Layla I’ve always known Emma was the smart one. Even when she was a kid, she understood homework and school and complicated conc epts more quickly than I ever did. I didn’t know I was this stupid. I lambast myself all along the subway ride and the frigid, icy walk to my apartment. I curse my stupidity, my lack of discipline, my weak, spineless self. Leif is paying me a stupid amount of money to be a nanny for a week. Money that I can use for an initial consultation for a lawyer for my grandparents’ problem. Money that can buy groceries and rent and power bills. Money that can support me and my sister when no one else can. And I’m ready to throw it all away—for what? For a kiss? For sex? For a few moments in the arms of a man who will doubtless forget me within a week? When I enter my apartment, I smell something sweet and buttery and fresh, and Emma appears from the kitchen wearing an apron and a smear of flour in her hair. “I made cookies!” she announces. “Chocolate chip. Your favorite.” She presents me with a warm, gooey, delicious cookie, and I eat it to soothe the ache in my chest. “If you don’t want to pursue medicine, Em, you could always open a bakery.” I sink down in a chair as Emma grabs me another cookie. She gives me an impish grin. “A backup plan. I like it. How was work? You look worn out.” You have no idea. Whether the exhaustion comes from the balked lust, the whirlwind of thoughts and emotion, or the hour of self-flagellation I just endured on my way home, I’m not sure. “Did he like the invitations?” Emma asks, sitting across from me. She leans her chin on her hand and blinks those big, innocent eyes at me. I frown. “The invitations?” My sister arches her brows in a distinctly teenage way. “Um, for the party? Hello?” “Oh.” I shake my head. “Yeah, he liked them. He liked all my ideas.” “Oooh,” Emma says, bouncing on her chair. “Exciting!” I give her a tired smile. “I might just get ready for bed, Em. You don’t mind, do you?” She shakes her head. “I have to study, anyway. I just made cookies as an excuse to take a break, but I have to finish an assignment before midnight. My professor is such a hard ass. He takes one point off your grade for every minute the assignment is late! How unfair is that?” “Better not be late, then,” I tell her, forcing a smile. My body feels a hundred years old as I get up from the kitchen table, shuffling to the bathroom to brush my teeth before collapsing in bed. But sle ep doesn’t come easy. I curl up into a tight ball, feeling lost and alone and unable to stop thinking about the way it felt to have Leif’s hands on my thighs, my hips, to feel him pull me to the edge of the counter like he owned me. I felt his cock against the seam of my pants, hard and hot and right there.
If I thought I was in trouble before, I had no idea what I was in for. This is bad—and only going to get worse. Like any reasonable, mature young woman, I decide to solve the problem of Leif Sorensen by completely avoiding him. For the next two days, we cross paths in the morning and the evening, but I treat him to a blank, professional smile and as few words as I can manage. I communicate through email for the party and do everything I can to avoid being alone with him. In the evenings, I work at the bar. Joe is there, as usual, eating wings and drinking beer, and his hopeful, shy smiles make me feel like the most horrible person who ever lived. I also hear back from a few of the lawyers I contacted over the weekend. Lawyers are expensive—a fact I learn by the end of the day on Wednesday, after I’ve gotten a few emails back about consultation fees. Flicking from the emails to my online bank account, I pinch the bridge of my nose. I’m no genius, but even I know the math isn’t adding up. Even with the injection of cash I’ll get from the week of working for Leif, I’ll only have enough for a consultation and maybe one hour of work. Nowhere near enough for any sort of extended legal battle with the army of lawyers the developers surely have. So basically, I’m screwed. Maybe Harriet will need more time with her husband and I’ll have the Sorensen job for more than a week. As the thought crosses my mind, I drop my head in my hands. Sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop in front of me, bitter despair starts se eping through the cracks around my heart. If I work for Leif for more than a week, I won’t be able to ke ep dodging him. There’s a pull in the d epth of my gut that makes me want to be near him, and fighting it every day is wearing me down. The more time I spend in his house, with his daughter, near him, the more I wish we had something between us. How ridiculous. There will never be anything between us other than stolen kisses on a kitchen counter—and I didn’t even get to do that. Leif doesn’t date anyone for longer than a few days, and he certainly doesn’t date people who aren’t in the upper echelons of society. Working for him is torture, slowly tearing my mind apart strip by strip. But what’s the alternative? The café, with a measly tip jar? A sports bar with a few regulars on weeknights? My grandparents will lose their house unless I pull myself together and deal with it. And I can do it. I can. All I need to do is put my attraction to Leif in a little locked box, stuff it down de ep, and never, ever think of it again. I tell myself that with so much force, I almost believe I can do it. “Layla?” The front door slams behind my sister. “Are you home?” I close my old, clunking laptop and swing my legs off the bed, heading out to meet my sister in the living room. “I made stew,” I tell her, pointing to the slow cooker on the counter. The good thing about stew is you can make it tasty with really inexpensive cuts of meat, as long as you have time to cook it low and slow. A slow cooker can also be left on while I’m away all day, which is doubly good.
Emma lets out a groan and makes a beeline for the cupboard housing our chipped and mismatched bowls. “I’m starving.” “You’re a teenager. Of course you’re starving.” She ladles a few big scoops of rich stew into her bowl before leaning against the counter. “Org chem is the bane of my existence,” she announces. “You know what my professor did today, when he was telling us about the midterm exam?” “Tell me.” I scoop some stew into a bowl of my own, making sure to leave most of it for my sister. This should feed us for tomorrow and possibly the next day, too, as long as we watch our portions. “He’s this old, white-haired man, right. I’m pretty sure he’s been lecturing at NYU since the seventies.” She blinks, meeting my eyes. “The eighteen seventies.” When I laugh, Emma takes another bite, groaning in approval as she chews. “And he says, ‘Look to the person on your left. Now look to the person on your right.’ Dramatic pause,” Emma says with a swe ep of her hand that sends a bit of stew sloshing against the edge of the bowl. “‘At least one of the people you just looked at will fail this exam.’ He said that. Why would you say that? What purpose could that possibly have in teaching people about stupid organic chemistry?” “Is this the guy who docks a point for every minute an assignment is late?” “Yes! Come on!” My shoulders shake with laughter at the outrage painted on my sister’s face, the worries about my grandparents fading to the background as I listen to the mundane yet important problems of my little sister’s life. “I’d probably fail organic chemistry, so I believe him.” My thoughts dart to Leif’s question on Saturday morning. He didn’t ask if I went to college. He asked what I studied. As if it was a given that I’d have had the opportunity to go to college and it wasn’t a huge privilege to assume that. The truth is, I didn’t have the grades to go to college. Everything fell apart at home when I was barely sixteen and Emma was six. I had her to worry about, then. Trigonometry didn’t seem so important. It’s exactly the same thing that’s happening right now. I could be enjoying planning Isla’s birthday party—and I am —but there’s my grandparents’ house hanging over it all. There’s my rent, there’s making sure that Emma has enough food to fuel that big brain of hers. Anytime something good happens in my life, anytime there’s a hint of an opportunity, a calamity happens and I find myself fighting fires. It’s not fair. Spooning more stew into my mouth, I try to eat past the lump in my throat. Self-pity never helped anyone, and I’m not going to start now. Yes, I’m tired. Yes, I’m attracted to a man I can never have. Yes, my beloved grandparents might end up homeless before the year is out. I just need to put my big-girl pants on and deal with it, because no one else will. Putting down my bowl, I head to the pantry to grab some half-stale bread that might fill me up. My sister makes a very unladylike grunt, her spoon clinking on the side of her bowl. “Layla, you’re smarter than you give yourself credit for. You could pass org chem for sure. You could do any college degree you wanted; you just never had the chance. Mom left when you were a junior in high school and you had to take care of me. I know your grades dropped because of it. And you did really well when you were studying event management. If we’d had the money, you’d probably be running a super-successful
business by now.” My heart squeezes, eyes blurring, and I busy myself dunking my bread into my stew. “How do you know anything about my grades, Emma?” “I saw your old r eport cards in Grandma’s attic one time. Connected the dots.” Of course she did. If there are dots to connect, Emma will be there to link them together. My little sister is a bona fide genius, hence her early graduation and acc eptance to NYU. I’m so proud of her I could scream, and all I want to do is make sure she has the opportunities I never had. She ke eps eating, unperturbed by the violent emotions swirling through me. “I know you sacrificed a lot—still sacrifice a lot—for me to study and live with you. The reason you didn’t go to college isn’t because you aren’t able, it’s because you had bigger things to worry about when you were younger than I am. That’s why when I’m a rich, fancy doctor, I’ll buy you anything you want. I’ll pay for your college, and then you can be one of those annoying old people that interrupts the professor a dozen times every class to talk about their life experience.” I snort-laugh, putting the old loaf of bread down to wrap my arms around my little sister. “Don’t worry about me, Em. I’ll be fine.” “You could finish your event management course!” Emma beams at me, pointing her spoon my way. “You know you’d love that.” A familiar pain squeezes my chest. “Maybe I will,” I tell her, not believing a word of it. “But first, you have to pass your midterms.” “Ugh.” With that quintessentially teenage noise, my sister and I finish our food, and when Emma starts washing the dishes, she glances over at me. “Did you hear from any lawyers?” A knot of tension forms in my gut so quickly I flinch. I cover it with a nod. “Yeah. I’ll meet with at least one later in the week. They need to review the offer the developers gave Grandma and Grandpa, as well as the deal the city made with the developers. It’s not a guarantee that Grandma and Grandpa won’t be forced out of their house, but we’ll fight it with all we have.” “I still have scholarship money,” Emma says casually. “I never used everything from last semester. Lawyers are expensive, right?” “Em, that money is for your education.” She leans her hands against the edge of the sink, glancing over at me with eyes that are far, far older than seventeen years. The cheerful enthusiasm of a minute ago gives way to something much more serious. When my sister speaks, her voice is low. “Let me help for once, Layla. You pay for everything, but you forget that we’re in this together.” “No.” “Layla.” “No,” I r epeat. “Why do you have to be the one to save the day all the time, Layla? You didn’t even eat half a bowl of stew and I know it’s because you wanted there to be enough leftovers for me. I see what you’re doing every day for me, and it kills me that you won’t let me help. Would you let Grandma and Grandpa lose their house because you won’t let me pay for anything?” “You’ll need that money for school, Emma,” I answer. “You don’t know if they’ll change the terms of your scholarship, and you need to save up for medical school. Anything extra now should be put aside for
that.” My sister faces me fully, puts her hands on my shoulders, and stares me straight in the eyes. “Let. Me. Help.” She shakes me slightly with every word, and each of the shakes weakens my resolve. I shouldn’t acc ept. I know by the time she’s finished medical school she’ll have a mountain of student loans, and it’ll be years before she’s a doctor. But the truth is, I’m tired. It’s taken so much energy to stay away from Leif, to stop myself thinking about him all day every day. I work sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and it’s still not enough. Maybe just this once, we can dip into Emma’s scholarship money. Shoulders dropping, I nod. “Fine. You can pay for the initial consultation, but we’re not making a habit of borrowing your college money for things that aren’t education-related.” Emma’s shoulders straighten, a triumphant gleam in her eyes. “Good. Make an appointment right now. I’ll help you write the email.” I give my sister a flat stare. “It’s almost like you don’t trust me to go through with this.” Emma ignores me, tapping on her phone. “I just transferred three hundred bucks to your account. That’ll cover the consultation, right?” I purse my lips, a tight knot of emotion budding in the middle of my chest. Emma glances up, sees the look on my face, and wraps me up in a hug. “It’s okay, Layla. Share the burden for once. I’m not a little kid anymore. I can help.” “I hate taking your money for this.” She squeezes me tightly. “Maybe I just want to be able to take credit when we save Grandma and Grandpa’s house.” Laughing, I hug her back, then I pull away and make an appointment. When it’s done, I give my sister a hug, and I realize that it feels good to lean on someone else, for once, even if it feels wrong for that person to be my seventeen- year-old sister.