Page 35 of Due Diligence

I wasn’t actually expecting to run into Cassie. When I set out for Brooklyn, I figured the odds of Cassie going to her favorite bar on a Friday night weren’t quite zero—but weren’t high either. After all, there were more bars per capita than Starbucks in this city.

When I first saw her, I didn’t even realize it was Cassie. I just thought she was any other woman at Shelf Atlas that night—except unlike the other women, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Once I saw her, I had to apologize to the woman I had been dancing with—a woman who was quick to make a lot of promises about what we could do back at her place. She seemed confused but not devastated over it. Judging by the size of her pupils, I was likely just a willing, warm body for her.

I left the dancefloor and walked over to the small lounge area where a few people were sitting by some low tables. I didn’t care that I was alone and gawking in the middle of a club; I just wanted to look at her. She was seated at the bar andwhispering with a guy with full tattoo sleeves on both arms, who—in the brief time I watched them—licked his lips twice while staring at her. Frankly, I couldn’t blame him. Cassie was wearing an unfathomably short, black leather skirt with a high waist that wasstillnot quite high enough to meet the hem of her loose, short-cropped t-shirt. She looked casual, maybe even comfortable, on display. She was ragged yet desirable all at once. Fucking hell, she looked good.

My gaze moved to her messy, almost haphazard ponytail. It looked like she threw it up in a hurry when the heat from the bodies in the club started to get to her. My eyes traveled over her tan skin and her shapely, bare legs. They landed on the thick lace up boots on her feet. When my eyes traveled back up those absolutelymouthwateringlegs and along her body,I watched the way her short shirt shifted around her chest, revealing the bottom of the band of her black bra when she leaned forward.

The sight of her stopped me in my tracks. There were countless women in the club, but the moment I laid eyes on that one, I was hooked. Transfixed.

Mine.

She looked like pure sex to me—carefree, unapologetic, no-holds-barred sex. I immediately envied the guy she was speaking to. I hated him. I wanted to be him.

When her gaze drifted away from her companion, I realized it was her. Cassie. I recognized the elegant column of her neck and the way she sat up straight—posture unparalleled. My heart practically stopped. It seemed impossible. After a few minutes—minutes where my heart rate climbed like it was summiting Everest—I was positive it was her.

I wasn’t sure why I walked up to her. Maybe it was the alcohol: the shots I took back at my apartment and the beer I was working through now. Maybe it was the high from the hit I took from that guy who spilled his drink on me. Maybe it was thefact that my brain couldn’t function with every part of my body shouting at me toGO GET HER, just like those girls in Panera told me to.

I didn’t fucking know. All I knew was that my feet brought me over to Cassie and I stood next to her quietly for a few seconds like a kid at his first coed dance in middle school.

“Hey,” I offered, in possibly the lamest opener in the history of the English language.

She was in the middle of pretending to laugh at something that this guy was saying before I arrived, so she was still smiling when she looked over her shoulder at me. At once, her smile faded and shifted seamlessly into a frown.

“Hey,” I repeated. Somewhere out there, great writers and masters of language like Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Hemingway were having drinks together in the afterlife and laughing out loud at how badly I was bombing this conversation.

“What are you doing here?” Her tone was downright accusatory. For a moment, she surveyed me up and down, starting with my black shirt and moving down to my worn jeans, which I dug out of the bottom of my dresser earlier that night. When her gaze settled back on my face, she frowned even deeper. “Did you follow me here?”

“Nope.” It was only then I realized I didn’t have a better explanation for being there. I couldn’t very well say to her,Well, my therapist recommended I get to know you, and I had nothing else to do on a Friday night, so I lied to my best friend and took his Instagram password so I could stalk your profile and then spent forty-five minutes in an Uber to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on a Friday night all because I’ve been contractually banned from doing anything fun in public for the last six years, and figured nobody would recognize me here.

“Hey, I’m Joseph,” the guy sitting next to Cassie chimed in. He held out his tattooed hand. “Good to meet you.”

“I’m Logan,” I responded, giving him the fake name I used at hotels and restaurants. When we shook hands, he squeezed so hard I was embarrassed for him. He had to be compensating for something, I assumed.

“Are you two friends?” Joseph asked, glancing between Cassie and me.

“Coworkers,” Cassie cut in, quick on the draw. “Marcus was just leaving.”

“Logan,” I corrected her just as quickly. “And I’m not leaving. I’m actually going to buy her a drink.”

My response made both Cassie and Joseph pause. She furrowed her brow and shifted to look at me, those big brown eyes examining me as if I were Marcus’s evil twin or something.

Not to be ignored, Joseph cleared his throat and gestured at Cassie with his thumb. “I already bought her a drink, so—”

“Joseph, I’ll give you two hundred dollars cash to get lost,” I offered. I reached into my back pocket and took out my wallet. “Sound good?”

He paused and gawked at the two hundred-dollar bills I tugged out of my wallet. Slowly, his eyes widened. He glanced between Cassie and the bills twice before he reached out and took them without a word, freeing up the stool next to her.

“What the hell was that?” she questioned as I slid into Joseph’s vacant seat.

I ignored her comment and instead tilted my head towards the beer tap. “What are you drinking?”

Cassie scoffed. “Nothing from you.” She rotated away from me so her body faced the bar, giving me a nice profile view of her. For a moment, I let myself appreciate what she was wearing. If it was her goal to drive a guy wild tonight, I was conclusive evidence that she succeededspectacularly.

“You look great, Cassie,” I said, looking her up and down once. “I mean it.”

“Bite me.”

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