“I don’t suppose you could finish the Egyptian walkthrough for me?” Amy asked with a sheepish bite at her lip. “So I can slip out early to meet Kevin?”
My stomach sank. I had a ton more work left to do on prepping the outgoing Chinese pieces, and finalizing the new installation was her job. If I had to finish what I was working on and complete her work for her, I’d never be done in time for when Merry came to pick me up.
It wasn’t our anniversary or anything, but we were going out for a nice dinner in celebration of it being only three more months until our wedding day.
Merry’s actual name was Merriman, which was so antiquated and unique, it basically made up our meet cute. I had heard hisname called at our local coffee shop, and when he picked up his order, I’d had to meet him, despite not having ordered my own coffee yet.
“Thatcannotbe your real name?”
“’Fraid so,” he’d said.
“Merriman? And it’s your first name?”
“It is.” He’d chuckled, he told me later because of my excitement, but I was pretty sure he thought I was a nerd. Thankfully, he liked nerds.
“The only other person I’ve ever heard of who had that name was Merriman Smith, the journalist—”
“Who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the JFK assassination.”
My eyes had lit up that he actually knew that. “It wasn’t even his real first name—”
“It was his middle name, yeah. I know that too.”
I was basically in love already at that point, but realized I didn’t know what else to say. “You don’t, um… shorten it to anything?”
“In private company, I do. But when I tell baristasMerry, my coffee tends to walk off with a soccer mom.”
I’d laughed, and he’d laughed, so captivatingly beautiful, both his voice and his…everything, further enhanced by him actually knowing his history, that when he asked, “Need me to treat you to yours, and then maybe you can buy me dinner later?” I hadn’t been able to say no.
Two years later, we had our date set to make this official.
“Please, Nero,” Amy begged upon my obvious hesitation.
“Amy…”
“Pleeeeease? I will owe you so big this time.”
She owed me for about a million other times, but I was such a sucker for a good love story, and I knew Kevin was a far better man for her than the last dozen dirtbags she’d been with. Thethought of helping someone else achieve their happily ever after always made me weak in the knees.
I could finish my work in the morning, I supposed, if I came in an hour early. The shipment wasn’t going out until noon.
“Fine,” I conceded.
“Yes! You are the best!” She flung herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck in a sloppy hug that nearly caused me to drop the tool I’d been using to clean the last of the Year of the Horse Zodiac figurines. Thankfully, I didn’t, or the heaviness of my brush might have chipped something.
“Okay!” I said with a strained laugh. “Just be aware that the closer we get to my wedding day, the more I am going to cash in some of these favors.”
“Deal!” Amy giggled as she released me. “And sometime soon, how about a double date? My treat!”
“Definite deal,” I said. Only as soon as she darted off to make her rendezvous for tonight, I started going over in my head just how much I had to do. Hopefully, a final walkthrough really was all the new installation needed.
Since I was at least finished with the last of the Zodiac figurines, I carefully packed it away with the others and set all my cleaning tools aside to finish the rest of this in the morning—which meant I could not allow Merry to talk me into a third and fourth cocktail again.
I probably still would, but I’d have to be up at the crack of dawn the next morning, regardless.
It was nearing closing time, and somewhere around the museum was our head curator, Mr. Setterfield. If he noticed I was doing Amy’s job for her again, she might get in trouble, so I’d have to do some creative thinking if I ran into him. Last call to finish up in the gift shop and head toward the exits had already gone over the speaker system, warning patrons that they had less than half an hour left, but even if Merry arrived afterclosing, the security guards all knew him well enough to let him slip in.
On nights like this, when it was quiet and I didn’t see Setterfield around anywhere as I left the back rooms, I liked to pretend that I had already achieved my dream of becoming head curator. Working for this particular museum was already part of my dream job, but I wanted to run things. I wanted the museum to be mine. It was strange, but the idea of having something that I made all the decisions for, being in charge of what I loved most, thrilled me like few things could.
