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Her gaze drifts down to her big ring. “Funny thing. I picked this up at my friend Rachel’s jewelry shop when she first opened it a year or so ago. Bought it as a show of support for a friend. I suppose it does look a little like an engagement ring.” She shrugs, with a rueful smile. “But I guess Special Edition’s not in the cards.” She frowns. “None of this with us is.”
I sigh, wishing she weren’t so damn right. Every step of the way we were thwarted. “Neither dating nor business?”
“Seems that way.”
She’s resigned, and I suppose I am too. I still don’t have time for a relationship, and while it’d have been fun to date before, now things are…almost awkward between us. “It was fun while it lasted. Like…a tornado.”
She tilts her head, studying me skeptically. “Tornados are fun?”
“The tornado of you,” I say.
She smiles, then drops a chaste kiss to my cheek. “Bye, Gage.”
“Bye, Elodie.”
As she walks away, I can’t entirely believe we went from the greatest date ever to…nothing.
Well, more than nothing.
We went to a fantastic business idea that won’t see the light of day.
I watch the tornado retreat then go on my way.
12
THE OUTFIT OF THE DAY IS…
Elodie
“Then you put your hands right here, like this?” I ask Amanda that evening as I wrap my palms around clay like I’m holding a teacup, but it’s really, well, a lump.
She gives me the look that says I’m not trying hard enough. “No, you have to pinch it, like I told you last time,” she says, then shows me again how to make a pinch pot, which is allegedly the easiest thing to make in ceramics, but as far as I’m concerned it’s ten times harder than mixing chocolate.
She rolls her eyes my way. “How can you make a cinnamon and cayenne pepper chocolate bar taste amazing and not make a pot for a tiny little plant?”
“They are different skills,” I say, defending my shapeless, formless mass of clay in the face of her crafts-womanship. She’s putting the finishing touches on a vase that’s worthy of Instagram adoration. “But also, in my defense, I’m having flashbacks to Ghost. It’s distracting.”
“What’s Ghost?”
I gasp. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
After she humors me through clay-making at her favorite pottery studio, she heads to the sink to wipe down her tools, tossing me a glance as she says, “So, what happened with your meeting with the hotel guy?”
My shoulders sag. I give her a smile—the kind that’s really a frown. “It’s not going to work out.”
“What? Why? Your idea was so good. Not that I would know personally. Cocktails are gross. But chocolate is awesome. How did he not like it? What is wrong with him?”
“Nothing. Felix loved it. He chef’s kissed it. But he thought we were engaged, and he ideally wants to lease the space to a couple that’s…committed,” I say, sketching air quotes.
“What’s the problem then?” It’s asked with genuine curiosity as she lines up her tools on a towel on the counter.
Isn’t it obvious? “Well, we’re not really engaged.”
“Put on a ring and say you are,” she says easily as she moves back to her station to gather her unused clay in a bag.
I grab some coils and drop them into the plastic. “But that’s sort of lying, isn’t it?” Actually, it’s not sort of. It is. But I’m curious about her take.
“Sure. But he’s being seriously patriarchal,” she says with the certainty of a thirteen-year-old feminist.
