Page 42 of Business or Pleasure

Harlee sounded surprised, and I understood why. Not much time had passed since I’d last seen her.

“Good afternoon.” I felt myself smiling already. “I was wondering if you would care to go with me to Alec’s birthday party next Saturday.”

“Like a second date?”

I couldn’t quite read her tone, but I answered her question honestly, “Aye. A second date.”

“At my boss’s birthday party?”

Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. “If you’d rather not…it could be awkward.” Then another possibility suddenly occurred to me. “Unless you’re not interested in a second date.”

“I am!” she blurted out. “I mean, I just thought it’d be a little weird, going to the birthday party of my boss with one of his closest friends.”

“I under–”

“But I’ll go. I mean, I want to go. To the party. With you.”

Relief and something else flooded me. I didn’t look too closely at either. “Brilliant!”

She laughed, and the sound made me forget everything else. The words of disappointment from my parents. The guilt of not doing everything humanly possible to make them proud. None of it mattered.

Nineteen

Harlee

If my life kept going this well, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I talked to Baylen every single day since Saturday, and not just when he came to MIRI to check out what marketing had been doing with his project. While there, he stopped in for a couple minutes to say hi and see how my day was going. I was working on another project, and he didn’t want to distract me, so we kept those interactions short.

No, the real times we talked were on our video chats in the evening, and they were hours of conversation. Everything from our favorite songs to the differences between American and Scottish words. Sometimes we talked about serious things, and sometimes we steered away from certain subjects, but we were getting to know each other better every day.

But, while I loved every minute I spent with him, I couldn’t get rid of the knowledge that we were on borrowed time. We made no promises, talked about nothing further ahead than our date for the party. And I was okay with that, even if it did make me a little sad. I intended to enjoy every minute we did have together.

I smiled as I remembered that I would see him tomorrow and kept that thought in mind as I drove home. I was so caught up in my head that I didn’t see who was waiting in front of my apartment until I was nearly at the door.

“You’re smiling like that cat in the cartoon.” Franklin pushed himself off the wall and came walking toward me. “You know, the one that disappeared.”

“The Cheshire Cat.” Unsurprisingly, it was my smile that disappeared first. Unfortunately, I couldn’t vanish too, the way the cat had. “From Alice in Wonderland. That movie gave me nightmares for a week.”

“I thought all kids liked cartoons.”

I bit back a snarky remark about how I doubted he knew anything about what I’d liked as a kid because he’d never been around. I didn’t want a debate. I just wanted to make this encounter as brief as possible. “What do you want?”

“Can’t a girl just be happy to see her old man?”

I glared at him and crossed my arms. If he thought I would let him in my apartment – hell, into my building – he was crazy. If he wanted to talk, we’d do it right here. I didn’t want him in my home. Ever.

“I just wanted to congratulate you on your new job. MIRI’s big-time.”

I fought to keep my expression neutral. The only reason he would have ambushed me in front of my home like this was to catch me off-balance. Him knowing about me working at MIRI was a surprise, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it.

“Thanks.” I managed to get the word out but didn’t try to say anything else. My gut said there was more to come. He never came to see me without wanting something. Most likely, it was an introduction or my help in some con, but no matter what it was, it was going to get shut down right here and now.

“What do you do there?” he asked. “You a secretary or janitor or something?”

“Or something.”

“But what do you do?” he pressed. “I mean, I don’t know much about what they do. It’s research, right? That’s what the ‘r’ is for? So you just, like, google shit?”

“You didn’t come here to congratulate me on my new job,” I said. “What do you want?”

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