“Tell me about yourself, Cassandra Renfield,” he said, leaning back with a slight smile after we’d gotten our drinks.
“Well …” I stirred my black coffee, trying to decide how to start. “I’ve been living in Bering for about two weeks. Moved here from Pennsylvania. I work at a coffee shop.”
“You don’t say.”
I smiled. “Um … I guess that’s about it. Not too much to tell.”
“Surely there’s more than that. Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“Did you move here with your family?”
“No, just me.”
“Just you? Why?”
“Why just me or why did I move here?”
“Both.”
I shrugged, not wanting to get into it.
Lucas frowned. “Well, was it to come to Lennox?”
“No.” I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t graduated from high school yet, wasn’t old enough to be a real college student.
“Uh-huh.” Lucas’s smile had faded. “You’re not making this very easy, you know. This is supposed to be a conversation, not twenty questions.”
“I’m sorry. ‘Tell me about yourself ’ sounded more like a command than the start of a conversation.”
He stared at me, then raised an eyebrow, slightly bemused, slightly annoyed. “You’re a prickly one, aren’t you?”
I shrugged again, feeling sulky. This isn’t how I wanted this to go.
I guess Lucas had the same thought, because he sighed and said, “How about we start over? I’ll go first.” He extended his hand across the table. It was firm and warm and made me a little tingly. “I’m Lucas Canton. I’m eighteen—nineteen in October—going into my sophomore year at Lennox. I’m from California, just outside LA. My family still lives there: Mom, Dad, and two sisters. I like good food, great books, coffee, squash, skiing, and challenging conversation.” He smiled wryly.
“I guess you’ve come to the right place.”
“I guess so. Your turn.”
“Okay. I’m Cassandra Renfield. You already know how long I’ve been in Bering and where I’m from.” I paused, knowing I had to tell him more or this conversation would be over. “I’m staying with my aunt for a while. I was living with my grandmother in Pennsylvania, but she died last month. My parents died when I was young. They’re buried here.”
“Wow.” He leaned back, one hand fingering his coffee cup, the other absently pinching his full lower lip. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. That must have been hard.”
“Yeah, well. I’m okay. But thanks.”
I looked away, wishing in the silence that I hadn’t brought all of that up. I could have just gone with “living with my aunt” rather than spilling the whole story. Especially the bit about my parents. For God’s sake, why on earth had I told my philosophy TA who I’d just met about them?
“So how about your dislikes?” I asked abruptly.
“I’m sorry?” Lucas had been looking out across campus, but turned back to me and I felt a slow flush as his eyes met mine. He was even better looking than I’d remembered from Cuppa. He had perfect skin and a nose neither small nor large, with a little bend in the middle. He wasn’t exceptionally tall, maybe five foot nine or ten, but fit and athletic and totally unlike my image of a philosophy student. But it was mostly those eyes. I could see now that the green was speckled with streaks of gold and amber. All in all, sitting across from Lucas made it hard to think.
“Your dislikes,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. I felt stupid, like I was pumping him for information, but I had to lighten the mood after bringing up all my baggage. “You told me what you like. How about the other half?”
“My dislikes …,” he said, thinking. “Wait a minute. You first—your likes. Don’t think you’re getting off the hook here, Cassandra.” He smiled and any heaviness lifted from our table.
We covered all the basic ground. Favorite foods, music, where we lived, what we thought of Bering. We had a lot in common, I thought. Certainly that’s what I wanted to believe.
“You’ll like Professor McMillan,” he told me.
“I already do.”
“You’ll learn so much from him,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “He’s tough, but great at challenging you to think, to question everything. They’re not all like that, the profs in the department. In fact, most of them aren’t.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d have even applied for the TA program if it’d been someone else. Most of them want you to dissect Plato’s or Aristotle’s arguments to understand their moral system rather than using it to discover your own.”
“Interesting.” I wasn’t sure I had a moral system. If I did, I hoped my new professor had the user’s manual.
“Not at all what the philosophers intended,” Lucas continued. “You’ll see what I mean.” He checked his watch. I knew from the clock in front of the library that we’d barely been there a half hour, just long enough for coffee. “Ready to head out?” he asked.
He paid the bill and I didn’t argue. I’m not sure what I’d hoped for, but his breezy “see you later” left me disappointed. Had my conversation not been challenging enough or had our attraction been one-sided from the start?
The hell with Lucas Canton, I decided, walking back to the apartment and grinning at the feel of my backpack, full once again, slung familiarly over my left shoulder. He wasn’t what I’d been looking for when I enrolled at Lennox anyway.
Chapter 13
I was tucked into a corner of the sofa when Drea came in around seven. The keys in the door startled me. I was used to hearing them only vaguely through a sleep-fogged brain, her arrival usually long after I’d gone to bed. We’d had exactly two meals together since I’d moved in, one of them a breakfast, which she’d spent looking at charts and bullet points for some presentation.
“Hey,” she said, tossing her orange bag onto the table beside the door.
“Hey,” I echoed.
She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. I returned to my book, fully expecting her to disappear down the hall to her bedroom.
Instead she came into the living room and flopped into the chair between me and the window with an exhausted sigh.