My brother Cade sat beside me in the lobby. It was rare for him to join me on business outings. For that matter, it was rare for Cade to do much work in general. My brother had an unfortunate tendency to attract disaster and avoid responsibility. Unfortunately, the work he did do was borderline genius, and we always knew we could bring him in when negotiations reached a standstill with important clients. Cade could convince just about anyone to do just about anything. If he wasn’t so annoyingly useful, we could’ve just told him to stay home and skipped the hassle. But becoming a father seemed to have pushed him to be a little more proactive in being a regular part of the business. He’d never admit as much, but I wondered if he was trying to be a better example for Bear.
I always felt slightly obligated to spend time around Cade, if for no other reason than to keep him from accidentally offing himself. I imagined it wasn’t much different from being in charge of a two-year-old, at least if that two-year-old was hypercapable and clever in the dumbest ways imaginable. I’d saved him from countless near-death experiences. There was the time he’d called to complain that the constant beeping of his carbon monoxide detectors was giving him a headache and making him nauseated. There was also the time he plugged in a drenched extension cord outside to prove it was safe—it wasn’t—and if I hadn’t kicked him away from the cord, I’m not sure he would’ve been able to let go.
Cade leaned his head back against the wall while he played a game on his phone that looked like it was designed for children.
“Can you at least turn the volume down?” I asked.
Cade shot me a withering look. He and my brother Rich were twins. Cade’s life of mischievous living and trouble had somehow managed to make the two of them pretty easy to tell apart. Cade was the one who looked like he’d throw a party at a moment’s notice, and Rich was the one who looked like he’d shut it down and tell everybody to get back to work. They were as close to polar opposites as you could get, but I supposed that wasn’t a shocker from identical twins. Everyone wanted an identity, but twins had to work harder to carve out their own since they were always being compared.
Cade tapped the buttons on the side of his phone, and I was fairly sure the game got louder. “How’s that?” he asked.
“Remind me again why you decided to tag along for this?”
“Because of your little speech?” He tried to change his voice to imitate mine. “Rich and I are so busy pairing off and getting in relationships that we’re going to neglect the business.” He paused, mimicking pushing a pair of glasses up his nose. “Blah, blah. You’re worried that it’s going to all fall on your shoulders. Blah, blah. You have a fetish for women dressed as pirates, and you fantasize about what they’d do with their peg legs. What was it you said, again? ‘I want ’em hilt deep in me dark star’? Or was it ‘elbow deep and harrrrd.’ Emphasis on the ‘arrr.’”
I sighed but couldn’t help grinning a little. “Why is that so weirdly specific? Also, that’s disgusting. Dark star? Do you seriously talk about assholes enough that you need to get that creative in nicknaming them?”
“Every good fetish is full of details. Like I knew this woman once who wanted me to role-play a crow.” Cade leaned in and lowered his voice. “But she had clipped my wings, and she was keeping me prisoner. Like a sex slave. But a crow, so I had to kind of—” He started trying to do something to me with his arms outstretched like two big, stiff wings.
I stared at him, and the look on my face made him trail off. “I was going to say you should be less specific, because it makes me wonder if you could make something so obscure up. But now I see you’re just pulling from past experiences.”
He shrugged. “You’ve never been with somebody who was into the pirate stuff?” He made an imaginary hook with his index finger and tried to pull my shirt open while making vague, raspy pirate noises. “Where do you keep the booty?” he demanded.
I chuckled and slapped his hand away. “Jesus Christ. No wonder we stopped trying to talk you into working more. It’s like bring-your-kid-to-work day.”
“You wish I was your kid.”
“What is that even supposed to mean?”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Just know that if your genius plan to give Dan a huge check fails, I’ll be right here with my unstoppable negotiation skills.”
“The big-check plan never fails,” I said. “Give me two minutes in there, and Bark Bites will be ours.”
“Bark Bites will be ours,” Cade mocked. “You sound like a supervillain.”
I shook my head and tried to get my head back on the work. This wasn’t the typical company we tried to flip at Sion. Usually, we aimed for the big, national kind of companies. It had always amazed me how even the biggest failing companies had one problem at the root of all their issues. If you identified all the symptoms and worked your way backward, you’d eventually find that single, glaring problem. The key. Sometimes, it was an employee, a company policy, a branding error, or even a clerical mistake. Whatever it was, I loved the challenge of finding it and fixing it.
The door to the lobby opened, and I stared for a few moments before I realized who I was looking at.
Miranda Collins. The afternoon sun blazed in behind her so at first all I could make out was the vague, glowing outline of her. I had to stop myself from thinking she looked angelic in that moment. It was just a trick of the light. She walked a straight line past the bench where Cade and I sat. Her head was held high, and her eyes never so much as flickered from staring straight ahead.
Seeing her always made me feel strange. I knew she still wanted nothing to do with me, but she took it a step further. Miranda was aggressively indifferent toward me, and not just the kind of indifferent that meant she’d intentionally avoid saying bless you if I sneezed in front of her. No. It had gone far, far beyond that. There was a kind of hatred in her eyes that, like good wine, had fermented and grown stronger over time. On the rare occasions I’d caught her looking at me since my brothers and I had come back to West Valley, I could’ve sworn my soul had tried to shrivel up and hide from the intensity of those eyes.
But, I had to admit the fact that she loathed me so much was also a little bit sexy. I also couldn’t help thinking that she was the Mount Everest of challenges. I mean, what possible key could there be to a problem that complex? What could I find in that tangle of old, sour bitterness she called a brain that would get me in? Sometimes, I thought the only way to fix what had gone wrong between Miranda and me was time travel. Hell, maybe that was why I’d always had such a nerdy fascination with the topic.
Without going back in time, how could I possibly fix what was broken between us?
It was an old question I’d asked myself a dozen times before, but it didn’t stop me from looking at it again. I studied her as she passed, as if some subtle hint in her body language might hold the key. She wore her long blonde hair in a braided ponytail down her back. Her outfit was crisp and pressed, like she’d somehow managed to commute here without sitting down and putting the slightest wrinkle in her skirt. I distantly decided I wouldn’t have put it past her to own a portable steam press to touch up her clothes throughout the day.