Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Reginald
When I was young, I used to find my name a burden. Now, at the age of thirty-eight, I wore it proudly like the trophy it is. I’d met plenty of Christophers and Jameses and Stevens, but I’d never met another Rainwater Merriweather.
My name is Rainwater.
Rainwater R. Merriweather, to be precise, and even though the R stands for nothing at all, I’d told everyone it was Reginald because that’s the name I went by on a day-to-day basis. Even though I loved being called Rainwater, I didn’t love having to explain it to everyone I encountered.
Reginald was still unique, but not unheard of. Rainwater was a laughingstock.
Reginald was the no-nonsense, straightlaced lawyer with a perfect record in court. Rainwater came home and loosened the knot on his tie, dripped four drops of lavender essential oil into a diffuser, and closed his eyes for ten minutes to unwind.
Reginald could use a friend or two, even though he abhorred letting anyone close lest they tease him for his name or his hobbies. Rainwater knew a little bergamot and orange on the insides of his wrists made all that anxiety go away.
I was both of these men and somehow neither of them at the same time.
So when I received a call that an uncle passed and left me with an unconscionable sum of money, my first instinct, of course, was to hang up the phone.
Sudden windfalls didn’t happen to men like Reginald or Rainwater, and neither version of me trusted the call.
But the lawyer was insistent, sending me documents that were very clearly legitimate, and thirty days later, I was down a family member but up about seven zeroes in my bank account.
My sister, Claire, was left nothing from this uncle.
My father, the brother of the man in question, also nothing.
I went to my parents’ house after the money cleared my bank, bringing a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
The bubbles went straight to my mom’s head, and we were three glasses in when she confessed to me my name had been the result of a bet my father and my recently deceased uncle had made together.
She didn’t remember the specifics, but my dad was on the losing end, and she’d gone into labor shortly thereafter. Dad had forced the name on all three of us, promising it would pay off in the end to go with Rainwater instead of James Michael, the name my mom had wanted all along.
Why they’d kept this truth from me my whole life, she couldn’t explain. My father also offered no explanation, so in addition to the millions in my bank account, I also found myself surrounded by half a dozen questions I’d never bothered thinking about before.
After her confession, I excused myself to the bathroom and took a quick sniff of the clary sage balm I’d tucked into my pocket on the way out of my apartment. I appreciated Rainwater was the kind of man who knew Reginald would need it at some point in the night.
With my nerves almost settled, I rejoined my parents in the dining room, making casual conversation while we finished the bottle of expensive champagne.
“What are you going to spend it on?” Mom asked, swirling some champagne around the bottom of her glass.
“It’s more than I can spend,” I admitted.
“Get a house maybe,” she said.
I knew she meant well, but I didn’t need the inheritance to afford a house.
I was a partner at my firm and made more than enough money to buy whatever I wanted for myself, for my sister, and for them.
The reason I hadn’t splurged was because of how much I worked.
I was so rarely home, I didn’t see the point of spending even half a million dollars on a place that would rarely see me.
“You know I work so much,” I reminded her.
“Just a nice place to land,” my dad suggested. “It’s what Uncle Rick would have wanted.”
“I don’t really want to talk about him right now.”
“You could have an office at home,” Mom said. “Maybe you could work from there a little instead of downtown so much.”
I had a corner office in a downtown high rise, and I liked it there. I liked my office, and I liked the view, and maybe…
Well.
There were penthouse apartments around the office that had to offer a comparable view and a little more privacy. Maybe buying something actually wasn’t the worst idea.
“I’ll think about it,” I conceded.
“You can take Claire,” Mom said quickly.
“I’m not taking Claire.”
I loved my sister very much, but she was eight years younger than me, obsessed with velvet, and a self-proclaimed maximalist. She was the absolute last person I would want to take real estate shopping with me.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t burdened with an abundance of friends—on account of the weird name and the excessive working hours—so I didn’t have anyone to offer up in my sister’s place.
That and…she was a real estate broker. Of course, I’d take her.
“Just think about it,” Mom said.
I agreed, told them both goodnight, and headed home.
Even though it was small, home was comfortable and quiet.
A small one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building, walking distance from the beach.
When I got there, it was dark, and the living room smelled like lavender and sage.
Relief and peace immediately washed over me as I leaned against the closed door to toe off my shoes.
With my eyes shut, I shuffled through the space I knew by heart, collapsing on the couch with a tired sigh.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and swiped through my app screen until my finger hovered over the H2H app Claire had downloaded for me the last time we’d had lunch.
“It won’t kill you to get out and meet someone, Reg,” she’d told me, even going so far as to set up a profile for me, annoying photo included.
I hadn’t thought much about the app since then, but after swiping it open, I found at least twenty missed alerts from interested singles in my area.
They were all reasonably attractive people, most of whom I would have definitely taken a second look at if I’d seen them in person.
There was a woman with close-cropped, platinum blonde hair and bright red lips who was terribly intimidating, then another person whose gender I couldn’t determine based off a picture alone.
The nonbinary marker beside their name sparked my interest, but their profile was travel photo after travel photo after travel photo, and I knew our schedules would never be compatible.
The men varied from slender to soft, all of them appealing in their own way.
And I found myself wondering if I’d ever run into any of these people in real life before.
If they’d recognized me from the app or not.
Just the thought of it was enough to make me nervous.
I raised my wrist to my nose to take a breath in of the essential oil left over from earlier in the day, scrolling through messages with my other hand until I landed on the profile of a thirty-nine-year-old man named Josey.
He had a round face and flushed cheeks, full lips, and straight teeth that were a little too big for his mouth.
He wasn’t conventionally attractive, but something about him was so interesting I didn’t want to look away.
In the picture, he was laughing, head thrown back at an angle with his eyes closed, and I was more than a little curious to see what color they were.
I wanted to know how they would look with the bright pink dye in his hair.
Looking for adventures was the headline on his profile.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I typed out a reply and hit send.
Josey, my name is Reginald, and I want to see if you’ll come on an adventure with me.