Page 197 of Handsome Devil
And what a douche I’d been to her in high school, for no fault of her own.
When I couldn’t sleep, I ended up sitting in front of the fire in my office, drinking instead. I pulled out the glossy photos she’d left in the meeting room at the agency office last week—obviously, for me. Some young, blondish dude in football pants, his body slick with oil meant to simulate sweat, and so much attitude emanating from his eyes… it was like I was looking into a fucking mirror, where my younger self scowled back at me.
Those werefuck offeyes, if I’d ever seen them.
Did she have these photos taken because of me? Or did they just remind her of me when she saw them?
Either way, the message was clear. I was a fucking brat back then. She hated me for it. But… maybe she would’ve liked me. If I ever actually gave her a chance to.
Maybe I’d always been a douche and I was just blissfully ignorant of it. It would’ve been easy not to notice.
I’d been spoiled all my life. Insulated. Protected. Bolstered up on a sense of importance that I’d never really earned, because my mother and my grandmother didn’t have a choice. There was no other heir. There was only me.
They had no other option but to bestow all their success upon me, and hope I could carry it forward.
I was born into that privilege.
No one had ever even asked me if I wanted it. That wasn’t a question that existed in my world, in my family.
But worse, if I’d ever been asked, what would I have said?
There was no answer to the questionWhat do you want to be when you grow up?for someone like me, other than the inevitable.
I want to be what they told me to be.
I had to want it. Because if I didn’t… what else did I have?
It was a really fucked-up position to be in, to feel like you had everything and nothing at once. And to be able to talk to no one about it. Because no one, not even your closest friends, could ever understand.
They weren’t royalty like me. No one expected them to be king.
My future had been paved in gold since the day I was born: as predictable as it was privileged. I never even really questioned it.
But then I met Devi Sereda.
And I started to question everything.
From the very first day I met Devi, it bugged me that she was there, at my school. Her very existence bugged me.
Because from the very first day she met me, she hated me.
And I never knew why.
By the end of that first day of senior year, I’d found out nothing about her but her name and the fact that she had Mark Wahlberg’s crotch on her phone. She’d sat down in front of me in History class and one over to the right; she was playing with her phone before the teacher walked in, and I saw it.
How did I know it was Mark Wahlberg, when it was just a closeup of a dude’s crotch—his hand grabbing his crotch, actually—in tighty whities? I asked her.
Actually, I kicked her chair with the toe of my Louis Vuitton sneaker to get her attention. She turned to glare at whoever had bumped her, and actually seemed disappointed that it was me.
I flicked my chin at her phone. “What the fuck was that?”
She looked down her nose at me. “What?”
“That dick pic on your phone.”
“That,” she said, with one-hundred-and-ten-percent attitude, “was Mark Wahlberg in an old-school Calvin Klein ad,” like that was totally fucking self-explanatory and I was dumb as shit.
Maybe it was her disdain for me that made me want to pull her hair.
