Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Eighteen

There's something about Thursday afternoons. There's a temporary hopelessness that seems to settle on the fourth day of the week. There's a brutal, relentless stretch to the day that isn't quite Friday, and that's been true for as long as I can remember. Thursdays suck—that is a fact universally true—but this Thursday seemed to suck just a little bit more than all the others. The only thing that made this day salvageable was my curiosity about how my CoveOps class would play out.

Because as far as I knew, we had no teacher. Ellie had dragged Woods out of here long before sunrise, the two of them around the world with a tail close behind. We didn't know where they were, and there was a good chance we wouldn't know for a very long time. The Goode family had officially been left behind, and so had the students of the Gallagher Academy.

As luck would have it, the Exchange boys were scheduled to spend the day with us. They have been for weeks now, which I knew not because we had been told ahead of time, but because Erin Cross had somehow caught wind of the date and every girl had marked it onto their calendars—the day we got to see the boys again.

It was a frequent occurrence. I couldn't remember a time when the Boy Days weren't counted down to. Alice would talk about Finn for a solid week before he'd visit. Erin would spend extra hours in the library, working on a thesis that she was working on with a junior named Derek. At the end of the day, everyone had a Blackthorne Boy.

And, I guess, my Blackthorne Boy was Bill.

While it was true that Bill looked tired, and indeed he also looked worn, mostly he just looked absent. As if every ounce of humanity had been drained from him, and now he was just an empty shell, going through the motions. I knew that feeling. I had lived through that feeling. Sometimes, when the nights were at their darkest, I still felt it gnawing at me.

But when he saw me, he sat up, as if he and and I were together against the world—I was his partner in crime. Some part of me had to wonder if this was how he had looked at Will, but then I realized that he had probably looked far happier back in those days.

This was not happiness, but this was excitement. Bill was excited to see me and I was more than willing to accept that. "Heya, Mags."

It wasn't Cap. I didn't think that he would ever all me Cap again. "Hey Bill," I said, making my way across the sublevel—Sublevel Three now, made up of rock, time, and conspiracies. "How's things?"

He almost smiled. Almost. "They've been better.

Right. Stupid question.

I opened my mouth to start my apologies, but right in that moment, the room sparked at the sound of heels clicking against concrete. Each of us turned, watching as Agent Rebecca Baxter, MI6, stepped into frame, absolutely high on power.

"Sit up straight—bunch of slouched potatoes sitting in my Sublevel. You're the most elite team this school has to offer? Bloody hell—Jackson, if you're going to smuggle a lock pick down here, hide it in your shoe, not your waistline. Anderson, quit making googly eyes at O'Reilly and Ms. Cross? What would your mother say if she knew that you still relied on pen and paper for your note taking? Tsk, tsk."

A gust seemed to move through the room when she stopped midstride, slamming her hands on the desk before us all. Spy training or not, everyone in the room jumped. "You've had a full forty-six seconds since I've walked through that doorway. What have you noticed about me?"

The students in the room were the best we had—the seniors of the Gallagher Academy. The meticulously placed members of the Exchange from Blackthorne. I expected shouts and answers. I expected piles of observations and examinations. Except nothing came. Nothing except for a single fact, coming from Finn O'Reilly. "You're not Professor Woods."