them down your stockings?” His tone wasn’t accusing, per se. More “mild, patronizing bafflement,” like someone gently questioning their child on why, exactly, they thought dog food would make a great snack. It only made me want to dig my heels in further.
I shook my head and laughed a little too loudly. “No.” The heat in my cheeks told me my face was betraying me.
“Turn around.”
I leaned against the lockers with a rustle of paper and folded my arms across my chest. The corner of one of the envelopes dug uncomfortably into the back of my hip. “I don’t want to.”
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Yeah. He wasn’t buying this for a second.
If my brain were functioning properly I would’ve said something to throw him off track, but unfortunately it chose that precise moment to go on strike.
“You are the person who runs this thing,” Brougham said, confidently enough I knew there was no point protesting further. “And I really need your help.”
I hadn’t settled on what I believed would happen if I ever got caught. Mostly because I’d preferred not to worry about it too much. But if you’d forced me to guess what the person catching me would do, I would’ve probably gone for “turn me in to the principal,” or “tell everyone in school,” or “accuse me of ruining their life with bad advice.”
But this? This wasn’t so threatening. Maybe it was going to be okay. I swallowed hard in an attempt to shove the lump in my throat down closer to my thudding heart. “Help with what?”
“With getting my ex-girlfriend back.” He paused, thoughtful. “Oh, my name’s Brougham, by the way.”
Brougham. Pronounced BRO-um, not Broom. It was an easy name to remember, because it was pronounced all wrong, and that had irked me since the first time I’d heard it.
“I know,” I said faintly.
“What’s your hourly rate?” he asked, peeling his shirt away from his chest to air it out. It thwacked heavily back against his skin as soon as he let go of it. See? Overly wet.
I tore my eyes away from his clothes and processed his question. “I’m sorry?”
“I want to hire you.”
There he went again with the weird money-for-favors language. “As…?”
“A relationship coach.” He glanced around us, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “My girlfriend broke up with me last month and I need her back, but I don’t know where to start. This isn’t something an email’s gonna fix.”
Well, wasn’t this guy dramatic? “Um, look, I’m sorry, but I don’t really have time to be anyone’s coach. I just do this before bed as a hobby.”
“What are you so busy with?” he asked calmly.
“Um, homework? Friends? Netflix?”
He folded his arms. “I’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour.”
“Dude, I said—”
“Twenty-five an hour, plus a fifty-dollar bonus if I get Winona back.”
Wait.
So, this guy was seriously telling me he’d give me fifty dollars, tax-free, if I spent two hours giving him some advice on getting back a girl who’d already fallen for him once? That was well within my skill set. Which meant the fifty-dollar bonus was all but guaranteed.
This could be the easiest money I’d ever made.
While I mulled it over, he spoke up. “I know you want to keep your identity anonymous.”
I snapped back to reality and narrowed my eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged, the picture of innocence. “You’re sneaking around after hours when the halls are empty, and no one knows it’s you answering them. There’s a reason you don’t want people knowing. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes.”
And there it was. I knew it. I knew my gut was screaming “danger” for a good reason. He wasn’t asking me for a favor, he was telling me what he wanted from me, and throwing in why it would be a bad idea to refuse. As casually as anything. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blackmail.
I kept my voice as steady as I could, but I couldn’t help the touch of venom that seeped through. “And let me guess. You’d like to help me keep it that way. That’s where this is going, right?”
“Well, yeah. Exactly.”
He’d stuck his lower lip out and widened his eyes. My own lip curled of its own accord as I took him in, any goodwill I’d been feeling toward him evaporating in one puff. “Gee. That’s so thoughtful of you.”
Brougham, expressionless, waited for me to go on. When I didn’t, he circled a hand in the air. “So … what do you think?”