Pine needles. The grass in an evergreen forest. Reeds in a freshwater reservoir.
Perfect.
“This one,” I murmured.
“A-Are you sure?” she asked.
My gaze shot to her. “Are you willing to move on and show me something else to start this process all over again?”
She shook her head quickly, eyes widening from the unspoken threat. “No, sir. I’ll get those ordered for you right away. All the cuts in that color?”
I set the gem back onto the velvet cushion. “You still have my list, I presume.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then you already know the answer to that question.”
Despite my dry words, she practically beamed back at me. “I’ll get those ordered and rung up for you right away. You’ve made a good choice.”
Yes, for your wallet.
I sunk back in the chair the second she disappeared around the curtain, a significant amount of chatter exploding on the other side of it with her coworkers no doubt congratulating her on finally landing the sale.
To be fair, even if I found nothing today, I wasn’t going to let her leave empty-handed. Going through the trouble of dealing with my pickiness deserved some kind of compensation. Contrary to what most people thought, I was well aware of my flaws and annoying personality quirks.
I simply chose not to care how they colored other people’s opinion of me.
“Wow, after all that,” Avery mused, snagging his champagne off the counter. He swirled it a few times in the glass. “You went with something so basic.”
I popped a brow. “Is emerald basic? Diamond is more common.”
“Yeah, but if you’re buying it for someone, that’s usually what most people go with.”
He sipped his champagne while I remained silent, unsure of how to pivot from that comment. While it wasn’t a stretch to assume this purchase wasn’t for me, I didn’t like the implications that it was obvious. Almost like we’d walked in here and he’d expected that to be the case.
See, that was the problem with having friends with big mouths.
“Marlow called you.”
Avery shrugged. “What about it?”
Good lord.
“Cut it.”
He snorted and reached for the chilled bottle, retrieving it out of the bucket. “I didn’t know you were seeing someone.”
“I’m not.”
“Then what was with the sleepover?”
Unintentional. But Avery wasn’t about to believe that any more than Marlow did. All of that had been an honest mistake, an oversight on my part, to not account for getting riled up that much that it exhausted us both into falling asleep after finally relaxing.
“It wasn’t like that,” I replied.
“Uh huh.”
Typically, I was over it by the time both parties came and the condom was ripped off. Clean up was annoying with another person hanging around, their gaze searching for the answer to whatever silent question they were too afraid to ask while I stripped the bed and tossed them their clothes.
