Two
TWO
TAYLOR
A t 4:30 p.m. in the west parking lot of La Jolla High School, Taylor Frost sits in the driver’s seat of his bluish silver used sedan waiting for his boss’s daughter to be let out of school. His trusty surfboard remains affixed to the roof. Waking up before his alarm and a clear, beautiful forecast meant he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to shred some waves before work.
A cool mid-March breeze floats through his open window as he reads his boss’s bio for the sixth time, scouring for typos. Even one misplaced comma makes Amy Lu upset, so he circles back for a seventh go.
* * *
Amy Lu, a proud Chinese American woman in business, has become a major player in the hospitality industry, winning numerous awards, grants and other accolades. The rising hotelier began her career by cofounding the Storybook Endings Resort in Calico, New York, a charming respite in the Catskills that gained popularity online with whimsy and charm. She is now the CEO of Storybook Lodgings, the company that has turned the original Storybook Endings Resort from single location to chain. With two thriving locations, the original and one right outside of Dallas, Texas, and one set to open on Lake Tahoe later this year, Amy is looking for partners to help expand her vision and operation on the West Coast and beyond.
* * *
This bio is going in front of investors. Big suit-and-tie types who have the capacity to flood money into the business that Amy can immediately put toward the necessary finishing touches on the dream California location. And as her personal assistant for the last three years, Amy’s dreams have become Taylor’s dreams.
Partially because his (long-term, so-close-he-can-taste-it) dream is to get a full-time position in hospitality at one of Amy’s locations.
He sips from the iced green tea latte sweating in his cup holder and pointedly ignores the fact that his current job is only hospitality adjacent. When he first saw the job listing for Amy Lu’s assistant, he jumped at the opportunity to apply, and after several intensive interviews and a lengthy trial period, he scored the gig.
At first, he assumed this would be more of a ground-floor position. Going to the locations. Assisting where needed. Learning the ropes of the business while seeing smiles on the faces of luxuriating guests.
That’s not at all what greeted him on day one. He practically spent an entire twenty-four hours stuck in an AC-less room undoing the mess Amy’s previous assistant left behind.
Amy Lu’s day-to-day is more big picture. So big, in fact, that he only ever sees the forest, never the trees. Illustrated now by an e-mail crashing into his ever-flooding inbox from a photographer out near Lake Tahoe. The first photo attached to the e-mail is of a forest. Edge to edge green. Overwhelming in scope.
The photographer was tasked with taking aerial shots of the resort grounds for the website update. Amy wanted some dreamy photos to go along with the press release and reservation link, so Taylor found, vetted and hired the best candidate. The second attachment on the e-mail is a sweeping shot of the cabins and the pool and the sandy volleyball courts from above.
At least there’s a bit of beach along with the swath of forest in this one. Something new to lure and appease Taylor’s eye.
For a moment, he gets lost in the image, fantasizes about moving up north to help launch this brand-new business venture. That daydream gets squashed as soon as the doors to the school clamber open and a rush of teens spill into the parking lot.
Samara Golding moves among them. She inherited her father’s towering height and her mother’s jet-black hair. She walks with the bounce of a still-fifteen-year-old but has the heavily done cat eye makeup of a soon-to-be sixteen-year-old. Taylor knows this in-between well. He ferried five younger siblings through the plentiful awkward stages of adolescence.
Samara flops into the passenger’s seat and immediately reaches for the aux cord. “You have to hear the new Olivia Rodrigo,” she says, already scrolling through her music app. “I added it to our shared playlist this morning. I don’t know if you saw it.”
Taylor spent half his day unburying himself from an e-mail mountain, so he’d missed the notification. He rarely got a second to check his personal phone in the afternoon. “I didn’t, but now I’m excited. How was photography club?” he asks, throwing the car into Drive as the pronounced electric guitar wobbles through the speakers.
She adjusts the camera bag in her lap so it doesn’t get jostled in transit. “Great. Can you take a left? I’m starving. I want In-N-Out.”
The house is five minutes away. In-N-Out is thirteen minutes in the opposite direction, a route that’s always punctuated with pesky traffic. But Taylor’s growling stomach decides for him. Once again, he forgot to eat lunch because he was too wrapped up in a whirlwind of responsibility.
“Mr. Larkspur loved my portraits of you,” Samara says as they traverse down Soledad Mountain Road. Taylor agreed to model for her a few months ago after she mentioned he could use one of her edited photos as his professional headshot. “He says you make a good subject.”
Taylor laughs. “Does he?”
“Duh.” This has been an ongoing topic since Back-to-School night in September. Amy sent Taylor in her place and Samara’s photography teacher took a distinct liking to Taylor. “Is it an age thing?”
“No, it’s not an age thing,” Taylor says, remembering the flutter of attraction he felt when the early-forties, tan-skinned man chatted him up after the session where he discussed the advanced photography syllabus and showed some students’ work from previous years. “It’s a time thing.” Taylor dedicates his life to Amy Lu and Samara Golding. To his roommates and his siblings and the surf. Men rarely find their way into that cluttered snapshot.
Samara whines when they pull into the drive-through lane at In-N-Out instead of parking. Taylor tells her Amy’s expecting them back ASAP. She huffs, but happily accepts the fresh-cut fries slathered in sunflower oil when he hands them to her. She puts the Olivia Rodrigo single on a loop since they were barely listening on the ride over. By the time Taylor parks outside the Beach Barber Tract rental with its large southern magnolia taking up most of the front yard, he practically knows every lyric.
Once inside the single-story house, Samara races with her food to her bedroom, eager to edit that day’s shots. “Don’t forget to do your homework, too,” he calls after her. Some days, he feels more like her older brother than her mom’s employee.
Amy’s in the third bedroom, which she turned into her home office, decorated with her signature colors—crimson, gray and white. She sits behind her glass desk, laptop open, desktop monitor on, phone pressed to her ear. She’s wearing a bright red blouse, a pencil skirt, and her jet-black hair is parted down the middle, hanging in shiny, straight tendrils that stop right at the crests of her petite shoulders. Her calculated mouse clicks can be heard out in the hallway.
Taylor waits outside, as he always does, until she looks up and gestures him in. One time, he made the mistake of bypassing this formality and accidentally overheard his boss saying some racy things to her recent boyfriend that he still wishes he could scrub from his memory.
“Okay. Great. I’m glad you understand the urgency. I appreciate your willingness to get this right. I’ll have my assistant on it first thing. You’re a gem. Take care.” She’s setting her iPhone down on the desk, a hard-won smile catching on her face. “Did you see Silvan’s e-mail?”
“Yes,” Taylor says, pulling his tablet from his bag. This tablet is his lifeblood; his whole career exists inside that terabyte hard drive. Amy’s everything—dietary restrictions, coffee orders, family birthdays, address book, etc.—can be pulled up with a single tap of the electronic pen on the ten-inch screen. Taylor treats it the way some might treat a family photo album, with reverence and gentle care.
“Well? What did you think?” Taylor is about to speak when there’s a ding from Amy’s phone and, probably having forgotten she asked a question at all, she starts typing out a response to someone else while speaking to him. “I thought the angles of the photos were off, and the lighting wasn’t right. I need him to go at it from a higher elevation, which means another pricey helicopter rental, but what can we do? I’m going to fly up north to go out with him and grab the shots we need for presentations and the website. The sooner we have the right visuals, the easier it will be to onboard new investors.”
“Understood.” Taylor launches every airline price tracker he has downloaded. “When do you need to be in by?”
Amy’s head is still down, thumbs moving at the speed of light. “This Friday, returning next Wednesday.”
Taylor doesn’t need to reference her calendar. She’s now double-booked, but he won’t phrase it as such because the bookings are his business. It’s his job to make her days as effortless as possible. “Excellent. Should I reschedule our travel to upstate New York for Samara’s sweet sixteen preparations, then?”
One of Taylor’s largest duties this year has been preparing Samara’s birthday bash. She and fifteen of her closest friends will take over the cottages at the Catskills Storybook Endings to make friendship bracelets, roast s’mores, play laser tag, and have movie screenings. The three-day, two-night trip will end with a proper party in the barn, which will be turned into a glimmery dream complete with photo booth, cake pops, and dance contests.
Overseeing the booking of flights and accommodations for sixteen precocious teenagers was a challenge, but he grew up in a big family, so corralling the uncorralable is a skill he’s fine-tuned his whole life.
Amy purses her lips before saying, “No, you go ahead as planned. Move my ticket to Samara’s flight.”
“Will do.” Taylor’s insides do a strange dance. He hasn’t traveled anywhere on his own in years. He barely even gets privacy in his three-bedroom apartment because when you’re the lone single person living with two couples, you’re last in line for just about everything.
“Book me in first class,” Amy says.
“On it.” He finishes writing out his notes, seven tabs already open and loading. “Should I reschedule the inspection of the Catskills location you had planned for before the party? Maybe for the end of the week?”
“I trust you can handle that for me. You know my standards well enough by now,” she says. It comes out so blasé that he almost doesn’t register it as an exciting compliment. “Make note of anything that you think is amiss. I’ll check it out when I arrive and make proper provisions to fix it moving forward. Does that work for you?”
A swelling sense of responsibility rises high through him like a particularly good wave to surf on. Maybe this is the ultimate test to see if he can live up to her lofty expectations for full-time resort workers. A true position is so close he can practically reach out and grab it. “Absolutely.”
“Good,” she says with a hand wave. “I’ll expect my travel itinerary by EOD.”
“On it.”
“Is that for me?” Amy asks, eyeing the bag of In-N-Out he’d set down upon entering. “You really do think of everything.” She stretches her hands out in greedy thanks.
He hadn’t thought to order her anything. In the last three years, Amy has eaten fast food in front of Taylor exactly once. She took the burger off the bun and didn’t even finish. She hates the way it makes her feel, but perhaps the stress of the California location is weighing on her so much that she could use the comfort. Far be it from him to deprive her of the greasy, savory goodness. He yields his belated lunch despite his furious stomach.
His hand is on the door handle when Amy says, “Oh, and please e-mail my ex-husband about the change of plans. Better from you than from me.”
He’s certainly heard that refrain before. “I’d be delighted to.”
On his walk back to the kitchen, those silly words bang around inside his brain. Delighted to? As Amy’s personal assistant, he’s expected to adopt her stance on the people in her life. It’s not that she doesn’t like her ex. It’s more that she begrudges him for having to chase her aspirations solo. For leaving her with no choice but to pack up and explore greener pastures for the business they birthed together.
That’s the story Taylor’s been told. It’s gospel truth to him. And every time he thinks of it, he shudders.
Taylor operates under a firm “family first” policy. He doesn’t understand how someone could be so selfish and stubborn as to let his partner and daughter move far, far away when they needed him the most. It’s unthinkable.
Which means, when he settles down at the breakfast nook in the open-concept kitchen, he swats at the slight titter of attraction that crops up as he pulls open his e-mail browser and keys in Ethan Golding.
Taylor has a type. Tall. Broad. Bigger than him. Outdoorsy. Guys with facial hair and eyes that have seen things .
The photo of Ethan attached to his e-mail contact is new-ish and checks every damn one of Taylor’s boxes. Ethan’s dirty blond hair refuses to stay in place despite there being signs of product in it. He has a well-groomed beard that suits his squarish jaw, and a body like a brick house—sturdy and bulky and warm-looking.
Nope. No way.
If Taylor’s learned anything from Amy’s cautionary tales, it’s that business and pleasure do not mix. Any sort of attraction he may be harboring for Ethan Golding is fatuous and fleeting.
To avoid considering this any further, Taylor sends off a very polite e-mail to alert Ethan of the schedule changes, puts on Samara’s playlist and then compares first-class seat options for his boss’s upcoming excursion.