I fled to the kitchen, hoping company would help. I dropped into a chair next to Mushroom and reached for a plate.
“Dude, what’s wrong with you?” Mushroom asked. “You look angry.”
I sighed as I piled potato salad onto my plate. “Not angry. Just . . . distracted, I guess.”
“Woman trouble?” Tyler asked. “I’m guessing woman trouble.”
I met Isaac’s eyes across the table and shrugged. “Something like that.”
Tyler waited, his fork poised above his plate, a look of expectancy on his face. “And?” he said when I didn’t offer any additional information. “Elaborate and maybe we can help you.”
“There isn’t anything else to say. It’s not recent trouble. I ran into an ex in New York and seeing her messed with my head a little bit.”
“You need a distraction,” Vinnie offered through a bite of fried chicken. “Someone new.”
I hadn’t given much thought to dating over the past year. I’d talked to a few women here and there but getting over Dani had felt like full-time work. Anything beyond talking had felt almost impossible. But maybe it was what I needed.
“Text Jasmine back,” Isaac offered from his end of the table. “Hasn’t she asked you out a dozen times or something?”
Jasmine was an old friend of Isaac’s. She’d gone to high school with him and Dani and recently moved into an apartment a few blocks away. A few weeks back, Isaac had invited her and a few friends over for an afternoon barbecue. I’d barely talked to her, but before she left, she’d asked for my number and we’d been texting off and on ever since. I didn’t know much about her. She had a dog that she often walked up and down Church Street. She was tall and had dark hair and a nice smile, and Isaac had known her long enough he wouldn’t have suggested it if she was crazy.
“Jasmine’s the tall chick with the dog?” Vinnie asked.
“Chicks are baby birds,” Mushroom said, not even lifting his eyes from his food. “Not women.”
The whole table froze, all eyes trained on Mushroom.
He looked up to meet the silence, his face flushing red when he realized everyone was staring at him. “What?” he finally said. “I’m just saying. It’s the twenty-first century. We should know better.”
Laughter spread around the table; I agreed with Mushroom. That wasn’t the funny part. I’d just never expected the comment out of him. Maybe I’d underestimated the guy.
“Jasmine is the tall . . . woman who owns a dog,” Tyler said, glancing sideways at Mushroom. “And she’s attractive . . . not that that’s the most important thing,” he quickly amended. “I’m sure she’s smart and . . .” He shook his head, clearly tiring of being so careful. “Whatever. Isaac’s right. You should ask her out.”
I pulled out my phone. “It feels wrong to be asking someone out because I need a distraction.”
“But maybe you’ll like her,” Isaac said. “Have an open mind. You never know.”
A part of me still felt guilty as I typed out a text asking if she wanted to get together, but I was desperate. Seeing Dani again had ignited something in me I’d worked a long time to suppress. I had to find a way to stamp the flame back out again, for my own sake, and for hers.
Chapter Eleven
Dani
I looked up to see Chase walking toward my desk. A welcome distraction. I glanced one more time at my phone, the texts from Alex still visible on my screen. Even though I’d received them weeks ago, they kept pulling me back, taunting me. Reminding me of his warnings.
Was I in trouble? His question had irritated me, mostly because I didn’t know the answer. Something was definitely up with Sasha. And the longer I was left in the dark, the more I worried it had everything to do with me. I had a huge stack of sketches I wanted to show her, and three different dresses I’d started to work on at home. I’d assumed she’d want to see them, discuss them. Be a part of the design process. But I’d only gotten seconds of her time over the past few weeks. She’d encouraged me to keep working and responded with a Yes, of course when I’d asked if I could be reimbursed for the fabric and other notions I’d purchased to start the new dresses. But that was it. Which didn’t make sense.
It was the end of September—barely three months from debut month. When, exactly, was Alicio going to tell the design team about Sasha’s new venture? What’s more, I had no idea if anything had been done in preparation for the launch. Had there been a photoshoot? Would there be a magazine spread? Promotional material of any kind? I didn’t know everything about debuting a fashion line, but I’d been working at LeFranc long enough to know that we normally worked almost a full year in advance. When everyone was just starting to wear our fall line, we were finalizing what would hit stores in the spring. It didn’t seem realistic that this close to January, there wasn’t a word about Sasha’s dresses anywhere.
Chase dropped the latest edition of Elite Fashion onto my desk with a dramatic thump. “Page seventy-two. Quick.”
I shot him a look—I hated being bossed around—but flipped open the magazine anyway. There didn’t seem to be much on page seventy-two, just a few random blurbs of industry-related news. But then I saw, in the bottom right corner, a photo of Sasha and Alicio on the red carpet of some awards show they’d attended together. I quickly read the caption.
Wedding bells approach for designer Alicio LeFranc and his fiancée, Sasha Wellington. In a recent press release, it was revealed that Wellington—a senior designer at LeFranc—will debut the first in a line of signature gowns bearing Wellington’s name and backed by the Le Franc brand at their December wedding, a preview of the rest of collection, debuting in January. “I’ve been working on the dress for months,” Wellington told Elite in an exclusive interview. “It’s the truest representation of my style and what I want this line of dresses to be. I can’t wait to share it with the world.” For those of us in the fashion industry, that’s one wedding dress we can’t wait to see.
“So she’s finally gone public,” I said. It had been nearly three weeks since I’d handed over Paige’s wedding gown to Sasha’s greedy hands.
“Wait, you knew about this?” Chase said, pulling my attention back to the article. “How has she kept an entire line of wedding dresses a secret from the rest of the design team?”
“I don’t know much,” I said. “But she did mention it.” I bit my lip, hesitating before admitting what Sasha had specifically asked me not to tell Chase. “She actually asked me to be on her design team for the new line. I’ve been working on dresses at home.”
Chase’s eyes went wide. “Dani! That’s excellent news!”
I shook my head, cutting short his congratulations. “I thought it was too, but I don’t know, Chase. Something isn’t right.”
He narrowed his gaze. “What do you mean?”
I looked over his shoulder, making sure we were well and truly alone at my desk. “Sasha has been completely avoiding me since we first talked about it. She’s hardly been at work. She’s avoiding my phone calls. She told me the line is supposed to launch in January, I guess right after the wedding,” I said, motioning to the article, “but she hasn’t said anything about the actual dresses. She made it seem like they already exist, but they might still need a little tweaking so that they coordinate with Paige’s dress and I thought she was going to have me do that. But she doesn’t seem to be concerned about any of it. If she wants me to be lead designer, why is she avoiding me? Why aren’t we collaborating? Brainstorming? Working?”