Half A Million For A Girlfriend, Both Men Belong To Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Pointed at the Wrong Girl
Beckett declares Abby his girlfriend in a full lecture hall and she answers with a made-up story about a dog leash; by evening he is at her laundry desk asking her to name a price, and she says half a million.
The richest man on campus pointed at me, and the first thing I did was invent a dog leash.
It was nine in the morning in the big lecture hall, and I had a laundry-desk lanyard around my neck and half a bagel in my hand.
Autumn was standing at the end of his row with a pink envelope.
She had lent me a pen in the hallway ten minutes earlier and told me my hair clip was cute.
Now she was holding the envelope out to Beckett, and her hand was shaking.
Beckett looked at it with his chin on his fist.
Everyone knew about the letters.
He got three a week, and he turned down every one of them in person.
"Sorry, Autumn," he said. "I have a girlfriend."
Two girls sat right beside him, close enough to touch his sleeve.
He pointed past both of them, across the whole middle section, at the back corner.
At me.
I looked behind me to see who he meant.
The wall was behind me.
His amber eyes found mine, and the corner of his mouth went up.
He was sure I would nod.
I knew this scene, because I had dreamed it the night before.
In the dream I nodded so hard my neck hurt.
He crooked one finger and I ran to him, and then he forgot my name.
I told the whole campus I was his girlfriend anyway, and I picked fights with every girl who walked past him.
The school expelled me, I went home, and I died of sadness.
My tombstone said WIFE OF BECKETT ASHWORTH in letters a foot tall.
I woke up at midnight and drank three bowls of the cleansing tea my mom sells at the farmers market.
She heard me retching, came in with a bundle of burning sage, and swatted me with a branch until the demon left.
Whatever the tea and the sage had done, it worked.
I sat in the back corner of that hall and felt nothing at all, not even a flutter.
So I stood up.
"Yesterday you came to my door in a dog leash," I said.
"You cried, and you said you didn't care if we were official."
"Doing this in front of everyone is a lot, honestly."
Nobody in the hall moved.
"I did not," Beckett said.
A phone went up in the third row.
"It was purple," I said. "You asked me to hold the end."
A boy in the fifth row said, "Bro."
Autumn slid her envelope back into her cardigan.
She looked at Beckett, and her face went from heartbreak to something more careful.
Beckett's smirk was still there, but it had stopped moving.
He tapped two fingers on his desk, which I took to mean "that's enough."
I took a bite of my bagel.
"You know what, never mind," I said. "I mixed him up with a different man in a leash."
The professor, who had not looked up from his slides until then, said, "Ms. Curry, please sit down."
I sat down.
Nobody in the hall took in a word of the lecture on marginal cost.
By the end of class the video had four thousand views.
Dell, my roommate, texted me from the library: "WHAT DID YOU DO."
I texted back: "Nothing. Why."
She sent a screenshot of a campus account called Calloway Confessions.
The caption read: LEASH BOY IS REAL AND HE'S IN ECON.
I had a shift at the dorm laundry desk at six.
I was folding towels when somebody tapped the counter twice.
Beckett Ashworth stood there in a gray hoodie with the hood pulled up.
Up close, his eyes were more gold than amber, and he looked tired.
"Three girls asked me today if I wanted to be walked," he said.
"That sounds like a you problem," I said.
"One of them mailed me a collar to my dorm."
"Was it purple?"
He did not smile.
"Abby Curry," he read off my lanyard. "Fix it."
"How?"
"Tell people you were joking. Tell them I'm the boring one."
I put down the towel.
In my apron pocket was a letter from the bank about my mom's house, folded in quarters.
It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone white.
"I don't work for free," I said.
"Name your price."
I thought about the dream, and the tombstone, and how everything I had done for him in it had cost him nothing.
So I named a number.
"Half a million dollars."
He didn't blink.
He pulled his hood down and said, "Send me the invoice. My brother Rowan pays my bills, and he'll love this."
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