Wreck My Plans

Chapter One

There’s nothing quite like getting fired and spending six weeks scouring Miami for a new job, only to end up declaring defeat, to make you reevaluate your life choices.

As I drive along the familiar, palm-tree-lined road on the opposite side of the Floridian peninsula, my battered confidence rattles around, complaining as loud as my car’s engine.

Not sure why the motor gets to whine when I’m the one who’s had to work the pedals while needing to pee for the last twenty-seven minutes.

This three-and-a-half-hour drive has given me too much time to think, to relive sitting across from my now-former boss, dragging my palms down my pleated skirt and sweating so much my antiperspirant didn’t stand a chance.

Anyone who says all publicity is good publicity has never had to come up with an explanation for a stray pair of underwear.

Sure, I’ve been in trouble before, but this time was different. This time, I couldn’t smooth it over with a cheery smile, perfectly curated response, and my signature can-do attitude. Not with my client blowing up on social media…for all the wrong reasons.

What happened?

My boss had opened with that question that never fails to make me feel like a kid, and I’ve always been a goody-two-shoes.

The rule-follower, the appeaser, the fixer.

The sort of student a teacher puts in charge of a classroom, cementing their position as an unpopular nerd among their peers for years to come.

I’m Mia Andrews. I don’t drop the ball. Don’t make careless mistakes.

Not as the reliable one, the adult in the room, the person people turn to for help during an emergency.

Six weeks later, and I still don’t know how I could’ve bungled things so badly. How I could’ve let so many people down, especially myself.

With my destination in view, I signal and slow. The instant I turn down the ostentatious entryway, I feel like a little kid again. But this time, in the best of ways. It doesn’t matter that my life’s a mess or that I’m twenty-six years old—there’s just something about Grandma’s house.

That’s right, I called in my version of the calvary.

What I usually am for everyone else, my Grandma Helen is for me.

When I broke down over the phone about my lack of employment opportunities, she insisted I drive over the swamplands and through the Everglades, to grandmother’s active retirement community, I go.

Not because my five years of being employed by one of the biggest PR firms in Miami was a long enough career to be pensioned off already, but because a position had opened up, and Lakeview Retirement Community was willing to take a chance on me.

The only place willing to take a chance on me, I think, my throat beginning to clamp. After my grandma called in a favor.

At least this job—polishing the village’s image to attract new residents—keeps me in the field of PR.

But it’s a task that seems laughable, considering my memories of tennis courts and oases of crystalline pools, shrubbery kept neat and trim, and flowerbeds planted so something’s always in bloom.

Why would anything so squeaky-clean need polishing?

But I needed the job and the win. While I still didn’t have a complete grasp of why I crashed so hard, I knew I was burning the candle at both ends, going way too long without a break.

It’s not like I didn’t realize a career in public relations would be demanding. If anything, I considered being busy a perk—I thrive in fast-paced environments. It’s during the quiet, calm stretches my brain attempts to sabotage me.

But I’d felt off for months, the fog in my head so thick I couldn’t access my short-term memories or full range of vocabulary.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, my stepbrother needed help enrolling in college and then settling into a dorm, and couldn’t I just fly to Virginia for a few days to help?

Knowing he wouldn’t get assistance from any of the parents we had between us, that left me to do the heavy lifting.

So even as my inbox continued doing its best impression of Mt.

Everest, I did what I always do when times get rough—I buckled down and pushed myself harder, faster, longer.

Until I hit a wall.

We’re talking Wile E. Coyote, running full speed ahead.

Exhausted from long hours at the office, evenings and weekends spent on the sidelines of the basketball court or traveling for my family, and another Saturday night date gone wrong, I’d groaned at the blur of notifications on my phone and done something wildly unlike myself.

I silenced the dang thing and fell into bed for a nap that turned into the sleep of the dead.

For fifteen whole hours.

And what did my NBA superstar client do while I was completely do not disturbed?

Ezekiel King (or King EZ to his fans) did what he did best and landed himself in a mess.

Social media influencers from every platform came rushing out of the woodwork, adding more claims of infidelity and panty-snatching.

It took me three years of running errands and volunteering for side projects to convince my boss to give me an account of EZ’s magnitude, and for the past eleven months, I’d handled the eccentric baller’s publicity like a boss.

A bleary-eyed, tired boss who showed up to basketball games and night club openings and oversaw commercial shoots.

I spun his dirty plays on the basketball courts into displays of passion, finessed stories that highlighted his altruistic side, and stayed far, far away from any whispers of infidelity between him and Dahlia Vale, his movie star girlfriend.

Mostly because I’d witnessed them both getting pretty hot and heavy with other people. At the beginning of my career, I would’ve balked. But by year five, I barely batted an eye.

Until he passed me a pair of panties to hide as his girlfriend rushed up to surprise him after a game.

They fell to the floor in the shuffle, as I’d obviously hesitated to touch someone else’s dirty underwear, the extra-lacy, extra-red thong starkly contrasting the white tile just outside the press-room door.

King EZ looked at me, pleading with his big brown eyes and unfairly long lashes, leaving me to stumble through an explanation about a wardrobe malfunction as I snatched them off the floor.

Mere moments before a swarm of reporters headed our way from the other end of the hall.

After that, I told him I was done covering for him, which evidently meant nobody was doing it.

Typical.

I should’ve had a more serious discussion then, before photos of his “trophy box” were leaked online by a disgruntled, assumedly panty-less lover.

But by the time I awoke from my weekend of playing Sleeping Beauty—completely refreshed for the first time in ages—the tiny window in which I might’ve controlled the narrative on his latest scandal hadn’t just closed, it’d shattered.

With the superstar athlete losing millions in endorsement deals and his team more than a little upset, my boss had wanted an explanation, one I didn’t have.

What happened after that is…I got fired.

How could one mistake—from someone who wasn’t even me—turn my life into such a dumpster fire? Why was I being punished along with the man who kept discarded panties from the women he bedded as trophies?

My thoughts flip sides, causing a lump to form in my throat and guilt to gnaw on my insides. I failed my client and my boss, along with the entire team. It’s no surprise that after six weeks of applying to every publicity firm in Miami, nobody wanted to hire the publicist from #PantyGate.

I jig in my seat, glancing from the road to the directions on my phone.

Three more minutes to the clubhouse.

Tiny little increments are how I measure my time now, each hour, each day, and each week overflowing with could’ves, should’ves, and anxiety.

Despite the circumstances that’ve brought me to the southwest coast of our most phallic-shaped state, excitement tingles through my veins as I catch sight of the tall line of palm trees.

Upon my initial visit to Florida from rural Indiana where my mom, stepdad, and three out of four siblings still live, I mocked the trees for having all that trunk for such a tiny spray of green. They didn’t make sense or even provide proper shade, yet they’ve come to symbolize home.

As I drive farther into the community, I see the landscape’s slightly overgrown and a few of the buildings are in need of a power washing or fresh coat of paint. Nothing that can’t be amended fairly quickly, and my mind’s already accumulating a task list.

A section of my flat-ironed bob falls forward as I roll down my window and let in the breeze, and I tuck the brown strands, freshly chopped and tinted in cinnamon, behind my ear.

“Main office.” I read the sign aloud as a robotic voice tells me to turn in five-hundred feet.

I take the left without having to wait for traffic, as hardly anyone drives cars around the neighborhood. Rather, dozens of blinged-out golf carts putter around the sidewalks, trails, and streets.

A cluster of them ring their bells and wave at one another just up ahead and, since they don’t seem to be paying any attention to me, I give them an extra wide berth. Hanging from atop the mini vehicles, I catch a string of colorful…

Are those loofahs? The puffballs sure look like what I pour my bodywash on every morning, anyway.

I’ve gone from sports cars to golf carts. It feels horribly accurate, that downgrade in my life from the fast lane. As my pulse rises and my lungs constrict, I assure myself it’s only temporary.

Once I’ve recovered and proved myself—again—I’ll return to my overachieving ways and my life in Miami. The next time a big opportunity comes along, I won’t mess it up. And if I ever find myself in need of another nap, I’ll tape open my eyelids and pound another energy drink instead.

With my bladder about to burst, I stifle thoughts of liquids as I screech into a parking space and bolt for the glass double doors.

Right as two men are coming out of them.

Ooh, maybe they can tell me if I’m in the right place.

“Excuse me,” I say, stutter-stepping to snag hold of the door, even though the man exiting the building hasn’t let go. My fingers tighten, flexing on impulse as I get an eyeful of firm pec muscles, rounded shoulders, and rugged features that place him in his early thirties.

Blond and burly isn’t my usual type, but my throat goes completely dry as he fully steps outside, his body propping the door I’m continuing to grip like a lifeline. Sunlight caresses his whiskered jaw, and when his blue eyes flash to me, I can’t remember my name, much less my question.

They return to the older gentleman at his side as quickly, which reengages the gears in my brain, but they’re still wonky enough that I blurt, “Where am I?”

“You think I like dragging you down here?” Blond and Burly asks, so hopefully he didn’t hear me, but the frustration he aims at the stocky man with the receding gray hairline prevents me from celebrating. “That I don’t have better things to do?”

“You’re the one who comes running every time,” the older man mutters under his breath, and the handsome grump drags an exasperated hand down his face.

Insinuating myself into situations so I can resolve them happens to be my specialty, but I’m here to start my job, not get in the middle of other people’s business.

The younger of the two men pinches the bridge of his nose and asks, “Can we not do this again?”

“You’re at the most expensive retirement village my wife could find,” the older man tells me abruptly. “Not sure what a woman who never goes swimming is gonna do with three pools within walking distance, but evidently, I’m the one paying for it.”

Looks like the surliness is a two-way street and, deciding I have plenty of problems of my own to deal with, I duck my head to charge through the open gap.

It’s a tighter squeeze than expected, given the guy’s enough of a gentleman to continue holding the door. The line of his forearm flexes mere inches from my eyeballs, the nip of air conditioning from inside the building contrasting the heat at my back.

“If I have my way”—the gruff voice is close enough to my ear I jump a little—“I’ll never step foot in this overpriced place again.”

“If you set your account to autopay like I suggested,” Blond and Burly fires back, “you won’t have to.”

“That’s how they get your information!”

As I slip past, close enough to the younger of the men to pick up a delicious whiff of palo santo, musk, and citrus, his deep voice rumbles, “Hell. This is my version of hell.”