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“Thatwouldbe rewarding.”
I pulled in front of the building, and as if he’d been waiting for us, my dad came out the front door with a wave.
“Christ, would you look at how excited he is?”
There was a smile in her voice when Sophie said, “He is adorable.”
We spent the next half hour being given the tour guide treatment by my father.
Sophie followed him around the building in her shiny black pumps, fitted suit skirt, and a tailored blouse, rocking the hell out of a yellow hard hat. She genuinely seemed to be interested in all the details my dad shared with her, which was a little surreal because it wasmyproject.
Seeing Sophie all over my work made me feel some sort of something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
The beams were up and the exterior was set, and after spending months poring over the plans, I could squint my eyes and visualize how it was going to look when it was finished. Break room over there, vestibule on the north side, conference room upstairs; the nearly there potential always got me.
I fucking loved it.
As we walked back to the entrance when we were finished, I showed her the 3D renderings on my phone of what it was going to look like when complete. She smiled up at me with dancing eyes and said, “I’d be so excited, if I were you, that I don’t think I’d be able to sleep until it was done.”
I leaned down a little, so only she could hear, and I said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I come here at night all the time, just to sit in the dark and imagine it.”
“Aren’t you afraid of falling and breaking your neck?” she asked around a laugh, her shoes clicking on the cement floor.
“No,” I said. “Because I know this building better than I know my own face.”
“As someone who reads workplace safety data on a daily basis,” she said, looking at me over her glasses, “your behavior terrifies me.”
“Such a buzzkill,” I teased.
“A buzzkill who is starving. Are you going to feed me or what?”
twenty-six
Sophie
I buckled myseat belt as the plane prepared to land in Detroit.
Max called me Wednesday night because he’d been asked to do what he called “the easiest wedding we’ve ever scored.” The bride and groom in this instancebothwanted out but couldn’t bring themselves to call off the wedding and upset the parents, so they were leaving it to the professionals.
Us.
An added bonus: It wasn’t within driving distance, so the unhappy couple had offered to pay for our travel and accommodations.
Yes, please.
I’d never outgrown the love of planes, people watching in airports, and hotel stays, so I was all in on this weekend.
Unfortunately, I’d had meetings all day that I couldn’t miss, so my plane was coming in later than Max’s and I was going to Uber to the hotel. He’d landed in Detroit at two fifteen, and it was now six thirty.
He was probably already drunk in the hotel bar.
Before I left, Larry warned me to stay away from Max’s mouth because he didn’t want me to get hurt. He was convinced that either Max or I was going to end up having feelings for the other if we didn’t stop with the “getting mine” kissing game, and it made sense that he’d think that.
What he didn’t understand, though, was just how opposed we were to relationships and romance and the L-word. He thought I was coming off a breakup and a little bit jaded; he didn’t know that I actually knew the truth about love and everyone else was a fool.
Still, Iwasgoing to stay away from Max’s lips because I didn’t want our non-relationship to progress into some sort of friends-with-benefits situation. I wasn’t sureexactlywhat made the two different, but I knew they weren’t the same thing.
Probably.
