There’s only so sad you can be on someone else’s behalf, and I didn’t think Sidney would appreciate me getting all weepy over their, like, teenage self. But that sounded so damn lonely. “It seems like it worked out? I mean for Arman. He got this totally extraordinary older sibling he can watch twice a week on YouTube.”
They kind of laughed. “Yeah. I don’t know about extraordinary, but I feel confident we aren’t going to lose touch.”
“Not with him commenting on every video.” I risked touching their arm, just lightly, the way I liked it when they touched mine. If Mara was right, they didn’t share much, which made this...even more special than it already felt. “Thank you for telling me. About your brother.”
“Thank you for listening. I don’t want to bore anyone, but I think my little owlet is pretty awesome.”
“I think so too. And you’re a really good role model. Like, you’re doing a great service and illustrating your relationship principles in real time, for your brother, for your fans, for whoever stumbles upon these videos. Though I totally wish we had a cooler ship name.”
“Now we know: date only based on the coolness of your ship name with that person.” Sidney’s voice regained some solidity. “I think this puts Your Spinster Uncle out of a job, actually. The number one priority of all relationships is ship name.”
I shouldered into their shoulder. “You should write a self-help book. That’s how you’ll make your millions, solving all dating problems once and for all.”
“There could be an app too. ‘Forget all those dating sites with their complex algorithms based on how much you might like another human being! Try our app, which uses an arbitrary algorithm taking into consideration only your first names!’”
“Honestly?” I thought about my friends and their adventures in online dating. “I think people would install that just for fun. It might work. Like, you’d have a self-selected dating pool based on people thinking that was entertaining.”
“And we wouldn’t let them even choose genders or race or height or whatever. It’d be the purest form of dating: based only on your names fitting in a catchy way.”
“Alas, we would never have gotten together.” I rested my head against their arm and sighed.
After a brief hesitation, they put their arm around my shoulders. “There, there. We’ve already gotten together. No app can keep us apart now.”
I readied my best Braveheart voice. “No app can keep us apart now!”
Both of us giggled.
“We are ridiculous,” they said.
“Yeah. It’s rad, right?”
“Pretty much.”
We sat close in our chairs and enjoyed the show in the comments until I went home.
Chapter Fifteen
The day of The Big Fitting—i.e. Oscar, Mason, and I getting fitted for our wedding rental suits—dawned on a Wednesday in the first week of February. I got to work early so I could get out early and was a little shocked that Jack was already in the fish bowl. Since most of my event planning time was at odd hours, I didn’t usually get to the fish bowl right away, but I had a few things I could knock out with emails to vendors. And it’d give me an opportunity to get ahead on proofreading the “Fling bricks” (the packets we’d hand out to everyone in attendance).
“Oh. Hey, Jack. Um.” I was so taken aback I just stood in the doorway for a few seconds staring at him. He looked terrible. Like he hadn’t slept. His sleeves were rolled up, but where on Sidney it looked intentional and sexy, on Jack it just looked messy. His hair was half-combed, and a comb was sitting on the table next to him.
As if he noticed it at the same time, he grabbed it and shoved it into his gym bag. “Why are you here this early?”
“Trying to get some hours in so I can leave early for an appointment later.” Should I have checked with Jack before doing that? I was his supervisor. Did that mean I could do whatever I wanted or had a greater responsibility to make sure he knew where I was? I couldn’t decide. I didn’t want him to think I was skiving off work, so I added, “Deb lets me flex a little when I need to.”
He waved a hand. “That makes sense. I’ll be out of your hair soon. I like working here because it’s so quiet in the morning. No one gets to this floor until nine.”
“Yeah, same.” I put my stuff down at the other end of the table and went about my usual setting-up routine, booting up my laptop, glancing over my lists for the last few days to make sure I had a plan for everything I’d meant to get done and crossed off everything I’d gotten done. The shared spreadsheet made it clear that Jack had done...a lot. At this rate we might not need full-time hours for the next two weeks.
I also checked the voice mail box for the other job I was covering, took a few notes, made a new list for that job, and a new list for the Fling.
By then the coffee maker thing was heated up, so I went back to the coffee/tea room to make a cup. (In what I considered to be one of the more genius inventions, the coffee/tea rooms were converted closets with sinks, pod coffee makers, and hot water dispensers for tea, which meant that you could stay caffeinated all day long without going too far away from your area, and it wasn’t a full-on kitchen which meant no one could corner you there with two hours of small talk.)
After a moment of thought I made another cup and pocketed some creamers and sugars. There was always the possibility Jack would throw it back in my face—literally or, more likely, figuratively—but the guy looked grim so it was worth a shot.
I set the cup down near him and the cream and sugar beside it. “Thought you might want some.”
He laughed harshly. “I look that bad, huh?”
“It’s seven a.m. Who doesn’t look bad at this time of day?”
He glanced up. “You don’t look bad, Declan.” He winced. “Shit, I don’t mean that in a harassment way, I’m not hitting on you. I just mean it looks like you took a shower this morning.”
Yikes. I mean, technically I was his supervisor? But he was definitely older than me. I would for sure have felt creeped out if I thought he was seriously trying to pick me up.
“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” he said stiffly. “I didn’t mean to. I’m not humaning well today.”
“It’s early, you have time to regain your humaning abilities. And I totally did not think you were hitting on me, it’s fine. I brought you coffee, though, if that helps.” Only now it seemed kind of weird. “Um, I’m...also not hitting on you.”
He offered a wan smile as he pulled the coffee toward him and dumped two creamers and two sugars into it. “Understood. We are officially not sexually harassing each other.”