Page 65 of Speak

A brunette with pale blue wings a matching mask and lingerie, sets her sights on me. While probably beautiful under the mask, the shape of her body is wrong, her ass doesn’t match her thighs, most likely cosmetically enhanced, and her lips are also wrong. Her eyes are also blue, not brown. In other words, she’s just not the woman I want. I send her a smirk and continue on to the bar where I spot a familiar face sitting on a barstool, amber drink in hand.

The bartender, a young ice-blonde guy with blue eyes lined with eyeliner, a silver hoop in his nose, wearing a bowlers hat, and ablack waistcoat over his white button-up is drying a glass tumbler, eyeing me. “You’re new here.”

“Only to the area,” I admit with a shrug. “I’m Aros.” I lie.

“Jamie. What’ll it be?”

“Old fashioned.”

A smile creeps along his face. “Would’ve taken you for a Tom Collins kind of man,” he flirts.

I smirk, “Once in my late teens. Turns out it’s always been whiskey for me.”

He nods once in understanding and proceeds to make me the best fucking Old Fashioned I’ve ever had. I tip him well and turn to face the dancers beside the dark-haired professor.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, taking a sip from his Rusty Nail.

“You ever host group therapy for women thinking one dead quarterback was the love of their lives?”

He chuckles over the rim of his glass, framed green eyes meeting my silver ones. “Can’t say I’ve ever been tortured in such a way.”

“I pray you never have to,” I grumble, taking a sip.

“What a fucking month it’s been.”

“It’s only been three days.”

Harrington shakes his head looking over at the brunette that hasn’t taken her eyes off of us. “Have you ever been so taken with someone… that even when someone with a body likethatdoes nothing for you?”

I know what he means. She’s not Raven. “Well, given that she looks as though she’s been to a few different surgeons and parts of her face look asymmetrical and protrude in the wrong areas, I can’t see how someone that looks like that would actually do something for you. Call me old fashioned, but I like my women to be more natural than they pay to look.”

He chuckles again, this time in a frustrated manner. I make a motion for Jamie to make us another drink as I take the whiskey infused cherry and eat it. “You have until the last drop of my drink to get a free psych session.” I offer.

Harrington scoffs, tilting his head back, finishing off his drink as Jamie rolls new ones our way. I hand Maverick his and take a sipfrom mine. He peers down at the new drink in his hand and the clenches the muscle in his jaw. “She irritates me. Won’t speak to me. Ignores me… I think I broke her.” And then he tells me his biggest secret. “She’s a student.”

“Oh?”

“It’s completely inappropriate. She’s a virgin and eleven years younger than me,” he drinks. “Her boyfriend and her broke up because of me and she’s wasting away.”

I rage internally. “And you… feelguilty?”

“If I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt guilty of anything in my life. I graduated high school in a small Texas town at sixteen and left my aging father behind. I never visited, never went back to that fucking hellhole, until he was in hospice due to colon cancer. I left again when he was on the ground. I’ve had to do questionable, unethical things to track and put motherfuckers in jail and slept just fine… but seeing her so… void of life… it makes me feel things I have no idea how to handle and with campus being closed, I haven’t seen her since last Wednesday but for a moment.”

Raven can’t be broken. She’ll bend. She may even tear… but break? Never. Knowing Harrington feels like shit? I love it. “Have you tried… beingniceto her?”

He laughs, tipping his glass back, the ice clinking together. “I don’t do nice. I see what I want and I take it. I will admit I fought it. I fought the urge to take her, yet I couldn’t resist her siren’s call. I plunged us both into the abyss of the black watered ocean. Her boyfriend heard us. Which is what caused the break-up.”

And that’s why she and Jonas were so equivocally catching up on lost time. Young love is beautiful. I decide to let up the farce. We’re two grown men. There’s no reason to dance around this. “Miss Monroe reacts better to kindness, Maverick.” His eyes snap up to mine, fury, and concern in his eyes. I make a motion with my empty hand. “She needs discipline, but she flourishes and blossoms under praise more than degradation. Although, I believe she likes a mixture of both, if my experiments have taught me anything. She’s a woman that was starved of love and nurture as a child, compared to her stepbrother, at all times, only given attention when she was rude or misbehaved, and then she had a traumatic event that made her shut down into her own mind.

“What happened with you and Jonas... let’s just say she most likely thought since there were no orderlies to punish her, no doctors to plunge in a tranquilizer, she punished and tried to tranquilize herself. Being out here, in the real world is not like the gilded cage I had tailor-made for my little bird.”

His green eyes go wide.

“She was my patient, Harrington. I believe under my care, and in the real world, I will have her talking in no time. But I do need help out here.”

“You want me to help you?”

“Not me.Her. Between me, you, and Jonas? She’ll be back to her former self soon. She needs guidance, discipline, praise, all of it. If you feel for her, even a fraction of what I feel for her, you’ll help. No matter what may come. We just need to get Jonas to agree.”

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