Page 13 of Baby Bombshell for the Boss

“It’s not like it sounds. The reviewer was a social media influencer looking for clout, and he did get it, but he nearly destroyed the restaurant in the process. It’s starting to get back on its feet again now, but there were a few years when no one would set foot in the place.”

“That’s crazy.” She grabbed a sweater from the back of a chair and stepped into a pair of shoes. “I wonder how they stayed afloat through something like that.”

“Well… I might’ve made a donation.”

“You did?”

Elliot shrugged. “It’s one of my favorite brunch places. I didn’t want to see it go under. So it was really a selfish move on my part,” he said.

“Yeah, helping a small business stay open when they’re struggling is about the most selfish thing I can think of,” she said with a laugh. “But it explains what you’re doing for me a little. I guess this is just the kind of thing you do for people.”

Elliot didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure quite what to say. The truth was that the way he felt about her was completely different from the way he had felt when he’d seen that restaurant in trouble. He had felt like he was doing something charitable for the restaurant — helping out a struggling business, just like she said. It was different with Ivy. He did want to help her out, but it felt much more personal, somehow, as if she was already a friend of his and he didn’t want to see her suffer.

The two of them left Ivy’s apartment and made their way down the block along the outside of her building. It was a nice morning, warm and quiet — fewer people were out and about than Elliot would have expected to see on a Saturday in this part of the city. It gave the place a bit of a private feeling, as if these streets belonged to the two of them alone.

For a while, they walked along quietly, neither of them bothering to break the silence. It was Ivy who spoke first.

“So why didn’t you tell me who you were?” she asked him.

“What do you mean?” He was stalling for time — it was clear what she meant.

“You knew I felt anxious about going into your office building yesterday,” she said. “I wouldn’t have felt that way if I’d known you owned the company. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“Are you upset with me?”

“No, but I am curious. I would’ve thought that would be something a guy would brag about.”

“Well, maybe. I don’t know.” He hesitated, wondering if he could explain this without it sounding fake. “I guess I was having so much fun with you that I didn’t want to bother talking about all that. I didn’t know if it might change what you thought about me.”

“You thought I might have liked you less if I knew who you were?

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought there was a chance you might have liked me more — but for the wrong reasons.”

“Oh,” she realized. “You mean you thought I might turn into a gold-digger or something?”

“Please don’t hold that against me,” he said. “Obviously I can see now that you aren’t like that. But there have been plenty of people in my life who were, whether romantically or professionally or in some other way. And it isn’t that I don’t like to help out the people in my life?—”

“No, I can tell you do,” Ivy agreed. “You’re helping me out, and you and I hardly know each other, so obviously you’d be willing to do the same thing for people you’re closer with. But I do get why it would be a concern. If people are only interested in your money, you can never be sure if your relationships are based on anything real at all — is that right?”

“That’s exactly right,” he said. “I’m impressed that you understood that so quickly.”

She laughed. “I had a trampoline when I was a kid.”

“I’m sorry — I’m not sure what that has to do with this?”

“I was the kid in our neighborhood with the coolest toy,” she explained. “A big, fancy trampoline, and everyone wanted to come over to my house so they could take a turn jumping on it. There were a few months when I genuinely believed I was the most popular girl in the neighborhood. There were at least five kids over at my house every day to jump on the trampoline.”

“Oh,” Elliot said, realizing.

“Yeah, you see where this is going. One day one of the springs broke, and my parents didn’t bother to get it fixed right away. No one could use the trampoline in the meantime. Of course, I had all kinds of ideas about what kinds of things my friends and I could do now that the trampoline was out of commission, but none of it ever happened. They all just stopped coming over. It turned out that they were never my friends at all. They were only interested in me because I had that trampoline.”

“God. That’s sad.”

“Yeah, it was, but it taught me something I needed to learn,” she said. “From then on, I was always more cautious when I made a new friend. I made sure that my friends liked me for me instead of for what I could do for them.”

“That’s still a pretty sad lesson for a kid to have to learn.”

“Well, you’ve had to learn the same thing, right?” she asked him. “That’s why you didn’t feel like you could be honest with me about who you were.”

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