“I’m nobody’s dream girl.” My voice comes out hollower than I mean it to. My mind flashes to my ex-boyfriend, then away before the familiar sting of memory settles onto my skin like a sunburn. “People can’t like me if they don’t really know me.”
Alex frowns. His eyebrows draw together, asking a question I can nearly hear: Who really knows you?
I could count the number of people on one hand. That’s the difference between us.
“Well.” He scratches at his jaw. “Unlike you, I have a pathological need to be liked.”
I snort. “Why is that?”
“If I had a therapist, I’m sure they’d have ideas.” His tone is dark and amused. Then, as if brushing past the admission, he shoots me a pointed look. “It’s why you’re so frustrating.”
“Because I don’t like you?”
“Yes,” he agrees. “Makes me bitter.”
“At least we’re in that together.”
He drains his beer and deposits it on a waist-high bar table in the middle of the balcony. “Hang on. Has something I’ve done made you bitter?”
“Oh, come on.” I wait. He waits. “Alex, you can’t be serious.”
“Rarely.” He smirks. “But that was a serious question.”
I consider him, wondering how to play this. If he wants it all out there, I’m game.
“Tell me what you’re doing here,” I demand, taking an educated guess at his answer.
He laughs softly, amused at a private joke. But then the expression vanishes, and he admits, “I’m sometimes invited to stuff like this.”
“Why?” I ask. It’s a dare.
He considers my dare, then turns to me. “I think you probably know why.”
“Maybe I want to hear you say it.”
My gaze never drops, and eventually Alex sighs in exasperation, glaring at the water. “I got invited to this event because my father has good seats. Not that I’ve ever been to a game with him. I’m pretty sure he mostly gives the tickets away to business partners, but the team’s probably hoping I’ll buy some of my own after tonight.”
This line of inquiry is going exactly the way I planned.
“Your father sounds rich and important,” I say, voice dripping with sarcasm. “What does he do for a living?”
Slowly Alex turns his head, eyes widening. “Oh. That’s what it is,” he murmurs. Very faintly, and more to himself than to me. He looks like he just decoded the Rosetta stone, and the fact that this cause-and-effect scenario is only now dawning on him makes my blood boil. “You hate the nepotism of it,” he says at last.
“Duh. Doesn’t everyone hate nepotism?”
He tilts his head back and forth. “Except the people who benefit from it.”
He’s smirking, but not smugly. Why do I feel like I’m missing the punch line of a joke Alex is keeping just out of reach?
He scratches at his neck. “I guess your reaction is fair.”
“You guess it’s fair?”
“I’m qualified for this job,” he defends, losing patience, but he gives away his unease by fidgeting with his shirt cuffs. “I spent the past two years working in Seoul for a digital media company that’s very similar to what Bite the Hand is trying to become. We grew that brand from the ground up, and the company is performing well.”
“Another family business?” I quip.
Alex pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re intolerable. I don’t know why I try.”
“Try? Alex, when have you ever had to try at anything?”
He whirls on me, caramel eyes roving hotly over my face. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t have a clue.”
Maybe he’s right, but now that we’re finally having it out, I can’t find it in me to hold back. “I know that you’re well connected, well educated, well traveled—”
“Here I thought we were fighting.”
“And I know that for some reason, everybody loves you. God forbid I’m the one person who didn’t immediately warm to your presence, but please don’t delude yourself into thinking it wasn’t for lack of trying that hard.”
“Just because you’re as inviting as a porcupine doesn’t mean I should be villainized because I’m friendly,” he says. “Believe me, you’ve got the try-hard personality trait covered enough for both of us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
His eyes gleam. “It means I’ve never seen anyone so committed to hating a person they hardly fucking know. No wonder you said you’re nobody’s dream girl.”
I flinch, stung, and take a step backward that’s more like a stumble.
“Casey.” Alex takes a small step forward, and our eyes lock. His face is twisted in regret. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I promise. I didn’t mean it,” he says again, lower.
Is he reading the heart on my sleeve right now? Am I letting him? It’s such a vulnerable feeling that all I can think to do in this moment is find the chink in his own armor and stab him right back.
“Do you really think HR didn’t know who your dad was when they offered you your job, Alex? Be serious. At the very least, they were biased in your favor.”
I can tell from the fracture in his eyes that he knows I’m right. A twisted satisfaction seeps through me, taking this small thing from him.
“What do you want from me?” He raises his arms, but his voice is soft. “HR said I was their strongest candidate by a mile.”
And that, I realize with a punch to the gut, is the crux of why his presence hurts me so much.
Not because I lost out on the job to the board chairman’s son, but because even if he weren’t the board chairman’s son, Alex would have edged me out anyway.
He clearly has no idea I applied. As much as I want to dislike him, I can admit he wouldn’t have said that to me just now if he’d known.
Alex doesn’t deserve to be the source of my insecurity, but still, he landed squarely into it, every edge of him filling the gaps of what I’m not.
Maybe I should say sorry, too. For saying he’s never had to try at anything in life, which was unfair. Because Alex is right. I don’t know anything about him. Not really. But I can’t talk, or look him in the eye again, without risking him discovering that there’s something deeper going on here. Like he said, heart’s on my sleeve.
We’re quiet for a few moments, letting the wave of voices inside and the noise of car horns below fill up the space between us.
“Casey,” he says eventually. “Just … I just wish—”
But he’s interrupted when someone in a navy-blue suit smelling suspiciously of spray tan comes up and claps Alex on the shoulder. “My God. I thought that was you!”
His eyes jerk away from mine, the cord snapping, ricocheting. “Yeah, I’m … Hey, Bishop, how’ve you been?” His voice resets. Now it’s the voice Alex uses on others, the one that makes everybody fall in love with him.
My eyes search for Sasha. She’s been watching us from the bar inside, too far away to hear much, but when we lock eyes, she jerks her head at the elevator.