Page 15 of The Grumpy Billionaire

She sits on the beanbag chair and texts somebody while I dig in.

“Oh my god,” I gasp.

“It’s okay?”

“This is the best cheeseball I’ve ever eaten,” I say. “It’s so…delicious.”

“Just…a bowl o’cheeseball.”

“Cheeseballs are amazing. You have this incredible cheese and you mix it with little things, like treasures, and the crunchy outside to balance the cheese. Cheeseballs are created for maximum pleasure. Beautiful to look at and eat.”

“You just saw a cheeseball one day and said, ‘those crackers have to go’?”

“It’s more of a historical thing with me. My parents had a math department party once, and I was really sad, and they’d put out all of these mini cheeseballs, and I stole one and brought it to my room and ate it with a spoon, and I don’t know, I felt like a queen. And later I graduated to full-sized ones. I mean, they are completely useless, put on earth for maximum pleasure.”

“You think about cheeseballs a lot,” she observes, squinting at her phone.

“I do. And did you know, there’s never been a perfect dish for the cheeseball—especially if you eat it with a spoon like me. If you put it in a bowl, all of the fun side stuff gets stuck to the sides. And if you eat it off a plate, it moves around unless you smash it down, and then, what’s the point? And on a plate with crackers? Don’t get me started. Someday I’m gonna find a way to eat it where it keeps its fun, festive shape.”

“A plate with a spike?”

“A spike would be a start, but it would need to go way beyond that.”

“Life goals!” Kelsey says, scrolling and scrolling.

I snort and take another bite.

* * *

Kelsey’s friendLizzie stops by with her sister-in-law, Willow, and of course Kelsey immediately tells them all about how I was cheeseball shamed by Gourmet Goose Greta.

“Greta sucks!” Willow says. “She and I had a huge argument about baked brie. I mean, is it a waste of triple-cream brie to bake it in puff crust? Fine. Maybe. But is it worse than murder? No, Greta, it is not.”

“But did she still sell you the brie?”

“She did.”

“What a freak!” Lizzie spreads some of the communal cheeseball onto a cracker. Lizzie owns Cookie Madness, the cookie store I pass every day. Kelsey says she’s building a whole empire of them. “If a person wants to shove a cookie up their ass, we’ll still sell it to them.”

I nod politely.

“So your new job sucks?” Willow asks, crowding onto the massive velvet couch.

“It’s not that it sucks, it’s just not the job I moved here for.”

“A company paid for her to relocate here, and they let her go the day before she was supposed to start,” Kelsey informs them.

“And you don’t know why?” Willow says.

“No! We had three Zoom interviews and one in-person where they literally flew me out here and put me up in a hotel. They loved my reel—my work samples. I had great chemistry with the creative team, and suddenly they’re going in another direction?”

Lizzie frowns. “That was their excuse?”

“Yeah—going in another direction with the position.I actually had competing offers—I turned down other jobs for this one, and they nix me?” I tell them about my weirdly fruitless search, all the supposedly sure things that evaporated like morning dew in the Gobi Desert.

“Weird,” Lizzie says.

Kelsey points at Lizzie with her cracker. “Lizzie would know. She hires and fires people all the time.”

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