“It’s fine. I just needed to put some space between me and a few people.” He laid his head back on the couch and studied the ceiling.
“So things didn’t work out with Jennifer?” Lexi remembered that the golden couple of Riverdale High had both been accepted at Stanford, making everyone in town speculate that they’d be walking down the aisle eventually.
“Jennifer?” His head shot up and he laughed. “Oh Lord, no! Jennifer and I were over well before I graduated college. Hell, we were almost over by our high school graduation.” He shook his head from side to side at the mention of her name.
“Really? You two always looked so happy together. You were the ‘it’ couple, you know.” Vincent rolled his eyes. “I’m serious. Everyone wanted to be you guys.”
“Yeah, well, things weren’t always as they seemed.” He became very quiet as he found himself lost in his own thoughts. “Being popular wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”
“Yeah, rough life having everyone adore you, being the star of the football team, girls throwing themselves at you and being able to get away with murder by flashing a sexy smile. Sounds like hell.” Lexi twirled a piece of chicken on her fork.
“Did you really think I had a sexy smile?” Vincent leaned closer and grinned from ear to ear, his pearly white teeth on full display as she inadvertently stroked his ego.
“I was a child. I didn’t know any better,” Lexi quipped. Vincent placed his hand over his heart, pretending to be hurt by her words. “Oh please, I’m sure Jennifer stroked your ego every chance she got.”
Vincent snickered. “She was shallow. I can see that now. But at the time, I thought she was genuine. Lesson learned.”
Lexi had to stifle a laugh. The similarities between Jade and Jennifer were endless. They both had that smile-sweetly-to-your-face-then-stab-you-inthe-
back vibe about them. Lexi highly doubted that he had learned nearly as much as he thought, but she kept her opinion to herself. “Who do you keep in touch with from Riverdale?” she asked.
“No one. I was so ready to graduate, it wasn’t even funny. I didn’t care if I saw any of them ever again.” Lexi raised an eyebrow at him in disbelief.
“Really. All of my ‘good friends’ were totally fake. Because my family had money, they all wanted to be my buddy. Every single one of them wanted something from me and yet were ready to let me take the blame for their screw-ups the first chance they got.”
Vincent got up off the couch and grabbed two bottles of water and handed one to Lexi. “Do you remember my graduation party?” he asked.
“I knew you had one, but I didn’t go. My invitation must have been lost in the mail.”
“Thanks, like I don’t feel like enough of a jerk already.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I wasn’t going to have one, but all of my friends talked me into it. Mom and Dad took Anna to Los Angeles for the weekend to go shopping as her graduation gift, and I stayed behind. As soon as they left for the airport, people poured out of the woods around the house, beers in hand. By Sunday morning, the house was trashed. And do you know how many people stayed to help me clean it all up before my parents got home? None of them. They all emptied my parent’s liquor cabinet, screwed each other in their beds, and ate every piece of food in the house, but no one could be bothered to stay and help me scrub the vomit out of the carpet or pick up the empties that were strewn about the yard.”
“That’s terrible.” Lexi could see his jaw tense as he wallowed in the memory.
“They did that kind of thing all the time. They’d borrow my car, then return it with no gas and junk all over the floor, or a nice dent in it that they didn’t expect me to notice. Over the summer, when my grandfather got sick, my parents came down here a lot on the weekends to check on him. It was like they had radar, and as soon as my parents left for the airport, people just appeared at my house, ready to party.”
“I bet that got old fast,” Lexi commented, and Vincent nodded his head in agreement. “How did they even know when your parents were leaving?”
“Jennifer.”
“What a bitch.”
Vincent laughed and took the empty plate from her hand, tossing it into the trash. “My thoughts exactly when I walked in on her and my roommate lathering one another in the shower my freshman year at Stanford.”
Lexi choked on her water. “Oh God, what did you do?”
“I walked out of the room and knocked on every door I passed and told them two people were screwing in my bathroom. He and Jennifer were so occupied, it took a good five minutes before they even noticed they weren’t alone.” He glanced up at the clock then sat back down behind his desk
and returned his attention to the papers in front of him as he prepared to get back to work. “High school was a totally artificial environment, nothing was genuine. It made college quite an eye opening experience in many ways. For example, I quickly found out that being the big fish in the Riverdale football pond was meaningless to college football scouts. They couldn’t have cared less about the snot-nosed kid from some no-name town. Stanford was a harsh introduction to reality for Mr. Popular here.”
Lexi watched him busy himself to avoid making eye contact with her. She knew better than anyone that appearances could be deceiving, but she never thought that applied to Vincent Drake. The guy who had everything at his fingertips was just an illusion.
In reality, he had been more like her than she ever could have imagined. He too had been ready to close the door on that chapter of his life as soon as the valedictorian speech ended. She thought back to their brief encounter on graduation day, and for a fleeting moment, she wondered: if she had offered him her hand, would he have taken it and left with her?
As she looked at the man sitting behind the desk ten feet from her, she knew it didn’t matter. None of it was important now. It was like she said earlier—perspective was everything. And now she realized that popular and invisible were simply labels. They didn’t do anything to really describe the people who wore them. They told nothing about their heart or soul.
“Back to work. What have we come up with that we actually like?” Vincent had asked that question five times already, and each time they axed a few more ideas. They’d whittled it down to just two or three things, but none of them were the idea they needed to catch Julian Stone’s attention.