Page 4 of Coming Around Again

I fucked it all up. It wasn’t all my fault, especially because of the accident, but somehow I ruined things.

Chase parks with a flourish and we go in. Between us, we make short work of four pulled-pork sandwiches on soft potato buns, plus coleslaw and an order of fries to split. I add a judicious amount of Western Carolina sauce, sweet with tomato and brown sugar and tangy with extra vinegar, piquant with spice.

I manage to keep my suit clean.

“So tell me what you know about the new data analyst,” I grill my cousin, who always seems to have all the company gossip.

“Can’t remember her name, just that she’s been working for…let’s see, I think it was a packaging company. Don’t know which one.” He chomps into his sandwich and speaks through his bite. “I think Michelle and Peter were pretty excited about her, and she’s been analyzing for a more complex operation than ours, so she’s got experience. Maybe she’ll help with the management stuff.”

“That would be good.” I took a class in business analysis, but it was some years ago and I was never all that great at it. Managing GoPlay’s operations? Now that I could do, as long as I have HR and Marketing and IT and Sales giving me the info I need. And that’s what management is about, isn’t it? Team leadership. Giving people the big-picture vision they need, and letting them work out the details however they see fit. When I get more experience, I’m gunning for the COO job. Not head of sales, which my dad has been handling for years, except as a stopping point on the way up. Maybe I’d be CEO, if Uncle Terry ever steps down. I’m too young for it yet, and I need more experience.

Which I’m determined to get, because the company is my family legacy, and I want it to go on at least another fifty years.

“So,” I say, finishing the last of my coleslaw, “another Yankee relocating to the South. That’s usually fun to watch.”

“Psshh.” Chase disagrees with me. “People keep making the point with me that Charlotte isn’t all that Southern anymore. Especially with all the transplants moving in.”

“Like us,” I point out. We both grew up in Pittsburgh, where GoPlay used to be based before our grandfather and great-uncle had their little business fiasco and the company had to get an outside investor to bail it out. Part of the price was moving everything to Charlotte. That was ten years ago, and I have to admit that we’ve done well here. I like this place.

Even though I’d spent that whole summer in North Carolina—that whole wonderful, disastrous summer—moving to Charlotte the year following was a little bit of a culture shock. I had just started college in Pittsburgh, and Mom missed her friends there, but Megan settled in the easiest of all of us.

Which is maybe why she sees things in that overgrown frat boy she’s going to marry that none of the rest of us do. Idiot that he is, he’s still related to a lot of established people in this state, and he’s got personal connections to a lot more of them, so his client list is exclusive and wealthy and his commissions much be stacking up.

Still, I would have thought that Megan would be less mercenary in her choice of boyfriend, so Brent must have hidden depths. Like, way hidden, so deep we’d never see them.

I shake my head, reminding myself to trust Meg’s judgment.

Chase finishes the fries and we head back to work, speaking easily of the new ad campaign his department is working on. “We want to feature women as well as men, but not make a big deal about ‘sports for women’ and pat them on the head. We’ll make the statement that women are athletes just as much as men are by using them in all the images.”

I look at him, startled. It’s surprisingly advanced thinking for a guy who dates former pageant girls.

“What?” he says defensively. “Women make most of the household purchase decisions. Women are the ones deciding where to buy their husbands’ golf pants and their teenagers’ cross-country shoes and their little kids’ tee-ball gloves.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And buying their own yoga mats, basketball shoes, and Ultimate Frisbee discs.”

I stifle a smile. “Sound decision on the part of the marketing department.” Maybe my cousin’s maturing.

I leave a few minutes early for the meeting. I still haven’t made any conclusions from the data that I really need an analyst to, know, analyze, so I shut down my laptop and head on down the hall. I speak briefly with Pete, our head of operations, and check in with Aunt Carla, who heads up Human Resources.

I’ve just pulled my chair out from the table when the new hire walks in.

She’s with Michelle from IT, and talking to Pete, but I’d know her anywhere.

Her walk. The carriage of her shoulders. That cinnamon-colored hair. Her smile. The shape of (okay, yes, dammit) her butt under the sensible suit pants.

Naya Miller. My first real love.

The first time I met her, I had no idea she wasn’t a guest at the resort. I was too taken by the sleekness of her body, the curve of her lips, the way she seemed to be swimming just for pleasure. I was eighteen. So was she, although I didn’t know it until I swam out to where she was, just to talk to her.

Eleven years later, she’s still shaking me.

I look down at the conference table and try not to dwell on the memories. The remembered sight of her, the sun on her shoulders and her head tipped back in ecstasy. More intimate memories threaten, but before I can remember the taste of her breasts, I shake myself out of it and start trying to read the agenda that Pete’s PA is passing out to the meeting attendees.

I think I have myself under control. Which is why, when she turns, I’m blindsided by the way my body reacts: heart rate up. Respiration up. Blood rushing to my face…and elsewhere…and my head starting to pound. I look into those warm brown eyes of hers, and I remember everything, from excitement to despair, and I’m suddenly so angry I can barely contain it.

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