Page 62 of Bribed by the Billionaire Bad Boy

A touch of stillness enters her breath.

I chuckle. “Come on, sugar. You cataloged my whole kitchen in a night and glanced at two recipes once before multiplying the ingredients in your head and making them perfectly. As if there’s anything you forget.” My expression darkens, and I tilt my head. “I know I have to be careful with you. What words have you heard that refuse to go away?”

Sheer alarm descends into a torrent of thoughts that steal her gaze from me.

“Shh,” I murmur. “That was rhetorical. Don’t bother going through all that drivel.”

“You said three questions. That was a fourth. Even if it was rhetorical.” Calypso clenches a fist against her lap, and the way her look withers tugs at a fragile piece of my heart. “Fine. You already know most of my secrets. What’s another one? I don’t even have to tell you them, so what’s the point in hiding? You just come in whenever you like and do whatever you want anyway.” Spite could lace such words; it doesn’t.

“You’ve been off for a few weeks,” I say.

Spite now touches her tone. “So people keep telling me.”

“And now you’re working on a song that sometimes sounds angry and sometimes sounds sad, but mostly it feels somehow…” I’m not sure the word I need. Lost? Afraid?

“Forlorn.”

“Yeah.” Of course the artist knows how to best describe the emotion they’ve written. “That.”

Her brows bend, and she frowns at me, but no real emotion backs the expression. “It’s your fault.”

I blink. “Oh?”

“Mom’s suspicious about something going on with me, andobviously I don’t want to tell her thetrue truthbecause yikes. Knowing her, she’s going to think I’m doing something horrible or vulgar.”

Disbelief hits me, perhaps even harder than the idea of whatvulgarthings Calypso could do if our arrangement were along such dreadful lines. I swallow hard, taking a breath. “Pardon, but you don’t seem…the type? Were you wild in high school or something?”

She breathes a short, hostile laugh. “Wild?I’ve never even been kissed,Alexander.” The jeering expression she shoots me carries a hint of self-deprecation, but it reaches me as something toying and sultry. Taunting her innocence. Innocence I’mliterally scheduledto steal.

Guilt swarms, and I don’t know whether it makes sense for me to bring up how she’s agreed to kissme. Calypso isn’t the kind of person to agree to that kind of thing unknowingly.

Before I can decide what to do with the information, she continues, “That’s why it hurts the most, I think. I’m not like that. I’m not. But she treats me like I’m just one mistake away from terrible. So what if I am?”

“No.”

Calypso scoffs. “You’re not my mother. Don’t you know? She knowseverythingabout me.” Her clenched fist trembles. “She doesn’t even know that I write. Or that I’m in this play. Or that I evenknowhow to play the piano. Isn’t that insane?” Wincing, Calypso looks away, removing her glasses and putting her back to me moments before she might cry. “I know I shouldn’t blame her. I’ve purposely kept it all hidden. And she’s not around a lot. But it hurts. It hurts when things like this happen and she proves just how little she knows me. She’s been my only friend for too long to know me this little. She thinks just because she’s my mother her assumptions are correct. She doesn’t see where they’re just her idea, and they’re either good or bad dependingon her whim or the last mistake she’s decided I’ve made.”

I slip off the desk and find my way to Calypso. Wordlessly, I pull her head against my chest, and she turns her face into my sweatshirt. She trembles, choking on a sob, and the sensation of it rattles through my bones. I stroke her hair.

Hoarse, she whispers, “Whenever anything goes wrong with me oranythingin general, it’s becausedad left. I love her. I love her, but it’s not him. It was never him.She’s not blameless. He was hardly ever around long enough to scar me. Why is that so hard to understand?”

A lump rises in my throat, but I push it down. I can’t see the full picture. What she’s telling me is nothing more than brief, broken snatches of moments rising to the surface. It’s private, and maybe after she’s cried she’ll regret the fact I was the one she fell apart in front of. But, for the moment, I’m the only comfort she has.

And we’re alike.

I’m no stranger to the pressure of a “blameless” parent.

“I’m so stupid,” she manages, her voice softer than a whisper, so faint I can barely be sure it’s there at all.

“No.” A defeated sigh leaves me, and it’s in that moment I realize that I understand her words too well. It’s so familiar I don’t even have the strength to be angry. Just…defeated. “Never that, sugar.”

“If you call mebrilliant,” she hisses, lifting a hand and clutching my clothes.

“You’re you,” I state. “Brilliant and beautiful and blinding. You can’t change those facts. I won’t ask anything of them, however. I’m content just to linger near and watch.”

Her shaking breath and shattered laughter accompany the tightening of her fist. “Hypocrite,” she whispers, and she has the contract to prove it.

Wetting my lips, I smooth my fingers over her hair, down tothe start of a braid. “Maybe a little. But I mean it. If it’s possible to understand that contradiction.”

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