Page 17 of Turn

CHAPTER SIX

Well that was awesome.

You give a guy a hot dog and he shits all over you.

Figuratively, not literally. But still.

Feeling irritable, I grabbed a stapler that Aspen had decorated with blue glitter and began angrily stapling together invoices that didn’t really need to be stapled. After every satisfying click a tiny shred of my frustration would fall away but I was still confused.

Curtis Mulligan was a jerk and yet I’d caught him glancing at me with a kind of naked hunger I’d seen before. Usually I ignored it but I’d already figured out that ignoring Curtis wouldn’t be so easy. Beneath the web of tattoos, unshaven jaw and faded clothes that had seen better days, he was definitely sexy in a gruff kind of way. Yet so far, every conversation with Curtis left me feeling both flustered and like I might enjoy tossing heavy objects at his head.

Maybe he was a natural born asshole.

Maybe he was socially awkward.

Maybe I just shouldn’t give a damn.

I stopped abusing the invoices and set the stapler down. The rest of the staff was beginning to return from lunch and they might wonder why I was going hog wild on the office equipment.

Plus my last thought had given me pause.

Why the hell did I care if Curtis Mulligan wanted to be a dickhead? We didn’t need to be friends. He probably didn’t even have any friends. He probably cultivated that sneering bad boy persona on purpose, thinking every female he encountered would be totally into it. If I had to guess, I’d say he hung out in his mother’s basement playing video games when he wasn’t on the hunt for some gullible girl who liked being treated like shit.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy being treated like shit. And I wasn’t going to make any more effort where he was concerned.

“Hi, Cassie,” waved Zach, one of the ink artists, as he walked through the front doors smelling like cigarette smoke. He pushed his long black hair out of his eyes and gave me a shy smile as he passed.

“Hi, Zach,” I said, thinking how easy it was to be nice to some guys while others made it nearly impossible.

Then I had to table all thoughts of Curtis Mulligan because a very tall man in a designer suit arrived and approached the desk so he could whisper that he was here for his scrotal piercing.

The afternoon proved to be busier than the morning. When I accepted my dad’s offer to work at Scratch, I had figured it would be an easy transition. I was used to providing good customer service due to my various jobs in retail, plus I was already very familiar with the way things were run because Cami and I had been running around this place since we cut our first teeth. Except for the Curtis situation, I’d been right about the easiness of the job. Aspen had left copious notes in case there was anything I was unsure about and as I read them over I found everything was pretty much as I expected. The best part was I’d have plenty of time for homework and reading. I’d been slowly getting acclimated to college life by taking a handful of credits each semester and I was very proud of the A’s I was racking up. Back in high school I’d never had Cami’s outstanding grades, but I’d done all right.

Until senior year.

Until I allowed the fallout from one dumb stunt to shatter my confidence and drive me to the depths of despair.

Sometimes I wished I could relive those days again, just so I could do something I hadn’t been able to do at the time; hold my head up and tell all those bastards to go to hell.

One bastard in particular.

At five o’clock there weren’t any customers in the lobby and I figured I wouldn’t miss anything if I stepped away from the desk and wandered down to my dad’s office for a minute. Along the way I avoided looking directly into the rooms, mostly because I didn’t want to lock eyes with a certain cranky staff member.

My father’s office door was closed but he answered my quick knock with a cheerful, “Come in.”

Cordero Gentry was in his element, leaning back in his chair with a sketchpad in his hands as his fingers flew over the page. Cami and I used to beg him to teach us how to draw like he did but our efforts usually wound up looking like a collection of radioactive mutants.

“Hi, honey,” my dad said, lowering his pencil immediately and giving me an expectant look. “How are things working out up front?”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks again for the job.”

He smiled. When Cami and I hit our teens we became aware that girls we barely knew suddenly had a hobby of finding reasons to visit our house. When we caught on that they were staring at our father we were horrified. I mean, he was DADDY. He was goofy and strict and really old (to us, anyway) and he told the corniest bedtime stories. The fact that our peers started drooling over him as if he was some kind of rock star icon made us gag and scream.

After looking behind me to check whether anyone else was waiting in the hallway, I stepped into the office and closed the door.

“So I’m curious, what’s up with that Curtis dude?”

“Curtis?” My dad was suddenly alert. “Why, is he giving you a problem?”

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