Henry: Sorry—who is this?
I do a real facepalm. Idiot!
Me: Oh sorry. It’s me, Quinn. The powdered sugar donut girl.
“Yes, smooth. Remind him about the donut,” Thomas says, reading over my shoulder.
I let out a growl. “Dang it, Thomas! I’m flustered. Leave me alone.”
The dots appear again, and Thomas and I keep our eyes on my phone. Now Holly is peering over with us.
Henry: Right. The pretty smile. How are you?
“Oh, the pretty smile,” Holly says. “I like him already.”
“How should I reply? And don’t,” I say, holding a hand up to Thomas’s mouth to stop his comment, “say the whole ‘I’ll show you mine’ thing.”
Thomas clamps his mouth shut after I take my hand away, like a toddler whose fun I’ve just spoiled.
I look down at my phone in my hand.
Me: I’m good, how about you?
Henry: Not bad. Could use a drink. You up for it?
“He wants to get a drink,” I announce to the table.
“Boring,” Thomas says.
I roll my eyes at him. “What should I do?”
“Go get a drink, of course,” says Bree.
“You think?” I look to her, wondering if she will go back to the “make him wait” position she took earlier.
She nods her head at me, her eyes bright. I look to Holly, who’s giving me the same response.
“You should go,” Thomas says. “I suppose your outfit will work.” He eyes me up and down. Holly and Bree both tell him to shut up in unison.
I look down at my a-line, V-neck maxi dress. It goes to the floor, emphasizing my upper body in all the right places and deemphasizing my lower body, which tends to be more pear-shaped. My hair is pulled back in a low bun at the base of my neck, large gold hoop earrings in my ears.
I let out a breath. “Okay, you guys. I’m going to do this.” I send out a text to Henry asking where he’d like to meet, and we set up a place only a couple of blocks down the street from Hester’s.
I say my goodbyes to my friends and then grab my purse and stand up, and then before I can take a step away, I sit back down.
“What’s wrong?” Holly asks, her face concerned.
I twist my lips to the side, trying to think of how to articulate what’s bothering me.
“I was just thinking that we’re going to meet, and this is our first time really meeting, and I don’t have powdered sugar all over me this time—which is good, but I don’t want to talk about work, and inevitably when I meet someone and they ask me what I do, I tell them, and then it becomes about that. And then they Google me. And then they see it. The . . . the video.” I don’t need to explain that one to my friends. They were all here for the video of me that went viral. And, I suspect, have added their own numbers to the views on YouTube. It hit eighteen million and slowed down, thankfully.
Thomas puts a hand out. “Please stop with the word vomit.”
“You guys,” I whine to my friends, dramatically plopping my purse in my lap. “What should I do?”
“Don’t tell him,” Thomas says, lifting a shoulder.
I cock my head to the side. “Don’t tell him?”
“About your job.”
“That’s like question number two after ‘How do you like the weather?’”
“You live in Orlando and it’s the summer. The weather sucks.”
I harrumph. “You know what I mean. I can’t exactly leave that out.”
“Make something up.”
“I can’t lie.”
He looks to the side for a beat. Then he snaps his fingers and points at me. “I’ve got it.”
Chapter 3
“So, Quinn, what do you do for work?”
Well, it wasn’t the second question out of his mouth. It was the third.
Sitting at a little round table in a dimly lit, swanky bar, I almost didn’t recognize him when I first arrived. He’s in a light-blue button-down dress shirt and dark blue jeans, his hair combed back and away from his face. He’s actually hotter than I remembered. Which is pretty crazy since my brain tends to overexaggerate things.
Not sweaty and covered in powdered sugar, I’m fairly confident that I look substantially better than when we first met. Also, upon arrival, Henry said I looked “lovely.” So there’s that.
So far we’ve discussed the weather, although briefly, and it was mostly about how Henry was adjusting after having moved here. He moved from London to Florida only eight months ago, and the humidity is still getting to him. I’ve spent thirteen years—half my life—getting used to it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’m still working on that.
Then he asked where I went to university. And I giggled at the way he said it, having only read it in books or heard it in movies. My alma mater—University of Florida—seemed to impress him. His school was prestigious sounding, and I immediately forgot the name as soon as he said it, as one does in these situations. From the year he graduated, I was able to do quick math in my head, putting his age around thirty-two.
And that’s when we got to the fateful question. I fumble with the edge of the cocktail napkin my wineglass is sitting on, not sure if I want to go with Thomas’s plan. My stomach is rumbling, a bundle of nerves. Maybe I should just tell him the truth. The whole truth and not half of it as Thomas had said I should do. I could even pull up the video and show it to him and we could get it all out in the open.
“I restore antique furniture,” I say, finally. I guess my mouth has gone with Thomas’s idea. I hear one of my camp counselors in my head telling me to “speak my truth,” and I push it away.
“That’s brilliant,” Henry says, the dimple in the right corner of his mouth extra pronounced as he smiles. His eyes do a magical crinkling thing that makes my heart bounce and sputter like a breaking-down car engine. I think it wants to take off at full speed, but it’s been so long since it’s felt something like this. Boring Brady never elicited these kinds of feelings.
“How long have you been doing that?”
I look to the side at the wall behind Henry, where a framed picture of a sunsetting beach hangs. At least that’s what I think it is, in this dim lighting. Laughter breaks out over the low thrum of the background music from someone sitting at the bar.
I force my eyes back to Henry, who’s looking at me intently. The blue of his shirt makes his eyes pop. A light five-o’clock shadow dusts his jaw.
“I’ve been doing it for a long time, actually,” I say. “But I didn’t start making money until about three years ago. My site is called Quinn Creates; you can look it up.”
My fluttering heart quits its sputtering and plummets, landing in the bottom of my stomach when I think of the half-truth I’ve just told him. It’s true, I do restore antique furniture, and I’m pretty good at it. Actually, Quinn Creates has become a fairly lucrative side job for me, since doing the midday news is a total crap-paying job. No one tells you that when you’re in college and have stars in your eyes and think you’re going to take the news world by storm. Kind of hard to do when you mostly live paycheck to paycheck. Yep, it’s that bad. You’d think a market with half the country’s news—nearly every crazy crime story originates in this lovely state—would pay better. Morning and evening news fare better, and someday I hope to be doing one of those. Either one, I’m not picky. And if I could get away from that viral video long enough, it might actually happen.