Willa & the Extraordinary Internship

CH. 14

She arrived ten minutes early. Even though the lunch hour was just supposed to be an hour long, for Paige it was more of a fluid concept. Evidently the sudden hush in the hall Willa heard had been Paige and her colleague taking an early lunch, so there was no one in the office to mind when Willa took off at 11:30. As long as she was back by 1 P.M. to admit students for office hours, Paige wouldn't notice.

Nate was sitting in a plushy purple armchair near the entrance, two coffees balanced on either knee. He smirked at her as she entered, one eyebrow raised higher than the other. "Looks like you're the late one," he quipped.

Willa ignored the jibe, sinking into the seat next to him. "I'm here. What do you want?"

"Straight to the point." Nate looked like he was hiding a grin. "Are you always this cranky?" He extended a cup to Willa. "Coffee does wonders for attitude."

"Cute," Willa said sarcastically, slanting her head to the side with a shit-eating grin. She took the cup, letting it warm her fingers.

"I was the one who came up with the idea of Simeon," Nate said abruptly. "I mean, she assigned us to write a novel during one of her graduate classes and I came up with Simeon. She changed a lot of things about the plot but he's still my Simeon." He let out a barking noise that Willa belatedly realized was a laugh.

It felt vaguely traitorous to be spending her lunch hour talking with the person who claimed Paige was a giant fraud. Willa ran her fingers up and down the paper cup, not meeting his eyes. She wasn't sure what to say and the silence stretched between them awkwardly.

"Willa?"

Hearing her name spilling out of unfamiliar lips made her flinch instinctively. "Sorry," she apologized. "I just...I don't know what to say. Why come to me? Why not go to Paige?" It felt like a cop-out thing to say and she wished she could take it back as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

"She doesn't want to see me." He spoke the words like they were acid on his tongue. "Claims I'm some trumped-up student who wants to give her trouble just so I can have my five minutes of fame." He levelled a stern look at her. "Which I'm not," he said slowly and pointedly.

Willa took a gulp of coffee, letting it scald the back of her throat. Hey, it was a small price to pay to buy herself a moment to collect her thoughts. "I'm not sure what you think I can do. I'm her assistant, not her boss. It's not like I can demand a signed confession from her."

"Don't you think it's suspicious?" Nate pressed. "She hasn't written a thing since grad school and now all of a sudden she hits her stride with Simeon?"

Willa shifted in her seat. She hadn't really thought about it, honestly. "Sure, I guess. But plenty of people reach fame later in life. It doesn't mean..." she trailed off, catching the look of disappointment on his face. "Look, Nate, I can't help you."

"Can't or won't?" he said acerbically. "Because it looks like you're just trying to cover for your sainted boss."

Willa let that sink in. Was it possible she wasn't being totally objective about this? Could she be defending Paige through some misplaced sense of loyalty? "Do you have proof?" She almost didn't want to ask. Sure, working for Paige wasn't the most challenging or interesting job she could be doing, but that didn't mean she wanted to risk it by sticking her neck out for some guy.

As if he had been waiting for this moment ever since she arrived, he thumped down a thick wad of hand-written notes, typed pages slightly worn around the edges with red squiggles, arrows, and scribbled notes in the margins, and battered index cards in every color of the rainbow. "All my work from her course that relates to Simeon. When you caught me, I was trying to search her office to see if she'd made any copies. That would have been concrete proof that she was stealing my idea from me."

Willa gaped. "Oh my god." Hesitantly, she reached out and thumbed through the pages in barely disguised shock. The comments in red sent a cold shiver down her spine. "This is in Paige's handwriting," she whispered, staring at the barely legible, loopy scrawl that would have given any doctor a run for his money. She looked up at him in dawning horror. "What can we do?"

The we wasn't lost on him if the relieved grin on his face was anything to go by. "We prove it," Nate said succinctly, the words a promise that would irreversibly change Willa's life forever.

Author's Note: If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! Votes/comments/additions to reading lists make my day :)