Page 24 of Try Me
He glanced down at his tie and scoffed. “Please, I know you remember those chore lists my folks would leave me over the summer.”
I’d forgotten, but he was right. Mark was the only kid I knew who had just as much to do during the summer as the school year. Maybe more. The list would be waiting for him on the kitchen counter in the morning. Laundry, mowing, cleaning out the garage. His parents could’ve hired someone to do it ten times over, but nope. It’d always fallen on Mark. His dad treated him more like a workhorse than a son.
“Did you do it all through high school, too?”
“Yep.” Mark clipped another set of papers together and tossed it into a pile. “The day I moved into the dorms, there was a list of shit for me to do before leaving. The first weekend on campus, I woke up flipping the fuck out when I looked at the clock, thinking I’d slept too late to get my list done before study group. It was, like, a month before I didn’t wake up panicking. I’m pretty sure if my folks could’ve gotten into the dorms, there’d have been a list waiting on top of my mini fridge every Saturday morning.”
My gaze shifted from Mark’s wry smile to the concentrated furrow in his brow and the careful, dedicated way he’d organized the different stacks, how he riffled through the papers to check that everything was there before clipping it together. The nails on his left hand were clipped close and neat, aside from a thin red line where he’d snagged a cuticle, and the movements of his fingers just as deft as they’d been on me the other night. At my throat, on my sides, my waistband.
He glanced up and caught me watching him. “What? I even sort paper like an asshole?”
“Collate.”
Mark eyed me for a second, then broke into laugh that was warm and amused.
“What’s funny about that?”
“Collate,” he repeated in a dorky voice, a quirky half-smile on his face that was magnetic despite my intent to maintain a generally irritable demeanor around him. It wasn’t the politely detached smile I remembered from high school when we’d slap hands at the end of basketball games—the one that was an imitation of his father’s.
I stared at him, waiting for more, and when he didn’t say anything, flicked the paperclip in my hand back at his face. “Say it. Whatever you’re holding back. Say it, dickhead.”
“Nah. I think I’ll keep it to myself. Let you wonder.” Mark gathered up his papers into one giant sheaf he placed back in a cardboard file box, then turned and walked out before I could reply.
Damn, I’d forgotten how much I hated that tactic of his. He’d done it even when we were kids.
* * *
Most of thefirm had cleared out for the lunch hour while I’d stayed behind to try to get ahead of my task list, and also because I was too broke at the moment to do anything other than brownbag it.
“What?” I emerged from a fantasy where I yanked off Mark’s tie and stuffed it in his mouth to find him studying me intently.
“Were you a total dick when we were kids, too, and I just didn’t notice it somehow? You’re, like, nothing but salt.”
I glanced pointedly at the bag of chips on my desk—salt and vinegar—and nudged them toward him silently.
Mark flipped me off. “Ha ha. You know what I mean. Are you one of those people who struggles to connect with and work through emotions?”
“Says the guy who so eloquently punched me in the ribs recently.”
“You started it.” He shrugged, though his mouth quirked up on one side, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: How many arguments had started and resolved with exactly those words when we were younger?
I balled up the empty chip bag and sent it in a hook shot to the trash can. Nothing but net. “Maybe I am. My baseline is cynicism. Tell me yours wouldn’t be if your world got blown apart and you were constantly running on just enough sleep to not drool on your keyboard in class, all the while knowing that no matter what degree you get, the things your father did are probably going to follow you into every job you apply for, like a streak of shit on your resume.”
Mark lifted a brow. “You’re doing resumes wrong, then. You’ve heard of toilet paper, right?”
As much as I wanted to scowl, I couldn’t. He’d always been good at defusing me with some off-the-wall comment.
He dropped into his desk chair and fiddled with a pen on his desk. “I don’t think that’s true, though. Not everyone’s going to be like that. Just uh…maybe don’t go into politics.” The tiny smile he cracked was meant to coax the same from me, I was sure, but I wasn’t in the mood to play along.
I leaned forward and checked that no one was within earshot. “You immediately made assumptions about me and Cam. I think you’re probably still doing it.”
“Maybe.” Mark winced, then swiveled in his chair, going quiet as he flipped through a folder on his desk.
It drove me crazy that even now I felt a level of comfort with him I’d rarely felt with anyone else. That even when we were antagonizing each other, there was something about sitting across from a guy I’d known since I was three that was reassuringly familiar.
The night in his room came back to me suddenly, and this time instead of the shame that had plagued me the morning after—when I’d crept back out of his window at the asscrack of dawn rather than bear any more of his pity or potential backlash against what had gone down between us—I felt a disorienting sense of nostalgia.
“How’s your mom?” I threw the comment out blindly, a life preserver of distraction against the heat stirring inside me.