“No problems,” he replies, his voice so arrogant and waspy I can barely take it. This is a man who is sure that in five years he will own the world.
“Here, let us me introduce you to my daughter,” my father says. “Katherine, this is Malcom Harington.”
It takes every ounce of willpower I have to simply turn my head in his direction and force what passes for a smile onto my lips. Any normal man would notice my hesitation immediately, but not Malcom. He grins like he’s just been handed a winning lottery ticket.
“Pleased to finally meet you, Kate. I’m sure we’ll get along swimmingly.”
Swimmingly? Seriously?
He extends his hand, and I do my best not to cringe as I take it and shake it.
He’s wearing too much cologne—designer, obviously, and I have to turn my head as he sits down beside me to avoid having my nostrils drenched in it.
Thankfully, he and my dad get talking about legal stuff for the first half of dinner, and for the second half, they move on to stocks and portfolios and all kinds of boring stuff I have no interest in, so I’m not forced to make any kind of conversation. And when dinner is finished, I volunteer to do the dishes just to get away from him.
“I see you raised her right, Will!” Malcom laughs to my father as I take the dishes to the kitchen. They both laugh, and I have to suppress my urge to vomit as I place them in the sink. Yes, this is a nightmare.
I’ve never felt more like a piece of meat in my life. Like a prized cow being taken to auction. Like a vintage car being shown to a collector. This whole thing barely even feels real. I knew this day would come, but I guess I never truly believed it would happen. And now that it’s here…well, I’m just not sure how to process it.
No one comes in to help me, so I finish the dishes alone and go up to my room. I know it’s the “polite” thing to do to go back in and socialize, but I don’t care about that now. And why should I? It’s not like what I do in my life matters anymore anyway.
I am just slipping into some bedtime shorts and a T-shirt when there’s a knock on my door. I barely have time to get my shirt all the way on when the door opens and Malcom enters.
“Hey there, beautiful.”
“What’s the point in knocking if you’re just going to come in anyway?” I ask, slightly flustered.
“Well, seeing as how we’re…ya know… now,” he replies, making a strange clamping motion with his hands in the air in front of him, “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
I cock my head to the side. “Ya know? No, I don’t know.”
Malcom steps quickly and aggressively forward, closing the distance between us, nearly leveling me with a tsunami of cologne. “Well, we’re together now, right?” Before I can react, he reaches out and wraps his hands around my waist. “Your parents are in their room now, I just figured we could, ya know, seal the deal.”
Oh God, I’m going to be sick.
Quickly, I do the same spin maneuver I did at the eighth-grade dance when Stephen Callaghan tried to get me to dance with him after spreading the rumor around school that we’d made out in the boys’ locker room. With two quick strides, I’m at the door and escaping into the hallway.
“Hey, where are you going?” is the last thing I hear Malcom calling after me as I take the stairs and race out the back door into the night.
The sun has vanished over the horizon, and the sky is a deep purple with the first glimmering dots of the night’s stars beginning to show themselves over the treeline. I run down the slope from the house and keep on running until I reach the docks, then race down the line of boats, keeping to the shadows in case Malcom is following. But when I stop and look back up to the house, it seems as though he has chosen not to.
Too much effort, I guess.
“Whatcha runnin’ from, girl?” A voice behind me startles me, and I almost jump into orbit. But when I spin around, I see the man from before, the unbelievably handsome man in the tank top, working on patching up a hole on an upside-down rowboat beside him.
Only this time he’s not wearing a tank top; this time he’s shirtless and even more devastatingly sexy than before. And try as I might, I can’t find my voice. All I can do is stare, my jaw hanging to the ground like a dummy.