Ian cleared his throat. “He and his family ordered your pizza and he was impressed. When he learned who owned Slice, Slice, Baby, he thought there was a real opportunity for expansion there. Texas and California to start. We’d want to discuss rebranding and diversifying the menu, but my client wants to meet in person.”
“I need to think about it,” I told Ian as I stepped back onto the elevator. I’d had several offers to franchise Slice, Slice, Baby and even sell it, but none of them felt right. And not that this did, but if this guy’s client was who I thought he was, it might just be the real deal.
The truth was, though, I could barely think about the business. The machine was on autopilot and Topher had things under control. So I found myself almost resenting this Ian person for trying to take up real estate in my brain when all I could think of was being here with Winnie.
But soon this would be over, and Winnie would go back to LA where she’d start her new life. Or maybe even go back to that shitbag.
“I’ll send over some preliminary numbers,” Ian said.
“Great. I love math,” I said.
“Oh, lovely. As do I.”
“That was a joke,” I told him, trying to hold back a laugh. “But yeah, thanks. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“A joke. Right.”
We hung up and when I stepped back out into the lobby, Gretchen was gone.
Stella, though, sat there with her printer humming in the background as it spit out paper after paper.
“Got your printer up and running?” I asked.
Her white hair and bedazzled sweater vest were very misleading. She smiled as she pulled the pages from the printer and slid them into her filing cabinet one by one. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
Chapter Thirteen
Winnie
I stood in front of my hotel door, holding the folded piece of paper in my hands.
The paper swam in front of my eyes, and I braced my shoulder against the wall, narcolepsy lapping like a thick tide at my feet, despite being passed out for the last sixteen hours. Even though I didn’t have cataplexy, and the sudden loss of muscle control that came with it, the sleep attacks were sometimes just as sudden, just as overpowering. I just had to make it long enough for the meds to kick in, though, and then I’d stand a fighting chance of making it through makeup without falling asleep on the stylist.
But I was awake enough to know that the paper in my hands wasn’t some kind of wonderful dream. It was real, and my cheekswere burning just reading it, and it was absurd given all the stuff that Kallum and I had already done, but this wasn’t research; this wasn’t for the movie.
This was something else.
Before I could talk myself out of it—before I could remind myself I was still feeling fragile after Michael’s visit yesterday, that I’d rather pluck out my left eye than get romantically involved ever again—I pushed off the wall and walked over to the desk.
Yes, I wrote underneath his question, and then added a little heart next to it.
And then felt very silly.
I was thirty-two! This man probably knew his way around my cervix better than my gynecologist! Why was I drawing hearts on someone’s note like I was in middle school?!
But I was humming to myself as I folded the note back up. Humming as I grabbed my bag and coat, and then actually singing an old INK song as I left my room to slip it under Kallum’s hotel room door.
“Greetings and salutations,” said Kallum as I opened my door later that evening.
He was wearing a zipped sweater with a peacoat open over it, nice jeans, and those sustainable wool sneakers he liked so much. His dark blond hair looked tousled, but his beard was perfect, like he’d groomed it and then made a point not to touch it again.
“Hi,” I said a little breathlessly, looking up into those lovely eyes. There were times when he was like a bearded Peter Pan, allboyish mischief, and times when he looked like he just stepped off the set of a History Channel show about warriors or something. And then there were the times when he didn’t look like anything but himself. Just Kallum Lieberman, who gave me his coat when I shivered between takes and who wrote me date requests in neat, blocky handwriting.
“You look—” Kallum flushed and cleared his throat. “Really cute.”
I laughed. “You’ve seen me naked, and it’s the jeans and long-sleeved shirt you think is cute?”
He was still flushing. “Yep.”
