Page 40 of Just A Little Magic

“This went much better than I thought it would. I expected you to talk nonsense about integrity and not cheating and letting Owen come to you, blah, blah, blah,” Rory said with a laugh.

“Oh, fuck that.” If it meant getting a date with Owen that he couldn’t run away from, I was willing to fix the auction. “Where’s Anders? Is his boss being a dick?”

Anders was more their friend than mine, but I knew enough to know that his boyfriend-slash-boss was a Grade-A asshole. For the first time, I saw a hint of chagrin and nervousness in their expressions.

“Anders had some concerns about this plan,” Rory finally offered.

“Concerns about me?” That surprised me because, as far as I knew, Anders and I were cool with each other.

“No, not you. With the plan in general but mostly with our part in it,” Jakob added.

“What does that mean exactly?”

The pause stretched to an incredibly awkward length.

With a huff, Jakob answered, “He refused to come today. He said we should stay out of it, and it didn’t matter how much he thought you two were meant for each other. And totally does, by the way. I think his exact words were, ‘This has disaster written all over it. You two need to mind your own business and let them sort themselves out.’”

I was somewhat mollified. Anders didn’t object to me, just the methods. In any other circumstance, I would have agreed with him, but for this one time, I was willing to have some rules broken.

Something had to give between Owen and me. I knew him better than anyone, and whatever was keeping him from deepening our relationship had nothing to do with me. If I could figure out what held him back, we could sort ourselves out. A rigged date auction was a small price to pay.

Our food was delivered to the table, and I played uncle for a little bit. There were napkins to be unrolled and manners to be reminded about. Before the afternoon with Owen, it had been months since I’d been around anyone in a little headspace. Rory and Jakob tended to float in and out of it, especially when they were around each other.

I suspected Owen confined his to more specific boundaries. There was no one way to do this, but self-prepared bottles and solo rocking to sleep was not ideal for any little especially if they deeply regressed.

Owen deserved to have a Da do all the things for him. I wanted to be the only one up for the job. But in the meantime, I had the pleasurable task of holding the crayons and providing them upon request when the boys returned to their coloring.

“Kim, could you ask Owen to come by this afternoon?”

I’d returned to the office after lunch to finish some work. One less worry meant I could move through the stacks of files on my desk. Considering how little I’d done in the morning, it was a win. Now that I knew a plan was in place, I could consider how to move forward, but there was also the design aspect of the auction to consider.

Owen had signed up as a vanilla date so my initial idea to have him design the world’s most perfect nursery wasn’t an option, but the drive back to my office had given me an idea that felt not completely harebrained.

“Boss, why don’t you call him yourself like you always do?” Kim asked when she poked her head inside my office.

“Because I’m the boss,” I said in a hopeful tone. It was true, even if I rarely played the boss card.

“That’s not a good reason. Did you two fight? Because I gotta tell you, it was weird when I dropped off the keys.”

Kim sauntered into my office and dropped into one of the chairs in front of my desk. She steepled her fingers and gave me a speculative look. The woman was here for the long haul.

“No, of course not. In all the time you’ve worked for me, have you ever known us to have an argument? We don’t fight.”

“In all the time I’ve worked for you, I’ve never known him not to pop in here at least once, usually five times a day.”

It was beyond me why I tried to pretend this woman, who was meticulous in all things, wouldn’t have picked up on the noticeable cooling between Owen and me.

“It wasn’t a fight.”

“So it was a positive interaction?”

“It wasn’t a fight.”

“You already said that.”

“It was…it was a moment when we shared parts of ourselves we didn’t plan on sharing, and now we feel a little awkward about the whole thing.” That was a nicely euphemistic way of describing it.

“I love how you think that I don’t know what that means. I am slightly, give or take a couple of decades, older than you, but I’m not a complete idiot.”

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