Page 10 of Best In Class
On that note, he leaves my office.
Five minutes later, I can still smell his cologne.
Damn him for getting under my skin.
Damn me for letting him.
CHAPTER 3
Dom
The Alley Cat Lounge is a Savannah institution.
It smells like jazz, good bourbon, and bad decisions.
Tucked below street level, down a narrow stairway, the bar glows with amber light and the weight of mistakes made after one too many drinks.
Lev and I are at the bar, drinks in hand, not talking…yet. We don’t need to fill the silence. That’s the thing about growing up together—you don’t have uncomfortable silences, but this one is heavy with Lev’s discontentment with me.
He takes a slow sip of his IPA. Lev is a wine snob, which means he only drinks wine at home from his cellar, and when he’s out, he sticks to beer.
He has Luna’s eyes, and they have the same Steele temper, though Lev wears it better, or ratherhidesit better. He’s the calm before the storm. Lunaisthestorm.
“You gonna tell her the truth?” he asks, casually, like he’s not tossing a live grenade on the table between us.
He found out the truth only recently, and only because of a slip of his father’s tongue. Now, he knows and he’s insistent that I tell Luna.
“You think it’ll help?”
“I think you owe her that much.”
He’s not wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to tear the scab off something that still bleeds. “First, she doesn’t want to talk to me about?—”
“Please, I know that you know how to push a conversation where you want it to go.”
He’s not wrong. “I don’t think she’s gonna forgive me because I was a coward with a reason.”
“No,” Lev agrees bluntly. “I think she might understand why you were a coward. There’s a difference.”
Not for Luna, who lives in the black and the white. In her psyche, there are no grays. You made a mistake, you’re out. I don’t think it’ll matter that I, the son of Abigail Calder, the erstwhile housekeeper of the Steele mansion, did what I had to do to be able to build a life that would give me the right to fight for Luna. To earn her.
I managed to get into Cornell. Luna was at Georgia Tech. We’d managed a long-distance relationship. It was messy, imperfect, and intense as hell.
Until I torched it.
I was finishing my third year at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning—on a scholarship, barely hanging on financially, juggling three jobs, studioreviews, and professors who saw potential in me. I was living on about three hours of sleep a night. Falling fucking apart while Luna was thriving. She made Georgia Tech look easy. Still aced every exam, and still managed to make time to love me.
She talked about transferring to New York. Applying to Columbia. NYU.
“We could get a place together.” She curls up against me in my shitty dorm room that smells like wet concrete and ramen.
I panic. Not because I don’t want her near me—God, I do. But because her future is bright, polished, and well-funded. And mine is hanging by a thread since Nathaniel Steele cornered me a couple of weeks ago when I was visiting my mother.
“You think you’re in college on merit?” he says arrogantly. “Son, you’re in Cornell because I allow it.”
“Sir—”
“I know about my daughter and you. It’s not happening. You end this.”
