Page 7 of We Met Like This
Oh you know, the usual: doesn’t know the difference between their, there, and they’re, hits the snooze button fewer than three times, has never seen Dirty Dancing, thinks the earth is flat.
Right… the usual.
As I was about to respond, asking him what his were, the front door to the office opened and Rob came in holding a Styrofoam box and some sort of iced coffee.
“You look…” He paused just inside the door.
“What?” I asked when he didn’t finish. I looked down at my shirt to make sure another button hadn’t come undone or anything.
“Happy,” he finally said.
I could feel the leftover smile on my face from the chat I’d been having with Oliver. I slipped my phone back into my purse by my feet and cleared my throat, trying to channel some seriousness. “I’m good. Fine. I thought you were out for the rest of the day.”
“You seemed so angry when I left, I thought I’d bring you some lunch and a chai.” He set the offerings on the desk in front of me.
My eyes shot between the food and him. Did he really think a bribe would work? It did mean he was thinking about me in his meeting. I felt my resolve melting. Maybe itwouldwork. I managed to keep my face neutral. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, not feeling the need to keep a smile off his face. He sat on the edge of my desk, one of his strong hands picking up the rake in my desktop garden and dragging a pattern in the sand.
“How did the meeting go?” I asked.
“It went well. She wants me to send over Sarah’s full manuscript. Can you do that before you leave today?”
“That’s great. And yes, of course.”
He stood.
“But Rob?”
He stopped before he’d even taken a step. “Yes?” He gave me the smoldering stare that had gotten me into trouble more than once.
It was not going to work on me today. Especially if Istopped looking at his eyes. I focused on a dark freckle on his cheekbone. “I’ve been here four years. It’s time for me to make the jump to full-time agent.”
“You’re right,” he said with a nod. “We’ll talk about what the path to agent looks like soon.”
“Right,” I said, somewhat shocked he didn’t push back. I could feel the surprised look on my face and I smoothed it to confident (another C). “Right. Thank you.”
As he walked out the door for the second time that day, my chest expanded with excited anticipation. Things were happening. Maybe I was finally going to take some steps forward in my life.
I opened the Styrofoam box, ready to dig into whatever lunch he had brought me. It was a few bites of soggy salad and a quarter of a chicken breast smothered in barbecue sauce.
His leftovers.
CHAPTER 3
“Hey, Mom,” I said, answering my phone while changing lanes.
Her voice rang out over my car’s speakers. “Hey, honey. How are you?”
“I’m good. Just on my way home from work. How are you and Dad? Any food roulette this week?” My parents were pretty technologically savvy, but they were helping to “work out the glitches” of a food-ordering app one of their friends had developed. Once the week before they’d ended up with a feast to feed twenty, and the second time they’d ordered a cake instead of the burgers they had been trying for. The app had a lot of glitches.
She laughed. “No surprises this week.”
“Because you haven’t used it?”
“Possibly… What about you?” she asked. “Still dating your yoga studio guy? I loved your meet-cute story.”
So maybe I talked about meet-cutes too much if my mom knew the term and everything. “No, actually. He turned out to be a flat-earther.”
