“I didn’t mean that the way I said it. What I meant was seeing you reminded me of our…discussion the other night, and I guess I’m still upset about it, but this isnotthe place to discuss that, so I’m calling a truce.”
“Fine. Then I’m going back to work.”
“But youwererude.”
“Well, I’m sorry,sweetheart, but I wasn’t aware I had to be overly polite when interacting with you.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Come on, Caleb.”
He looked at his watch. “I really do have to go. My shift ends at six if you want to yell at me more then.”
He left, which was essentially what she’d told him to do, so she shouldn’t have felt as angry as she did. In the early days of this…thing with Caleb, whenever she’d felt this worked up, they threw themselves at each other, but maybe whatever had happened between them had matured.
No, it definitely had matured. But Caleb wouldn’t admit that, which was the central problem. They had a relationship or they didn’t, was basically what he’d said the day before, and it was becoming increasingly clear they didn’t have much of anything.
She turned to go back to her laptop on the sofa, but Evan was now standing beside her. “So that’s going well.”
“Shut up.”
“What happened the other night that has you so upset?”
“Nothing. It was nothing. Just something he said that I disagreed with. Which is basically everything he says, actually.”
“It’s not more than that?”
She hated lying, but she felt like she had to adhere to Caleb’s wishes, at least until they really hashed this out. Caleb wanted this to be their secret. So Lauren said, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“All right. But if he said something that offended you, I will totally go kick his ass.”
“Not necessary. Thank you, though.”
“All right. Well. I guess I was wrong about you two. You really don’t get along.”
“I tried.”
“Yeah. Well. If you need to get back to work, I’ll let you. But before you do, I want to show you something.”
“All right.”
Lauren followed Evan back over to his laptop. He sat and said, “Paige let it be known that you were thinking about potentially selling some merch, and I think that is an excellent idea. I mocked up some T-shirt ideas. Tell me what you think.”
Evan had already designed the logo for the Cat Café that appeared on the website, but he’d enhanced it a bit for the T-shirts. He’d also made a few designs with punny phrases, likeI spent a purr-fect afternoon at the Whitman Street Cat Café!
“Cute!”
“I thought we could make also make stickers with cartoony representations of some of the cats with their names on them. We could even put Sadie on things, like mugs or shirts. You can get these produced for a reasonable price and mark them up to make a profit.”
“Email me these. I’ll run them by Diane.”
“I’m still making some tweaks, but I definitely will when I’m satisfied.”
“You do so much work for us; Diane’s going to have to put you on salary.”
“I’d settle for getting paid for a few hours’ work.”
“Of course. I’ll see what I can do. Thanks, Evan. Maybe the profits from this will make Diane less nervous about hiring more people.”
“You’re rocking this, you know. If Diane can’t see you’re making this space fun and profitable, she’s crazy.”
