Page 63 of Butterfly

Pain and anger tightened his jaw. “Lock the door behind me.”

And then he was gone.

I collapsed on the bed and let myself cry.

23

LESLIE

“Come in,” Professor Evans called.

I entered her office. It was bright and light and cluttered with more books than I’d ever seen in my life outside of a library. I loved it immediately.

The professor herself sat behind her desk, staring at her phone. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was blushing behind her glasses.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

She looked up from her phone, smiling gently. “Of course. Just got caught up with this stupid little box of technology. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Millennials aren’t as addicted to their phones as your generation is.”

I laughed, a little weakly. I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation.

“So how can I help you, Ms. Berger?”

“It’s about the partnered project for class.”

She sat back in her chair, eyes trained on mine. “What about it?”

“I’d like to see about changing partners. Or if I can even do it myself.”

“Hmm.” She took her glasses off and carefully folded them before placing them on the desk in front of her. “It’s a little late to change partners. The outline for your presentation and paper are due tomorrow.”

“So then let me do it alone,” I practically begged.

“The point of this project is to get you all comfortable with partnered projects. Often, those come with…friction.”

I tried not to blush at the word friction, and Professor Evans was kind enough to pretend not to notice that I failed.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Mason and I…” the words caught in my throat. I tried again. “We don’t see eye to eye on a number of things.”

“Hmm.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and I waited, my feet tapping out their anxiety on the floor. I didn’t know how much she knew—I’d die if she knew about the sex—but the subtext in her words made it clear she knew that there was more to my relationship with Mason than stepsiblings and project partners.

Opening them, she smiled again. “In any sort of project, compromise is hard, especially if the partners have different…end goals.Especiallyif one of the partners isn’t sure what their end goal is.”

“I—I don’t know what to say.”

She nodded. “You don’t have to say anything, not to me at least. I recommend talking through the friction with your partner so you can agree on a joint goal.”

“What if it’s not our goals, but our approach that we can’t agree on?”

At that, she smiled. “A lot of the time, people—men especially—always use a hammer, because they can’t imagine anything isn’t a nail.”

“So what do I do?”

She rose, lifting her hand to emphasize our time was up. “Give him a tool that isn’t a hammer.”

Outside her office,I texted Mason.

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