Boomerang (27 page)

Ethan

Q: Do you live more in the past, the present, or the future?

I
manage maybe two hours of sleep, then I meet Alison for breakfast at John O’ Groats, where I push some food around while we both act like we can do this. Remake ourselves. Or whatever the fuck it is we’re doing.

Alison asks me about my parents and my brother. She asks about the Dynamos and Jason and Isis. She chips away, getting me to talk about the people and things I care about until I start to relax in spite of myself.

Then she asks about Boomerang.

“What’s Adam Blackwood like?”

“Mixing in a little work, Alison?”

She smiles, a little guiltily. “I was just curious. Dad’s trying to get a read on him.” She takes a sip of her latte—dusted with cinnamon—and picks at her egg-white omelet. “Do you like working there?”

“Yeah, I do. I’ve met some really good people.”

My mind does a stop and pivot, suddenly one hundred percent focused on Mia. On her green eyes and sweet smile. The way she felt the night I kissed her in her mother’s studio. She was so responsive, so turned on. I want that again. I
need
that.

Alison must sense that I’m distracted because her eyes narrow on me, then take on a resigned sadness. She looks down at her latte. “It means a lot to me that you’re here, Ethan.”

“I almost blew it off.”

“I probably would have if our situation was reversed.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “Give yourself a little credit.”

She continues to stare at her coffee, but her eyes begin to fill with tears, which shocks me. Prior to this Remaking Us campaign, I’ve only seen her cry once, when her horse, Zenith, broke a leg and had to be put down. I pull a napkin out of the holder and hand it to her, flashing back on Raylene. This is starting to become a habit for me.

“Thanks.” Alison takes it, but she tucks it beneath her plate. She’s already gotten herself under control again. No hour-long cry for her.

“How’s your mom?” I ask, because it feels like I should.

She looks up and pastes on a smile. “Oh, you know. Raising millions of dollars for charity. Doing lunch. Getting Botox. The usual.”

Her mom is a piece of work. She’s the most self-absorbed human being I’ve ever known. I don’t know what to say next, but I’m saved when her phone buzzes.

“It’s my dad,” Alison says, fishing it out of her purse and declining the call. “I told him I was seeing you this morning.”

Okay. This is awkward. “Tell him I said hi.”

“You know him. That’s not going to cut it. He’ll ask me a hundred questions about you, then decide to call you himself. He wanted to call you weeks ago when we—ended. I swear, he almost disowned me. He misses you.”

I smile, because the idea of her dad missing anything except making money is hard to imagine. He’s a shrewd entrepreneur like Adam, but where Adam seems to have fun in business, Alison’s father is ruthless. Graham Quick and I have nothing in common, which makes me both nonthreatening and interesting to him. Plenty of times on trips it felt like he wanted to spend more time with me than with Alison.

That is one screwed-up family, but I got along with them okay.

“Well, tell him he can call anytime,” I say.

“He’ll probably ask you to golf with him.”

“That’d be great. I’d love to school him again.”

“He’ll keep inviting you until he wins.”

“Then we’re going to be playing a lot of rounds.”

Alison’s smile fades and her long fingers flatten on the table. “You bring out the best in people, Ethan.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. And I can’t take this non-Alison character any longer. I have to call her out. “You’re pretty different, you know that?”

She shakes her head. “No . . . I’m not. Only with you, Ethan, believe me. I guess I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” She straightens her back in a familiar gesture. It reminds me of all the times I’ve heard her mother harp on her for slouching even when she wasn’t. “And I mean what I said,” she continues. “About you. I think that’s why I held onto you so long.”

“Because I was your life coach?”

“No. Because you were my life preserver.”

I’m emotionally beat up by the time Alison drops me off at work. I need time to think, to process, but as the elevator rises to the seventeenth floor, my numbness wears off and I remember how Alison happened. Mia’s words at the restaurant last night come back to me.

Cookie sent a text. . .

I take off like a horse out of the blocks as soon as the elevator doors open, barreling through the lobby, down the hall and straight into Cookie’s office.

I find her sitting at her desk, signing a stack of documents with a sleek silver pen as Paolo watches on.

“What the hell are you trying to pull, Cookie?”

My entire body pulses with anger.

The silver pen stops, and Cookie looks up. “
Excuse
me?”

“I know what you did. If you didn’t like Mia and me going around you to Adam about the booth, fine. But that was a
low
way of fighting back.”

Cookie rises from her desk in slow motion, her eyes the same color as the pen clutched in her hand.

“Mr. Vance,” she says, sounding more professional than I’ve ever heard her. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Come on . . . Are you trying to tell me what happened was a
coincidence
? Don’t pile on the BS now.”

Paolo has turned pale at her side. For an instant, I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. That maybe some crazy glitch happened, where my original date canceled and the Boomerang algorithms kicked in and reassigned my ex to fill the gap.

But there’s no way that happened. This shit did not happen organically. Cookie was pissed about Boothgate and found her perfect weapon in Alison. She’s probably been planning it for weeks.

“O-kay,” Cookie says, in a forced chipper voice. “No more piling on the BS. Understood, Mr. Vance. Oh! Speaking of coincidences, it’s simply perfect that you’re here because I had something I wanted to tell you. About the show? Your booth budget has been reduced. Effective immediately. That’s all me, not Adam—God forbid I
BS
you anymore. You’ll have to eliminate your precious video game from your plan. Now get out before you upset me, you irrational little peon.” She drops back into her chair and starts signing again.

Before I do something
really
stupid, I force myself to leave.

I knew it. This is war.

Word spreads around the office at lightning speed. No one says anything to me, but I can feel that everyone’s heard. Whenever anyone comes by the kitchen, there isn’t the usual chatter. They just grab coffee in silence and go.

Mia is quiet too. She keeps her focus on her work, barely sparing me a glance. As the hours drag by, I get the impression I’ve disappointed her somehow, and that’s the part that sucks the most. Her checking in on me last night was the only thing that kept me from losing my mind. Just knowing she was thinking of me, even if it was just for a small part of her night, made a difference.

Now I feel like a villain in her eyes and in this office—exactly the opposite of what I’ve been working toward. I’ve given my best to this company, and I know I’m doing good work. It’s unbelievable that one below-the-belt attack by Cookie could screw up everything.

Three months ago I had all this forward momentum. College graduation. Dreams of landing this great job and paying down loans before moving on to law school. Now I’m somehow doing this backward slide and I can’t find a way to pull myself out of it.

I don’t realize it’s noon until Mia stands and grabs her purse. “Can I take you to lunch?”

“Sure,” I say, before I can think about it.

We walk to the garage and climb into her car in awkward silence.

“I’m not hungry,” I say. “So whatever you want is fine. I’m just along for the ride.”

Mia’s hands come off the steering wheel. It’s dim in the underground garage, and I can only see the contours of her face, but I know this look of hers. A mixture of understanding and warmth. The tension lets out of my shoulders, and I realize that’s all I’ve wanted all morning. To see her look at me with that expression.

“It’ll blow over, Ethan,” she says. “You know how Cookie is. But I’m sorry about the video game.”

I make a mental note to strangle Paolo for being so accurate in his gossip spreading. “No need to be sorry. I’m still doing it.”

“You’re . . . What?”

“Cookie approved the funds for the game already. I’m not calling Zeke to cancel it.”

Mia shifts so she’s facing me. She’s wearing a tight white dress that hugs her every curve, and I kinda want to thank her. Her hotness is a welcome distraction from all the life crap I’m dealing with.

“Ethan, are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure. It feels like Cookie is—I don’t know—hazing me or something. Anyway, there’s no way I’m backing down.” I smile. “You should be celebrating. The job’s pretty much yours now, Curls. Congrats, winner.”

Mia leans back against the headrest. “No . . . We’ll fix this, Ethan. I’ll help. I promise.”

A weird emotion claws up my throat. My hands fist with how much I suddenly want to hold her. If I could just hold her right now, none of this would fucking matter to me. Not Alison or the goddamn video game that’s going to get me fired. Yeah. Holding her would “fix this,” and I have to bite the inside of my cheek not to ask her for that.

I set the rules, after all. We’re coworkers. Coworkers don’t cuddle.

So I play-punch her on the shoulder instead.

“Hey,” I say. Time to lighten the freakin’ mood. “Want to go bowling with me and eleven nine-year-olds tomorrow night?”

Chapter 35

Mia

Q: Are you the sporting type?

N
o one should look this good in a pair of bowling shoes, but of course Ethan looks like a god. Like he should be in a loincloth, flinging a discus instead of hefting a sapphire-blue bowling ball and staring down the pins as though they’ve personally insulted his mother.

The alley is neon-lit and retro. Every server looks like Rosie the Riveter or an escapee from a swing band. They circle with heaping platters of wings and bowling-pin-shaped beer glasses.

I drift around for a bit, filming the couples there on dates, the single-girl bowling leagues checking out the single-guy bowling leagues. But time after time, my lens finds its way back to Ethan.

All around him, a squirming battalion of nine-year-olds wrestle, knee-bounce on the fake leopard skin and vinyl benches, and generally create a moving cloud of pandemonium while Rhett tries unsuccessfully to marshal them into teams.

“Come on, guys,” he says. “Let’s see a little discipline.”

He’s already made the mistake of letting them enter their own names into the computer for scoring, which means that my bowling compadres have names like “DUCK LIPS” and “MR. BUTTS.”

Ah, nine. Such a precious age.

Ethan rises up on his toes, lunges forward a few steps, and fires a missile down the alley, practically shattering the pins. A strike. Of course.

“Way to go, Coach!” says a husky kid with a white-blond faux hawk.

Ethan swivels and grins. Jerking a thumb at the pins, he says, “You’re up, Butts.” Which of course makes the kids hysterical.

For now, it’s just Ethan, Rhett, the kids, and me. Most of the kids, that is. I don’t see Raylene’s son or Raylene yet.

I need to head out early to make one of Skyler’s concerts, but I
have
to tell Ethan that I’m the one who switched the Boomerang date. The guilt is chewing away at me, and I’ve already spent three whole days watching Ethan commit professional suicide without being able to cough up the words.

I take a deep breath. Then two more. Then give myself a pep talk along the lines of “Mia, don’t be such a chicken,” and then I part the sea of sticky boys, most of whom smell like fried food and ozone.