Page 2 of Canvas of Lies
My mom’s shrieks pierced the air. There was no waynotto hear her, even through Nico’s palms. Though I wished he’d kept them pressed over my ears for protection from it, my mouth dropped open and he let go to cover it before I could make a sound that might draw attention to us.
The adults were all talking at once: screaming outrage from my mother, deep-voiced protests from my father, the fascinated chatter of the audience just outside the door.
It felt like hours, huddled there together under the desk, but eventually the sounds faded and the intruders left amidst a good deal of shouting about alimony and prenups. We waited until the footsteps faded, then waited some more, just to be sure, before Nico took my hand to draw me out after him.
We shook out our legs, weak and quivering from holding still for so long, slipped carefully out of the office, and sprinted for the stairs at the far end of the hallway.
Over the years that followed, I tried hard to forget about that night. My mother, thanks to her own high-priced lawyer, walked away with enough money to move to St. Croix—with said lawyer in tow—and left full custody of me to my father, which boiled down to being left mostly to my own devices. It didn’t matter that she’d had affair after affair throughout my childhood, only that he got caught doing the same.
Publicly.Verypublicly.
Since their prenup was ironclad, he didn’t bother to fight her on anything, not even to push her to keep me in her life. On one of the rare occasions he actually answered instead of brushing me off when I asked why, he uttered the only words of wisdom he ever gave me.
“You can’t fight fair with someone who has no sense of fairness.”
It seemed rich, coming from a man who fought with strangers for a living, but it never quite left my memory bank.
My friendship with Nico seemed as altered by that one segment of time as my relationship with my father, though in the opposite way. I could barely look my dad in the eye after that night, not that he ever seemed to notice. My continued existence was a mild annoyance to him, at best, a serious inconvenience at worst.
It stung, realizing how disposable I really was to both my parents, but Nico was there to cushion the blow.
We were bound together even tighter afterward, well beyond the friendship that had existed between us beforehand, beyondeven my childish crush. Something akin to adulation filled me when I thought about how he’d cupped his hands over my ears, rested his face against mine, and held my hand for the rest of the night. Even after one of the other boys made a kissy face at us and teased Nico about it, he didn’t let go.
That hopeless devotion lasted right up until the day Nico left for college, bidding me farewell with a jaunty grin and a quick, “See you later, Kitten,” that forced me to accept he’d probably only ever viewed me as a friend, or maybe—even worse—as a tag-along little sister.
I swallowed my humiliation and tried my best to move on.
Life without Nico around lost a bit of its shine, but high school swooped in to fill the gaps left by his departure. I did see him a few times over those years, usually from a distance, but gradually the infatuation faded, even if the old affection lingered.
Once, when I’d hacked my long, honey-blonde hair into a short pixie cut and gone running down the front walk to hop onto my boyfriend Zeke’s motorcycle, I caught a glimpse of Nico standing around the side of the house with his dad, staring after me with a forbidding expression that rivaled my father’s.
Read it and weep,I thought, pulling a helmet over my cropped curls.
As we pulled away from the house, a sharp twinge of regret stabbed through my chest, but I forced it down—forced myself to ignore the hurt that built up during those years.
If I’d known what was to come, I wondered if I might’ve turned back, let Zeke ride away without me, and taken the time to run to Nico as I always had when I was younger instead of fleeing from him.
Hindsight was, in fact, a bitch.
Chapter One
Kat
“EarthtoWilloughby,comein, Katherine Willoughby.”
I jerked to attention, blinking stupidly at my assistant, Erin, who’d voiced a question I hadn’t heard and now arched a perfectly shaped brow at me.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
Erin rolled her pretty green eyes toward the ceiling as though searching for strength to deal with her daydreaming boss and said, “That history professor you went out with last week. Are you going to see him again? He was cute, in a geeky sort of way.”
“The professor’s name is Alan, and I don’t know if I’ll see him again,” I said, rubbing my temples with both hands. “How do you know he’s cute?”
“I might’ve stalked his social media for you. He seems like the type to have studied the female orgasm extensively. I can tell these things, you know. It’s a gift.”
“Right, how could I forget about your amazing gift?”
Erin’s off-color commentary didn’t faze me at this point, though I wasn’t in agreement about Alan’s study habits—I wasn’t even convinced he knew what a female orgasm was. Our non-relationship hadn’t yet progressed to that point, but there didn’t seem to be much chemistry between us.
