I smirked and held my phone up to her again. “Gimme six months of this salary and I’ll be ready to launch my own boutique agency, three years ahead of schedule.”
“True,” Sarah agreed. “Okay, now I get it. Working with the Jetliner Jackass is a means to an end.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
Sarah snorted at me.
“Come on. Give me some credit.”
“I’ll do better than that.”
Sarah popped up and jogged to her room, then came back clutching a black bag from an exclusive boutique grocery store where I window shopped when I’d had a bad day. I couldn’t afford anything there, but fantasies were free.
“Presents!” she said as she sat down next to me on the couch. “I’d planned to give these to you the next time Alan got on your case about something and you needed cheering up, but since he’s out of the picture now consider them preemptive presents for dealing with JJ.”
She handed the bag to me while I stared at her with my mouth open. “The flake salt costs sixty dollars a pound there.”
“Good thing I didn’t get you the flake salt, then,” she said, nodding toward the bag. “It’s a selfish gift since I’ll benefit too.”
I finally dug into the bag and pulled out a tiny, perfect jar of amber. “Sarah! You got me the acacia honey?”
“For when you finally bake Bubbles. Warm sourdough drizzled with salted butter and honey? Perfection! And there’s one more thing in there.”
I peeked in the bag and froze. “Oh my God! The Ecuadorian dark chocolate? Are youkiddingme? This stuff has a market price that changes every day, like fresh lobster!”
“It was on sale,” Sarah said. “Plus my latest research paper made it into theWestern Journal of Marine Science, and mydepartment gave me a little bonus, so I decided to share the wealth with my favorite person.” She paused. “As long as she shares her baked goods.”
“They’re publishing it?” I shrieked. “Sarah, congrats!”
I jumped on her and hugged her tightly, making her laugh and swat me away.
“It’s no big deal; it’s a regional publication, but it’s a great résumé builder.”
I looked at my treasured ingredients in front of me. “I definitely need to do some celebratory baking, then. Bubbles isn’t quite ready yet, but I can do something fun with the chocolate. What about salted caramel and dark chocolate chunk cookies?”
Her eyes went wide. “Yes! Right now, please.”
I was tired, but baking was my favorite de-stressor, and I wasn’t about to deprive my sister of sweet treats. I ran to my room to change and met her in the kitchen.
Sarah knew better than to get in my way when I baked. Our kitchen was ridiculously small, and the appliances were way past their prime, which meant I usually needed to improvise and get creative with my desserts to compensate for things like an oven that didn’t heat evenly, knobs so worn that you couldn’t read the markings on them anymore, and a refrigerator door that refused to fully latch and required a hip check to close. Despite the challenges, I made it work.
I held up the gleaming brick of chocolate to show Sarah before I destroyed it. “Gorgeous, right?”
She shrugged. “Looks like chocolate to me.”
It was one of the many differences between us. I could appreciate the beauty of the ingredients I used, like the bright red of a saffron strand and the aroma of roux as it darkened, but it was lost on Sarah. Meanwhile, she was deeply enthused about tidal pools and driftwood, which to me were things to step around when I saw them at the beach.
“So how did he look?” Sarah asked. She licked her finger and pressed it into the shavings that were accumulating as I chopped up the chocolate.
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied quickly. “We’re colleagues now.”
“He’s yourboss,” she corrected as she popped her finger in her mouth. “And your hot vacation fling. So don’t act all prim and proper. Spill. How good did he look?”
I paused, frowning at my sister. “So good. So damn good it was hard to focus on anything else. But then again, he was a total jackass to the receptionist in my building?—”
“Oof,” Sarah interrupted. “That’s shitty. That’s, like, unforgivable in my book.”
“Exactly, so you see why lusting after him is absolutely not going to be a problem? I’ve got no time for jerks.”
