Harvard Hottie (13 page)

Chapter Sixteen

I’m not terribly excited when Luke invites me to go out with him and a couple of his “prep school buddies.” I immediately imagine the three of them wearing matching blazers and preppy haircuts. This does not excite me.

“Are you seriously still friends with people you went to high school with?” I ask him. We’re lying in bed together, naked and kind of sweaty from the previous activities of the evening.

“No,” Luke says. “Actually, I hate these guys.”

“Even better,” I say. “Do you hate every single one of your friends?”

“Possibly,” he admits. He shrugs. “I knew a lot of assholes in prep school and college. And lately, I’ve been too busy working to make new friends. So I’m kind of stuck with the assholes.”

“Lovely.”

“Anyway, they’re good business contacts,” he says. “Carter is next in line for his family’s business and they’re almost as big as ours.”

“Carter? That’s his
first
name?”

“Look, are you coming or not?”

“I don’t know.” I make a face. “How much do you want me to come?”

Luke props himself up on his elbow and looks me in the eyes. “A lot.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he says and grins sheepishly. “I get together once or twice a year with these guys and every time they show up with some gorgeous girl and I’m usually… well, I’m usually alone. This year, I want you with me.”

It’s very hard to say no to that.

We go out to dinner with Carter and Peter on Saturday night. I can tell Luke is a little nervous about it by how long he spends trying to figure out what to wear. He holds up like three ties and asks me which one is best, but how the hell should I know?  I just tell him they all look very expensive, which is the truth.

He tries to persuade me to let him buy me a dress for tonight, but I refuse. I already feel weird about the $5,000 dress, which is still hanging in my closet and I swear I can’t imagine ever wearing it again. I do end up buying a new dress, but I get it at the mall. The mall has plenty of nice stuff.

We meet Carter and Peter at a Legal Seafood. We arrive first to hold our table and I can see Luke shifting in his chair even more than he usually does. “You okay?” I ask him.

“I guess,” he mumbles.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he sighs. “I guess it’s just that ever since high school, everything was always a competition with these guys. And I feel like ever since I got paralyzed, it’s always been a given that I can’t win. Which, you know, I don’t care, fuck it. But it’s just not the most fun way to spend the evening.”

“Luke,” I murmur, my heart going out to him. I lean forward and kiss him on the lips, feeling him pull me closer. I don’t think either of us wants to be here right now. I’m just about to suggest we blow off his friends when I hear snickering above us.

“Thayer, you old dog!” I look up and see a good-looking guy with perfect golden hair and an impressive tan grinning down at us. “Finally got yourself a woman, have you?”

“Hello, Carter,” Luke says tightly. “This is Ellie. Ellie, this is Carter.”

He sticks out his hand and nearly crushes mine in it. What kind of man shakes a woman’s hand that way?

“Good to meet you, Ellie,” Carter says. “We’re all really pleased for Luke. We were beginning to wonder if he’d turned gay or something. But you seem all woman to me.”

“God, shut up, Carter,” Luke says.

In a few minutes, Carter’s girlfriend Olympia joins us from the restroom. Olympia is one of those completely perfect-looking women who seems designed for magazines or TV, and I later find out that she is, in fact, a model. Then Peter shows up with his girlfriend Regina, who is also a model.

So I’m sitting there with five of perhaps the most good-looking people I’ve ever seen. (Admittedly, Luke doesn’t have it going on as much since he’s in the wheelchair, but from the neck up, he’s still pretty gorgeous.) I feel so awkward sitting there, in no small part because Carter and Peter can’t stop talking about women. Before our appetizers arrive, I find out that Carter thinks Angelina Jolie is the hottest actress in Hollywood, while Peter prefers Zoe Saldana.

“What about you, Luke?” Carter asks him. To his credit, Luke has gracefully stayed out of the conversation.

“Um, I don’t know,” he says, glancing at me.

Peter snickers. “What, do you have to get Ellie’s permission to participate in the conversation?”

“Are you seriously that whipped, Thayer?” Carter says.

Luke’s face darkens and for a second, I’m worried he’s going to say something regrettable, so I quickly interject with, “It’s okay, Luke. I want to hear who you like too.”

“You do?”

“Of course,” I say. “Aren’t we both supposed to make a list of five celebrities we’re supposed to be allowed to have sex with if the opportunity arises?”

Luke laughs. “Okay, so who would be on your list then?”

“Um,” I say thoughtfully. “I’m not really sure.”

“Justin Bieber?” Carter suggests.

“Isn’t he, like, thirteen?” I point out.

“I don’t know,” Carter says, chuckling. “You seem like a Belieber to me.”

I roll my eyes. “No, it would be more like… Hugh
Jackman.”

“Wolverine?” Luke looks amused. “I would have taken you more for the Peter Parker type.”

“Well, maybe you don’t know everything about me.”

Peter is still snickering. “Ellie, nothing personal, but I doubt Hugh
Jackman would have sex with you.”

My face turns red as Luke says to Peter, “Yeah, and I’m sure Zoe Saldana would jump at the chance of having sex with you.”

“I think I could get Zoe Saldana,” Peter says confidently. “If the opportunity arose.”

Sometime before the arrival of our entrees, I’ve decided that I don’t like either Peter or Carter. In fact, I kind of hate them. I’m glad Luke prefaced the dinner by telling me they were assholes, or else I would have lost all respect for him.

Eventually, I become as quiet as Olympia and Regina, who must have learned the hard way to keep their mouths shut. The dinner is very much a competition between the three men who subtly jab at each other any chance they get. Carter and Peter tease Luke about his lack of romantic success, whereas Luke casually mentions that Peter’s company’s stock recently dropped. As much as he says he hates them and feels he “can’t win,” Luke plays the game just as well as they do.

It becomes obvious to me that while Peter and Carter have more social success, Luke is the far better businessman. I’m fairly sure that Thayer Industries is the largest company of the three of them, and Luke has the most money.

Part of the reason may be because neither Peter nor Carter seem to work very hard. They talk a lot about traveling through Europe, going horseback riding (why do the rich always ride horses?), and various other recreational activities. “We’re going rock climbing in two weeks,” Carter says. He adds, “That’s not really Luke’s activity, is it?”

I recall Luke told me the way he got injured was rock climbing. I want to ask if these were the guys he was with when it happened, but I feel that would be as tasteless as Carter’s comment.

When the check comes, it’s practically a battle to the death over who’s going to pay. They all whip out their gold credit cards and beg to foot that gigantic bill. There’s a part of me that wants to offer to pay too, just to see the look on their faces, but if they somehow agreed to let me pay, I’d have to go to the bank to take out a loan or something. Apparently, Luke paid last time, so somehow Carter wins out.

“I made after dinner reservations at the
Dubonney Club,” Carter says. “I thought we could get some drinks there.”

“Fantastic,” Peter says. “Luke, are you coming?”

“No, that’s all right,” Luke says. “I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow morning.”

Carter grins. “You work too hard, old man. You
gotta enjoy life more. Meet more women. Stay out late.”

Luke just shakes his head. “Yeah, that’s all right. Thanks anyway.”

I want to be a good girlfriend and encourage Luke to go, but he seems like he wants the evening to end as much as I do. As we drive back, he’s practically fuming. “I hate those guys,” he says.

I laugh. “I hate them too. But I wouldn’t have minded if we went to that club.”

“They didn’t want me to come,” Luke says.

“How do you know?”

“Because the Dubonney Club has like a million stairs and no elevator,” he says. “And they know it. We went once and I was stuck in the lobby while they went upstairs to try to figure out if it was worth staying there. After thirty minutes, I gave up and left.”

“Why do you bother seeing them?”

“I don’t know,” Luke says. “Force of habit, I guess. Plus, this year, I wanted to… you know…” He grins. “Show you off. Sorry, is that insulting?”

“No, it’s not.” In fact, I can’t help but feel flattered. Nobody’s ever thought of me as someone worth showing off. I can’t believe he thinks I’m in any way comparable to those two models. “By the way, those two guys are jealous as hell of you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“They are,” I insist. I can’t believe that Luke, with all his intelligence, can’t see that. “They think you’re much more successful than they are. That’s why they’re such assholes to you.”

Luke laughs. “I don’t know if you’re right about that. But thanks for saying so.”

“By the way,” I add. “If you want to know why I wouldn’t go out with you in college, that’s why.”

“Oh, come on. I wasn’t that bad.”

“Of course you were.”

“That’s only because you didn’t know me.”

“No,” I say, as I look at his perfect facial profile, contrasting with his hunched shoulders. “You’re different now.”

He shrugs.

“Hey,” I say. “I wanted to ask you, when you… got hurt, were you rock climbing with Carter and Peter?”

Luke nods. “Yeah, I was climbing with Carter. Somehow he always manages to bring it up.”

My eyes widen. “Was it his fault that you got injured?”

“God, no,” he says. “It was my own dumb fault for being careless and thinking I was invincible. Carter tried to warn me to be careful, and after I fell, he made sure not to move me and he ran to get help. I think he was more freaked out than I was. But it was always weird between us after that.”

Luke is quiet for a while after telling the story. I don’t say anything and finally he says, “I still remember lying there on the ground and not being able to move my arms or legs. It never even occurred to me for a second that my injury could be permanent. I just figured I’d go to the hospital and they’d fix me. And now I feel like, whenever I hear about some new experimental treatment to ‘cure’ spinal cord injury, I know it’s bullshit. I know I’m going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.” He shakes his head. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am different than I was back then.”

“That’s a good thing, you know,” I tell him.

“Maybe,” he says quietly.

I guess I can see his point. Luke is by far a better person now than he was in college. But I can see how it would be nice to go through life as an oblivious jerk.

Chapter Seventeen

Luke and I spend practically every night together over the next several months. Generally what happens is we fool around, which consists of either sex or him going down on me, usually the latter, followed by my using my mouth to pleasure him in some way. Then we get some dinner and cuddle up together watching the news or something.  

“Tomorrow evening I’m going to be gone,” Luke says randomly one night as we’re watching the nightly news.

“Why?” I ask. I feel a little clingy asking but I can’t help myself. “Meeting?”

“No, I have to go over to my parents for dinner in Weston,” he mumbles.

Luke very rarely mentions his parents. Right away, I’m intrigued. “Do you want me to come?”

“No,” he says quickly. He looks at my face and adds, “It would bore you. I’m mostly going to talk business with my father.”

“Lucas Thayer the second?” I ask teasingly.

Luke seems confused. “What are you talking about?  My father’s name is Thomas.”

Okay, now I’m confused. “I thought you were Lucas Thayer the third?  That’s what you said in college.”

Luke laughs and smiles apologetically. “No, I guess I made that up to sound important. My mother was just really into
Star Wars
when I was born.”

“You’re joking.”

“Afraid not.”

I have to hold a hand over my mouth to stifle laughter. Luke makes a face at me and tries to turn up the volume on the TV, but I grab the remote from him before he has a chance. “So what’s your dad like?” I ask.

“Beats me,” he says. “We don’t talk about anything besides business. Haven’t in years. Maybe ever.”

“Do you have any photos of your parents?”

Luke rolls his eyes. “What is it with women and photos?”

I prod him long enough though and he retrieves a handful of photos of his parents tucked away in a drawer. His father is an imposing man in his sixties with a lot of white hair, a deeply wrinkled face, hollowed cheeks, and a prominent nose. Luke’s mother, on the other hand, appears at least a decade younger and is stunningly beautiful. I guess that’s what money buys you. “You don’t look much like your father,” I remark.

“Yeah, he says I lucked out,” Luke says with a grin. “People say I look a lot like my mom.”

He does. I always figured Luke inherited the Thayer family good looks or something, but apparently he just inherited the trophy wife’s good looks.

“So can I come?” I ask.

“No.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because it’s going to be horrible and I don’t want to put you through that.”

“But it’s your family,” I point out. “I want to meet them.”

Luke looks kind of miserable about it, but he eventually agrees to let me come along to the dinner. I’m nervous but also a little excited to meet the people who gave birth to Luke Thayer.

***

The next night, Luke picks me up in his car to drive to his parents’ house out in Weston. Weston is a town west of Boston that boasts the highest per capita income in Massachusetts, so it doesn’t surprise me that this is where Luke’s family lives. It doesn’t escape me that Luke lives only a short distance away from them, yet doesn’t seem to see them very often.

I agonize over what to wear. I want to wear something that will show that I’m good enough to be dating a Thayer. The number of hours I spend trying on outfits is a tribute to my growing feelings for Luke. I finally choose a flowered skirt and black fitted blouse that seems to match. Both are practically new, as I don’t have much opportunity to dress up outside of work.

Luke seems really tense when he picks me up. His jaw is clenched and he barely pecks me on the cheek as I climb into the car beside him. He looks like he could use a massage, but I’m not in a good position to give him one, so instead I say, “Can I turn on the radio?”

“Knock yourself out,” Luke says, as he merges onto the highway and I instinctively grab the edge of my seat.

I fiddle with the tuner on the radio. I haven’t listened to the radio in years and I’ve mostly lost touch with new music. I guess that’s the problem with getting into your thirties. I don’t even know who’s popular anymore. Do people still listen to Britney Spears?

“What station is WBCN?” I ask Luke. “I loved that station in college. Alternative music, right?”

“It’s gone,” Luke says. “Shut down. Became a sports station.”

“You’re joking!” I cry. “That’s a tragedy! How could they do that?”

“Boston loves its sports,” Luke says with a shrug. He glances over at me. “Do you want me to buy the station and bring it back?”

I laugh. “You couldn’t really do that.”

Luke shrugs again. Oh God, could he?  He probably could. If I asked him to, Luke could buy me a radio station. That’s… kind of cool. Not that I’m impressed by such things.

We drive up to Luke’s parents’ house, and if I was intimidated by Luke’s place, this house is mind-blowing. It’s really more of an estate, with a long winding driveway, a pool, and a vast lawn with fruits growing in it. I feel the blood draining out of my face as I stare at this mansion. I shouldn’t be here. Luke should be here with, I don’t know, a princess or something. Not Ellie Jenson from Jersey.

“This is where you grew up,” I manage to ask him as I emerge from the car on rubbery legs.

Luke nods. He doesn’t seem to realize how intimidated I am by this house. I guess to him, it’s just home.

The house is so beautiful and perfect that the splintered unfinished board leaning against the front steps seems out of place. For a second, I can’t figure out why it’s there, until Luke positions his wheelchair in front of the board and uses it as a ramp to get up the steps. At the top of the board, he struggles a bit to maintain his balance as he jumps up onto the landing.

“No ramp?” I ask.

“My father hasn’t accepted that my inability to walk is permanent,” Luke says. “So I have to call the housekeeper whenever I’m coming to visit so they put out the board for me, so I can get inside.”

I stare at him, shocked.

Luke sighs. “You should probably know, my father’s in permanent denial about my disability. I had to tell him I hired a physical therapist to get me walking again, which of course, I have not. He thinks that if I try hard enough, I’ll walk.”

My heart goes out to Luke. No wonder he seemed so tense in the car earlier.

Luke rings the doorbell, and a few moments later, the pretty woman from the photographs throws open the door. I’m a little relieved it’s not a butler or something. I immediately catch the strong resemblance between mother and son, which makes me like Mrs. Thayer, because of course, I like Luke.

“Luke, sweetheart!” she cries as she bends down to hug him. Mrs. Thayer may be a trophy wife and her face may be lifted to the hilt and her boobs made from silicone, but I don’t doubt for a second that she really loves Luke. She hugs him way too long for it to be phony. “I missed you so much, darling! You need to visit more often.”

“I’ll visit more often when you get a ramp to the front door,” Luke says pointedly.

Mrs. Thayer blushes a bit, then lays her eyes on me. She gives me a quick once-over and her face lights up. “This must be Ellie!” she cries. And I’m pleased because Luke told her about me. I expect her to shake my hand or something equally formal, but instead she throws her arms around me. “It’s so good to meet you. So wonderful!”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Mrs. Thayer,” I say awkwardly.

“Please, call me Sophie,” she says. Am I imagining it or are her eyes a little teary? Well, at least she didn’t tell me to call her Mom.

Luke looks really uncomfortable by now. He’s shifting in his wheelchair, looking around the house. “Where’s Dad?” he asks.

“He’s resting in the bedroom,” Sophie says. She lowers her voice. “I should tell you, Luke, he’s not doing too well. He’s been needing the oxygen almost all the time. He has to hang onto the furniture when he walks.”

Luke nods. I knew his father had a heart attack and that was why he gave up the company to his son, but I didn’t realize he was that sick. It’s not something Luke ever talked about.

Sophie leads us down a hallway, and at the end, she opens the door to a dimly lit room. Before I can see anything, I hear the blowing of oxygen from the tank. Then my eyes adjust a little and I can see the gray-haired man lying in bed with oxygen prongs in his nose. When I see his sunken cheeks, pale face, and closed eyes, for a second I think he might be dead. But then his eyes fly open and he yanks the prongs out of his nose. “Sophie,” he snaps as he sits up, “why didn’t you tell me Luke was here?”

“I wanted to let your rest,” Sophie replies gently.

“How are you doing, Dad?” Luke asks.

“Great,” Mr. Thayer huffs. “Never been better! I think I’ll be ready to come back to work within the month.”

Luke doesn’t say anything.

“And how about you?” Mr. Thayer says. “Have you been walking at all yet?”

Luke shakes his head. “Uh, not… yet.”

“But you’re trying, right?” his father presses him. “You haven’t given up, have you? 
Thayers never give up.”

Luke seems at a loss for words, so instead he says, “Dad, this is Ellie.”

Mr. Thayer, noticing me for the first time, gives me the usual look up and down. But in contrast to the immediate approval I received from Sophie, his face reflects the reaction I’ve been afraid of every time I go somewhere with Luke. That I’m clearly lower class, not terribly pretty, and nowhere near good enough with someone with the money and the name of Thayer.

“Ellie what?” he says.

“Jenson,” I reply weakly.

“Are you from Massachusetts?” he asks.

“New Jersey,” I admit.

Mr. Thayer doesn’t even bother to hide his contempt. He shakes his head at his son. “Oh, Luke…”

Luke’s face reddens. “Dad, I don’t even want to hear it. Ellie is wonderful. And… I love her.”

My heart skips a beat. It’s the first time Luke’s said that and I can’t believe he’s announcing it in front of his parents. And as he says it, I realize that I think I love him too.

“Whatever,” Mr. Thayer says, waving his hand as if he’s too important to be concerned by any of this.

“I came to discuss the company’s finances with you,” Luke says. “If you’re well enough.”

“Of course I’m well enough!” Mr. Thayer snaps.

“Fine,” Luke says, no warmth in his voice.

Sophie takes me by the arm and leads me toward the door. “This will be dull for us females,” she says. “Why don’t you and I go have a cup of coffee?”

I thought Sophie was going to make a pot of coffee herself, but instead she delegates the responsibility to her maid and the two of us retire to the “sitting room,” as Sophie calls it. It’s like their living room, only slightly smaller. I can’t imagine living this way. I feel so bourgeois.

“So how did you and Luke meet?” Sophie asks me when we’re seated.

“Through work,” I say, not wanting to get into the long story of Luke’s infatuation with me back at Harvard.

“Oh, you work then?” Sophie asks, looking pleased.

“Uh, yes,” I say.

“That’s so wonderful,” Sophie says. “The way so many women work nowadays. Tom would never let me work. Aside from the pageants, of course, but I retired from that after getting married.”

“Pageants?”

“Oh, yes,” Sophie says. “I was Miss Delaware. A long time ago, of course.” She adds, “But not too long. I had Luke when I was quite young.”

I can totally see Sophie being in a beauty pageant. She’s certainly pretty enough. And while she might be exaggerating her youth, she’s probably at least fifteen years younger than her husband.

“Luke seems very happy with you, by the way,” Sophie says, her eyes shining. “I haven’t seen him so happy in… well, ages.”

“Oh,” I say, blushing.

“It’s hard,” she goes on, “with all the money that he has and his reputation, to find a
nice
girl to go out with.”

Reputation?  What reputation?

“And of course,” Sophie adds, “it’s been so hard since the accident. A lot of women, even the gold-diggers, are hesitant about a man with a serious disability.”

I feel like Sophie’s talking too much and Luke would be outraged if he knew. I’ve known women like Sophie before, who seem unable to censor what they say. I wonder if I can use that to my advantage.

“What reputation do you mean, Sophie?” I ask her.

Sophie laughs. “Oh God, you know. Anyone who’s successful, they just try to slander them.”

Okay, that was extremely unhelpful. What the hell is Luke’s secret?  This is getting ridiculous.

“Anyway,” Sophie says, “you can take it from me: Luke is a really good person.”

There’s a pause in the conversation. I look at my watch and realize we’ve been sitting here barely ten minutes. How long is Luke going to be in there with his father?  We’re not going to be sitting here awkwardly for an hour, are we? Or what if it’s longer?

“Um,” I say, “what was Luke like as a kid?”