Chapter Three
Darcy
At 4:03 in the morning, I knew because I checked the clock, I heard the clang of pots and pans coming from down the hall.
Grumbling, I rolled out of bed, pushed my feet into slippers, and padded into the kitchen to find Iris standing at the counter, surrounded by mounds of hacked-up vegetables. She chopped celery with a large knife, while two huge stock pots bubbled away on the stove.
Iris did a lot of the cooking. But she didn’t usually do her chef thing in the middle of the night.
Something was wrong.
“What’s going on, Iris?”
“Meal prep. Thought I’d get a head start for the week.” Her eyes were big and bright. “Sorry for being so loud. Go back to bed. I’m okay.” She gave me this wild I’m absolutely fine kind of smile.
“Sounds good.”
I’d gotten used to surviving on college student food, which came in Styrofoam containers from the cafeteria. Other than Iris, none of us had the time or inclination to cook. I tried to eat as clean as possible, grabbing salads and fruit cups, but it was a struggle.
“I’ve got a whole system.” Iris pointed to the pots. “I’m batch-cooking brown rice and pasta. Then I’ll freeze it with some sauces, and we can throw in veggies and meat whenever we make something. Isn’t it great?”
Oh yeah, she’d lost it. Poor decapitated veggies.
I thought about tossing this one to Poppy. After all, she was the psych major, but I might as well take one for the team, since I’d already gotten up.
“Okay. You need to take five.” I pulled out a chair and, before she could protest, pushed Iris’s butt into it.
“I don’t need a break.”
“But you do.” I thought a minute, grasping for the words. I was fuzzy-brained from lack of sleep. “What’s really going on?”
Iris shrugged. “I’m keeping busy.”
“So you won’t think about Will?”
“That was the plan,” she said pointedly.
“Before I rudely interrupted? How’s it working out?”
“How do you think?” She heaved a disgusted sigh.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault he’s a big, stupid butthole.”
As a kid, Iris’s mother had washed her mouth out with soap once for using a bad word at the dinner table. Iris said it was a Bible Belt thing. As a result, she only cursed when really aggravated. And when it happened, the obscenities came out in a Tourette's-like stream of consciousness.
I’d only seen her let loose on somebody once, but I loved it. Kate liked to provoke Iris, hoping for another show, but she’d resisted a repeat performance so far.
“You should go back to bed.”
“I can’t sleep.” She rubbed a palm over her chest, as though her heart hurt.
I’d never gotten into a fight in my life, but I’d like to sock Will right in the nose. Nope, lower. The guy deserved a dick punch. And I’d love to be the one who did it.
Right now, I had bigger problems helping Iris get through the rest of the night.
“Then I’m going to help you.” I picked up her swordlike knife and started chopping celery.
“Thank you.” Iris hugged me from behind.
“Anytime.” I patted her hand. I wasn’t much of a hugger.
We worked side by side for the next hour. By the time we finished, we’d made rice, pasta, chicken breasts, all the veggies anyone could eat, roasted red pepper hummus, and a yogurt sauce. I’d never cooked so much stuff.
And I made myself a solemn promise. I’d never let a guy tie me up in knots like this.
***
Later on that morning, I sat at my desk, paging through For Love or Money. The book featured a handsome older man, the contract killer, and an innocent young virgin, the waitress. Okay, so it was a bit clichéd, but I wrote the kind of books I liked to read.
Naturally, I’d poured a bit of myself and a bit of Ian into it.
Despite his disdain for my work, I inherited the writing bug from my father. I loved romantic suspense. I wrote my first book at the age of thirteen. Sure, it was awful, a romance, of course, about a cute boy in my class. It’d been all handwritten on notebook paper and organized by chapter in a folder.
For Love or Money was much better. It’d taken me months to write, and I’d enjoyed every second I spent on my laptop, tapping on the keyboard, making myself laugh like a crazy person.
I couldn’t help it. The characters spoke to me—bits of dialogue popped into my head. And no, I wasn’t cracked—it’s all part of the creative process. When you wrote about someone, you had to get into his or her headspace, figure out what made the person tick. I loved nothing more than getting to know my characters, watching them grow.
At this point, I had a half-dozen ideas for other books. I’d downloaded a notebook app because the ideas were out of control at this point, and I had to put them somewhere before they overwhelmed me.
Somehow, I’d tapped into the creative side of myself, which created an explosion of sorts. I wished Dad could be happy for me. He could’ve read my book, given me some honest feedback, and then encouraged me. Was that too much to ask?
But it’s pointless. I’m not going to be an author. Instead, I’d be a professor. I’d spend my life talking about other people’s books, instead of writing my own. It wasn’t a terrible way to make a living. I loved literature.
Yet the thought was depressing.
But I shouldn’t be second-guessing my plans. So I shoved my manuscript back into the drawer and slammed it shut.
Time to face the day.
On the way to class, I stopped at the Starbucks near campus. I loved their green tea lattes and needed a boost this morning. Besides, I felt virtuous when drinking it, like it cleansed my body or something. My family introduced me to organic food, and the habit stuck with me.
When I walked in the classroom, latte in hand, I found Ian standing by the chalkboard. Unlike most of the modernized rooms, this one had an old-fashioned slate board, and his trousers were dusted with a bit of chalk. His brow furrowed in concentration as he contemplated the board.
He’d written challenging questions for discussion group today. Ian believed in the Socratic method and encouraged us to defend our positions and dialogue about the readings.
I sucked in a breath.
His world-class mind was a great big turn-on. Okay, so I had a fascination with professors, well, this one, anyway. Who can resist an intellectual, eloquent older man?
Like he could teach me a thing or two. In my fantasies, none of the lessons came from books, though I wanted hands-on tutoring.
Yikes, wrong choice of words.
“Good morning.” I took my customary seat in the front row.
“Hi, Darcy. So how was the big birthday bash?” Ian took a sip from his Van Gogh travel mug.
“Good.” I shrugged.
“Just good?” He peered at me. “You don’t even look hungover.”
“Because I’m not.”
“You didn’t get pissed at a twenty-first birthday party?”
Yet another reason for my crush: his cute British-isms. Instead of drunk, he said pissed. Things weren’t terrible. They were rubbish. Ian lived in a flat, not an apartment. You get the gist.
“Not my style. Besides, the whole thing feels anticlimactic or something. I’m twenty-one. So what?”
Like most things, it hadn’t lived up to the hype. Somehow, I thought I’d be different afterward—fully an adult or something. So far, it hadn’t happened.
“Then you didn’t do it right.”
“How’d you spend your twenty-first?”
“In the UK, the legal drinking age is eighteen.”
“That’s not fair.” I’d had to wait three extra years.
He chuckled. “I turned eighteen my first week at university. My roommate and I went on an epic pub crawl, and I got so pissed, I woke up face down on the school lawn wearing a kilt, and it wasn’t even mine.”
“How’d that happen?”
He raised a brow. “No one knows, which makes it the stuff of legend.”
“I’m not much of a party girl, so I won’t be having any legendary nights. I don’t need any incriminating photos popping up. Anyone with a cell phone could immortalize my stupidest moment.”
“You’re so proper. There are other ways to make an evening special.”
I swallowed. “Like?”
He paused for a long moment. “I’ll leave it up to your imagination.”
Hmm. What did Ian mean by that? Maybe Kate’s seduction plan messed with my head. I looked for hidden signals now.
“Are you free later on today?”
I gaped at him for a moment. “Oh, you mean the meeting.” I snapped my fingers and pulled out my cell phone to check. Of course, it’d been an innocent question. “Unfortunately, my schedule is insane. What about next week?”
He shook his head. “I’ll have a round of papers to grade, so I won’t have any free periods. Sure we can’t squeeze some time in later on today?”
“Hmm…” I paused, swiping through Google Calendar. “What about much later on in the day? Around five?”
“Works for me.”
Then I remembered my dad’s stupid book signing and groaned. I’d promised him I’d go. Although it was pointless, he hardly ever spoke to me at these things. But Dad enjoyed seeing “a familiar face.”
Dad had probably asked my older sister, Elinor, and she hadn’t been able to sneak away from work. Elinor and I had been named after two of Jane Austen’s most memorable characters—Elinor Dashwood and Fitzwilliam Darcy. We were six years apart, but it might as well be sixty. We had a big nothing in common.
She’d always be his first choice. I should accept it and move on. Yet I kept trying to gain his approval, again and again, like one of the time loops my dad wrote about.
“Whoops, I forgot. I’m going to the bookstore down the street then…for supplies.” Ian didn’t need to know the details. “We’ll have to schedule another time.”
But our conversation was cut short by a flood of students coming in. When I glanced up ten minutes later, his eyes were locked on me.
Ian shook his head and then rounded the desk, while I shuffled the papers in my folder for no reason.
Hmm. Interesting.
I couldn’t stop smiling the rest of class.