Lisa shrugged one shoulder. Her cardigan slipped free and she pulled it back up. “I hope he finds someone, but I’ll be honest. I don’t think it’s in the cards for him anytime soon. He has a lot to be careful about like gold diggers and such. Once the articles start getting published, I expect things will get worse before they get better and women will start throwing themselves at him looking for a night out with Seattle’s most eligible bachelor. I guess I’m just wary. Why?”
“Just curious,” I said thinly.
“My brother isn’t one for dating anyway. I don’t think he wants something serious. He’s enjoying the single life, you know? No attachments. No responsibilities. No commitments to spend a certain amount of time with a woman so she doesn’t feel neglected. His lifestyle doesn’t permit room for a girlfriend and the timing is bad.”
Disappointment settled in place of the guilt I’d felt moments before. “Right, that makes sense.”
“My brother is a fool anyway.” Lisa laughed. “What girl in their right mind would want to date him unless they were in it for the money?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
The girl who’s known him almost his whole life and knows all his darkest corners and feels safe in his brightest rooms.
Lisa flagged down the server and put a fifty-dollar bill on the table. “I have to run back to the office. Thank you for meeting me for lunch. It was a nice break. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Lisa, you don’t have to pay for lunch. I can—”
“Nonsense, I want to. Besides, Lukas pays me really well. So technically, lunch is on him.”
Lisa got up, slung her purse over her shoulder, and bid me one last farewell before she hurried out of the restaurant and out of sight. She left me with a few bites of salad left and I told the server to keep the change when he came by. He was delighted by his twelve-dollar tip.
I left shortly after and hopped on the bus to ride down to my office. It was only a fifteen-minute ride from the restaurant and I was inside flipping the closed sign to the open side before one thirty in the afternoon. I tucked into my desk and opened my computer to start responding to emails.
There were over two hundred in my inbox that I needed to get through.
The feeling of overwhelm left me paralyzed. My mind hadn’t been fully on work lately. And by lately, I meant since Lukas came back into my life and shook everything up like a snow globe, minus the magical feelings and perfect flakes of glitter. He’d shaken it up in a confusing, messy, stressful sort of way. I wasn’t supposed to have any of the feelings that caught me off guard at random points of the day every time I thought of him.
And I wasn’t supposed to think of him twenty times a day either.
Something was wrong with me. I’d turned back into that lovesick girl who’d pined over her best friend’s older brother with the charming smile and bad boy attitude. He still had both of those things but a bit more class and flair now.
And money.
Twenty minutes passed and I only got through two emails.
I slumped forward on my desk and rested my forehead on the back of my hands. “I’m screwed.”
My office door opened. I lifted my forehead from my knuckles and blinked up at Rodney, who stood backlit by the sunny afternoon with a grin on his face and a bottle of some kind in one hand. In the other were two plastic champagne flutes that looked like they were from the dollar store.
“Rodney?”
“Hey, Kayla,” he said as he approached my desk. Out of the soup kitchen, he looked much less the ragged man that I was used to seeing. Instead of chunky black shoes with thick rubber soles, he wore a plain brown boot with no laces. He looked good in his dark green chinos and cream-colored polo shirt. He wore a thin brown jacket and looked the part of a successful entrepreneur instead of an exhausted kitchen worker. He set the bottle down and I realized it was champagne. “I’m glad you’re here. I brought wine so we could celebrate.”
“Celebrate?”
“Yes, celebrate. I owe you a big one. I can’t believe you got the entire school lunch program funded! I knew you wouldn’t let me down but I had no idea you’d secure this kind of funding. It’s mindboggling and it’s probably the most wine-worthy thing that’s happened to either of us in a long time.”
I smiled and closed my laptop. “I honestly hadn’t thought about that.”
“Probably because you’re running yourself ragged going all over town making everyone else’s day better. Please tell me you can spare a minute to have a drink with a friend.”
I couldn’t spare a minute. Not really. But then again, when had I ever been able to say yes to that question and be telling the truth?
“I’d love to have a drink with you,” I said.
Rodney clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “That’s what I wanted to hear. I only have one problem.”
“And what might that be?”
He grimaced. “I forgot to bring a corkscrew.”
Chuckling and shaking my head at his forgetfulness, I went over to the three-tiered table upon which I kept my electric kettle. In the top shelf, tucked away in a wicker basket I’d found that fit snug in the opening, were all my tea bags and fixings. In the second drawer were non-perishable snacks like individual bags of chips, granola bars, dried apricots, crackers, and trail mix that had been untouched for months because I’d eaten all the chocolate out of the bag. I crouched down and opened the bottom drawer which held my hidden mess. The junk drawer overflowed with random items including a tape measure, a bedazzled hammer Lisa had bought me eons ago as
