Seb let the book fall shut again. “How old are you?”
Cassidy’s eyes narrowed. “Eighteen?”
“Cass.”
“I turned seventeen in August. Come on! Please! It would be so amazing for my application!”
Seb ran a finger over the book’s corner, letting the pages ripple under his thumb. Cassidy yanked it from his grasp. Paper bit into his skin as the book slid away, but years of calluses and tiny scars kept him from feeling any real pain. Seeing her submit it as part of her art school applications would be pretty funny. He could picture an admissions review panel coughing discretely as they opened up her submission and tried to ask their carefully prepared questions about influences and artistic vision. He snorted at their imagined discomfort and passed her the knife.
“Fine.” This was a new medium for her, so odds were good she’d screw it up before it was ready anyway. If it turned out okay, though, he planned to be a fly on the wall with every faculty.
Later, as Seb rose to get a glass of water, she said, “I was thinking maybe I could talk to Dr. Lindsey about my application.”
“Who?” Had her parents signed her up for another psychologist? Seb supported Cassidy as much as he could. She was an amazing artist, one of the best he’d seen for her age. Sometimes he wanted to shake her uptight parents and scream at them that there was nothing wrong with their daughter.
“Martin? The new guy downstairs?”
Seb couldn’t suppress the laugh that came out. “He’s a doctor?”
“Notthatkind of doctor.” Cass gave him her very best eye roll, loaded with all of her seventeen years of wisdom. “Mrs. Green says he’s a famous professor.”
“Oh yeah? What does he teach?” He’d known his fair share of awkward academics over the years, the kind who buried themselves in knowledge to hide their social shortcomings. It would explain Martin’s perpetual frightened, fish-out-of-water expression.
“I don’t know.” She flipped through pages, then paused to run her fingers down the spine of a naked man who stood with his arms spread.
“He didn’t say?” Seb tried not to sound too interested. He couldn’t say why exactly, but he’d enjoyed his run-ins with the bookshop’s newest employee. Something about the way Martin seemed to squirm under his own skin made Seb feel devilishly giddy. It would be disappointing if he turned out to be a visiting professor slumming it among the regular folk for “research purposes.”
“He doesn’t talk much. Mrs. Green made him sound like a pretty big deal, though.”
Seb bet she did. His landlady had a propensity for collecting local personalities, and he was happy to play the role of reclusive artistic genius for her to parade around to her friends and admirers. It had been the unspoken part of the deal when he’d moved in. If he had to be trotted out and shown off among Seacroft’s blue-haired set to add a certain bohemian flair to the bookshop, so be it. The rent on the apartment hadn’t gone up in years, and he had easy access to all the books he needed to fill galleries for the rest of his career.
The idea that nervous, twitchy Martin—sorry, Dr. Lindsey—might be in some way trying to usurp Seb’s position grated.
“What makes you think he can help you with your application?”
Cass shrugged. The defeated slump of her shoulders made him tense. It always showed up when she talked about school, her parents, and most other aspects of her life that weren’t her art.
“I still haven’t started my essay.”
“Fuck the essay.”
“No!” She shook her head. “You keep saying that, but I have to have a good essay!”
“My essay was shit, and they still let me in.” In fact, his college application essay had been more than shit. Halfway through his second paragraph, he’d written“But that doesn’t matter because you’re not reading this anyway.” He had no idea if anyone had ever seen it. His acceptance at Watersmith College had been a done deal from the moment he’d printed his last name on the top of the form.
“My grades are already shit.” She said it so softly he almost didn’t hear, but they’d had this fight before, so he knew her plan of attack.
“You don’t need them.” He pointed at the back corner of the apartment where they’d stacked the finished pieces for her portfolio. “Cass, they can’t teach you anything you don’t already know. They’re going to make you sit in history lectures about classical periods and take a philosophy credit because it will broaden your horizons. You don’t need any of that! You’re already better than I was at your age.”
Her eyes were sad, which only made it clear how very much of a child she was. He liked hanging around with her. She was funny and daring, and she picked up the things he taught her amazingly fast, but then she got her pouty expression going and very firmly cemented her status as a hundred percent a high school senior and not an adult.
“I guess.” Her defeated look made him want to pull his hair out. She saw her art as a last resort, the only thing of value she had to offer to the world—she’d more or less told him as much in the time they’d been working together. Her parents, who had forced an army of tutors and psychologists on her for years, had taught her that attitude. There was nothing wrong with her, but her parents didn’t see it that way, and she worried they were right.
He hated it because he knew that feeling only too well.
“Besides, who knows what Martin’s specialty is? He probably teaches astrophysics or something and wouldn’t know a well-crafted sentence if it bit him in his superior ass.”
He meant it as a joke, but she stared at him like he’d taken away the last life raft on a sinking ship. He clenched his teeth in frustration. He was doing everything he knew for her. She had real talent, and she didn’t need some twitchy professor in oversized flannel to tell her so. Not that she’d ever believe Seb. It was too ingrained in her from her parents, her school. Breaking away was a huge task.
