I glare at her while she laughs. “Look what you did!”
“Just pointing out whatyouwere doing,” she says, her eyebrows wiggling a bit.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say haughtily, and she laughs again.
Colton comes up behind us, whipping out the towel in his hands. It catches me lightly on the hip, the slight sting sending a rush of heat to every corner of my body. Inez raises a knowing brow at the way my skin flushes. When I turn to face him, he spots the coffee all over my shirt and bursts out laughing.
“Shut up,” I say, crossing my arms over the offending stain.
He covers his laughter with a cough, wrangling his broad smile back into a serious line. “Excited for today?”
“God, yes,” I say “Give me an overly excited Italian person explaining the science behind wine that I’ll avidly listen to in the moment and forget by the time the liquid hits my tongue.”
He chuckles and drapes the small towel over his shoulders, leaving his defined chest on display. “Or, I could go to the store and buy a dozen different bottles of Tuscan wine and we could stay at the pool.”
Tempting, him in low-slung swim trunks pouring me another glass of wine while I lie on a pool float.
“That’s what we did yesterday. I want to go out and see the world.”
“I wish I could go with you,” Inez says, playing with the soft silk of her shirt.
Something’s off. She’s meeting up with a friend, but doesn’t seem happy about it. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” I ask.
Inez smiles tightly. “No, you guys go. Have fun, and you can tell me all about it over dinner tonight.”
I nod, unable to shake the feeling that she’s hiding something from me, but I head inside to get ready.
An hour later, Colton and I are ready to be picked up by the driver we hired so we could both indulge, leaving Inez to use our rental car. We make our way out to the car before I realize I left my phone behind. I run back into the little house to find Inez pulling on a blazer.
Her lucky blazer.
“What is that?” I ask, pointing at the offending piece of clothing.
She bought it our first year of graduate school before we started our internship interviews. After receiving offers from every single university she interviewed with, she dubbed it her lucky blazer. She’s worn it for every interview and important meeting since. The abstract teal and white design has faded over the years to something softer, but it’s no less beautiful than the day we found it on the sale rack at Saks.
Inez looks like a deer caught in the headlights. “I thought you left.”
“Forgot my phone. Why are you wearing your lucky blazer to ‘get together with a friend’?”
She starts chewing on her lip. “Okay, don’t freak out. But I’m meeting with Dr. Lascano.”
My brows pull together. “From graduate school?”
She’d been a professor in our program, teaching class virtually from Florence where she worked for Scuola Leonardo da Vinci, a massive Italian language school and study abroad program. I’d completely forgotten about her existence, but I’d only taken one class with her while Inez had worked closely with her for several classes, including an independent study.
“And you need your lucky blazer to meet with Dr. Lascano?” I ask, even though I know the answer in my bones.
“I’m not taking a job,” she says quickly, reaching her hands outto me, but stopping before she touches me as she thinks about her next words. “I’m just… thinking… about a job.”
I sputter. “But… but weloveBillings.”
She winces again, and I feel guilty, like I’m jabbing her with a needle over and over again. “Idolove Billings. It’s a great school, and it would break my heart to leave Boston and you. But it has a lot of problems, too.”
Obviously, I know Billings has problems. I’m literally working my ass off to try to fix them. We’ve spent eight years bitching about the professors, but neither of us has ever seriously considered leaving.
Until now.
“We always said we were going to fight to fix the problems. If everyone runs away from the problems, they’ll just get worse. Remember? That’s what we’ve always said.”
