Raffi raked a hand through his thick hair. “All right, all right. Truce. I’m not trying to fire you. You can do the job. I’m just saying, I’m going to be around, is all.” He stepped an inch closer to her. “When it comes to Ô, I want to have a hand in every brick that gets laid.”
Ani breathed in sharply at his words. A man this stunning saying “gets laid.” Unfair. It sent a hot zing through her body, she couldn’t deny it.
“Sticking your fingers where they don’t belong?” she chanced, and almost regretted it, until Raffi showed his wolf smile again.
“My favorite pastime. As you apparently know.”
Ani gulped and had to turn away from him to stop the blush that she felt forming.
“I have to go. Another site visit,” she lied. She gripped her tote bag and rushed off, hearing his “See you soon, Ani” in her wake, so slick the words penetrated her skin, try as she might to brush them away.
Ani mentally blackedout the entire drive back to her apartment in Russian Hill, San Francisco. If she had thoughts, they were not deposited into her memory bank.
It wasn’t until she saw the winter camellias blooming in her building’s courtyard that she came back to herself. She needed to decide what the hell she was doing: take this wedding or not. And if she was, she had to debrief with Sanan. And potentially her sister and all of her friends.
Ani took the steps two at a time, and once she got inside her unit, she made a beeline for her room and flopped on her bed. Her roommate was a travel nurse with night shifts, so Ani often had the place to herself. Her sister, Talar, used to be her roommate until she got married and moved out. Since then, Ani had found roommates who were only temporary, because it hurt too much to replace Talar with anyone she could form a real connection with. The apartment, built in 1910, with creaky original hardwood floors and ornate but drafty windows, was hers and Talar’s, since they first moved in together several years ago.
Ani pushed herself back, laid her head on the pillows, and stared at the small antique chandelier she and Talar had installed shortly after they moved in.
It was time to get serious. Would she take this job or not?
She knew she didn’t want to, that merely seeing Kami on the regular would be painful. But to then have to plan Kami’s wedding? The wedding she had envisioned for herself and Kami, the one they had even talked about during their year plus together? That would be torture. She wasn’t a masochist, and she had no desire to put herself through that.
However.
They were going to pay her twenty grand for the landscape project and another ten grand for her wedding planning fees. That would cut her debt by more than half. She only wished she had quoted higher for her wedding planning fees, because she knew Kami and Grace could pay.
If she didn’t take the job, she would likely have to lay off Sanan. The predatory interest rates with the credit card company and on the bank loan were simply too high to sustain. Even without paying Sanan, she would really have to hustle to get new clients. She only had three weddings booked this summer, and they were all smaller-scale affairs. Quaint.
She shook away Raffi’s haughty voice and directed her anger elsewhere for the moment.
The Avedissians. Those fuckers. Leaving her in this position.
She’d tried every method of getting in touch with them, to no avail. Ani’s only hope was that the bride, Knar, had an Instagram profile. She thought she had found her profile, undeniably Knar, with that severe brunette bob and curtain bangs. It was a private account, but the number of posts kept going up, so Knar was active. Last week, Ani had made a fake profile and requested to follow Knar. Now, Ani sat up and logged into her fake account again, but Knar hadn’t accepted her request.Maybe it was too obviously fake and Knar did not fool that easily. She’d need to find another way.
If Ani was able to get access to Knar’s Instagram, she could maybe discover her whereabouts and show up and confront her. Or serve her with a lawsuit, if she had the guts for it.
But all that was hypothetical. What was real was an overdrawn checking account, two voicemails from debt collectors, and the one wedding she couldn’t stand to plan that would, regrettably, pull her out of her miserable financial situation.
She couldn’t afford to have pride.
It was depressing, but there was a part of her that felt invigorated by this opportunity. It wasn’t just wedding planning. She was also tasked with turning Raffi’s already lovely garden into a wedding paradise.
She would love to add landscape design experience to her roster. A really legit piece of experience. She had previously helped her parents redo their backyard, so she wasn’t entirely clueless. Granted, it was a forty-by-twenty-foot space behind a humble home on a still humbler budget, but she’d created beauty, no doubt about it. She could do that in quadruple the size and with fifty times the funding. Right?
She’d simply harden her heart to Kami to make it work. And figure out a way to work with that pretentious ass who owned the place. It would be a challenge like no other, but Ani didn’t shy from difficulty.
That’s it. She’d take it.
Ani texted Sanan.Landed that new gig. Call me when you have a chance?
Then she sank a little deeper into her bed and called her sister because she was dying to spill about this insane venture.
Ani found an errant thread in her fluffy duvet cover that she wanted to tug when Talar picked up. “Ani jan, what’s up? You okay?”
Talar was the younger sister, but there she was, acting like the older one. “Yes, Talar, I’m fine.”
Then Ani assessed herself. Was she? No, she was not. “Health-wise, anyway.”
