Never Say Never, page 4
He sighs, his eyes scanning the room one more time before settling on a gallery-wrapped oil painting and hanging above the fireplace. Somewhere out there, the family who owns this place is biding their time and hoping that this showing is going to be the showing that sells their place. This place has been listed for eleven months. I feel bad for wasting their time.
“Next one is about two blocks from here,” I say, shuffling to the door.
I see a sliver of my father in him in the way he cuts through the night air with an air of importance. His unattainable standards for perfection could go toe to toe with my father’s any day.
So it’s settled. I couldn’t date Theo even if I wanted to. My mother would kill me.
But then again, my mother doesn’t speak to me.
I lift my head and trudge forward, marching side-by-side, fighting off a dreamy haze of lust that pulls me off track.
I need to stay focused.
I need to stop daydreaming about a man I would absolutely never, ever be with in the first place.
Never.
The second apartment of the night is an exact replica of the first, only it’s as if some techie guru threw up all over it.
“It’s a Smart House,” she says proudly, flipping various switches and pointing out the touch screen monitors and thermostats built into the walls. She leads me to the kitchen, showing me everything from touch-activated faucets to induction stove burners to a voice-command trash compactor. The place is doused in cool colors with plastic furniture. I’m expecting a robot to pop out of the closet at any moment to offer me a night cap and warm pajamas.
This must be where the Jetsons live.
I yawn. I’ve been yawning all night. A six-hour flight coupled with the stress of my impending litigation has zapped my energy reserves. “I hate to do this to you, Skylar, but can we see the rest tomorrow?”
My watch reads eight o’clock. I’m not sure how many more properties she’s showing me tonight, but I’m not sure I can stomach another copy and pasted classic six.
“During the day, yes,” she says, silently implying that her Friday night was not available.
“But what if I need you at night?” I test her.
“You have me until five,” she says. “After that, I have plans.”
I don’t appreciate her glibness. It’s insulting. “Another date?”
She reaches for a light switch and flips the apartment into a dimmed state. A low-light lamp illuminates her from behind, casting soft shadows on her face. My gaze settles on the exaggerated arch of her upper lip, and I find myself wanting to taste it.
“If you must know, yes. It’s the date you made me cancel.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I wish I can shut the stupid thing off, but my attorney has been blowing it up all night as we figured out how to artfully handle our new little problem without jeopardizing the sale we were attempting to negotiate. We’ve had the upper hand until now. Pending litigations tend to drive away buyers like startled rabbits into their holes.
“I’m not cancelling it again,” she says, her arms crossed and her heels digging into the ground.
“Who’s the lucky man?” My words taste like sarcasm and bitterness peppered with annoyance, though I deliver them with a casual sweetness.
Her face shifts and our eyes meet. “It’s a blind date. I don’t know him. Not yet anyway.”
“Blind date.” I shudder. The last blind date I had was when Mila tried to set me up with her Ukrainian cousin. We couldn’t understand each other, and she wore so much perfume it took weeks for it to fade from the passenger seat of my car. She never set me up with anyone again after that.
I feel her eyes on me, as if she’s trying to gauge my reaction. She probably expects me to talk her out of it, to hijack her schedule the way I did the first time. I want to. Oh, God, do I want to. But I haven’t the energy. Not tonight.
We head outside and slip into a parked, on-duty cab nearby. She wiggles my jacket off her shoulders, folds it in half, and places it in my lap. “You okay, Theo?”
It’s been a long time since anyone has asked me that.
“I’m fine, Skylar.” I don’t want to burden her with my worries. She’s been trying so hard to please me all night, and seeing the way her face falls when I’m not impressed by these apartments is a swift kick to the gut, and I’m already down.
My attorney sends me another message, wanting to meet early in the morning to go over everything. I’d much rather spend my day with her. Not even apartment shopping…just spending time with her.
She makes me forget.
***
“Theo,” my attorney Vic Valotti greets me in his conference room the next morning. Two young bucks flank his side. Junior partners, I assume. They remind me of sharks hungry to win a case, and I sure as fuck hope they’re starving. “Good to see you. Although I wish we were meeting under different circumstances.”
“Likewise.”
“These are my newest associates,” he says. “Brayden Geffler and Tyler Levinski, meet Theo Van Cleef.”
They’re young as fuck. I’m young, but they’re much, much younger. Skinny and baby-faced, I venture a guess that they’re fresh off a fast-track-through-law-school. I didn’t think Vic would hire them if they couldn’t pull their weight, but then again, their jobs may be favors he owes to various associates.
Vic presents a stack of paperwork, copies of the litigation files my L.A. attorney faxed over the previous morning.
“So it looks like we’ve got a slight hitch in our plan,” he says with a minor chuckle that annoys the fuck out of me. I smile because I have to. He’s the best. If anyone’s going to win this case, it’s going to be Vic Valotti and his outrageous, pie-in-the-sky hourly price tag. He charges what he charges for a reason.
“So who’s this asshole that thinks he’s entitled to half your company?” Vic squints over his nearly-invisible, rimless glasses as he reads the papers. A logo on the frames reads Gucci. His hair shines like it’s loaded with product. I can smell him from several feet away, and we all sit silently bathing in his aftershave together like a bunch of polite, spineless morons.
“My old college roommate,” I say. I don’t want to say his name. I haven’t said his name since our falling out years ago. “I believe he caught wind of my little buy out and now he wants in on it.”
“It says here that he came up with the idea for Performance Vodka’s easy-dissolve whey protein?” Vic reads from the sheet.
“Not true.” I spit out my words. “Not true at all.”
It’s his word against mine. I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this scot-free, but I’ll spend whatever it takes fighting it. I can afford Vic Valotti, so at least I have that going for me.
“Why would he say that?” Vic asks. I can’t help but feel he’s scrutinizing me, though I know it’s his job to gather evidence and examine both sides of the coin.
“We were sitting around one night, drinking after an afternoon at the gym, and I mentioned that I wondered if anyone had invented liquor with whey protein in it yet,” I say. “He said he’d pay good money for it if it were a thing. We talked about the logistics of it briefly. We dropped it after that. Now he says he’s fucking entitled to half of everything I’ve worked my ass off to develop.”
A wave of heat flashes through me. My molars grind. I’m going on day five of what I can only imagine is two pain levels away from being a full-blown migraine.
Vic pulls in a weighted sigh, and his cohorts exchange looks. “This isn’t going to be easy, Theo. I’m going to be very honest with you. It’s his word against yours. I know you know that. But we’re going to win this thing. I’m going to fight it tooth and nail for you. And when it’s all over with, you can go back to negotiating the sale of your company. Keep in mind there’s always the option to settle out of court.”
“I’m not giving him a fucking dime.”
Vic’s hands fly up in the air to protest. “You’ve got to trust me, Theo. I’ve been around a lot of years. I know what I’m doing. My goal is to bury this thing so fast your head’ll spin, and then we can go back to dealing with the merger.”
We were so close, too. I’d narrowed it down to one of the three companies all competing for me, and we were in the early stages of negotiating a final deal.
“Obviously you know that American Royalty Liquors would like to put your deal on hold,” he adds. “At least until the dust settles.”
Well aware.
“They don’t want to lose you though. You have nothing to worry about, Theo. Their attorney made it very clear to me.”
His words bounce off me, neglecting to sink in with any amount of meaning. He’s blowing smoke, likely as a result of his overinflated ego. Vic Valotti is eight pounds of confidence in a five-pound bag. No one can say for sure what American Royalty is going to decide. Everything hinges on the outcome of this lawsuit.
A handful of days ago I was basking in contentment. Funny how the wind can shift its direction just like that.
I stare to the right, out the wall-to-wall windows that frame half of Vic’s conference room. The vehicles below line up like matchbox cars, and the people file along like ants. A girl with long blonde hair struts down the hall to my left, a stack of files clutched against her chest as she smiles at a colleague in passing.
She reminds me of Skylar, and I forget my troubles if only for a brief moment.
“Of course, with the merger on hold,” Vic continues, “your big payday will also be on the back burner. I advise you not to make any major purchases until we get this all ironed out.”
There goes my apartment.
There goes any excuse I have to see Skylar again.
“You’re home early.” I peek my head inside the door of the apartment I share with my best friend, Nina Ortiz, only to find her red-faced and swollen-lipped, slowly climbing off the lap of her fiancé, Charlie.
“Sorry,” I say. “I should’ve warned you. Wait, why aren’t you at work?”
She stands up, tracing her fingers across her lips in an attempt to wipe away smudged lipstick. Her ability to act like they weren’t just five seconds away from fucking impresses me. “We both took the day off. We had to pay the florist and approve the set list and sign off on a few things.”
Ah, yes. Her wedding. She only mentions it every single day.
But I’m happy for her. I am.
A smidgeon jealous but happy.
“Speaking of the wedding,” she says, “you find a date yet?”
“I have a date tonight,” I say. The wedding is three weeks away. I highly doubt anyone I meet between now and then would be jumping at a chance to attend a wedding with a bunch of strangers they didn’t know. Still, the crazy amount of optimism perpetually coursing through my veins reminds me that stranger things have happened. “So we’ll see.”
“Date?” Charlie appears from behind Nina, tucking his shirt back into his pants. My mind flashes naughty for two seconds as I wonder if he’d been waiting for his erection to go down that whole time. I smile and say nothing. I’m used to it. Nina has been my roommate since I moved to the city, and Charlie has been with Nina since the dawn of time. “With who?”
“With whom,” Nina says, whipping her head around and flashing a teasing grin. Her jet-black hair is piled on top of her head in the world’s most perfect top knot. Soft tendrils garnish the space above her ears.
“Actually, I watched a thing online where a bunch of English majors said that’s not really the rule anymore,” Charlie fires back, still teasing. She slips a lanky arm over his shoulder. Even when they bicker, they can’t keep their hands off one another.
Nina’s lips pout. She sets her jaw and raises an eyebrow as if she’s ready to square off with him over this. God, if this is their biggest issue, they’re going to be golden.
“I’ll stick with tradition until Strunk and White update their manual,” she says. “You stick to day trading and I’ll stick to journalism, okay?”
“So stuck in the past,” Charlie says, leaning in and kissing Nina’s pointed nose. He turns to me. “She forgets I minored in English back at Princeton.”
They’re so cute it makes me want to vomit sometimes, but I know I’d be lucky to experience an ounce of what they have.
Nina spins around, leaning her elbows against the kitchen island as I empty out the contents of my purse. I’m going to switch to a clutch that night, and I fully intend on wearing the little black dress I borrowed from her weeks ago. She’s forgotten all about it despite rifling through my closet a half dozen times.
“So this date,” she says. “His name? Where’d you meet him? What does he do?”
“His name is Ryan.” It’s such an easy name to say, and I love the way it rolls off my tongue. “He works in marketing. I met him on that dating app.”
Her mouth gapes wide. She knows me too well.
And I get it. I’ve been judged by my exterior my entire life, and for me to utilize a dating app where people swipe left or right based on what I look like goes against everything I’ve ever stood for.
“Before you say anything,” I interject. “I uploaded an old picture of me.”
Charlie’s jaw falls this time. He knows. Charlie and Nina are the only two people in my current circle who know about “Whitney.”
“So you baited him with Whitney, but he’s going to get Skylar?” Nina says. The way she’s looking at me doesn’t give away whether she’s impressed or disgusted with my tactic. “And how do you think this is going to go?”
I shrug a single shoulder. “No clue. I think he’d be happy though, don’t you? I mean, I’m a big improvement from before.”
“You don’t even look like her anymore,” Nina says gently. “He might not even recognize you. You realize that, right? Or he’s going to think you’re certifiably insane.”
My stomach twists in response, a flash of anxious heat soaring through my body. “It’s not an old-old picture. It’s from about halfway through my…transformation.”
“It’s still a bait and switch,” Charlie says, blowing a gush of air past his lips as he shakes his head. His hair falls into his face, loose chocolate curls as soft as baby hair. He’s had shoulder-length hair ever since I’ve known him, and he refuses to cut it for the wedding despite Nina’s desperate pleas and attempts at bribing him with copious amounts of sex.
I always told her the sex bribes were useless when you fucked like bunnies anyway.
“What would you do if that happened to you?” Nina spins around to face Charlie.
“Honestly,” he says, his lips widening into an obnoxious smirk. “If the girl was hot, I wouldn’t fucking care.”
He’s such a guy.
I release the breath I’ve been harboring. I’m going through with this. I’m convinced the only guys to swipe right on the abhorrent picture of me several pounds ago with mousy brown hair and too-small glasses and that awkward smile had to have liked me for my bio. No one remotely superficial would swipe right on that picture.
Besides, I was still that same girl – just on the inside. I always thought she’d melted away, but it turns out I only swallowed her.
“Well, thanks for settling that, Charlie,” I say, gathering the spilled contents of my purse and heading back to my room.
“Good luck!” Nina calls out. From the corner of my eye, I see her and Charlie exchange a kiss before he tugs her back to the sofa.
***
“Ryan?” I say as I saunter up to a high top table at Tarantino’s Bar on the Lower East Side. “Are…you Ryan?”
My mouth curls up and I force a smile to my eyes, forcing away any indication that I’m nervous as hell. He turns slowly, his eyes running the length of me as it registers that I’m the girl he’s supposed to be meeting with.
He stands up, his face twisting into an expression that I can only interpret as pleased. “Hi, have a seat.”
I don’t know if I’m supposed to hug him or kiss his cheek, so I smile and nod like the painfully awkward girl that I truly am. He pushes my seat in, unable to take his eyes off me.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say. I’m not more than a few minutes late, but I don’t know what else to say. I’m hoping he can stop gawking at me long enough to take the lead. My belly is nothing but butterflies, and my mind is a muddled, knotted mess of hope and optimism.
He’s gorgeous, even better than he was in the picture. He’s wearing a gray sweater with blue-check button down underneath and a skinny tie. His tan pants are slim cut, clinging tight enough to show he very well might be a runner. His dark hair shows a hint of wave, but it’s cut high and tight.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” he says, breaking his silence. His eyes flash a stormy mix of blue and gray, as if they don’t know what they want to be, but the crinkle in the corners when he smiles puts me at ease. Ryan’s stare penetrates me, and I squirm under the heat of his gaze, wishing I had something, anything, to drink at that moment. “You look nothing like your picture. You know that, right?”
A waitress walks by, depositing a glass of water in front of me along with a paper-wrapped straw. I dive for them. “I know. I’m sorry.” I’m going to own this. I search for the right words to say, ones that don’t make me sound like I think I’m some walking, talking supermodel. I can only hope he’ll understand my intentions. “It’s sort of a deterrent.”
“A deterrent?” He leans in, gifting me his full attention. This is a good sign.
“Some people think appearances are everything,” I say. “And I get it. Looks are important. There has to be an attraction for there to be a spark. But I’m looking for something deeper than that. And someone who only wants to be with me because I look a certain way is not someone I want to associate with.”
My speech, the one I practiced in the cab on the way over, is met with silence. I will him to say something, anything.
