Page 116 of Forced Proximity
Finnian squeezed my hip and placed a kiss on the side of my head. “He would’ve been twenty-five soon.”
My heart squeezed inside my chest. “He’d have been so handsome.”
“Yeah.”
The silence wasn’t bad.
We were both thinking about that little boy, and what life would’ve looked like had he lived.
The possibilities were endless.
“Ma! Who’s taking me tomorrow?”
I looked back at the calendar and started talking.
“All right,” I said as I looked at our next few days. “You have Jack and Geenie tomorrow.”
Finnian groaned. “What? Why?”
Geenie and Jack were a couple of workaholics both on and off the field. Academically, they were dominating their class, and usually we split them up between us to keep the running around at a minimum.
But this time, that wasn’t possible.
I glared at him as I sat with my hips against the counter, my eyes on the calendar.
“Because I have a parent meeting for Cort because he was an ass to a teacher Friday.” I leveled him with a look. “And I wonder where he got that from?”
Finnian had nothing to say.
The shit.
“You do realize, right, that it’s unacceptable for a fourteen-year-old to be hacking into the school’s email and changing teacher’s email addresses to their provocative last names, right?”
“I think it’s unacceptable that he was caught,” Finnian agreed, “but it really is unfair. Every other teacher and student has to go by their last name in their school email.”
“Yeah, but when you pair it with the first three letters of their first name like everyone else, you don’t get anything provocative. With hers, you do.”
“If she wasn’t such a dick to him, and tried to act like he knew nothing, then he wouldn’t act like that to her.”
The teacher’s email address had read “[email protected]” for a solid four hours because it’d taken them a while to catch it.
In the meantime, every student in the school had chosen to email her, just to get a rise out of her.
The woman was overly uncomfortable with her name, and I had to question why she would come to a school with that kind of last name and not expect fourteen-year-olds to give her shit about it.
That was what they were majoring in—assholeness.
“And the only reason I was caught,” Cort said as he came into the room. “Was because someone narced on me.”
Cort’s big brother, Jack, walked into the room as he said that, then turned around and walked right back out.
“Ah,” I said as I watched the move. “Come back here, Jack.”
Jack turned and his cheeks flushed. “What happened?”
“It wasn’t me,” he sighed. “It was my girlfriend’s friend. She was failing that class and was trying to earn some bonus points.”
I liked Jack’s girlfriend, Tillie, a lot. Tillie’s best friend? Not so much.
