Page 6 of Best Friend Burden

Then she showed me the picture on her phone. Patrick, it seemed, was a raccoon. And it appeared he was eating pita bread.

“I gave him a little bit of my lunch the other day and now we're besties. My first friend here on the coast!” She said with a smile.

I couldn't tell if she was joking or certifiably insane.

“See, living out of a food truck isn’t so—hey, what's that?” she asked, pointing to the open door leading to the spare bedroom.

“It's an extra bedroom…”

I saw the look in her eyes. She didn't even need to ask the question, I knew what she was thinking.

And I know that I told myself she wouldn't stay the night. And that we would have our dinner and never see each other again…

But I couldn't say no. Even if she hadn't actually asked. After all, we were friends, right?

“Would you like to—?”

I didn't even get a chance to finish my sentence.

“Oh, yes!”

Melody jumped up and hugged me, just as she had when she said hello earlier, putting her body against mine, not in a sexual way, but in an expression of her pure joy. Of course, it was impossible for me to feel her body against mine without it being at least a little bit sexual. As much as I tried to push that idea out of my head, it wouldn't go away.

“It'll just be for a little while,” she said. “You'll barely know I'm here. You know, I was worried I'd have to be commuting from out in the boonies every day, but if you ask nicely, the universe always provides.”

She stopped herself.

“The universe by way of you,” she said. “Thank you.” And then she laughed, lightly punching me in the shoulder. “I bet you’ll be an even better roommate than Patrick.”

I politely forced a smile at that.

She looked so happy, with that smile all the way across her face, that I didn't know why I had that feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I'd just made the best or worst mistake of my life.

CHAPTER3

***MELODY***

Staying with Kiefer was the best luck I have had since my move. Not only was I not having to live with a raccoon in my taco truck, but he was drop dead gorgeous and something I didn’t mind waking up in the same apartment to every day. But my luck with investors wasn’t as great as Kiefer's, and the meeting I was in was going over as well as a nun in a brothel.

Their three faces were stern and serious, like the kind of face you have trying to pull a major wedgie out of your caboose in public. These joyless faces were of men who cared only about money, who both had too much of it and who also clutched every single penny as if it were their last breath of air. They were, of course, potential investors, and no matter how enthusiastic my presentation or how much heart I showed them, they didn't care. All they cared about was a number that showed up in their spreadsheet column and how to make it just a little bit larger.

“The Vegan Vaquero was a huge hit in Austin,” I said to them, pressing the button on my remote to pull up the next slide, displaying a graph with the money we made during the years I was there. “In fact, year after year, we never saw anything less than a 30% increase in revenue.”

“What about profit?” said a man in the middle with a snide expression and an air of condescension. I wasn't sure if he was legitimately asking or if he was quizzing me, wondering if I knew the difference between the two of them.

“We also saw an increase in revenue,” I said. “Though, due to expansion and shared profits with the employers, it only went up an average of five percent per year.”

“Average,” the man sneered again, looking at the two of the other investors, who nodded. They caught my math trick, but I wasn't expecting to fool them. While we did experience an increase in revenue over time, there were years with negative revenue, as I was putting the money towards building another location and paying the employers what they were worth.

“With property costs in Los Angeles,” one of the nodding men said, “we can't afford to have such scant revenue. You're coming here with what you describe as an investment opportunity, but we could just as easily make five percent on our money in the stock market.”

I had to bite my tongue because, for me, this wasn't about dollars in pockets, but that was all these men cared about. This was about providing good food to good people, filling their happy stomachs, and putting smiles on their faces in the process.

It was an effort to speak their language.

“Understand,” I said, “that this was a food truck I was operating on my own without the help of business-savvy gentlemen like yourselves.”

That hurt to say, not just because I was giving an empty compliment or because I was speaking in terms of dollars and not happiness, but because I was, in effect, promising to cede control of the business, at least in a small part, to these soulless cretins who didn't know the first thing about food.

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