“I have a plan,” I mumbled.
“What is this plan? I am a doctor. I need details. You know this.”
I sucked in a breath. I was the bug. She was the spider. This was her web.
“Mark wants to open a gay sports bar in Ybor. He’s offering me twenty-five percent ownership and . . . well . . . to pretty much run the place.”
Priya went still. Her jaw clenched mid-chew. The chip she’d been holding, waiting to be consumed next, froze halfway to her mouth.
Then she returned said chip to the bag, set the whole thing on the coffee table, and turned to face me fully.
And didn’t say anything.
Not one word.
She looked at me with that expression she got when she was working through a particularly complicated diagnosis—focused, analytical, turning the information over in her mind from every possible angle.
The silence stretched.
My underarms grew moist.
Then I chided myself for using the word “moist.”
Priya wasneverwrong. Not about medical stuff, not about people, and definitely not about life decisions.
When I’d been thinking about taking the assistant manager position at Riley’s two years ago, she’d told me it was a trap. She’d said that Brad would never promote me, and I’d just end up doing more work for the same pay.
Of course, she’d been right.
When I started dating a guy from my gym who seemed perfect on paper, she’d taken one look at him and said, “He is going to ghost you the second someone with bigger tits walks by.”
Two weeks later, he’d done exactly that.
With Mr. D Cup. Maybe E.
If Priya thought the bar was a bad idea, it was a bad idea. There would be no getting around her telekinesis or omnipresence or whatever the hell it was called.
But in that moment, whatever she thought, I needed her to saysomething. Her staring and not chewing was killing me.
“Mark,” she said finally. “Your Mark? The one who tried to fix a leaking pipe with duct tape?”
“It worked for three hours.” I could hear Mark out there somewhere . . . laughing.
“The one who adopted six dogs because he ‘could not choose only one’?”
“They’re good dogs.”
“The one who tried to learn carpentry from YouTube and built a bookshelf that looks like a Jenga tower mid-collapse?”
“It’s structurally sound! Mostly. If no one touches it and the wind never blows.”
“I am not judging Mark. He is a sweet man with a certain salt-and-pepper hotness.” She held up a hand. “I am just . . . processing.”
Another pause.
“Twenty-five percent ownership? He offered you this?”
“Yes . . . and a salary.”
