22
Ashanti stood next to the curbside check-in kiosk outside Louis Armstrong International Airport, attempting with decreasing degrees of success not to worry that Thad had decided to pull out of this whole thing at the last minute.
She texted Deja to find out if he’d stopped in for the travel crate. She responded that he’d come by not even ten minutes after Ashanti and Evie left.
If he’d picked up the crate, he was at least still planning to travel with Puddin’. But he should have been here by now.
Just as she was about to text him, his black pickup pulled up to the curb. The passenger door swung open, and Thad hopped out before the truck had a chance to come to a complete stop.
“Wasn’t my fault,” he said, quickly lifting the travel crate from the truck bed. He set it, along with a rolling carry-on suitcase, next to Duchess’s crate. “Three semi-trucks were clogging up I-10. We were stuck going fifty miles per hour on the interstate.”
“We’re still good,” Ashanti said, checking her watch to make sure she wasn’t telling a lie. The ticketing agent had told her all was well as long as they got Puddin’ and Duchess checked in at least forty-five minutes before departure.
“Hey, friend,” Von called from behind the wheel. “Keep that one out of trouble for me.”
Ashanti brought two fingers to her forehead in salute. “You got it,” she said with a laugh.
“Ignore him,” Thad said. He got Puddin’ out of the back seat. “Thanks for the ride,” he told Von as he shut the door.
The passenger side window lowered. “Remember, the keyword is fun,” Von said.
“You have a house to demo, right?” Thad asked.
“And TikTok videos to post.” Von gave him a thumbs-up before winking at Ashanti and pulling off.
She laughed again. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still upset that you’re turning the Bywater house into a bar, but it helps to know that Von will make sure there’s never a dull moment there.”
“I guess that’s a selling point,” Thad said. “Can we check the dogs curbside?”
“The ticketing agent inside told me to come straight to her once you arrived. She’ll let us bypass the line.”
They started for the terminal, Ashanti carrying Duchess’s much smaller crate in her right hand and rolling the hard-case carry-on she’d borrowed from Evie with her left. It had been so long since she’d taken a vacation that she hadn’t realized she didn’t have a proper suitcase until she went to pack.
She glanced over her shoulder as they walked through the parting automatic doors. “I’ll be honest, I thought you were standing me up.”
“I would never do that,” Thad said. He stopped her, catching her by the arm. “Really, if I say I’m going to do something, I follow through. I’m sorry again for making you wait.”
His earnestness softened any hard feelings his tardiness had caused. She could tell how much it bothered him to have her think he’d gone back on his word.
“You’re here now,” Ashanti said. “That’s what matters, right? Come on, let’s do this.”
They checked the dogs in with the ticketing agent and headed for security. Even though he had TSA PreCheck designation, which had a much shorter wait, Thad joined her in the regular security line.
“It’s not as if I’ll get on the plane without you,” he told Ashanti when she tried to get him to go through the shorter checkpoint. He nodded toward the front of the line. “It’s moving fast. We’re good.”
It took them less than ten minutes to get through the line, leaving enough time for Ashanti to stop at her favorite candy store in the airport. She loaded up on overpriced chocolate-covered Swedish Fish and Hot Tamales.
“You sure you don’t want any?” she called to Thad, who stood just outside the store with his arms crossed, as if he was a bodyguard on a detail.
“I’m good. Thanks,” he said.
Ashanti paid for her candy and walked up to him. “I forget that you’re a former soldier. You probably haven’t eaten sugar in a decade.”
One corner of his mouth angled up in a grin as they started for the B concourse.
“What?” Ashanti asked.
“If you only knew how much junk food I have in my grandmother’s pantry,” Thad said. “I’m addicted to Tootsie Rolls.”
“Seriously? How can you be addicted to junk food and still have a body like that?” Her steps came to an abrupt stop. “Not that I’ve spent too much time studying your body or anything,” Ashanti said. “I just figured…”
Goodness, girl! Shut up!
It would be challenging enough to get through this trip without it being awkward between them, especially after his grandmother’s comment about the two of them sharing a room. One way to ensure the awkwardness joined them in New York like a giant third wheel was to let the man know that thoughts of what his body must look like naked flashed through her mind at least a thousand times a day.
Please, God. Don’t let her mention his naked body.
“You haven’t spent too much time? Which means you’ve spent some?” Thad asked.
Ashanti’s head shot up at the amusement she heard in his voice. She didn’t need a mirror to know that her freckles were the color of the Hot Tamales she’d just bought.
“Excuse us,” a woman said as she cut between them. Three young children—all pulling Mickey Mouse suitcases—trailed her.
“We’re in the way,” Ashanti said. She looked around, searching for some place they could have this extremely important discussion before they got on that plane. “Come with me.” Her face still burned as she led Thad to an alcove near the restrooms.
Ashanti released a deep breath.
“Okay, so do you remember when you asked me to forget that thing you said earlier when we were outside Mrs. Frances’s place?”
He nodded.
“Well, I’m asking you to do the same now.”
“What am I forgetting?”
“That I just admitted to spending time thinking about your body,” she said. God, she needed an ice bath. “Forget I said that.”
He stuffed his hands in his front pockets. “So does this mean we’re going to keep demanding the other person develop a case of selective amnesia when we say what we really feel?”
“Yes,” she answered quickly. “Yes, that’s exactly what we will do. I just can’t do…” She waved a hand between them. “This. For numerous reasons, I can’t do this right now. It’s best if we do the selective amnesia thing.”
“Is it realistic?” Thad asked.
Not even a little bit. But…
“It has to be,” Ashanti said.
This time, his grin didn’t hold much humor. There was disappointment there, and maybe a smidge of resignation.
“If that’s what you want,” he finally said.
Want?
No, it wasn’t even remotely close to what she wanted. But it was, without a doubt, the best course of action here.
A relationship of any kind was off the table, even that fling Ridley had suggested. She wasn’t even thinking about Anita and her threat to petition the courts; Ashanti simply didn’t have the bandwidth to handle any emotional entanglements. Her life was currently broken up into twelve-minute segments—the time it took to bake a batch of Duchess Delights treats.
And she had a feeling when Thad got down to business he needed way more than twelve minutes.
That was not where she needed her mind to go right now.
“This is what you want, right?” Thad asked.
“It’s what we both want,” Ashanti said. “Isn’t that why you asked me to forget what you said when we were leaving the assisted living facility?”
He blew out a breath and ran a hand down his face. “Not really,” he mumbled. “But you’re right.”
“Okay,” Ashanti said with a nod, pretending she hadn’t heard the first half of his answer. “So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can just enjoy New York without any more awkwardness. And if I slip and say something like that again, you can ignore me.”
“Just so I’m clear, how many times am I supposed to ignore you before acknowledging that those slipups are how you really feel?”
One hundred? Two, maybe?
“I won’t slip up again,” Ashanti said.
His shrug said he didn’t believe her. He was probably right.
It was going to be a long three days.
They headed for their gate, which turned out to be just a few yards down the concourse. The moment they arrived, Ashanti could tell something was off. The whispers and murmurs were low at first, but within two minutes of her taking her seat, the questions started.
The woman sitting directly across from her leaned over and asked, “Excuse me, but are you Duchess and Puddin’s two owners?”
“Yes, they are,” answered a younger girl with braids and a Southeastern Louisiana University sweatshirt. She held her phone up to the woman who’d initially asked the question, then turned it to face Ashanti. It was a screenshot of her and Thad in the playroom at Barkingham Palace.
“My suite mates are going to be so mad they flew out on an earlier flight,” the girl said. “We are all obsessed with Puddin’ and Duchess. Where are they?”
“Um, they’re flying cargo,” Ashanti said. “They’re both too big for the main cabin.”
“It’s so sweet that you two take them on vacation with you,” the first woman said.
“Oh no, we’re not going on va—”
But then Ashanti remembered that they were told to keep their appearance on Up Early with Leah and Luke! hush-hush until it was announced in a teaser this afternoon. She had no idea what time the commercial was supposed to run.
Thankfully, she was saved from having to explain their trip by the gate agent, who announced that the first boarding group was welcome to board.
Thad put her suitcase in the overhead compartment before heading for his seat. Because their flight had been booked so late, they were in different rows; he in 26A and her in 13B. Ashanti hoped this wasn’t an omen of things to come. Not only was she in a center seat but unlucky number thirteen.
After buckling her seat belt, she stuffed her mouth with a handful of Swedish Fish and leaned her head back. Exhaustion took care of the rest. She was sleeping before they reached 10,000 feet and didn’t awaken until the plane landed at JFK.
She insisted they go to the holding area where the dogs would be brought out the moment they were allowed to deplane. It was probably best that she’d slept through the flight because otherwise she would have spent all her time worrying about Duchess in the cargo area.
“Hey, baby.” She stuck her finger through the grate and wiggled it. Duchess licked at her, then settled back down, seeming no worse for wear.
“We have the podcast first, right?” Thad asked.
Ashanti nodded, fighting back the anxiety that threatened to claw its way into her psyche. She had been nervous enough talking to the reporter from their local TV station. That was small potatoes compared to what she was about to embark upon. Much of this media campaign would be seen by a nationwide audience.
What was she thinking? Everything had a national audience these days—a worldwide audience, in fact. Her segment from that noon broadcast had been viewed over 500,000 times on YouTube.
She had way too much riding on these next few days to allow nerves to take her down. She would employ Dom’s media tips and face those interviewers with the same confidence she displayed when she stood before a mirror and pretended to accept a Grammy, or an Oscar, or a Tony Award back when she was a kid. Couldn’t no one tell her that she couldn’t sing, dance, or act.
While they were in the air, Dom had sent a message saying that their appearance on Up Early with Leah and Luke! had been moved up to the next morning instead of Friday, but that Ashanti and Thad shouldn’t panic because she had already rescheduled their other meetings.
She had also sent over a file with the addresses of every stop on their whirlwind media tour. All Ashanti had to do was plug the address into her Uber app.
“Okay, so Dom really is the best at her job,” she said. “I don’t know what she charges, but I have a feeling it’ll be worth it.”
“I’ll wait until after I see her invoice before I decide that,” Thad said.
Because their flight had landed early and traffic was, in their Uber driver’s words “mad light, yo” on their ride into Manhattan, they had time to drop off their bags and the dog crates at their hotel in midtown. Puddin’ and Duchess were both recognized the moment they walked into the lobby.
For a town known to treat movie stars as regular people, it seemed those unwritten rules went away when it came to celebrities of the canine variety. Ashanti took a step back as multiple guests who had been in line to check-in converged on them. People were either snapping pictures, recording video, or going live on their social media accounts. It was wild.
“Please, stand back,” the concierge said as he escorted them out of the lobby to their waiting cab.
“Did that really just happen?” Ashanti asked as she settled in the car.
“You mean these two dogs getting treated like Meghan and Harry?”
She pointed at him. “I knew you secretly loved the royals! I can tell a fellow royal watcher.”
“I only know their names because you have it under their picture at the daycare,” Thad said. He patted Puddin’s topknot. “Don’t let this go to your head. Be humble.”
“I know you won’t admit it, but he’s growing on you,” Ashanti said.
“Like a rash on my ass.”
She threw her head against the seatback and laughed. “You really should stop hating on Puddin’.”
“But I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s spoiled.”
“That isn’t his fault. Blame Mrs. Frances for that.”
“Oh, I do,” Thad said. “I can both blame her for him being spoiled and continue to dislike him because he’s spoiled.” He shrugged. “Though, he’s not half bad when it comes to watching sports on TV. Doesn’t crowd me. Eats the kettle corn when it falls to the floor. So I guess he has some redeeming qualities.”
“He’s also going to bring more attention to your new business than you could have ever imagined,” she reminded him.
“The jury is still out on that, but if you’re right, I’ll upgrade that collar to cubic zirconia.”
Ashanti was still laughing by the time they pulled up to a nondescript building two blocks from the Hudson River.
“No need to get out,” she told the cab driver when he opened his door.
He got out of the cab anyway, phone in hand. “Can I get a selfie with Puddin’ and Duchess?” he asked.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Thad muttered.
“Of course,” Ashanti said.
After their impromptu photo shoot—the cabbie turned out to be one of those people who took a dozen selfies before he was satisfied that he’d gotten the perfect shot—they entered the building and took the elevator to the third floor. Ashanti was disappointed that there wasn’t a view of the river, but she was determined to make her way to one of the piers before she left New York.
They were led into the podcast studio and introduced to their hosts, Beth and Seth. Ashanti was excited to learn that the husband and wife duo had started the podcast to help people with a fear of dogs overcome their phobia.
“I’ve held events at my daycare to help kids with phobias,” she said. “Duchess has the perfect temperament for it, but Puddin’—” She wiggled her hand. “He can be a bit high-strung at times.”
The poodle immediately illustrated her point by jumping two feet when Seth pulled the microphones into place.
“Calm down, Puddin’,” Thad said, dropping to one knee and rubbing under the dog’s chin.
It wasn’t until Thad mouthed close your mouth that Ashanti realized her jaw had gone slack. What had gotten into him?
Thad stood and whispered to her, “I figured I should at least pretend that I like the dog.”
“You like the dog,” she whispered back. “Just admit it.”
“Are we ready to get started?” Beth asked.
“No, I don’t,” he said against her ear as he pulled her chair out for her. Awareness shot down her spine.
Ashanti’s nerves ratcheted up even more when they were informed that today’s episode would be livestreamed on the podcast’s YouTube channel.
“We could not have Puddin’ and Duchess in studio and not stream it live,” Seth said. “Our audience would show up with pitchforks.”
“Well, if there’s one thing Duchess and Puddin’ are used to, it’s being livestreamed for all the world to see,” Ashanti said.
“Our eight million subscribers are ready!” Beth said.
Ashanti’s knees nearly gave out. “Eight million?” she asked. “Really?”
“You’ll do fine,” Thad said, covering her hand with his own. Ashanti looked down at their hands and then at him. She nodded.
It turned out that was right. Once the podcast started, her anxiety began to melt away. It helped to have Duchess in her lap. Puddin’ stood between her and Thad’s chairs with his chin on Ashanti’s leg. According to Beth, the YouTube channel’s chat box went berserk whenever Puddin’ and Duchess rubbed noses.
The conversation was funny and lighthearted, though heavy on the dog puns. She cringed every time Seth asked for another “round of a-paws” as they went into a commercial break. But at least she tried to hide her low-key embarrassment for their corny host.
Thad, on the other hand, was as transparent as fine vellum. He barely cracked a smile.
“So howl is business going, Thad?” Seth asked with a dorky laugh. Ashanti winced.
“It hasn’t opened yet,” Thad answered with the enthusiasm of a wet slug.
“But you can follow Thad and his business partner’s journey as they renovate a beautiful home in one of New Orleans’s quirkiest neighborhoods. You may even see Puddin’ helping with demolition, right Thad?” Ashanti asked, trying to signal to him to lighten up.
“Uh, yeah,” Thad said.
Despite his continued aloofness and Seth trying way too hard to crack said aloofness, she thought the podcast was a great start to their media junket.
Beth and Seth ended the broadcast with promises to keep in touch, then immediately ushered Ashanti, Thad, and the dogs out of their tiny studio. Apparently there was some kind of podcaster gala in New Jersey tonight that was a must-do.
Thad turned to her on the sidewalk as they waited for their Uber to arrive.
“Be straight with me, are the Leah and Luke folks like that?”
“Not at all,” Ashanti said with a laugh. “Leah and Luke have much more chill.”
“Thank God.”
“You could have been a little more chill yourself,” she said. “Poor Seth was trying so hard to be your friend.”
“I would rather go through a year of basic training than be friends with Seth,” he said.
Ashanti burst out laughing.
Their Uber pulled up and Thad opened the door and motioned for her to get in, followed by Duchess and Puddin’.
“We don’t have their harnesses, so please drive carefully,” Ashanti told the driver. She hadn’t thought about how they would get around Manhattan. She hated riding with Duchess not strapped into her little doggy seat belt.
Her phone rang just as the driver was pulling away.
“It’s Ridley,” she said to Thad, rolling her eyes as she answered. “Hey, Rid.”
“Put the phone on speaker so soldier boy can hear me,” Ridley said.
This wasn’t good. Ashanti bit the side of her lip.
“Um, she wants to talk to you,” Ashanti said. She switched the call to speaker. “You’re on speaker.”
“Thaddeus?” Ridley asked.
“I’m here.”
“Loosen the fuck up.”
Thad jerked his head back. “Excuse me?”
“You looked and sounded like you were in pain during that podcast. Lighten up. You are too fucking hot to be so uptight.”
“I don’t think that was supposed to be a compliment,” Thad said.
“It wasn’t a compliment. It was an order. I told you both before you left New Orleans not to blow this chance. You have twelve hours to learn how to be charismatic. Do not go on that show tomorrow looking like you just ate a bowl of stewed prunes, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Thad answered.
“Shanti, you were amazing. Hell, even Duchess and Puddin’ were amazing with their little doggy kisses. Carry that same energy over to the studio tomorrow. I gotta go. I’ll call you later tonight.”
Ridley disconnected the call.
Silence filled the car, until the Uber driver broke it with a low whistle. “Wow,” he said.
“Yeah,” Thad said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Ridley means well,” Ashanti said. “She’s just a bit… blunt.”
“A bit?” Thad asked. “Hey, my man,” he called up to the Uber driver. “Any chance they sell charisma at Macy’s?”
“I think you have more than enough,” Ashanti said with a light laugh. “You just need to learn how to use it.”
He turned that grin on her, the one that made her heart do a two-step. “Guess I know what I’ll be doing tonight. Maybe I can find some videos on YouTube that’ll teach me how to be charismatic.”
“You can learn everything else on there,” the driver said.