“Oh,” says Teddy, just as unhelpfully bashful. “Wow.”
If the two of them are just going to blush and stare at his parents’ carpet all day, I figure I officially have license to cut in. I clear my throat loudly. “Okay. Well. I, for one, am glad we talked this all out. Teddy, thoughts?”
Teddy steps over to Chloe. It’s the moment in the rom-com where the tall, lovable goofball is supposed to surprise everyone by saying something swoony, but what happens instead is arguably much more entertaining. “Do you maybe … wanna … geocache together sometime?”
Chloe takes a breath that might be the first one she has taken in two full minutes. “Yeah.”
I let go of Chloe, but only so I can nudge Teddy in the ribs.
“I mean, uh—in a romantic way,” says Teddy.
There’s a beat where she looks so frozen that I wonder if I’m going to have to grab a hairdryer to thaw her back out. Then the hesitant smile on Chloe’s face just about bursts. “Yeah,” she says again.
After letting the two of them moon over each other doofily for a few seconds, I clap my hands together. “Well, in that case, my work here is done.” I turn back to Teddy. “Please just promise me you’re not going to give her the coordinates to Panera and call it a date.”
Teddy frowns. “But the mac and cheese.”
“We’ll workshop this,” I say, gesturing widely at them. “In the meantime, I’m going to bail out Cooper Price before he dissolves into the carpet.”
Except by the time I reach the door, it’s clear he doesn’t need my help. They’ve both burst into laughter over something—Beth with this big, open guffaw I haven’t heard from her yet, and my dad with that quiet wheezing laugh he usually has only when we’re watching something go terribly wrong on The Office. And then a few words that have me matching Chloe’s grin, ear to ear: my dad finishing his wheeze and saying, “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. I should be free Tuesday night, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After an hour of eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches and ribbing my dad within an inch of his life about the “casual coffee” he’s getting with Beth that is “not a date, Millie,” emphasis on “I don’t even know what ‘shipping’ means,” I have reapplied my makeup, squared my shoulders, and headed back to Check Plus Talent. I’m braced as if Oliver, Steph, and Georgie will be lined up and glaring at me in the waiting room like my own personal firing squad, but it’s quiet when I walk in. Just Steph, right at the desk where I left her, finishing up a salad.
“Hey, hon,” she says sympathetically. “You okay?”
I nod on reflex, but oddly, I am. Something pops up on Steph’s computer screen and distracts her for just long enough for me to get one last weird glimpse into what my life might have been like if I’d been right. If she really were my mother, and if instead of coming here to make nice with Georgie, I was coming here to salvage a relationship with Steph instead.
But there’s nothing to salvage, really. Steph turns to me with those bright eyes that I thought looked so much like mine, and it’s clear she still feels the same way about me that she did this morning. That she’s not going anywhere. And from the looks of it, Beth and Farrah aren’t, either.
Everything in the last two weeks may have changed, but it’s nice to think that this, at least, probably won’t.
“So…” I start carefully, sinking into one of the chairs, an eye on Georgie’s office. “On a scale of one to ‘she’ll set me on fire with her eyes,’ how’s Georgie?”
Steph laughs. “Actually, she left for an errand this morning and hasn’t come back yet.”
One small mercy. At least I have a few more minutes with Steph before I get the boot. “Am I totally fired?”
Steph puts her fork down and looks me square in the eye. “I’m guessing not.”
“You … heard what went down, right?”
“Yeah.” Steph checks the hall, and when she’s sure nobody’s coming, she leans in with a wink. “But I have it on good authority she was looking for a way for you and Oliver to split the internship for the rest of the summer, too.”
I almost lose my grip on my bag. “Wait, actually?”
“She thinks you’ve got ‘spunk,’ so. You’ve got that in your favor.”
I’d just dismissed the internship altogether at this point—really, it seemed like collateral damage to all the other things I’d metaphorically set on fire in the last few days—so I’m surprised by how relieved I am. Oliver actually wants to do this with his life, and he’s more than proven he’ll excel at it. At some point the internship just became his in my mind, before this deadline snuck up on us. But I was going to miss the routine of it. The little insights into a world I wasn’t fully part of yet. The kind of smiles on Oliver’s face that I’ve never once gotten to see at school.
Still, I’m going to have to deliver one hell of an apology to get off Georgie’s shit list and back on her Check List after this.
“Have you ever gotten into an argument with her?” I ask.
Steph waves her hand at me. “Plenty of times. But to be fair, she is my cousin.”
“Huh,” I say. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yeah. Why else do you think I’m allowed to skip out for auditions?” She pushes her salad away, looking over at me with a gleam in her eye. “Speaking of … I got another call today. They still want to see me for that project.”
I jump up in my seat. “The one they want to turn into a TV show?”
She nods, her lips pursed but a smile still sneaking its way through them. “Yeah. The producer’s in town with a casting agent this afternoon. They want to meet at a studio uptown. The whole thing’s kind of nuts.”
I hit the desk with my hand. “Steph!”
“We’ll see,” she says, as if my excitement is contagious and she’s trying not to catch it. “It might be nothing.”
“It might be everything,” I counter.
She shakes her head, laughing at my enthusiasm. “Well, if it’s anything at all—thanks for bullying me into it. I needed a good kick in the pants.”
I sit back in my chair, satisfied. “Any time.”
Oliver walks in then, holding his Check List for Steph to sign off on. When he sees me he stops short, but only for a split second. After that all I get as he hands the notebook over to Steph is a curt nod.
Steph signs his task list. “You can go on lunch now,” she says, looking between the two of us with clear curiosity.
“Cool,” he says.
I ease myself up from the chair, taking a step toward him. “Mind if I join?”
He doesn’t say anything. Just cocks his head toward the elevator for me to follow.
“So … what’s your deal now?” Oliver asks as we reach the ground floor. He’s clearly still on his guard, even as he holds the door open for me and tilts his head again to indicate he’s heading over to the bodega to grab a sandwich.
I follow. I don’t know when I decided I was just going to go ahead and tell him the whole truth, but apparently at some point it was decided. I grab on to the strap of my bag to steel myself, then say, “This is going to sound ridiculous.”