Page 58 of Sparks Fly
“Mate?” Max said after he’d had a sip.
“Yes, I’m prepping for my trip to England,” he said. Then, donning a very bad British accent, he added, “Cheerio, old chap!”
“You know, I don’t think anyone expects you to have a British accent when visiting,” Max said with a shake of his head. “In fact, I think they’d prefer if you didn’t.”
“Ah, but how else will I fit in with all my Brit cousins?” Rashid asked. “I don’t want to spend the whole weekend being called a Yankee.”
“And you think the fake accent will prevent that?” Max asked.
“No, but it’ll make for great entertainment and hopefully distract my aunties from asking me when I’ll be getting married.”
Max took another swig of his beer. “What’s happening with Sabrina? I thought it was going well.”
Rashid sighed, and Max already knew that wasn’t a good sign.
“It’s fine, but you know I’m Indian and she’s Chinese. Neither of us are itching to meet the other’s family. A part of me feels like we should end it now before it gets harder to split, but every time I think about broaching the topic, she does something so disgustingly cute that I convince myself we can make this work.”
Max grinned. “It sounds like you want to make it work.”
“Yeah,” Rashid said, sighing again. “I fear I might love her or something.”
“Or something,” Max said, rolling his eyes. “Maybe instead of telling her you’re worried you’ll need to break up, you try telling her that you’re worried about your families’ reactions but you want to make it work. Have you considered that?”
Rashid squinted at him. “Why do you sound so logical?”
“I’m always logical,” Max said.
“Oh sure, that’s why you’re dating one of your brother’s employees, right? How’s that going, by the way?”
Max was already regretting telling Rashid about Stella. He hadn’t planned to, but Rashid had caught him smiling at his phone one too many times recently, so he fessed up.
“It’s going well,” Max said. “We were together all weekend, actually. But now she’s doing some Sprint Week thing so she said she’ll probably be busy this whole week.”
“Ah, yes, your brother’s brilliant idea,” Rashid said. “I have to admit, it is working. I’ve had more people ask me about Sparky and how to use it today than all of my previous office hours combined.”
“What brilliant idea?” Max asked.
Max’s confusion must’ve been evident on his face because Rashid frowned.
“Dude, I literally just spent a good fifteen minutes telling those rich guys back there about this whole thing,” Rashid said. “And Stella didn’t tell you?”
Now Max frowned. “She only told me that she’s doing Sprint Week. What is Miles doing?”
Rashid shook his head. “Truly just a man with his head in the clouds, I swear.”
“Tell me, Rashid,” Max said.
“Alright, I’ll go through my spielagain,” Rashid said, pointedly. “Sprint Week is something Miles does periodically, but for this one, to encourage his staff to use Sparky, whoever wins Sprint Week will get ten thousand dollars—but they have to have used Sparky for all of their posts to win the grand prize. So even if someone gets the most traffic for the week, if they didn’t use Sparky to get there, they won’t win the ten grand.
“So, of course, now all of them want to figure out how to use it so they can get paid.”
“That’s…interesting,” Max finally said.
“It’s genius,” Rashid said. “I checked in today, and just in one day, there are already one hundred Sparky-generated posts that have gone up. It’ll be interesting to see how they perform and the learnings we’ll get from it.”
Max could only nod as his thoughts spun. He didn’t have to wonder why Stella left this part out when she texted. Not talking about work, and Sparky specifically, was a part of their arrangement, after all.
And yet he couldn’t help but feel like she’d lied to him by omission, and he hated how that made him feel. They should be able to talk to each other about anything. That’s what people in a—
