Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
Later that night, after I’ve showered and crawled into bed, my bones tired, my mind disassociating, I check my phone one last time before muting it and see a new text from Will.
I saved his number after he sent me a message at the office with his full name, as if I didn’t know it: Will Grant . But for some reason, I saved the contact as only Will .
Will: I extended my trip through Sunday
Josie: ok. Why sunday?
Will: I can’t meet with you tomorrow because of my other client but if you have time Friday, I want to pick your brain about B Corp strategies. And Saturday, I’m going to fix your car.
Josie: You want to pick my brain?
Will: Don’t fall over
Josie: You know it’s mostly girl pop lyrics and glitter up there, right?
Will: We both know that’s not true
Josie: Did you get Derrick’s dinner invitation?
Will: Yep. Eberly at eight thirty tomorrow night. I’ll be there.
Josie: Great
Will: Can I pick you up on the way?
Josie: why on earth would you want to?
Will: To take pictures of your car. I need to show my cousin.
Josie: What does your cousin have to do with literally anything?
Will: Just give me your address, Josephine
Josie: 154 marmot Lane
Will: See you tomorrow night
I push my phone onto the bedside table and force my eyes shut, trying to block out everything, let sleep steal me away. But I drift off imagining versions of him between seventeen and twenty-seven. Will at twenty. Twenty-two. Twenty-five. I imagine the divot in his chin sharpening with age, his shoulders broadening, his voice dropping lower. And I fall asleep to the sound of him saying, You and me.
Thursday is my favorite day of the workweek. Objectively, worst to best, the list goes like this: Tuesday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Thursday.
I’m not taking questions on the list.
But Thursday is the best because it’s my creative day. I get to mess around with the design team, gossip with Camila on brand strategies, watch the social team shoot content, and do the other fun, sparkly things. Plus, I have Pilates on Thursdays and the entire soundtrack is female rappers. It fills up my well, and on my way home after the day, just as the summer sunshine is fading to a purplish hue behind the far tree line, I’m still in a great mood. Not even dinner with Derrick Lovell and Will Grant tonight, as off-kilter as that’s going to be, will sour this day.
Until I find him waiting on my doorstep.
Which is a problem because it’s not even eight o’clock yet, and I’m wearing a neon-pink athletic bra and very tight bike shorts. My hair is in a matted blond knot on top of my head. I’m still glistening.
Will Grant, by contrast, is sitting on my front porch in a suit, looking like James Bond or maybe Harvey Specter, his brown hair combed back, hands behind him on the concrete to support his upper body weight. When he sees me pull into the driveway, he stands.
Of course he stands.
I get out of my car, hauling a backpack in one arm and a shoulder bag in the other, and head toward him with a tense face. If this was a Bachelor clip, I would plainly and simply not be getting the first impression rose.
His eyes flick up and down me, then flash back up to my face. Is that a red flush beneath his chin?
Will clears his throat. “I take it you’re struggling with the dress code as well?”
“He jokes,” I say.
Will’s dimples grow larger and larger with every passing second. “Did I get the reservation time wrong?”
“No.” I move past him on the steps, fiddling with my keys. “I just expected you to be here five minutes before the reservation, considering I live five minutes from the restaurant. ”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“Because you’re from here?”
Will gives me a look. “When I lived in Austin, my family didn’t go to dinner at restaurants like this one.”
It’s a subtle way of saying his family doesn’t come from money—like mine does, to a degree, and like Derrick’s kids will, to a much larger degree.
“Give me twenty minutes,” I say. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Um.” Will eyes the bachelorette paraphernalia scattered literally everywhere. “Okay.”
I’m in too much of a rush now to explain, so I barricade myself in my bedroom and turn on the shower, imagining what he’s thinking about only a few walls away. So much pink. So many sparkles. All those cardboard boxes piled by the door.
After I scrub my body down with soap under the warm spray and dry off, I throw on a simple green smock dress and strap my feet into a pair of low nude heels. I slap on a few makeup necessities and dry-shampoo my hair, then swirl Listerine. The longer I leave Will alone in my home, the more insecure I become. Forget picking my brain tomorrow at the office. He’s going to take one look around and say, You know what? I think I already get the gist of who Josephine Davis is these days, thanks.
“You have three sewing machines in this room,” Will informs me when I make it back to him, slightly breathless. He’s absentmindedly rubbing a thumb over his full bottom lip as he turns to look at me.
“Four,” I correct, knocking on a vintage piece of rolltop furniture. “This one was passed down from my oma. It’s a foldaway, and it doesn’t work.”
“What’s in progress over there?” He points at the Brother, which I use for embroidery. It’s set up on the table in the midst of the props.
“Oh. My best friend is getting married. Camila Sanchez, maybe you met her in the boardroom? I’m embroidering her bachelorette sash with her new last name.”
“What about”—he turns ninety degrees, points at the Singer on the kitchen countertop—“ that one?”
“Making some pajamas out of this buttery fabric I got.”
“In the kitchen?”
“I don’t cook much.”
“Okay.” He smirks. “And that one?” Will nods to the corner of the room, where the small mint-green desktop machine is currently presiding over a pile of hardbacks.
“Terrible quality, but it was cheap and looked cute in Instagram photos, back when I was the one taking them. Now I just use it as an artistic bookend.”
Will nods, his eyes finally pulling over to mine. Another scan up and down my body, quick as a flash of light, but his expression doesn’t change. “All set?”
“Wait a minute.” I put my hands on my hips. “No snarky comment on the glitter blanketing the grooves in the floor? The pile of returns ready to ship out?”
“All that tells me,” Will says, eyes narrowing, “is you’re a dedicated friend and you shop online—which, let’s face it, could be a write-off in your case. Besides, I like this house. I’ll admit I pictured you somewhere fancier, but now that I’ve seen your home, I think it suits you.”
I bristle at the positive, calming note to his voice. “Well, thank you.”
His blue eyes dance. He knows he’s thrown me. “Shall we?”
“Yep.” I head for the door. “Did you get the pictures of my car you needed for your cousin?”
He holds it open and lets me exit first. “I did. He owns a repair shop. He says it’ll only take the day, since he preordered the part when I first called on Wednesday morning.”
“I’ll be in town,” I say, “but Revenant has its first pop-up on Saturday. I’ll ride my bicycle there, so you can have the car.”
We head down the cobblestoned side path to Will’s rental car, parked on the darkening street. “You have a bicycle?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“A road bike?”
“It’s a hybrid.”
After a minute where I can feel Will’s mental gymnastics—his attempt to digest this hobby we have in common even amidst his notions of me—he says, “Cool.”
When we reach his car, he opens the passenger door. I slide into the seat without making eye contact but grumble a thanks under my breath, my body heating.
After he climbs in, he says, “So. You’ve apparently got exactly five minutes to tell me what you think of Derrick.”
I burst into a short laugh, then cover my mouth with both hands. He looks amused at my amusement, his dimples poking through.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “It’s just, Derrick has probably been in a million situations where someone asked him what he thinks of me. This is the first time it’s happened the other way around.”
Will frowns as he pulls onto the road. “Nobody’s ever asked your opinion of him?”
“I think most people were so thrilled with his investment that personal opinions didn’t matter. But for the record, I like Derrick. He respects me.”
Will’s grip on the steering wheel tightens as he takes a right turn. “He listens to you?”
“He always listens. And he almost always argues back. But I don’t see that as a bad thing. Derrick pushes me, exposes my limitations. I’m young and I lack experience. That’s just a fact there’s no getting around.” After a beat I add, “He’s making me take online CEO classes.”
Will smirks. “How’s that going?”
“Don’t tell him I said so, but it was a good idea.”
As the air-conditioning circulates, I’m hit again with Will’s scent. Cedar in sunlight. I peek at his profile and let myself watch him while he focuses on the road. There’s a tenseness to the set of his jaw, but his posture is almost forcibly relaxed. I wouldn’t have guessed he felt out of place with me unless I’d known to look for it.
Has Will told Zoe about this yet? That we ran into each other after all this time, that he signed a contract with my company? I wonder what their relationship is like these days. Are they closer than they were as teenagers? More estranged than ever?
“How do you like Austin?” Will asks.
“I never want to leave.”
“Yeah.” He sighs. “I remember that feeling.”
“What about New York?” I ask.
“New York is great. It’s always been great.” He shifts in his seat, eyes darting over to me briefly. “I’m just tired, I think. I sleep better here, away from the noise of Manhattan. This is my favorite place to visit clients.”
“So that’s why you changed your mind about Revenant,” I joke.
“No,” Will says. “I changed my mind because I was in the wrong, and you deserve better.” When I don’t immediately reply, he adds, voice going soft, “You’ve always deserved better from me, Josie.”
My voice catches in my throat. “Yeah, well, Zoe deserved better from both of us.”
After a moment he says, “I leaned in first.”
“We leaned in at the exact same time,” I say, while goose bumps erupt over every inch of my skin. “Don’t rewrite history to ease my conscience. It was perfectly mutual.”
We pull up to the restaurant parking lot thirty seconds later, but neither of us makes a move to immediately vacate the car. I’m envisioning his lips on my skin. His fingers in my hair. His voice, urgent and broken, murmuring You feel perfect on a deserted stretch of beach.
He’s thinking of it, too. I can tell.
Will turns to me in his seat, his eyes as dark as the water that night. “I can’t change what happened in the past, or the way I wasn’t there for you afterward. All I can do is give you my absolute best from this point on. You haven’t seen me at my best—not then, and not yesterday—but that changes starting tonight.”
I bite my lower lip in amusement. “Did you practice that?”
“Three times. How did I do?”
“Pretty good,” I say, laughing.
Will offers me a small smile. “Shall we go swindle the most notorious retail shark on the West Coast out of a four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine?”
“Five hundred,” I counter. “He’s got property outside Napa.”
Derrick ends up surpassing both our guesses, and I think it’s because he’s pleased with this turn of events—buddying up with Ellis Consulting, and at a discount. I’ve discovered that Derrick Lovell wines and dines people only when he thinks he’s getting the better end of a deal, and tonight, he’s pulling out all the stops on Will. But after the appetizer plates are cleared away, Derrick takes a phone call and comes back to our table in a rush.
“I have to get back to SF.” He pulls his coat off his chair, nodding at us once with no further explanation. “I’ll flag down our waiter and pay the bill. See you both soon.”
With that, he’s gone. Will turns to me, his brow hitched.
“He’s like that,” I explain. “It’s either his wife, his kids, or another one of his investments that needs tending to.”
“He flies private, I assume?”
I nod. “I was on that jet once. The pilot’s name is Gerald. He likes to joke about maintenance issues.”
Will blanches.
Our entrées arrive, and as we tuck in, I make a calculated ploy to turn the conversation on him.
“Tell me about your time in New York.”
Will sneaks a look at me, cutting into his roast chicken with careful, meticulous precision. He looks… anxious, all of a sudden. I can tell by the way his eyebrows are drawn together, like he’s rehearsing his lines before he speaks them aloud. “I went to NYU for college and studied finance. After I graduated, I accepted a job on Wall Street at an investment bank—”
“No.” I cut him off. “You were a finance bro ?”
I’m mostly joking, but Will blushes, caught out. “Reformed,” he corrects me, with emphasis, and quite a bit of self-awareness. “Don’t look at me like that, Josephine.”
“Like what?”
“Like I crush dreams. Like I’m thirty seconds away from lecturing you about diversifying your portfolio.”
“How bad is the itch?”
He glares, leaning an elbow on the table between us. “I left that job after three years,” he goes on, “and moved to the Carlisle Group. Which was fine until I got assigned to this company that was doing some shady stuff with privileged information.”
“Think I heard about that.”
“Everybody heard about that,” Will grumbles. “I couldn’t move past it, even though everyone else did, and fairly quickly. I’d reached a…” His head does a small tic. “Crisis of conscience, of sorts. I needed out.”
“Which leads us here,” I say.
Will nods. “Now I mostly work with start-ups in a variety of industries, but I try to avoid New York– or Silicon Valley–based companies.”
“Why?”
He frowns. “They more often cut corners I’m not interested in cutting. So, instead, I spend a lot of time in Austin, Boulder, and Miami when I travel, which suits me much better.”
“You really are reformed.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
The ambience of this restaurant—the low lighting, sultry music, overpriced wine warming my ears—is doing its level best to shrink the distance between us. Our voices drop lower, conspiring as well, and our shoulders droop in, magnetic.
I shake off the feeling, turn my attention to my plate. Will does the same, a quietness expanding as we start to eat. He refills both of our wineglasses wordlessly. Pours me water from the carafe.
“Can I ask you something?” I grab my wineglass by the stem, swirl it a couple times as I watch Will over the rim. He nods at me, taking a bite of his chicken. My eyes flick away from the sight of his jaw working, back to the deep red in my glass. “Did you tell your boss it wasn’t a good idea for Revenant to be your client because of Zoe or because of yourself?”
“Myself,” he answers immediately. “Zoe wouldn’t have cared.”
I frown. “You honestly don’t think so?”
“I know she wouldn’t. Zoe and I…” He looks beyond me. “There were other things going on that had nothing to do with you that drove us apart during high school. But we’re as close now as we were when we lived in Austin. So no, I can say with confidence that when I tell her we’re working together, Zoe’s not going to mind. She may even think it’s some kind of cosmic fate. She’s like that.”
He smiles, and I do, too. “I remember. Obsessed with the zodiac, with destiny. All that.”
It eases my mind, knowing Zoe isn’t going to be furious when she discovers this. I should give all three of us more credit for how much we’ve grown up.
“Now can I ask you a question?” Will counters.
Something about the flash in his eyes gives me pause, as if the question coming my way has far more depth than I’m prepared for.
But fair’s fair.
“Sure,” I say.
“What is it,” he says, voice impossibly low, “that you want more than anything?”
Fuck.
“That’s rather broad,” I deflect. “And ambiguous.”
“ That’s a cheap answer.”
“What do my personal desires have to do with Revenant?”
“Everything, Josie. They have everything to do with the creation that fell out of your head and now exists in the real world, perceivable and consumable by friends and strangers alike.”
“You’re freaking me out.”
“Good. Nobody ever gets anywhere interesting when things are comfortable.”
“To be clear, are you asking me to contort myself into an uncomfortable position as a means of keeping you interested? Here I thought you were a reformed finance bro.”
“Stop avoiding the question. I answered yours, didn’t I?”
He waits patiently, letting me summon the courage to articulate something that no one—and I mean no one —has ever asked me before.
What do I want more than anything?
My brain runs through a list of obvious responses: to get B Corp Certified, to make our customers happy and confident with the way they look, to be the best friend to Camila I can possibly be, to be a daughter and sister my family is proud of. But something tells me Will’s not going to accept any of those. They’re all associated with somebody else. They’re all desires built on perception. Which maybe says something all on its own about my fatal flaw.
What do I want, just for me?
“I want my existence to be meaningful,” I all but whisper. My eyes are trained on the bottle of wine, but I force them up to Will’s. He’s watching me with singular, patient attention, with the same focus he gave me in that presentation yesterday. “I want to add value to my community and still be true to myself. A girl who’s into clothes and self-care and pretty things and riding my bicycle, but also environmental conservation and positive social change. I have a fear of being a waste of space. So I guess my biggest desire is… the opposite of that? I want to have to try, but not just for the sake of it. I want the focus of my efforts to be good, and deep, and meaningful. Does that make any sense at all?”
I press my lips together, a blush collecting on my cheeks as the full weight of my speech settles over Will Grant. His eyes are roving my face, searching for something.
“Makes perfect sense,” he says, his voice scraping out. “And for the record, I know exactly how you feel.”
This, I wasn’t expecting. The fact that we both love cycling is one thing, but connecting on an emotional level is… uncharted.
“Really?” I ask, my tone soft.
Will nods, his stormy eyes still locked on mine. I wonder if he’s planning to elaborate—to give me a morsel of history that explains his own insecurity over the depth of humanity he doesn’t know if he can personally accomplish—and for a moment, it seems like he just might. But then our waiter comes back holding a to-go box with Derrick’s untouched meal, and the moment passes.
Still. I leave dinner that night feeling a little bit less alone.
On our drive home after the meal, Will asks me about my bike. When I tell him it’s mostly pink, he emits a bitten-off laugh and says, “I bet that suits you.” He walks me up to my front porch, bids me good night, his eyes lingering on mine until the door clicks shut between us.
On Friday, after our meeting when Will “picks my brain”—which is mostly him asking questions about my company vision and me going on a passionate tangent—he leaves me with not one, but five reference letters from his other clients.
They’re glowing, every one of them.