Page 72 of Kiss the Girl
“Thanks, coach. This whole thing has been…” Her eyes went unfocused, like she was imagining horrors I couldn’t understand.
“No biggie, I promise. Just promise that there’s no problem with our Cat in the Hat theme and I’ll survive.”
“No, no problem there. I saw it on your booth application, and I think it’s great.”
“Cool. I’ll brainstorm with the boys and figure out what to serve instead.”
I gave her a small salute and walked back out to my car feeling slightly shell-shocked. As I started it up, my own panic set in. I was decent in the kitchen, but I didn’t know how to bake stuff on a massive scale. I’d been planning to follow the same old ASB playbook. I’d already used their recipe and previous order invoices to order the ingredients for this year.
But my playbook had just been stolen, ripped up, and thrown to the winds. So what was I supposed to do now?
* * *
I called Grace on my lunch break. “We have a problem,” I said when she picked up.
“Uh, hey?”
“Hey. We have a problem. Or I do, anyway.”
“Is this about making out?”
I smiled. “Do you think of anything else?”
“Not lately.”
I sucked in a breath. Did she know how sexy she was? “This is not about that.”
She sighed. “Fine. Hit me.”
I explained the problem with Taylor and the apple cider donuts. “So basically, I have more bags of flour and sugar than I know what to do with, not to mention gallons of apple cider.”
“Okay. That sucks, but we can figure this out. There must be other recipes out there we can make.”
“It’s not that easy. We need time to test recipes and find one that we can scale up and make sure it’s good enough for people to want to buy five hundred of them.” I didn’t panic easily, but my stress climbed as I imagined making well under what the ASB usually brought in. It would only prove to Dr. Boone that I wasn’t ready to run the football program if I couldn’t pull the Christmas Town booth together. “This is a disaster.”
“Hold on,” she said. “We have a lot of roads to go down before we can call it a disaster. And this isn’t all your problem to solve. Get the boys involved. Make them work on this.”
I took a calming breath. “You’re right. They pull through when it matters.”
“Also, you’re dealing with scope creep. This happens a lot when we’re working on engineering projects. Solve the problem at hand, not all the ones that may or may not be coming. This is about what to bake. Get that figured out, then you can tackle what may or may not happen after that.”
She never talked about her engineering work. It was easy to see why her parents had wanted her home to step in and run things. She sounded unflappable.
“I mean this as the deepest possible compliment: you sound like a computer right now, solving things logically.”
“I’m taking it as a compliment,” she said. “That’s what engineering brains do. Slow down, think it through, then solve. We’ve got a bunch of stuff we can try before it’s time to panic.”
It was weird how much I liked hearing her say “we,” like it was her problem too.
It was weird how sexy it sounded to get a glimpse into the Boeing badass side of her.
I really needed to make it not weird with whatever I said next.
I cleared my throat. “What if you dropped by after practice today? We can brainstorm with the boys and come up with a solution.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll see if my dad can come in and close up.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ll figure it out with the boys.”
