DOMINIC
Darcy’s family was… interesting.
Her mom looked like her hobbies included day drinking, tanning beds, and curling her hair into oblivion. Her name was Lanie. Her dad was clearly trying to cultivate a sort of pseudo-intellectual vibe with the facial hair, attention-grabbing clear frame glasses, and the black turtleneck he had on. His name was Ebert.
Then there was the sister and her boyfriend. I’d met both last week at the art gallery. Her sister Eloise had on some kind of romper suit with more paint stains on it. She also had a smear of white across her forehead and blue on the tip of her nose. Basil was suited up in a pretentious all black outfit composed of a sweater, black jeans, and a puffy little hat.
Ebert’s cooking was surprisingly good, but I still found myself imagining how it would feel to slide my hand up Darcy's thigh. She was sitting beside me and wearing a white dress that made her look deliciously tanned and golden. The two of us hadn’t spoken much since her parents brought out the food. The topic of conversation was Basil and his latest piece of art.
“So,” Basil said, wiping the corners of his mouth and setting down the napkin. “I think this piece will be my magnum opus. I’m thinking about telling Cecil he can go fuck himself this time. I won’t just put it at thed’Orsay. I’ll reach out to the art dealers on my own and see how much interest I can generate.”
“That’s great,” Eloise said. She beamed up at him and I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disgust. She seemed like a sweet kid. I pegged her at late teens or very early twenties. This Basil asshole looked more like he was thirty, and he didn’t seem to deserve any of the kindness Darcy’s little sister showed him. “I’m hoping to get my stuff out ofd’Orsaysometime, too,” she added. There was so much desire to please in her voice that I wondered if she meant a word of what she said, or if maybe this asshole convinced her the place wasn’t prestigious enough to be proud of.
“Very impressive,” Ebert agreed. From the way he’d been interacting with the pair, I was starting to gather he actually thought this Basil tool wasn’t full of shit. Maybe there was something I didn’t know, or maybe Darcy’s father was just a shitty judge of character.
“I want to hear more about you, Dominic,” Lanie said. She leaned in and batted her eyelashes at me while resting her chin on the tops of her hands. “How did you start working with Darcy?”
“Oh, I can take this one,” Darcy said with a little too much excitement. “Dominic’s father bought out the ownership of our magazine in a hostile takeover.”
“It was hardly hostile,” I said. “The owners ofThe Squawkerwere looking to move out of business and retire. We reached a mutually beneficial deal.”
“And Dominic here thinks he knows better for the magazine than Jasmine did, so he’s trying to change everything. I’m pretty sure he also wants to fire all of us, but I did a little research and my guess is the backlash his family got last time they took over a company means he has to be more careful than his daddy was. So he’s just watching us all like hawks and hoping we screw up so he can give us the axe.”
She threw a sickly sweet smile my way, then tipped back her glass and downed some wine.
“That’s not exactly accurate,” I said.
“You don’t want to fire Darcy, though, right?” Eloise asked. “She loves that job. We all thought she was going to get depressed or give up when she got kicked out of Columbia, but ever since she got the job atThe Squawkershe has been super happy.”
My eyebrows pinched together.What?When I turned to look at Darcy, she had frozen mid-bite with a piece of potato on her fork raised to her mouth. It fell to the plate with a softplop.“You went to Columbia? When?”
“Around the same time as you,” she said slowly.
“You were kicked out? Why?”
“It’s a long boring story. Not important.”
“She wrote this article for the school paper,” Eloise said. “It was kind of like an expose–”
“Eloise–” Darcy said tightly.
“What?” Eloise said, pressing on. “I think it really sucked. More people should know how they treated you. See, a lot of top colleges basically let parents buy acceptance for their kids. Darcy found out a bunch of kids at Columbia were nowhere near acceptance level based on their high school performance, but their parents all made big donations and got them in. So she wrote this piece about it and one of those rich parents got mad. So he went to the Academic Review team and paid them to claim she plagiarized pieces of the article. It was total bullshit, obviously, but money talks. Who was the main asshole again? Hardwood? Locksmith?”
“Lockwood,” Darcy said slowly.
A cold fist gripped my chest.
Fuck.The pieces clicked together one by one in my head. She’d hated me from the start, hadn’t she? No fucking wonder. My dad was the reason she got kicked out of Columbia.
“Yeah,” Ebert said with a grimace. “But our girl is resilient, right? You would’ve had that spot atThe Union Coastin a heartbeat if they didn’t call off the internship. As soon as you’re done proving your value at thisSquawkerplace, you’ll be a shoe-in for something more respectable.”
A thousand thoughts were going through my head, but seeing the way Darcy flinched at her dad’s words lit something inside me. “You’re not proud of her?” I asked. “Have you read her pieces inThe Squawker?”
Ebert pulled a face, shrugging. “I have a relatively full plate when it comes to my reading diet. I don’t really have the time or interest to read gossip pieces.” He held up his palm. “I don’t mean to offend, but you strike me as a businessman. I’m sure you understand you’re not exactly publishing respectable literature at that place.”
“You really have no idea how talented your daughter is, do you?” I asked.
Everybody slowly lifted their heads to stare at me. Darcy’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates.