Page 44 of Power Play

She watched me pack for a moment before tilting her head.

“How many classes did you actually take with Klein?”

I paused with the Norton anthology in my hands.

“Enough.”

“That isn’t a number.”

“Neither was your answer last night when I asked why you were taking her class.”

“That was different.”

“Everything’s different when you’re the one avoiding the question.”

Charm narrowed her eyes. “You know an unreasonable amount about literature for someone who keeps pretending you randomly took a few electives.”

I tucked the anthology into the box. “Maybe I contain multitudes.”

“Whitman.”

I stopped.

The smug smile spreading across her face nearly made me laugh.

“Look at you.”

“You taught me that.”

“I absolutely did not.”

“You said it at the Sin Bin last year when Briggs tried to convince everyone he could be both a goalie and a qualified relationship therapist.”

“That does sound like me.”

Charm folded her arms on the table. “What did you study?”

I looked at her.

For the first time all afternoon, she was the one leaning forward while I decided how much I wanted to give away.

A degree had never felt like something I needed to announce. Too many people heard where I came from and treated education like some inspirational escape story instead of work I’d earned. Others looked at the tattoos, heard the Spanish, saw the hockey player, and visibly recalculated when I knew more about the book in front of them than they did.

I got tired of watching faces change.

Charm’s face probably would too.

That bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

“Books,” I said.

Her brows rose. “Books?”

“Words. Arguments. How people use both to convince somebody their version of the world is true.”

“That sounds deliberately vague.”

“It is.”