Page 68 of Meet Me at Midnight

“I’m fine.” Her smile is easy and her cheeks pink as she shakes her head. “I just hope I’m that excited when I graduate so I can get you back.”

“You can knock me over right now.” I grin at her. “I won’t mind.”

“I think you should let her punch you in the balls, Beau,” Avery comments while she stares down mindlessly at her freshly painted nails. She shrugs one nonchalant shoulder. “Seems only fair.”

Juniper snorts. “Yeah, that’s okay. I’m good.” Her long, wavy copper hair is down and around her face, and a single piece sticks to her shiny lip gloss from the fall. I reach out and pull it back, and her blue eyes widen as my thumb brushes the corner of her mouth.

My stomach pitches strangely. It’s weird, seeing her like this, with makeup and heels and a dress that is shorter than my brain wishes it would be.

But Juniper is eighteen now.

Most of the time I’ve known her, she’s been a sweet, awkward kid. Suddenly, she’s looking a whole hell of a lot more like a woman because sheisa woman. A full-fledged adultwomanwho is stunningly beautiful in ways I hope all men don’t realize.

“Come on,” my mom says, taking me by the elbow and turning me around to walk toward the exit of the stadium. “We have reservations at Pasitinos and then a celebration party at the house.”

I clasp my hand over my mom’s and smile.

I’ve got a great family, a great girlfriend, and the job of my dreams lined up with my dad in the fall. The whole world is in front of me, and I can’t wait to get started living in it.

Today’s been a busy day in exactly zero of the ways I intended, and my brain is on the fritz, trying to hold it all together.

After what went down in our condo’s gym last night, I’ve messaged June a bunch of times on Midnight, but she’s yet to respond. And when I got to work this morning, my first priority was finding her and guiding her toward a quiet spot in our office to hash everything out—to try to understand why she did what she did, to try to understand what it all means—but everything went to hell, and I’ve spent hour after hour putting out fires on multiple accounts.

Social media disasters, missed commercial spots, unreliable vendors—you name it, and it’s come up since I arrived at the office early this morning.

This was supposed to be an easy day. I should’ve been able to coast right through to the weekend until my parents’ big Halloween party tomorrow night, but my phone’s Teams’ notifications, paired with our Asana workflow, have sounded like a fucking swarm of noisy birds. One more chirp from the damn thing and I’m going to lose my cool. Or, you know, just fucking deal with it and try to keep my head from exploding.

Chirp,my phone announces right on cue, and a heavy sigh leaves my lungs as I look down at the screen.

Harry: The Gerry Meats contract is stalled in legal review. They’ve had it for three months, and we already have one hundred hours on this thing because of the drop date. Any cues on direction?

Me: I’ll escalate the issue to Neil and Chris. Stay on task until I get another edict.

Harry: Understood.

Huffing out a breath, I round the reception desk, offering a friendly nod to Marlene, and head through the glass doors that lead to the cubicles in the center of the floor plan.

June’s desk is empty—as is Avery’s—but the deeper I get into the junior marketers’ desks, the more flames surround me. I don’t know what it is about holidays and their supposed “easy” status, but in my work world, statistically, they’re the leading time for anything that can shit the bed to shit the bed.

I pocket my phone and pray, dead set on making it to my office before someone else can stop me or finding June and confronting her—at this point, either option will do.

Laura tries to meet my eyes, and Eddie waits outside my door, but I’m about as prepared to be a boss today as I was to find out June was my Mystery Woman last night.

Fucking not at all.

I finally spot June alone in the break room and take off toward her on a mission. She looks amazing in a crisp white blouse and black pencil skirt, and her bright copper hair is curled in a way that seems to glitter under the fluorescent lights.

Her feet are just barely crossed, one kicked back in a sexy lean as she waits at the Keurig for her coffee to finish brewing. I watch her movements closely, imagining all the erotic things she said to me in our chats coming to life with her face and body. The Mystery Woman’s been nothing more than a hazy blur in my mind for so long, it’s almost counterintuitive to allow myself anything else.

But fuck, she looks good. Beautiful.Downright stunning.

Though, it doesn’t change the tornado of thoughts that have been swirling through my brain since I walked into our condo’s gym last night and saw her standing there.

June is my Mystery Woman, and I still don’t know how I should feel about it. There’s a part of me that thinks I should be angry, but that anger has yet to come. There’s another part of me that thinks I should feel completely violated by how things went down—by the very intimate direction our Midnight messages went—without me knowing it was her the whole time.

It was dishonest, to say the least, but if she’d never done it, if she’d never initiated our Midnight chats, where would that leave me?

The answer to that question makes my chest ache with the kind of discomfort that has me lifting my hand to rub at my sternum as I close the distance toward the break room, my eyes fixated on June the whole time.

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