Page 3 of What You Own
Lord, did that hitch mean he maybe cared a little bit? “Ellie and I were discussing doing something together.”
“You should. You always had a great voice.” For a moment, the boy I knew and loved from high school peeked through, reminding me of better times. He almost smiled.
“So did you, Adam,” I said.
The wrong damn thing, too, because he shut down, and that ice wall went back up. Me? I got lost in the memory of the sound of his voice, singing “What You Own” over and over again with me, until we got it right. The only time Adam ever tried out for a play, and he landed Mark, the fucking lead. I took Roger, and I thought it was the best thing to ever happen to us. And it was, right up until it wasn’t.
Adam shifted his angry gaze to the table—no, not the table. I clenched my fingers into a fist, embarrassed at flexing my wrist in front of him.
Ellie, bless her, saved us both. “Do you suppose LQF will be interested in backing our benefit and helping to save the center?” she asked.
“It’s a good cause,” Adam said. “LQF likes to keep its fingers in the community, and I think this benefit has a lot of appeal. I’ll take it to my boss.”
Boss being Joe Quartermaine, or his father, Raymond Langley?
“My contact information is in the paperwork,” Ellie said. “Or you can call the center directly and speak with the director, Lou Paige.”
“Thank you. I’ll try to get you an answer as soon as possible. What sort of time frame do you have?”
“We’re hoping to have the benefit on July twenty-seventh.”
“That soon?”
“I know it’s already June, but we aren’t looking to stage elaborate numbers, and we want to do this before college classes start again and some of us get too busy.”
“Understandable. Well then, allow me to walk you both out?”
We did. Adam led the way, and I couldn’t stop staring at the back of his head, wishing I could see inside it. Was he angry? Sad? Apathetic? I wanted to crack his skull open and get the contents, to see for myself if our entire friendship had meant anything to him at all. To see if those few, precious minutes when it was more than a friendship were as treasured by him as they were by me.
He left us in the lobby with a curt good-bye, and I followed Ellie into the afternoon sunshine. In the safety of the parking garage, I finally let my hands start shaking. Ellie wrapped her arms around me from behind. I twisted around to hug her properly while my body betrayed me, doing what I didn’t want it doing. She held me until I got my shit together.
“Don’t ever forget, baby, that he turned his back on you,” she whispered, fierce like she got when I was upset. “He’s the asshole here, not you. Never you.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t agree, but I liked my nuts intact too much to say so out loud. “Love you.”
“Love you, back.” She kissed my cheek, then pulled away. “Now let’s find our next appointment and get this finished, so we can go get dinner. On me.”
“Cool.”
“And absolutely no talk about Adam Langley.”
“Deal.”
Didn’t stop me from thinking about him all afternoon, though, or about how much I still missed him. Because I was that special kind of fool.
Chapter 2
Adam
ITHOUGHTmy day couldn’t possibly get worse, and thoughts like those only tempt the wrath of God. Day four of my summer internship at my father’s company began with me oversleeping, thanks to forgetting to plug my cell phone into its charger last night. I arrived exactly on time, but I’d had no opportunity to shower, shave, eat, or even get coffee. Father’s stern look at my semirumpled state as I rushed into the office made my stomach erupt with acid.
Interning at his company for the summer, instead of working a paying job, was his idea. I’d get credit toward my business degree—a degree I didn’t want, but I was suffering through for him—and he could continue to micromanage my life. My only saving grace was that I was directly reporting to his business partner, Joe Quartermaine, instead of my father. I’d known Joe my entire life, and he was more like an eccentric uncle than a boss.
Joe had asked me to take the meeting with the Emmett Paige reps.
I never expected to walk into the lobby and spot Ellie Wright, a ghost from my past and from the abrupt end of my participation in a play that I’d tried for years to forget. She hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. Her curly chestnut hair was longer, her figure a bit rounder. Instead of her favorite outfit of ripped jeans and band T-shirts, she wore a pencil skirt and blouse and heels.
She was as surprised to see me as I was to see her, and we’d barely gotten past the awkward “how are yous?” before she glanced over my shoulder.
