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“Thanks. I thought I’d lost it right at the start and it was going to be a total disaster. A whole scenario of Netto pulling out and us looking for new sponsors, failing, and having to ditch the whole thing flashed before my eyes.”
“Well, you brought it home like a champ.”
“Thanks.” I turn away from him, the magnetic pull from the classroom floor too powerful to resist. “I gotta go thank some people.”
“You mean Charlotte?”
I smile and hop off the platform to find her heading toward me.
My heart pounds with a mixture of excitement and nerves. Has she forgiven me for my conversation with Max? Is she here to tell me she’s seen the light and all she wants is me? Or is she here purely for work reasons, to ensure everything goes well enough for her to qualify for her promotion?
My palms are suddenly sticky again.
Charlotte couldn’t look more beautiful. Her brown ponytail’s pulled forward over one shoulder, skimming the word “Byte” on her blue T-shirt, right where it sits over the rise of her breast.
Casual Charlotte is hot. And, wearing sneakers instead of heels, a few inches shorter than Office Charlotte.
But I knew that from the grand opening weekend of Walker and Emily’s Toasted Tomato brewery resort when Charlotte spent the whole time in shorts and flip-flops. Well, apart from when she had that ridiculously sexy wetsuit on for the surfing lesson.
Oh fuck, that wetsuit.
Finally, we’re face to face, and I need to not be imagining her in skintight neoprene. The chatter around us fades into the distance. There’s just the two of us.
“Hi,” she says softly, less sure of herself than usual.
If my pulse keeps this up, they’ll have to re-write medical textbooks. “You came.”
“Well, I had to make sure everything was okay with this place, didn’t I?”
Right. Maybe that is the only reason she’s here.
“Was this you?” I point up at the swags of fabric covering the disaster zone that is the ceiling.
She nods. “I got the idea from Priya’s beautiful bag. In India they sometimes decorate ceilings with drapes of fabric like that. I thought if we did it with branded colors, it might look deliberate rather than like a coverup.” She tips her head back to admire the work, revealing her smooth, kissable neck. “I’m so happy with how it turned out.”
“You can’t have come all the way here to see that. I could have sent you pictures.”
“Yes.” Her chest rises on a deep breath, and she deliberately locks eyes with me. “But I couldn’t apologize to a picture.”
The heady combination of her words and her gaze are like a warm blanket around my nervous soul. “Apologize?”
She looks at me, or rather into me, in a way that feels like she can see right through my eyes and into my deepest thoughts.
“To you,” she says.
“What do you need to apologize to me for?”
“For yelling at you in the hallway on Friday.”
“Oh, you don’t need to say sorry for that.” I shrug it off like it was nothing, like it didn’t really feel as if my innards were being dragged out as part of a medieval torture technique. “It was all my fault. I overstepped. I just wanted to try to figure it out so we could…”
I stop myself. This isn’t the time or the place for me to get into all that again.
“I know,” she says. “I understand. I’ve never had anyone go out of their way to try to be with me before. I overreacted. I lost my temper. And I’m sorry.”
I smile down at her beautifully apologetic face. “You could have told me that when I got back to New York, though.”
“I could. But I also wanted to see your speech. It was amazing. You might not have noticed, but more than a few people were dabbing their eyes.”
