Page 24 of Designed for Disaster

But he was also the devoted grandson who’d given me the job of my dreams and who seemed to have a genuinely nice circle of close friends. This was all so confusing. Couldn’t I just go back to hating him? That had been so simple.

“I’ve got the parma chicken club,” the waitress said, returning with our food. Thank god.

“That’s mine!” Dominic said, raising his hand.

The waitress divvied up the meals, and we settled in. I stuffed my face with my chicken burger. I was hungrier than I’d realized, and it was easier to focus on my burger instead of Trent.

“So, is business how you all met?” Stacy asked. “Is there like a club for CEOs or something?”

Dominic laughed. “There are a couple, actually. But no, that’s not how we met. We went to college together—Cornell University. The four of us linked up in a brand management class.”

“And I brought along my roommate, Paul,” Vincent said. “He’s part of the group, even if he couldn’t make it tonight.”

“It’s great that you stuck together after college,” I said. “I feel like so many friend groups fall off when everyone goes their separate ways.”

“Well, we had plenty of reasons to come together since we always spend the holidays and special occasions with Trent and his grandmother,” Aiden explained. He then went on to spin atale of winter break their freshman year when family dramas and a baggage handlers’ strike had left Aiden and Vincent with nowhere to go for Christmas, leading them to all come with Trent to Dee’s house in Jamesport.

“She eventually met Paul and Dominic too,” Vincent added, “and from that point on, she basically adopted us. She calls us her Lost Boys.”

“That sounds lovely,” Stacy said.

“We have some good times,” Aiden agreed.

A strange ache filled my chest. The way the guys talked about Nana Dee, I could tell she was important to them. The news of her illness must have been hard on all of them.

Conversation flowed easily as we ate. They asked me how I liked working at Saunders Furniture and about some of my furniture designs. I didn’t miss the look they shot Trent when I talked about the company. As soon as I could, I shifted the conversation over to Stacy, who was more than happy to talk about costume design and the truly terrible show we’d just been to.

Once the spotlight was off me, I was able to relax even more and marvel at how this meal had turned out much better than I’d expected. It was worlds away from the macho, chauvinist bullshit I expected from a group of guys that played squash at a douchey racquet club. Not to mention, it was actually nice to see this side of Trent. Of course, I’d seen him with Dee, so I knew there was more to him than the Coffeezilla I’d first met, but Dee very obviouslyadoredhim and doted on him, and I couldn’t imagine her ever pissing him off. But here were a bunch of guys who seemed to thrive on teasing him and giving him shit, and rather than snap at them, he just needled them right back.

For a brief moment, I found myself thinking about my ex. He’d been so insecure that he would have reacted horribly to being teased like this. He’d lash out at the slightest criticism, and I always found myself overthinking my words, just to make sure I wasn’t inadvertently saying something that might be taken the wrong way. I hadn’t dated much since we’d split, but I’d had a front-row seat to a lot of Stacy’s relationship dramas, mostly with actors she met through the shows she worked on, and a lot of them had been just as hypersensitive, to the point where I’d started thinking all guys were that way.

But Trent wasn’t. In fact, he seemed—in some ways, at least—to be a good guy.

How strange.

“That would be great!” Dominic said.

I turned, coming back to reality and realizing, to my surprise, that Dominic and Stacy had hardly stopped speaking the entire meal.

“You’re sure it’s not too much trouble?” Dominic asked.

“A princess costume will be such a nice break from my last batch of costumes,” Stacy assured him.

“Do you think you can have it done before Hailey’s birthday party?”

“Definitely.”

“So…I’m gonna say something,” Stacy said as we boarded the train for Queens. The subway wasn’t too packed at this hour, sowe scooted into a pair of free seats. “Try not to bite my head off, okay?”

“What?”

“Trent’s…not that bad?”

I rolled my eyes. “You caught him on a good day. Maybe he was on his best behavior because his friends were there. Trust me, he’s capable of being a real asshole.”

“I mean…aren’t all of us capable of that sometimes?” Stacy pointed out gently. “Maybe that first time you met him was the outlier, and on your average day, he’s actually a decent guy.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I said, sneering a little as I remembered him yelling at his dad on the phone. What kind of guy would do that? Surely not a good one.

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