The Damaged (The Insiders Trilogy #2) - Tijan by Tijan

My whole insides had melted, and he knew, his eyes catching mine and warming. His hand moved to my leg under the table, and like in the car, his fingers rested on the inside of my leg.

It was the best Burriotle I’d ever enjoyed.





NINE


I was listening to my voice-mail and Chrissy’s voice played. “You need to call your mother right now. You need to update her on your first few days of school. Dinner was not enough. We didn’t get the time to talk like we need to. You need to tell your mother you love her because if you don’t, your mother will hunt you down!” She breathed hard into the phone, and I was grinning listening to her. “You got that, my beautiful little genius daughter that I love and cherish and worry about? Call your mother!”

I snorted, because it’d been her who had been distracted during dinner. Not me. I’d been thankful at the time.

“Enjoyed any good burritos lately?”

Now I wasn’t so thankful, because calling Chrissy back might’ve saved me a little from the teasing I’d already endured this evening.

I was at Naveah. It was a couple days later, and that question came to me as I was in the VIP booth, squished with Matt and Guy. No Tony. No Chester. Both absences that I wasn’t complaining about.

And I knew the teasing would start, just didn’t know when it would start.

Tuesday was the Burriotle date.

Someone there took a picture of us, of Kash leaning over me like he wanted to eat me for lunch.

That photo was sold the next day.

It came out Thursday. And here we were. Thursday night. Naveah. My brother beside me. That damn picture was haunting me, and so was Chrissy’s voice message.

The club was packed. We had extra club staff at the end of our stairs to keep people from coming up, and since we’d just gotten here, I figured I got my brother for thirty minutes before he’d head off to quench the real thirst that had brought him to Naveah.

I figured I had that long with Guy, too, before he had a girl up here, or two. Both were grinning at me, sharing sly looks.

I flushed, putting my phone away. “Fuck off.”

Matt laughed. “I do believe that’s the look Kash had, wanting to do that to you.”

“I took a girl to get a burrito the next day and what do you know?” Guy piped in, his amusement thick. He winked. “It worked. She got a different burrito within an hour of leaving there.”

“An hour?” Matt shot at him. “It took that long?”

I added, “What were you doing before?”

Guy’s grin lessened, but he rolled his eyes and gave us both a middle finger. “Fuckers.”

Matt jerked his chin up to me. “Where’s your man tonight?”

The official answer: “Working.”

The unofficial answer: a meeting with Japan investors. Why I wasn’t supposed to know that, I didn’t know, but Kash let it slip he had to call overseas, and I got a text later telling me not to share with anyone the location of “overseas.”

Matt didn’t care. He didn’t question. He only nodded, all easygoing. “Right on, right on.” His hand was resting on the booth next to my shoulder and he bumped me with it. “Fill me in. How’s the school thing going?”

Matt barely went to class when he got his degree, so he didn’t really go to college. How he got that degree, well … I was assuming money had something to do with it, but I wasn’t going to ask. Graduate school, what I was doing, was a phenomenon to him.

I got it. I did. He gave me enough teasing, lumping me in with Cyclone and Peter, that I knew there was a part of him that was bothered by it all. I didn’t know why or how it related to him, though I had a guess. And I didn’t like what my guess was, but as he asked me this question, I could tell he was genuine in asking. He’d been authentic the other times he questioned me, too, and that was warming my belly in a way no alcohol could obtain.

I smiled at him. “It’s going good, actually.”

And it was.

I was up to date on my assignments. I thought there’d be more papers, but there weren’t. Turns out computer grad school was actually about computers, so the assignments we had were easy for me. I had to put in extra time reading the textbooks so I knew I would get everything correct on the quizzes, one of which we had coming in the morning.

I wasn’t supposed to know that, but moving through our student database, I had hit a few extra buttons that I shouldn’t have and I got the screen that showed me the complete schedule of pop quizzes in my IT Strategy and Management class. I didn’t print anything out. Didn’t copy it. Just got one good look at the screen before I was pushed out. That was enough.

I didn’t share with anyone that I’d had that peek. I was prepared, because I actually did the readings. Some of the students in the class didn’t. They skimmed. Melissa told me her secret was to read the first section, the last section, and every third paragraph the rest of the chapters. Hoda, I didn’t know what she did. After I came back from Burriotle, she didn’t say anything to me the rest of the day, and it’d been like that for the past two days. Melissa, on the other hand, loved everything about that day and proceeded to share this with Fitz every time he was with me.

The rest of the guys in the class thought Fitz was cool, though only one or two of them told him this. Melissa was the one who told me the guys thought Fitz was cool, because the guys mostly all stuck to themselves. They lingered around a few of their computers. The spokesman was the extroverted “leader” of them, Dax, but the rest just talked with one another. And Melissa, she was on the in with them.