Maia grinned back. “He already has.”
“Well, we haven’t checked that hypothesis yet. It’s just a guess.” I shook all their hands and hoped they weren’t going to expect me to remember their names right away. I could tell from the smell that half of them were wolves, and wondered why Crescent had hired outside the pack for my role, but since no one seemed mad about it, there had to be a good reason.
We worked through lunch, and it turned out that my predecessor had indeed routed all repair tickets through their own email address. It was a matter of minutes to change that over, sending them to a central address, so that whoever was there at the time could assign them and respond or mark them up however necessary.
Maia showed up at one with two enormous boxes that smelled like meat and bread and vegetables. Sandwiches. She’d brought us all lunch, since we’d been working through.
For half an hour, we all sat around eating sandwiches, chips, and some of the biggest pickles I’d seen in my life, talking and joking like we’d been a department together forever. Sure, theyhad been working together for a while, but I wasn’t left out at all. Not treated like some distant boss that no one wanted to hang out with.
It was awesome.
“I don’t get it,” Lucas said, looking his sandwich over. “Nothing blue in it. Why is it called The Weary Blues?”
“They’re all named like that,” the girl next to him said. “Mine’s called the Caged Bird.”
“But yours is chicken,” he pointed out. “So bird kinda makes sense, at least.”
“I couldn’t say why they named it that, butThe Weary Blueswas the name of Langston Hughes’s first poetry collection,” I said. Everyone looked up at me, so I turned back to my own sandwich, pretending I hadn’t just outed myself as a giant nerd. “So they’re, um, probably all named for poems, or poetry?”
“Huh,” Lucas said, looking his sandwich over, like maybe it made more sense, even though it totally didn’t. Then he shrugged. “Well, it’s delicious, so that’s what really matters, right?”
Everyone laughed at him, and he grinned. Clearly, this was a man who’d been class clown in his day. I still wished I could have ever had that confidence.
“Hey Landon,” he said. “You want to come to trivia night tonight? A couple of these losers will be there, but obviously you’re on my team.”
There was some jeering at that, but overall, everyone seemed amused. Pleased.
“You should come,” the girl with the chicken sandwich—Julia?—said. “Maybe Lucas’s team won’t come in last for a change.”
They laughed again, and this time, I laughed with them. This wasn’t so hard. I knew I’d made the right decision for myself, butI was starting to feel like maybe... maybe things didn’t have to be hard at all.
CHAPTER 2
DEAN
I’d lost it.
Every hint of inspiration, every word I’d ever known, had tumbled out of my skull. Now, I was useless. A hell of a songwriter I was, with no goddamn words.
The cap of my pen buckled between my molars as I bit down on it. The paper in front of me was completely empty. I had a melody in mind, but lyrics? Zilch. Nadda. Not a damn thing.
And Craig had the audacity to walk into our rehearsal space smiling.
“What are you so happy about?” I grumbled, shooting a glare up at him.
He shook his head, then shrugged. “Nothing much, really. Ah—” He set down the case of his bass and bit his lip, overcome by something.
It wasn’t fair for me to resent his smile.
I did it anyway.
“Kimmy just called,” he said. “She got the lead in her school play. Just proud of her.”
I blew out a slow breath. Here I was, snipping and impatient because Craig was proud of his daughter.
Kimberly was a great kid, at that. She was bubbly and bright and so damn brave. When I was her age, I’d been too shy to do that kind of thing, bitter and prickly and convinced I was above it all.
Kimmy just went for shit and tried everything. She was so freaking cool.
