“I’m usually not.”
I nodded.
There was a beat between us where the conversation could have ended. She could have said something polite. I could have stood up. Neither of us did.
“How did you end up at Myrror?” I asked.
She looked surprised. After that, she looked like she was deciding how honest she wanted to be. Then she landed somewhere in the middle.
“State school,” she said. “Public PM internship pipeline. No connections. I sent in two hundred and eleven applications theyear I graduated and got three callbacks. Myrror was one of them.”
“Two hundred and eleven.”
“I kept a spreadsheet.”
“Of course you did.”
She bristled, just slightly. “What does that mean?”
“It means I would have done the same thing.” I paused. “I did do the same thing, actually. Different year. Different number of applications. Same spreadsheet.”
She looked at me.
“Beckett and I lived in the same frat house in college,” I said. “He was the only guy in that house who let me work in his room while everyone else partied. They all thought we were a joke. We were not, in fact, a joke.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I know you weren’t.”
It was the “I know” that did it. Not the words around it.
I was about to say something else—I didn’t know what yet—when I heard Beckett’s footsteps behind me.
He stopped at the edge of the couch. He looked at me. He looked at Joss. He looked at Joss’s roommate, who had reappeared with two new drinks and the air of a woman watching the slowest train wreck of her life with significant interest. He looked back at me.
His expression did not change.
“Sutton,” Hadley said. “You’re in my seat.”
I held Beckett’s eyes for a beat. He held mine.
Then I stood up.
I picked up my drink. I straightened my cuffs. I looked down at Joss, who was looking up at me with an expression I had no business committing to memory and was going to anyway.
“I’ll see you Monday,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
I crossed back to the bar with Beckett falling into step beside me. I didn’t look back, because I knew exactly what I would have done if I had.
3
JOSS
Ispent the weekend pretending I wasn’t going to think about him.
That worked about as well as I could have expected. By Sunday night, I’d reorganized my closet, deep-cleaned the kitchen, taken Hadley to brunch under the explicit pretense of having “things to catch up on”—and then refused to discuss the one thing she actually wanted to discuss—and rewatched two seasons of a show I’d already seen twice.
I’d also, somewhere in the middle of all of that, drafted three different versions of a message to my actual boss about Outfit Builder follow-ups, deleted all three, and convinced myself that whatever happened Monday would happen Monday.
