Page 19 of This Time Around
Jack blinked. “Come again?”
“Mutant cats. The place is overrun with them.”
“What do you mean mutant? Like radioactive or something?”
Allie laughed and shook her head. “They have all these extra toes. It makes their paws look like catcher’s mitts.”
“Oh, you mean Hemingway cats?”
“What?”
“That’s what they’re called, I think. Ernest Hemingway used to own a bunch of extra-toed cats, so that’s where the name comes from.”
“I guess so. I didn’t know that.” She shook her head, pretty sure the fact that they’d spent this long discussing cats officially qualified her for crazy cat lady status.
As if owning fourteen felines hadn’t already accomplished that for her.
“So it sounds like your job’s been going great,” she said, eager to steer the subject away from felines. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. I had a few years of being a lazy dumbass before I met Caroline. She urged me to get my shit together, so I went back to school and had just about finished the degree when we found out she was pregnant with Paige.”
“Wow.” Allie kicked herself for not formulating a better response, but that was all she could come up with. The back of her throat started stinging, and she wasn’t sure if it was the knowledge that he’d been willing to shape up for another woman, or something else entirely.
Something else entirely, her subconscious said, but Allie ordered herself not to go there. She grabbed the can of whipped cream and took a hit.
“So are you a lawyer now or what?” he asked. “I tried to stalk your social media over the years, but you never really posted much. I couldn’t make it to our ten-year high school reunion, so I’ll admit I’m kind of clueless what you do for a living.”
Allie laughed and swallowed the whipped cream. “You and most people.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a Certified Association Executive,” she said. “I know it sounds like a made-up job, or like a glorified secretary or something.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“It’s okay, I get it a lot.”
“So what does a Certified Association Executive do?”
“I oversee a state medical association, organizing membership campaigns and public advocacy and planning education events. That might sound boring, but I really love it. No two days are the same, and I get to use a lot of negotiation and people management skills. It’s so much better than the political campaign stuff I was doing before.”
“So did you finish your poli-sci degree?”
“Undergrad, yes. But I only got through one year of law school before I quit.”
She wasn’t sure if she’d ever said those words—I quit—out loud before, and she braced herself for Jack to say something snarky. To rib her for not being able to hack it or to give her crap for not heading down the path she’d been so certain was meant for her.
Instead, he reached for her. Well, not for her. For the whipped cream can in her hand. He pulled it from her grip, tilted his head back, and took a hit. “Delicious,” he said.
Allie smiled. “Thank you.”
“Why? Did you can it yourself?”
“No. I mean—thank you for not being a dick about me dropping out of school. Or faking a fiancé or having jailbird parents or?—”
She stopped there, not sure how much he knew about that. Not sure how much she wanted him to know.
“So it sounds like life didn’t turn out quite like either of us expected sixteen years ago,” he said at last.
