Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 46846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 187(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 187(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
There’s a crash from the next room. Maxine has dropped a glass on the floor, and now she’s staring down at it like she has no clue what to do, like she’s never seen broken glass before.
“I’ve got to go,” I tell Lucy, the only woman I ever want to be with. “Text me the time and place.”
“I will,” she says.
“Goodnight, Lucy.”
“Bye, Logan.”
I hang up the phone, close my eyes, and take a long breath.
Opening my eyes, I know what time it is.
Time to get this over with.
I walk into my apartment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lucy
It’s difficult to focus today.
Thankfully my workload is quite light, and I’m able to spend most of the time thinking about what the heck it’s going to be like, going on a date with Logan Locke.
Leaning back in my office chair to get a better hit of the AC, I remind myself it isn’t a date.
The office is small, with three other colleagues, all of us quiet since there’s a store right below us and sometimes the customers can hear if we’re too loud. This is the main store, the hub.
It’s not a date, I say in my mind, making it a point of really hearing the words in my head.
Maybe then I can accept that.
Jane didn’t help last night. I mean, she did, she was trying to. But she’s not making it easy to accept the truth…that Logan’s just being nice, friendly, a Good Samaritan like he always is.
I’m nothing special. At least not to him.
“How do you know that?” Jane had asked last night. “You’re going to a restaurant. Maybe he’s in the mood for something new.”
I laughed along with her, pretending like that would thrill me, being his something new.
But the truth is, I don’t want to be his something anything…I want to be his everything, his one, and only woman, as much as he’s my man.
When my boss walks into the room, I lean forward, focusing on my work again. I’m not slacking since I’m getting all my work done, but Barry still likes us to look busy even if we’re not.
I take my thirty-minute break in the park opposite the thrift store office, sitting beneath the shade of a tree and swiping on my phone.
I don’t have to go far until I find it, the thing I’ve been dreading ever since I heard her voice last night on the phone.
Logan Locke and Maxine Waterson: Will She Finally Tame the Playboy?
I know it’s stupid, subjecting myself to this, but I can’t stop.
I find myself going through the photos.
There are four.
The first shows them stepping from a limousine together, Logan’s face as dreamy and intense as it usually is. Maxine is standing close to him, but he’s not touching her, not like he often is with the women in his photos…the photos before we met, before he knew who I was.
And before I knew who he was…before Dad, before I learned of Never Alone, and before this crush captured me with the threat, the promise of never letting go.
The second shows them posing on the red carpet; again, they’re not touching. Logan stands there with that savage look in his eyes, a light smirk on his lips, staring dreamily at the camera.
The third is of Logan making Maxine laugh.
The fourth is the worst. Maxine has her hand on Logan’s forearm, leaning up to whisper something in his ear. I stare at her dainty, manicured hand on the fabric of his silver suit, imagining my hand there instead, thinking of how firm he’d feel beneath his clothes.
But that’s not for me. It’s for her and all the other Maxine Watersons of the world.
Clicking off the website, I people-watch instead.
It used to be one of my favorite things. I’d people-watch and imagine what problems they were going through and try to figure out what I’d say to them if they came to me for counseling or therapy… whichever specific branch I decided to pursue.
This was before Dad, before I turned borderline cata-freaking-tonic for a while.
Before Logan made thinking of anything else impossible.
Back at work, I often look at the clock, counting down the minutes until it’s time to meet Logan.
“You have to dress the part,” Jane said to me last night.
She was trying to persuade me to take a change of clothes to work.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t,” she went on. “Take it from somebody who’s been there. You remember Freddy the Fireman?”
I smiled, nodding. “You went completely cuckoo over him.”
“Exactly. Just like you are with Logan.”
I thought, not exactly the same.
“And once, I went to work, knowing I was going to meet him. This was in the early days. I still wanted to impress him but I didn’t bring a change of clothes.”
“Okay…so what happened next?”
“A bird crapped on my blouse,” she said. “And the date was ruined.”