I open my trunk. When some of the boxes tumble out, I’mprepared. (I have dealt with this five times already this week.) Sample testing is one of my favorite parts of my job. There’s something endlessly satisfying about feeling the design beneath your fingertips, seeing it on a real person instead of a mannequin or a computer screen.
“You look like a thirty-two?” I guess, turning back to Will.
He nods, and now his amusement has caught fire, his smile begrudgingly holding around his eyes. Are those dimples on his cheeks? I don’t remember them, but then again, Will didn’t do much smiling when we were high school seniors. They match the divot in his chin.
“That’s one of our men’s sample sizes,” I say. “We’ve got slacks in gray, black, forest green, navy blue. There are some white shirts around here, too. Different box, I think.” I put three of them on the ground, riffling through the material. “Wait, those are women’s blazers. Hang on.”
“I nearly forgot,” Will calls to me.
I stand back up, my gaze switching to him. “Forgot what?”
His voice comes out low and focused. “That you’re the CEO of a clothing company.”
I pause to consider the nuance of what he means. We’re facing each other now as adults with real careers and fully developed brains. Two things neither of us had the last time we spoke.
To Will, I was Zoe’s best friend. I once overheard him refer to me as a surface-level kind of girl. (I think it was his reaction to my girlish enthusiasm over an album release I was excited about, which enraged me to the point of mentally dismissing him.) To me, Will was Zoe’s malcontent twin brother, hot as fuck, but strictly off-limits, and too moody besides.
Funny, considering now Will’s looking at me like I hold a modicum of interest to him, and I’m looking at him noting he’s still moody but can at least manage a dimpled smile.
I fiddle with the shirt cuffs of the blouse I’m wearing. Dusty blue, tucked into high-waisted cream balloon pants. “Yes,” I say.
“I heard a couple years ago.” He cocks his head to one side, a lock of hair falling between his eyes, just as my heart stalls out and revs back to life at the idea that I have come up in conversations he was part of. “Are these—” Will points at the clothes, still in boxes at my feet. “Are you suggesting I wear trade secrets to work today?”
“Trade secrets might be alittledramatic—”
“But these items aren’t on sale yet, are they?”
“No, they’re not.”
Even though it’s the height of summer and the Texas wind is warm, I shiver as the cars passing by push the air against us in rushes, over and over.
I can’t tell if this is getting more or less awkward by the second. If I was aiming for polite, I’d ask about Zoe, but that’s a can of worms I’m pretty sure I don’t want to mentally open now, or maybe ever. Will isn’t exactly being effusive, either.
He steps toward me, rolling his bike with him. He’s taller than me but not by much, maybe just a few inches. Which means he’d be taller than most girls by alotmore than a few inches.
“I think we might be headed to the same place,” he admits. “Your office is in that complex on North Congress, isn’t it?”
I nod.
“So is the client I’m meeting this morning.” His lips part just a smidge, eyes roving from the boxes at my feet to the additional boxes in the trunk of my car. “Do you think there’s room for my bike in there?”
My shoulders perk up. He’s accepting my help. It feels like a truce, or at least a mutual agreement to ignore the past. “Definitely! We can put the back seats down. Take off the front wheel. We’ll make it work.”
I spring into action, climbing into my trunk so I can push theboxes toward the front seats and neatly stack them. Part of me knows my ass is aimed at Will, and part of me hopes he’s too busy taking off his bike wheel to notice. Before I climb out, I secure a pair of black pants and a white shirt that match what he’s wearing.
As the owner of a fashion brand, I’ll deny it to the day I crack open my retirement fund, but sometimes, the predictability of men’s clothing comes in handy.
Will places the bike into the space I’ve cleared as if relocating a cherished feather and then grabs his front wheel off the ground, resting it on top of the bike. His arm stretches up, straining against dirty cotton to close the trunk.
He nods at the clothes in my hands, pulling the backpack off his shoulders. “I’ll change into them in the Starbucks bathroom on the first floor. I promise not to ruin them, and I’ll make sure they get back to you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’ll get you through one day, but the inseam on these pants needs some work, and the material of the shirt feels wrong to me.”
I hand over the clothes and our thumbs brush. My nervous system spirals. Will pushes the items neatly into the top of his backpack.
Finally, my curiosity cracks all the way open, igniting the coals of my interest. “Where do you work?” I ask, heading toward the driver’s side door.
He mirrors me on the other side of the car. “I work at Ellis Consulting.”
