Chapter 12
TURNS OUT IT’S SORT of difficult to track down the person you have spent the past few months ignoring, avoiding, and altogether denying their existence.
It’s even more difficult when you’re kind of, maybe just a teeny-tiny bit, hoping to not find them, so you have a great excuse to not get yourself mixed up in a situation that you single-handedly caused.
That is, until a very disheveled Wilson Monroe casually walks into The Rundown office at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. I have the phone pressed to my ear, jotting down a message for Camilla, when the doorbell chimes. Not only is he not wearing his usual beige khakis, but he seems to have forgotten his morning hair-care routine. His waves flop around his head in fluffy tufts, somehow making him look about three years younger. The usual business-casual attire has been swapped out for jeans, sneakers, and a plain black T-shirt. For once, Wilson looks like a regular nineteen-year-old guy.
Most alarming, though, is the expression on his face. Usually sharp and focused, he now looks lifeless. Dark circles kiss the skin beneath his eyes, which is still the slightest bit swollen. It looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Even the way he walks is off. His posture is normally ramrod straight, and he takes these annoyingly long, determined steps. Now he kind of slumps around, like a hunched-over version of himself.
I immediately turn to Jillian, who looks as confused as I am.
“What is he doing here?” she whispers as she stands up, nearly tripping over her chair in her rush to greet Wilson.
Curse them and their hushed voices. No matter how far I scoot my chair over, I can’t hear a single word they say. I watch Wilson’s mouth move. He keeps running a hand through his hair, which may explain how wild it looks.
There’s a tiny part of my brain that struggles to comprehend that This Wilson and Manager Wilson are the same person. I feel like my mind is malfunctioning in real time. Put me through a CT scan, and my skull may come up empty.
Wilson sits on the couch, on the edge of the cushion, like he’s prepared to make a run for it at any moment. Jill returns to her desk and immediately begins typing furiously on her computer.
“What’s going on?” I hiss, watching her chipped black nails tap the keyboard too quickly for me to piece the letters together.
“Pulling up the transcript of our interview. There’s something Wilson said that he now wants off the record,” she says, her eyes trained on the screen as if this is a national emergency.
Whatever this top secret information is, I’ll decipher that later. Right now, I need to weasel my way into speaking with Wilson—a sentence I never thought would cross my brain, but here we are.
“I need to talk to him before he leaves,” I tell Jillian.
Her head swivels to face me so quickly it’s like a scene from a horror movie. “You want to talk to Wilson? Your mortal enemy ?”
“First, thank you for finally acknowledging that he is in fact my enemy. Second, yes. Desperately. When you finish, don’t let him leave.”
Jillian prints the pages and returns to Wilson’s side, moving so quickly she nearly trips. When she hands him a pen, he begins to presumably cross out the now “off the record” part of the interview.
And because Jillian is completely unreliable, I watch as Wilson stands and walks out of the office, his gaze planted on the floor like he is maneuvering himself over molten lava instead of hardwood.
Maybe the fastest I have ever moved in my existence, I bolt out of my chair and chase him, sparing a split second to stare daggers at Jillian before crashing outside. I immediately regret wearing these stupid sandals Julie coaxed me into. With every step, my foot all but slips right out of them. Despite a pebble nearly taking me down, I manage to make it to Wilson’s car as he removes the keys from his pocket.
“Wait!” I call.
He spins around quickly, but I’m moving even quicker. I miscalculate how fast I’m going and, with a loud thud , I slam right into his chest.
The level of self-hatred I feel skyrockets when the first thing I notice is that the cologne scent from his office chair is here as well, tucked into the soft cotton of his T-shirt.
I may be taking another whiff—I also may be suffering from severe brain damage from events unknown to me—when Wilson literally pries me off him like I’m a dead mosquito being flicked off his skin.
“What are you doing?” he says, staring straight down at me.
For some godforsaken reason I am relieved to see that familiar look of disdain cross his face.
“Just, you know,” I say between pulling in an embarrassing amount of air, “testing your reflexes.” To make matters worse, I pat his chest. “Good job. You passed.” I have to clasp my hands behind my back to physically stop myself from doing a thumbs-up.
“Are you done?” he asks. “Can I leave now?”
“Can you leave now?” I repeat, unable to hide the anger slipping into my tone. “And go where, Wilson? To Monte’s? The place you’ve completely abandoned?”
His nostrils flare. He looks away so quickly I can’t make out the next expression that crosses his face. “Yes, Jackie, to Monte’s. I’m going there right now. Did you want an outline for the rest of my day? Perhaps the week? I can share my calendar with you, too.”
I nod so quickly I might morph into a bobblehead. “Sure, yeah, that’d be great. Maybe then your employees can actually know when you plan on showing up, signing their paychecks, and doing your job . Gosh, Anita and I have been busting our asses to keep that place afloat while you’re sulking around.”
“Wait— What? You’ve been helping?”
The look of shock on his face is so evident I want to kick his shin. “Yes, I’ve been helping. Turns out that, lucky for you, I spring into action in the most dire of circumstances.”
Wilson scratches at his head, tripping over his words. “Oh. Well— Uh, thanks for, you know, doing that?”
I glare at him. “I can’t believe you abandoned us.”
Wilson looks more run-down than our office. He runs a shaking hand through his hair as he sighs. “I don’t expect you to underst—”
“That you got broken up with? Of course I understand. It’s horrible, and I’m so sorry that happened to you. For what it’s worth, I actually thought you and Kenzie were decently cute together. And you’re allowed to sulk and be sad and sit in bed with the blinds closed for as long as you want, but you can’t abandon everyone at Monte’s. Not when we’re relying on you.” The words come out rushed, slung together like one giant run-on sentence. “Do you even know how hard I had to work while you were gone? I gave about ninety percent more effort than I usually do, Wilson. Ninety percent .”
The last expression I expect to see on his face is embarrassment. His cheeks are red, his eyes looking so intensely at the ground he may as well be talking to it. “How do you know about the breakup?” he asks.
It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen him. Suddenly, the rush of anger I was feeling fades. Now I just feel... Well, I feel kind of bad.
I may have had to spend some time working harder than usual and taking on more tasks than I’m used to at Monte’s, but in the past few weeks Wilson’s life seems to have entirely flipped upside down. He took a year off business school, moved cities, took on a new job, and now his girlfriend—the person he loves—has broken up with him. In comparison, it makes what I’m going through look, well, pretty insignificant.
I guess I was so used to Manager Wilson that I forgot that Regular Wilson is a real person, too. He may be a year older than me, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to struggling with all the same stuff.
It takes me by surprise—the level of sympathy I feel toward him. After all these months working together and annoying one another, it sucks to see him like this: quiet, resigned, heartbroken. Like, who am I supposed to bully at work if not him?
I feel the weight of my phone in my pocket, feel the burden of the hundred-plus unread messages waiting for me on iDiary . And for the first time, I feel something like fear. If my advice hurt Wilson this much, what could it do to the others?
“Jackie. How do you know about the breakup?” he asks again when it’s clear that I’ve spaced out.
I blink up at him, take in the hurt coating his features like a fresh layer of paint. “I read the letter,” I say. Right there in the middle of the street, as dozens of cars rush by and probably my entire team watches through the windows, I confess.
The part about me giving Kenzie the advice remains tucked away in the most private corners of my brain.
He immediately looks mortified. “No.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I say honestly. “I was looking through your office, trying to find a spare key or your cell phone number. Some way to reach you and figure out what was going on. And the letter was just... there.”
Because it’s the right thing to do, I add, “Look. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. I regretted it the literal second I read it. But at the time it felt like the only way to figure out what happened with you. And”—I cough—“Anita was worried.”
The most fleeting of smiles crosses his face. “Anita was worried?”
“Yes,” I repeat. “Only Anita. Stop looking at me like that . I wasn’t worried about you. Can you stop?”
I am now beginning to think this is a nervous tic of his, because Wilson rams his fingers through his hair yet again, this time sticking up his roots and making his hair appear to have seven cans of hair spray living inside of it.
“I really messed up,” he says. “I told my uncle he could rely on me, and now—” He cuts himself off, as if that sentence was veering into territory I don’t have access to.
“I just can’t do this right now. This job, this town— All of it. I need a second. I’ll run it by my uncle—”
“Your uncle is sick, Wilson. You can’t bring him into this.”
“How do you know—” He closes his eyes, sighing. “The letter. That you read. Right.”
We stand in awkward silence for a moment. Wilson can barely look me in the eye, and I find it way easier to look anywhere but his face. The hurt etched across it is doing something strange to my heart. Something I would very much like to ignore.
“How do I fix this?” he asks. “My uncle trusted me with Monte’s. I can’t let him down.” Then he quickly adds, “Sorry. I shouldn’t even be dragging you into this. You already helped keep Monte’s going while I was away. I caused this problem, and it’s up to me to fix it.”
Well... That’s not entirely true. There’s a teeny-tiny way that I caused this problem, too. Which probably means I’m semiresponsible for trying to help fix it.
Dammit.
While Wilson seems to search for answers in the sky, a plan pops into my head. One that just might be crazy enough to work. Once the idea is out there, there’s no taking it back. I very well may immediately regret the next words I’m about to say. But as the person solely responsible for Wilson’s broken heart, it only makes sense that I try to un-break it.
And, look, I’m not totally selfless. If all goes well, my promotion could be back on the table, which means more money for the road trip. I believe that’s called a win-win.
“Look, here’s what we’re going to do,” I say.
Wilson tries to cut me off, but I give him a warning look and carry on.
“You are going to come back to work. Your uncle is going to continue getting better, far away from the stress of Monte’s. I’m going to get my promotion to waitress, and I’m going to help you win Kenzie back.” I force the last sentence out.
A painful ten seconds pass, with Wilson staring blankly at me before he bursts into a fit of laughter. “You cannot be serious,” he says.
I point to my face. “Does it look like I’m joking?”
“Why would you possibly want to help me win Kenzie back?”
For many reasons I won’t be sharing with him. For right now, I’ll settle on telling him what he will believe. “Because I want to be a waitress again, and the second you got hired, my promotion flew out the window. So when I help heal your broken heart, I get my old job back.”
“But you hate Monte’s,” he points out. “And you hate me .”
“Wilson, will you just shut up and accept my help?” Holy crap. I’ve never met a human being more difficult than this six-foot-something buffoon.
“No,” he says, “I won’t. Why do you want to help me? We hate each other, Jackie. Like, that’s our entire thing.”
“And this doesn’t change that at all. Believe me, I still hate you. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever hated you more. But right now, we have a common interest, which is keeping Monte’s afloat. So if fixing your fragile little heart is going to solve all our problems, then let’s do it.”
Wilson studies me like I’m a candidate for a job interview. “What makes you think you can help me win Kenzie back?”
Duh, because I’m the one who helped you lose her in the first place. Surprise!
I hold a finger up for each reason I list. “Because I’m a girl,” I say. “Because I know what Kenzie probably wants from you. Because I have two older sisters who have basically taught me the ins and outs of relationships. Because—and I cannot stress this enough—I’m your only hope. And if you were a big enough goof to lose her the first time, I hardly doubt you can win Kenzie back on your own.”
Wilson looks at me like I’m speaking a different language. “I don’t like that you’re making sense,” he says.
“So do we have a deal?” I ask, ignoring his comment. “We maintain enemy status while I help you win Kenzie back, therefore saving your family business, and when all is said and done, I get repromoted to waitress.”
A minute passes without a response.
“Well?” I ask.
“I’m thinking about it,” he says.
“Wilson, your options are eternal sadness or let me save your ass.”
“No,” he says. “My options are eternal sadness or spend a significant amount of time with you. Like I said, I’m thinking about it.”
This annoying, frustrating, irritating person stands there for another two minutes—I counted—chewing on his lip and alternating between looking at me, his car, and the sky.
“Wilson, you cannot be serio—”
“Fine,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
He extends his hand. I shake it. His grip is firm, determined.
Well. I guess that’s that.