Page 32 of Lucy Loves Him Not
“Honestly, it was a great time. I’ll definitely be back.”
“Sorry I pulled you away from your new friends,” I said, shrugging apologetically.
“Lucy,” he said, drawing out my name like I was missing something. His guard was down, too.
“What?”
Ding. The doors opened.
We made our way back outside and he locked the doors behind us while I glanced over to Liv’s car all lit up in the parking lot. I could see her in the front seat chatting on her phone.
We stepped apart, heading in different directions, saying our goodbyes. “You can call me anytime, Lucy. I’m happy to help.” His voice sounded soberingly more professional.
He gave me a small smile.
My heart, my body, and my mind were all in disagreement. “So you don’t have to keep drawing up contracts or stealing purses to get me to hang out with you?”
Adam burst out a grin. Shouting as he walked down the stairs, “You’re still the one who calledme, Lucy. Victor has a key, too, and you know that. He’s the one who let you in the other morning.”
He waved goodbye gleefully. I watched him go, knowing he was right.
All weekend long, I had flashbacks to our elevator conversations and my undeniable reaction to it. My undeniable reaction to Adam. I had been afraid to work with him after our hostile first meeting, but now, I was terrified I wouldn’t know how to work with him without remembering his arms around me as we unlocked his office door.
Our Monday morning meeting loomed over me, thrilling me and simultaneously making me sick with nerves.What if Adam thought I was flirting with him? (What if he was right?) What if Adam regretted our tipsy office break-in? (What if he didn’t?)
“Nothing really happened,” I’d told Olivia on the phone over the weekend while I walked around the neighborhood in the morning sun. “I don’t know why I’m acting like it did.”
“If you feel like something happened, it probably did. If you feel like something changed, it probably did. Trust me,” Olivia said before I heard her hammering something over the speakerphone.
In our meeting Monday morning, I put my most professional foot forward and Adam did, too. Like we had silently agreed to pretend we hadn’t played with the pyrotechnic energy between us last Friday.
It was 98 percent back to normal that week, except for the two percent that made my cheeks flush when he got close to me.
Danaya had asked me over Tupperware lunches on the City Hall front steps, “Is there a vibe between you and Adam?”
“Adam and me?” My eyes went comically wide. “No, no, no. There is nothing romantic at all going?—”
“No, I meant like anunfriendlyvibe. I’d heard that you two were kind of forced to work together on the festival. And I’ve heard some of your little bickering,” she explained before taking a bite of her pasta salad.
“Oh.” Of course, that’s what she meant. Because that wasreality. “The rumors are true. We both wanted to run the festival ourselves and wound up needing each other. We kind of resented each other’s existence at first.” I thoughtfully chewed a potato chip. “The bickering seems to just be how the two of us communicate, honestly. Like how you mix red with blue and get purple. If you put me with Adam—you get bickering.”
Danaya snickered. “He’s really not that bad, though. He gave me time off when I was busy with graduate school last month. He grows on you.”
I nodded along. “I don’t think the guy is terrible, I promise. I probably misread him at first due to, you know, wishing he’d never taken this job. And the bickering has become…” But I didn’t know what it had become, so I let my voice trail off.
“A joke?” Danaya offered.
“Our thing.” I shrugged.
Twelve
Adam
Check your email. I got a research project for us.
Early one morning the following week, Adam forwarded me a marketing email for a nearby town’s summer festival happening that day.
Adam
