all the fucking endless summer internship opportunities at his fingertips, Mark had chosen this place?
“Physicists and religious leaders alike have been pondering that question for years. You think anassholelike me has figured out the answer?” He perked a brow.
“You know what I mean. You’ve worked at your dad’s firm every summer since I can remember. You’re all but guaranteed a cush job the second you toss your cap in the air next spring. What the hell are you doing at a law firm? Is this the rich boy version of a rumspringa?”
“I switched my major last fall.”
That was a mental speedbump. “You did? What the hell for?” Don’t get me wrong. Mark’s dad was the fucking scum of the earth in my opinion, but his investment firm was the biggest game in town, and no doubt a six-figure salary I would kill for awaited Mark. It didn’t make any sense.
“Maybe I saw where the path was going and it didn’t quite jive with what I had in mind.”
“Yeah? A 100k starting salary and a corner office with a view sounded shitty? Wow. I’m weeping internally for your Sophie’s Choice.”
“No,” Mark snapped, and the whole smarmy act fell away as his gaze heated. “You don’t get to say that kind of bullshit to me. Tell me my tie is stupid and that I suck, but you don’t get to pretend you know anything about why I make certain decisions.” Coffee sloshed over the edge of his mug as he thunked it on the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “And by the way, thanks to your ass, I lost my phone and had to go to campus police to pick it up.”
I blinked at the non sequitur and caught up a second later. “I think you mean, thanks to my ass, you weren’t hauled off to jail that night.” I ignored the previous comment because, A. he was right, and B. it didn’t really matter. He was here, and the sooner I accepted that and shifted my focus to getting that letter of recommendation, the better.
“The officer I spoke with was awfully curious about the dark-haired guy I was with, too.”
An icy tendril of fear uncurled in my stomach. “Did you tell him?” Something like that could cost me my scholarship or work-study, and I’d already established it’d been stupid for me to have shown up in the first place. But I’d never acted reasonably over Mark Farrow. Even when we were younger.
Mark shrugged. “Guess you’ll find out sooner or later.”
“You didn’t.” I wasn’t confident about that, but fuck if I was going to act cowed or intimidated by him. I knew a power play when I saw one.
We stared each other down for a long moment in silence, and then he broke eye contact to pick up another stack of papers from the machine. “How’d you get this internship anyway?” he asked.
“You mean without a Daddy Farrow to grease the wheels for me?”
“You made that comment about your last name, being an already formed conclusion, or whatever—which I think is bullshit, by the way. Well, at least until someone talks to you for more than thirty seconds.” Mark’s mouth hooked up. “But if that’s the case, how’d you get through the door here?”
“I didn’t expect to get it.” I set my stack of papers next to the copy machine and started feeding them in. “One of my professors wrote me a really good rec, I guess.” Mark didn’t need to know the true amount of effort I’d put into trying to get my foot in the door, though. The hours I’d spent on my essay, the professors I’d had review it, the application I’d delivered personally—just in case that made a difference—how I’d hounded one of my professors to let me do extra credit to bring my grade up a couple of points so I had all A’s for the entire year. If this, along with a killer LSAT score, was my best shot at getting into a decent law school, I wasn’t going to waste a second of it. “You probably wouldn’t know anything about that, though, huh?”
Mark shrugged, not taking the bait. He flicked a paperclip at me. “It’s a little disappointing, though, isn’t it? I mean, I kind of thought we’d be more…included in the action.”
I laughed. “Fat chance. No way. I knew we’d be manual labor.”
“I’m not trying to say I’m above that.”
“Bullshit, Paisley.”