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Kendall just grins. “All right, all right. I’ll stop teasing you. But I do like her. She’s very perky, the complete opposite of you.”
I open my mouth to mention that she lives in my building but I wisely choose not to divulge that bit of information. God knows what Kendall would do with that information.
“How did your blind date go, by the way?” She peers at me curiously.
I avoid her gaze. “Oh, that. Yeah, I forgot about that.”
“You did what?” Kendall asks dangerously.
I scratch at my chin, wondering if I should grow a beard. “I never made it. It slipped my mind.”
“Kendall, if you throw the glass at him and he sues the company, that’s coming from your salary,” Caleb says, calmly.
I see Kendall lower her hand and I feel grateful to my brother-in-law for coming to my rescue.
However, those feelings evaporate the minute he turns to me and narrows his eyes. “Stop ditching those blind dates. I’m the one who gets nagged afterwards.”
“Then tell her to stop setting me up on them.” I sulk into my drink. “I’ve enough on my plate with that fucking Hashem on my ass all the time. I don’t want to add a woman to this mess. It’ll just make things worse than they already are.”
Caleb sets down his papers and eyes me, seriously. “I can promote you to the Head of the Department. You just need to say it.”
I can appreciate his sincerity and I know that I’m lucky Caleb Starr is making this offer to me, but as every other time before this, I have to refuse again. “I didn’t work my ass off all these years just to be promoted to a position because my brother-in-law owns the company. Mom would never forgive me.”
She wouldn’t have.
Mom had worked hard all her life and had always told me to earn every morsel that passes my lips.
“We could always kill Hashem,” Kendall suggests, the blind date matter forgotten.
“I’d rather not have to visit you in prison,” I say, dryly. “Don’t go around piling more work on me.”
“If you want Hashem dead, you let me handle it,” Caleb tells his wife, and
I stare at him for a few seconds, trying to determine whether he’s serious or not. “You two are terrifying,” I say, loudly.
Kendall reaches over and hooks her arm around my neck. Pulling me forward, she plants a noisy smacking kiss on my cheek and beams. “I know.”
The next two weeks are relatively calm with Halley coming every day.
She is a quick worker and efficient, so I can appreciate that about her. However, the woman talks so damn much.
She jumps from topic to topic so quickly that I have to struggle to keep up. One minute she’s telling me about the position of the sofa and then she’s discussing this Chinese baby she saw on the train with the roundest cheeks she’s ever seen.
I have to tell her to shut up at least ten times a day, on a good day. But she doesn’t get offended, simply falling into silence for a few minutes, and then the room is once again filled with her chatter.
I have never met a woman who talks this much.
She doesn’t care that I’m her boss nor is she even the slightest bit afraid that I could very well fire her.
There have been no run-ins at the complex, so it’s like we don’t live in the same building. This makes things less awkward for me.
Hashem also hasn’t dropped by. Part of me is waiting for him to show up any day and make things hard for me. The waiting has me on edge.
So, when he does show up, things take an odd turn.
I’m working on something, once again ignoring Halley as she prattles on about this new shawarma place she found near our apartment complex. Part of me is still listening, however, the mention of food enough to hold some of my attention. Two days ago, she had been telling me about this sushi place.
I can’t even tell her to focus on her work because the woman excels at multitasking.
