Page 20 of Accidentally Amy

I thought about it for a second, got an idea, then pressed the end call button.

Blake

Did she just hang up on me?

Before I could even process that, the phone started ringing.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hi, is this Mr. Chest?” she asked, and I was annoyed that I liked the sound of her voice when she was clearly a flake.

Which is why I asked, “What are you doing?”

“Hi, um, this is Amy—we met at the coffee shop and then in the elevator a couple weeks ago…?”

“Yeah.” I picked up the bottle of Dos Equis that was sitting beside my laptop and took a long drink, irritated by the ridiculous situation I suddenly found myself in. Not only was Amy a liar who wasn’t actually Amy at all, but she was underneath me on the Ellis org chart.

Talk about a lose-lose scenario.

Even if I was cool with casual dishonesty, which I so fucking wasn’t, Scooter’s Girl was on my payroll now, so she was simply an employee. Nothing more, nothing less.

She said, “I know nothing about your career and you know nothing about mine, this is just a call between two people who met in a coffee shop and in an elevator. Nothing we say is connected to any two people who might work at the same company. Are we clear?”

I sighed. “What’s this about,Amy?”

“Okay, well, I’m certain you think I’m a horrible person because of the coffee lie, but in my life, I’m usually honest to a fault. So to prove myself, I’m going to tell you five embarrassingly honest things about myself.”

“Okay,” I said, knowing I should stop her but too interested in hearing the five things to actually do it. Goodyear walked up to the desk, bumped into it, and then started meowing and walking in circles until I picked him up and set him on my lap.

“First of all, I think you should know that even though I’m an adult, I still sleep with my baby pillow. It’s nothing freaky—I’m not into wearing onesies and pretending I’m a baby—but my mother never pried the pillow out of my sticky hands like she should have, so I still need that lumpy little rectangle in order to get a good night’s sleep.”

I was smiling, damn her. “Um, noted.”

“The second thing—I have a large pizza delivered to my apartment at least once a week, even though I live alone.”

“Tell me what you watch while you eat it,” I said, wondering what kind of apartment she lived in.

“I’m very much a creature of habit, so it’s one of two things. I either turn onGilmore Girlsand rewatch episodes I’ve already seen, or I watchLittle House on the Prairie.”

“You’re shitting me.” My grandma loved that show, and sadly, I’d seen nearly every episode.

“I’m not,” she said. “My grandma loves that show, so I grew up watching it every time I went over to her house. I swear to God that Charles Ingalls has ruined men for me by being so damn perfect.”

“Thatisa high man bar, isn’t it?”

She said, “The Mount Kilimanjaro of man bars, for sure.”

I heard something rustling, and I wasn’t sure how, but I knew. “What is that—potato chips?”

“Charles Ingalls would never put me on the spot like that, for the record,” she said, laughing. “But you are close. Cheetos.”

“Lucky.” I couldn’t think of the last time I’d had Cheetos. “I had a Clif bar for dinner.”

“That’s because you’re Mr. Chest,” she said, reminding me of the way she’d called me that via text. “No way would your pecs be that spectacular if you filled them with trans fats and french fries.”

“Did you just compliment my pecs?”

“Settle down, Chest, it’s just an observation. No different than ‘there’s a book, that is a car, those are spectacular pectorals.’ ”

---