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“So I’m going to leave you to get everything started, and I’ll be back in about—” Finn paused. “Well, how long do you need?”
“An hour,” I said, smiling at him sweetly. I couldn’t believe how quickly I had gone from being rude to sucking up to him, but I suppose that was what a hundred fifty thousand dollars did when you were a broke ass.
“An hour?” he said. “Oh, very funny, Harriet.” He took a step toward me. “How long really? Twenty minutes?”
“Twenty minutes for eggs Benedict and potatoes.”
“Oh, you’re going to do potatoes as well?”
“Yes. I’m going to do my very special Campbell potatoes, and they take thirty minutes minimum, so…”
“So you’ve got thirty minutes, then,” he said. He nodded for a couple of seconds and then smirked. “Who would’ve thought it, huh?”
“Who would’ve thought what?”
“Who would’ve thought that we would be standing here in my kitchen just days after you were being impertinent in that coffee shop.”
“Not me,” I said.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to ask to put me over his lap. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. At least it would get me out of having to cook eggs Benedict.
“Can I ask you why you did that?”
“Why I did what?”
“Why you pretended you were making me coffee with Rwandan beans.”
“Because you were being a jerk.”
“But I don’t recall saying anything rude to you.”
“You came into the coffee shop on your phone having a loud, obnoxious conversation. I was waiting to serve you, staring at you. You wouldn’t make eye contact, and then when you did order, you were being just rude and obnoxious and… I don’t know. It rubbed me the wrong way. And yes, maybe I was slightly in the wrong. Maybe I should have told you we didn’t have any Rwandan beans. And maybe I should have told you that I was going to use a Keurig.”
“But…”
“But what?”
“I got to hear your reasoning that’s going to make this all okay.”
“I didn’t say it was going to make this all okay,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just saying that it’s just been a really rough week, and—”
“I know,” he said. “You lost your job, and you lost your apartment or something?”
“The place where I was living got sold, and they gave us a week to vacate. But because I lost my job, I wasn’t going to have a paycheck. And because I wasn’t going to have a paycheck, I wasn’t going to be able to find somewhere else to live, and then I’d have to live with my parents, who are both crazy, and I just don’t want to do that. And they may be getting a divorce, so they may have to sell the house anyway, and then we’d all end up in the street and…” I bit down on my lower lip. “Well, you can see it’s been a long week.”
“Is it always like this with you, Harriet?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is it always so animated?”
“I don’t consider myself animated. I just consider myself normal.”
“Okay then,” he said, smirking. “I suppose you’ve not spent much time in Manhattan or LA or Tokyo or London or… I was going to say Paris, but then you spent a lot of time in Paris, didn’t you?”
“Oh yeah, just the best years of my life were spent in Paris.”
