I considered that because I was kind of hungry… “Maybe pizza and those cinnamon bread sticks?”
He grinned. “You got it.”
Hank and Archie shared a brief handshake before he headed up the stairs, with Ian following him.
“You’re leaving,” were the first two words out of my mouth. I eased my feet out of the heels. I’d managed to wear them all day, and currently, my feet were kind of numb. The warm pavement under them felt great.
Instead of denying it, he just leaned against the hood of his rental car. “If I could, I’d stay the rest of the week. I want to, but I still have a job and I have summer term coming up that I have to prep for.”
“We’ve barely even gotten to talk about that,” I admitted. He was a professor at Harvard. “We were actually up at Harvard a few months ago, on spring break. We kind of gave ourselves a tour and then had a snowball fight.”
Inane as that sounded, he grinned.
“I wish I’d known…” he said, and I lifted my shoulders.
“But we didn’t,” I said. “I mean, I know that we might have had the test results then, but I wasn’t ready.”
“There’s no problem with you waiting until you were ready, Frankie,” he told me. “You’re an amazing young woman, I am so damn honored to have met you and gotten to spend this time with you. Even more, I’m hoping you’ll do more visits? Maybe come up and see Kelly and the kids? I’d love for you to meet them and for them to meet you.”
My stomach bottomed out, both from excitement and a little bit of fear. “They may not want a big sister appearing out of nowhere.”
He snorted. “No, I think whatever minor resentments they could possibly nurse will be utterly outweighed by the cool factor.”
“The cool factor?” What cool factor? However, he just grinned at me.
“Trust me, you’re way cooler than their professor dad and real estate mom.”
Folding my arms, I lifted my shoulders. “If you say so. I think you’re pretty cool. I mean, you’re teaching at my dream school.” How weird would it have been if I’d actually gotten into Harvard, then ended up in his class or something?
“That’s the other part of what I wanted to talk to you about,” Hank said. He glanced toward the apartment, then back to me. “You guys are all going to NYU…”
“That’s the plan. I was wait-listed at Harvard, and it took me a little time to get over it, but I’m good now. The five of us—well six now if you count Rachel—we like the idea of going to the same place. Even before we were dating, the plan was to go to the same school, be roommates, and you know, build a life.”
Even before we were dating. I might as well have said back when I was oblivious to the fact they wanted me, but there were some things that he really didn’t need to know. The fact I had been dense definitely seemed to fall into that category.
“Sounds good, and forgive me if I pull on my dad hat for a moment, but I want you to think about your life as stages and that this is the next stage, not the rest of your life…”
“Hank, we’re not getting married, but they are my life. I get what you’re saying, and none of us are interested, you know, in changing that anytime soon…” Okay, maybe I shouldn’t just assume. “It’s not a topic we’ve discussed. We are focused on building our best lives. Ian and I want to record. Archie and Jake want to build and design. Eventually, Archie will be involved with Standish. I might help with that, I kind of like studying business and focusing on getting a project through from concept to creation to launch. Coop’s gonna be a psychologist. But we’ve kind of known that for years. None of that is going to happen overnight.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “That’s fair and a really good attitude. College is a challenging time. You’re becoming adults, away from home and… Well, I suppose you’ve been away from parental supervision a lot longer than you probably should have been.”
“Probably, but it means I can handle the day-to-day stuff. Though wrangling Archie and chores is fun and balancing a grocery budget seems like an impossibility. But it’s half the fun too. He loves to do things grander, and the other guys are learning to cook or already do cook.”
“So Archie doesn’t cook?” He cocked his head.
“No,” I mouthed with probably more force than necessary. “He’s brilliant with machines though.” And the worst cook ever.
Hank chuckled softly, then sobered and stared at me with such serious eyes. “Fair, fair. What I wanted to tell you was that if Harvard is still the dream, I can make it happen.”
“I don’t want money to open any doors…”
“It’s not money, kiddo. It’s me. I’m a professor and a tenured one at that. I earned it pretty early, and while Humanities isn’t the full-on sciences, I do have a pretty heavy class load. As my daughter, your admission would be easily handled and your tuition wouldn’t be an issue.”
It was probably the sweetest thing in the world to offer me.
“And selfishly, I’d like it if you were closer. Now that I know you exist, I don’t want you so far away.”
“We’re moving to New York, that’s a lot closer to Boston,” I promised. “And a few months ago, I might have leapt at the offer.” Maybe. I’d had a couple of offers to grease the wheels and get me in, but I still wanted it on my own merit. The nepotism of being a professor’s biological issue didn’t seem any more fair than using money to open the doors. “Thank you so much for thinking of me. But it would still be a no because Coop and Ian didn’t get
