Page 77 of A Barista's Guide to Love & Larceny
“What are you doing here?” Kass asked. He dropped one of Dani’s hands and faced Wyatt, his face hardening into an expression she’d never seen before. It was unequivocal dislike.
Wyatt ignored him, his gaze darting down to their joined hands, a disbelieving smile tugging at his mouth. The emotions flickering in his eyes told her everything she needed to know: disgust mixed with akind of twisted amusement. “Nah, nah, you can’t beserious,” he said, talking mostly to Dani. “Are you messing with me right now?”
“Wyatt,” she said, her voice ragged.
“You know this guy?” Kass asked her.
“We’re in a group project together,” she said weakly.
“For what class?”
Wyatt didn’t give her time to provide an answer, not that she had one. He was laughing now, a maniacal twinge in it. “This is too much,” he said. “You’re not—you guys aren’t, like,together, are you?”
“What’s it to you?” Kass challenged.
A wide, disbelieving grin split Wyatt’s face. He kept shaking his head. “You’ve got to be fuckingjoking me! This is too rich.”
“Wyatt,” Dani tried again. “Please, you don’t—”
“This whole time, you’ve been dating Gianakos?” he said. Colors spilled into her mind, a mix of red and yellow and cotton-candy blue, like Wyatt couldn’t decide what he wanted to say or how he wanted to feel. It didn’t really matter—either way, he was saying more than he should, and she needed to stop him. “Did Silva put you up to this?”
“Who’s Silva?” Kass asked. “Dani, what is he talking about?” She could already hear the hurt in his tone, whorled with confusion. The urge to cry was more powerful than ever, but she fought it off.
“Of course she didn’t,” Dani said to Wyatt. “Silva doesn’t know about this. And Kass has nothing to do with anything. Can we talk about this later? Or at least somewhere else?”
“I don’t think so,” Wyatt said. “I think we’ll talk about it right here, right now.” He at least glanced around to make sure no one was listening, then took a step closer. “Dani, you know who his father is. You can’t be messing around like this.”
“This is about my dad?”
Dani would have given anything in that moment to rewind the morning by half an hour, or at least by thirty seconds—anything to make it so Kass didn’t look at her with such abiding disappointment.
“No!” she said, loud enough to attract a few looks. She felt Kass pulling his hand away, and she tightened her grip. “Kass, no, wait—”
“I thought you were different,” he said. His eyes were big and sad, like a puppy who’d been promised a forever home only for it to be taken away at the last second. “I thought you just liked me for who I am, not because of who my father is.”
“Ido,” she insisted. This time, he succeeded in tugging his hand out of her hold. Tears were filling her eyes now and blurring her vision, his betrayed face swimming before her. “We’re just in a group project, it has nothing to do with your father. I didn’t know who he was when we started dating, I swear—”
“Unbelievable,” Kass said, and the pain in that single word was almost enough to kill her. Panic started to rise when she realized he was turning to walk away. She lunged after him and grabbed hold of his arm. He stopped in his tracks and stood stock-still, refusing to look at her.
“Please,” she gasped, and people were openly watching them now. “Please, Kass, let me explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” he said, his voice empty. “I just hope you got what you came for.” He pried his arm from her grasp and started to walk again, his steps quicker this time, like he was determined to get away as fast as possible.
“Kass,” she said, but he had already been swallowed by the current of students moving down the sidewalk, and after only a moment he was gone from sight.
Dani stood there, shaking, tears burning lines into her cheeks. The world was still moving around her, some people giving her sympathetic looks as they passed. A few drops of rain had started to fall from the gray sky.
She didn’t notice any of it. All the life had slipped from her body and pooled at her feet, like it had only ever been a dress she was borrowing. She didn’t know what was left now that it was gone. A deephorror had passed through the membrane of every single cell of her being, and in that awful, claustrophobic moment, she felt certain it would never leave her.
“Dani.”
She had forgotten about Wyatt. But she remembered him now, as his hand found her shoulder and he rotated her toward him. As she looked up into his face—his annoying, asshole face that had destroyed everything—she had the desire to scream at him, worse than she had at OneiroLabs. But the rain began to fall in earnest, and as it did, she felt her defiance put up a white flag of surrender. She was too heartbroken, too exhausted. She truly had nothing left.
“I, um,” he said, like he was looking for words. “I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have reacted that way. But were you really dating him? Like, for real? You couldn’t tell that was just a time bomb waiting to go off?”
She blinked slowly at him; her eyelids were heavy. Everything was. “Don’t tell Silva” was all she could think to say.
Wyatt frowned. “I dunno, Dani, it seems kind of important.”
