“Bullshit,” Milo gleefully shot back. “You’ve been gone for a couple of weeks, and somehow Chicago’s most eligible demisexual found a girl in Beautiful Cow, and now you’re sitting around your apartment listening to love songs. I’m… Well, I’m astounded, frankly. Whoisshe?”
“Nope. We’re not doing this.” Jake spoke with finality designed to shut Milo down. His friend had the start of it right, but Jake didn’t have the strength to tell him that it wasn’t love songs he was listening to but Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” on repeat.
Milo raised his hands in surrender. “Fine. Shut down my supportive questions. But if you’re not gonna spill your guts, I need you to shut up. The Cubs are down by one, and I have to focus.” He clicked the sound back on and reclaimed his beer. “And Iamgoing to use this weekend to do some research and find out all about the girl.”
Research. Jake plucked that word from Milo’s jokey threats and held it up to the light.Research.There was something there, something he could use. If he could just…
He straightened with a start as the idea materialized. “I’ve got to handle a few work things. You good here?” he asked Milo, who waved him off without tearing his eyes from the screen. Jake shut himself away in the bedroom, blocking out the announcer’s voice from the TV, and selected a number on his phone.
“Well, well, well. You’re callingmefor a change.”
“Hey.” Too restless to hold still, he paced the tiny length of the room. “I need to borrow your marketing genius. Got a minute?”
“For you, brother of mine, I’ve got all the minutes,” Finn said. “Let me just put my glamorous life on hold for you.”
He snorted. “Glamorous? It’s Friday night, and your boyfriend’s next to you on the couch, reading something nonfiction, isn’t he? Oh God, please tell me that’s all you were doing.”
His sister responded with an identical snort. “Actually, yes, Tomisreading a book on macroeconomics while I’m immersed in a magazine. A trashy one. Much sexy. So glamour.”
“Well, put it down. I need your help on a research project, and knowing you, you’ll want to take notes. It’s a, uh, a personal thing.”
He heard rustling, as if she almost dropped her phone. “Personal? Like,personalpersonal?” He grunted, and Finn stifled a gasp. “Jake, did you meet someone?”
His heart lurched at the delight in his sister’s voice—delight that he had to crush. “No. I mean yes. I did. But it didn’t…” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose to hold back any further words.
“Oh.Oh, I’m sorry,” Finn said softly. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Jake’s younger sister was one of the people who knew how uniquely challenging his relationship situation was. Well, she knew most of it anyway. She’d helped him through the worst of his depression after he ended things with Asha, but what she didn’t know was that the only woman since then who’d sparked similar interest was her best friend Josie. Jake had seriously considered it, thought long and hard about pursuing the flirty redhead. But in the end, the possibility that it would create friction between him and Finn, and between Finn and Josie, had been too much, so he’d turned away from that possibility even though it felt a little like he was turning away from romantic relationships forever. Until Mabel.
“Yeah, I guess I do need to talk about it,” he said.
Finn listened raptly as he sketched the broad strokes of radio-station events in Beaucoeur, his spirits plunging as he neared the end of the story. He concluded with “I don’t know that Mabel will ever forgive me, but I want to at least try to make things right for her job-wise.”
Finn was quiet for a long moment. “And my marketing genius might help with that.”
“You tell me. Will commissioning a focus group work? Have them listen to the old morning show and the new, non-Mabel one?” Everything else might be fucked up, but he could at least try to help Mabel with this.
Finn laughed softly. “Oh, my quantitative-minded brother, how it does my heart good to hear you asking about qualitative methodologies. Yes, focus groups provide rich data that could help convince the new boss in a situation like this. Assuming the show actually was better before.”
“It was. So you’ll help?”
“Of course I will, Jake.”
Her simple statement of support overwhelmed him, and he swallowed thickly. “Thanks.” He was used to feeling like he had to take care ofher. How strange to be the one taken care offor a change.
“So,” Finn said briskly, tender sibling time apparently over, “I’ll type up an outline for the focus group moderator and research what local firms might be able to run it. Check your email on Monday.”
“I will. Give my best to Tom, okay?”
“Oh, Iwillgive my best to Tom,” his baby sister purred, then hung up before Jake could groan over the wrongness of that. Actually, no. Nothing was wrong with his sister finding happiness with a guy who adored her. In truth, he envied her the joy she’d grabbed for herself.
Envy. Jealousy. Frustration. Of course those feelings hit him from time to time, but he always buried them under work and gym and good-guy Jake. He was the person who toasted his friends at their engagement parties before hopping into a cab to finish up some work at the office before going home alone, andfuck, he was tired of it.
When he wandered back out to the living room, Milo spared a glance at him before zooming back to the game. “So what are the plans for the rest of the weekend?”
Jake settled on the couch. “Work. Maybe stream a James Bond movie later. I could give you a city tour, I guess.”
Milo gave him a dramatic Roman-emperor-style thumbs-down. “I don’t want a tour. I’m talking bars. Ladies. Nightlife. You may or may not have found your person, but I’m still on the prowl.” He scratched his stomach and took another pull of his IPA. “Come on, man, what do you do for fun around here?”
