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Max
“So what’d youdo this weekend?” Eli, the mechanical sub on the project who also happened to be my best friend, took the stairs two at a time as we headed for the sixth-floor conference room. He was a former cross-country runner and thought elevators were for lazy asses. “I thought about calling you during the Cubs game but then shit hit the fan in the top of the second, so I shut it off.”
“Good call.” I’d watched a few innings of that travesty with TJ and Sophie at the dive bar. “I went to a wedding Saturday and that was pretty much it.”
“Fun wedding or meh?”
I pictured Soph with the bride in a headlock. “It definitely wasn’tmeh.”
I told him the story of a girl objecting and getting attacked by the bride, leaving out our involvement in the whole thing. And by the time we exited the stairwell, Eli was laughing his ass off. “This is unreal and you have to be kidding.”
“I couldn’t have made this up. Seriously.”
“This might be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished I’d been invited to a wedding.”
“Right?”
We entered the conference room, but there were only fourpeople in there so far. We did the quick head-nod thing—they were the electrical guys—before sitting at the other end of the long table.
“Who’d you go with?” he asked quietly, taking his phone out of his pocket and setting it on the table. “Anyone I know?”
“No. She’s a girl I met atanotherwedding, oddly enough.”
“Are you seeing her?”
I channeled my inner Sophie and said, “Is that seriously your question?”
“Fuck off,” he said in a whisper. “Jane always wants to set you up with her friends, so if you’re seeing someone, I’m off the hook.”
“Makes sense,” I said, picturing Sophie’s red lips. “And I’m not really ‘seeing’ her, I just see her sometimes.”
“Clear as mud,” he muttered, then said, “What’s her name?”
“Nope,” I said, knowing Eli’s propensity for using social media to look up every human he’d ever met. “I don’t need you creeping on her.”
“Then show me a pic at least so I can sound like I knowsomethingwhen I tell Jane.”
I got out my phone, not so much because I needed to show Eli but because I wanted to look at the damn picture again. Sophie had been all over my mind since she’d left me fucking reeling on the corner Saturday night, and I was having trouble shaking her.
I pulled up the shot and held it out to him. “Sophie. That’s all you need to know.”
“Who isthis?” I heard from behind me, an interested smile in the man’s voice. “Maxwell Joseph, have you been holding out on your mom and I?”
Shit, shit, shit.
My father leaned down a little, peering at the selfie on my phone. “That’s a nice-looking couple right there.”
I looked at him over my shoulder. “Just a friend, Dad.”
“A friend you went on a date with?” he asked quietly, taking the seat beside me at the head of the table. “It’s about damn time you got back out there.”
I glanced at the other end of the table—for fuck’s sake, Dad—but everyone else was thankfully in their own conversations.
I put my phone back in my pocket as the familiar knot formed in my stomach.
“We went to a wedding together,” I muttered, trying not to attract attention but knowing I needed to get in front of this. “It was no big deal.”
God help me, my dad’s face lit up like sunshine as he said, “That’s how your mom and I met.”
