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Inside, the coolness of the air conditioning helped with the jittery feeling in the pit of my stomach.
In, out. Breathe.
You can do this.
I repeated the mantra over and over, although didn’t know why that was even a question in my head. Of course I would do this. What other choice did I have?
We approached the clerk’s desk. The red-haired woman behind the desk was young, and I wondered for a moment how on earth she’d ended up at a job like this. She clearly didn’t want to be there. She was chewing a thick wad of bubblegum, smacking her lips loudly, stretching it out of her mouth with her tongue.
Walker and I exchanged a glance, the first we’d shared since leaving the lawyer’s office.
“Ahem.”
Walker cleared his throat when she didn’t look up or acknowledge our presence in any way. She blinked her heavily shadowed lids—pink glitter, though I couldn’t see how that was office-appropriate in the slightest—and looked up at us.
“You guys got an appointment?”
“Yes.” Walker tilted his head. “For Walker Prince and Mackenzie Henson?”
It occurred to me then that we’d never even bothered to change my last name. A choice for a modern couple, we had called it.
“Hmph.” The young woman looked entirely unimpressed with us. “Hold on.”
She turned to the computer, clicking away. Her nails made the most obnoxious clackity-clack-clack sound on the plastic keys as she typed something into the system. She kept popping the gum in her mouth too. It would have been wildly annoying had Walker not nudged me, pulling a mocking lip-smacking face with his eyes screwed up. I couldn’t help but snort, hiding my face behind my hand.
The woman looked up at us, her penciled brow raised. Walker’s mocking expression was suddenly and conveniently gone.
“Something wrong?” she asked, her tone even less helpful than it had been when we’d arrived.
Walker cleared his throat. “Nope. Nothing at all.”
She didn’t look convinced but went back to clicking away on her keyboard.
“I don’t see your name on here,” she huffed out. “Like, are you sure that you even have an appointment?”
“Positive.”
She groaned and rolled her eyes.
“It’s really good to be out here with such good vibes and positive attitudes today,” Walker said, overly chipper as he leaned onto the counter. “Just a day full of sunshine.”
I snorted again as the clerk looked up at him, her expression flickering from mild inconvenience to outright irritation.
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Nope.” He grinned brightly at her, and I almost laughed at the confused look on her face.
“Whatever.” She stood up, pushing herself away from the desk.
“Let me go see if you’re written in somewhere.”
She sauntered away, her heels clicking as hard as her nails had against the keyboard. Walker and I watched, and for just one tiny moment, the distance between us seemed to vanish. I wouldn’t have thought it would take a gum-chewing, fake-nail wearing bimbo to ease the tension between us, but I found myself suddenly, oddly grateful for her.
“You think if we talked with, like, a lot of likes and mouth smacks, she’d talk to us like we were clients and not hobos off the street?” he mused, turning to me. A smirk tugged at my lips.
“I doubt it. We’d probably confuse her even more.”
We snickered, and I let myself forget for a second what we were even here for. It was just me and Walker, having fun as we dealt with some snotty woman behind a counter. But eventually, that snotty woman came back, holding papers in her hands. She looked highly unimpressed.
