Beside me, Ava gulped.
Yeah, I thought caustically. You and me both.
CHAPTER TWO
Ava
I wasn’t normally unfriendly.
Being rude didn’t work for me in life. It wasn’t a quirk or a ruse. I liked being nice. But Bishop Manfield made it almost impossible to be nice. He was so quiet his silence was too loud. He was short when he did speak, and that irked me, especially when I wasn’t being rude to him, and he was imposing. A man child. Too tall and too long to sit next to me until we had to move seats again.
He toyed with his wedding ring.
I’d yet to put mine on.
Miss Barter had caused an uproar. My friends Laurie and Henny were paired together. Not fair. I wanted to marry my best friend.
Felix raised his hand and Miss Barter called on him. “Um, my partner’s a boy.”
“So?” She waited for the big deal.
“Yeah, so?” his partner, Wren, said, grinning. “What are you afraid of? I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not buying you flowers, that’s for sure.”
Felix glared at him. “Why the hell not?”
He snorted. “Roses are too expensive.”
“Carnations then,” Felix argued.
Wren shook his head, so serious a few of us were trying not to laugh.
“Fine. I see how it is.”
Wren asked him a question, but Felix looked away, refusing to talk to him.
“We gotta get this paper started,” Wren argued. “Ignoring me won’t help.”
“Do it yourself,” Felix snapped.
Miss Barter clapped happily. “Welcome to marriage, kids. You either have to buy him roses or your assignment—aka your marriage—suffers, and then nothing gets done. Compromise.”
“But our budget, which is already squat, goes down,” Wren griped.
Miss Barter was unapologetic. “Money isn’t everything.”
“But,” Wren said, brows drawn down. Felix nodded, like tell ‘em. “This is a class about money.”
“No,” Miss Barter said. “This is a class to teach you about life. If you’re unhappy now, wait until the next assignment.” She grinned maniacally.
I hoped psych evaluations were still a thing.
“Different partners?” Wren asked hopefully.
All Miss Barter did was wink and shake her head.
“Rings on!” she called out, settling at her desk.
It just so happened that my costume jewelry wedding ring was surprisingly pretty. Small diamond, thin band. It’d go with all of my outfits. Bishop’s was black. It almost looked like a nut or bolt on a skateboard. I put mine on and turned my hand this way and that.
“Should we include our rings in our budget? I bet that’s a trick a lot of them are going to fall for. We’re not rich, so ideally, we’d have to pay our rings off over time.” I felt like we’d earned an extra point for working that into our paper.
But all Bishop did was point at something he’d already written under our budget section. RINGS. Oh. He’d already thought of that. Well, aren’t you so smart and handsome?
I crossed my legs and decided to be honest with him. “We have to work together, Bishop.”
He cut his eyes to mine. “We are.”
“No, we aren’t. You had an idea and wrote it down on your paper. I had an idea and told you.”
His eyes narrowed a bit. As far as eyes went, they were uneconomical. If they had a price, they’d definitely be out of our budget. Icy blue with shards of darker blue interwoven in his iris, with specks of black flecked in for good measure. His hair was inky black, so were his lashes, and the combination of his pale skin with the dark of his hair and the richness of his eyes, Bishop Manfield could quite possibly be in the running for the handsomest fake husband ever.
But we’d never really gotten along. Not that I hadn’t tried to be nice to him. The poor guy was always an outcast, but not in the typical sense. No one bullied him or pushed him away, quite the contrary. It was almost like he didn’t want the attention he knew he garnered. He was really popular amongst the female population and he’d been one of the top players last year in the hockey division. Not that I cared. My dad was the sports guy. He was a sports broadcaster during football and hockey season, and he wrote for the sports column in a magazine.
“Do I have a pimple now?” he asked, an edge to his words.
He was intentionally distasteful. Every time. Would it hurt him to be nice? I took a deep breath. “We need to get along for as long as this project lasts. Do you agree?”
He turned back to his notebook. “Not getting along would be an interesting approach. Think about how expensive it would be to take your budget from the last project and mine and try to make that work while we secretly want to kill the other.”
My lips popped open. An uncomfortable feeling wormed its way into my chest. “You want to kill me?”
He rolled his eyes and shot me a look. “No, I was just making a suggestion.”
I turned straight. Great. My partner wanted to kill me. He hated me that much. I hadn’t remembered ever doing anything to Bishop to earn that much anger. “To murder me? Awesome.”
He ran a hand through his hair and groaned. He looked around and then leaned close. “You’re the one who doesn’t like me. I was just trying to make it easier on you.”
I gave him my eyes sideways. “I never said I didn’t like you.”
“You suggested it.”
“How?”
He was losing his patience. He blinked, taking too long to open his eyes, and he leaned even closer to me, like it would rein his anger in if he looked at what was causing it. “Your mannerisms suggest that. Look. Forget I said it. You’re right. We need to get along. I’m…” He cringed. “Sorry.”
“How sorry?”
“So sorry it burns to even say it,” he lied, rolling his eyes again.
He rolled them so meanly. That made me want to hit him, which made me think that maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t like him any more than he liked me.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he muttered, writing down roses in the bills pile.
His choice made me laugh. “That’s not even nice. You got that idea from someone else. And I don’t like flowers all that much. Try again, Bishop.”
“What do you like?” he asked, eyes teeming with frustration. It made his eyes glimmer, which admittedly made them prettier.
Who knew a guy got even better looking with aggravation. “Guess. We’re newlyweds. You barely know me.”
“Why’d I marry you then?” he grunted.
“Because I’m an amazing kisser and you’re whipped,” I whispered. “Now shut up and buy me something pretty by tomorrow morning.”
He stilled, watching me carefully. “I have never been whipped. I doubt it’s even possible in here.” He tapped his head.
I pointed at his crotch. “What about in there?”
He tried to keep a straight face, but his lips quirked up in the corner anyway, and that only seemed to make him even madder, the fact that he found me amusing, and then he dropped the look altogether and groaned.
He wrote something down under roses. I leaned over his shoulder to read it. “Marriage counseling?” I was so offended, I wrote something down on my own notebook.
He leaned over my shoulder to read it. “A divorce lawyer,” he read. “Good idea, babe.” He pecked me on my temple and leaned back.
I rarely got overly angry. It just wasn’t me. But right then, boy, did I get mad. My blood boiled. I cracked my neck from side to side and took deep breaths. “Miss Barter?” I called, rubbing my temples. “My husband is giving me a headache.”
“Better write down aspirin,” she quipped.
Bishop did.
I snatched his pencil from him and lobbed it across the room and then I turned to him, pointing threateningly. “If you screw up my perfect grade point average with your crap personality, I will decapitate you. Am I clear?”
“Sorry
. Decapitation devices aren’t in our budget.”
“Who said I need a device? I’ll just use these.” I held up my hands.
He smirked, like I was a puppy trying to be a grown up. “You’re cute, you know that?”
I growled under my breath. “You’re a walking, talking headache. Did you know that?”
“No,” he said, like I’d helped him or something by realizing that. “But thanks for letting me know.”
I had two options. Either I could stoop to his level, which was somewhere on the ground, and argue back with him. Or I could be myself and let it go.
I turned straight and ignored him for the rest of class.
Wondering why anyone got married in high school.
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