Free Want Me by Jo Leigh Page B

hell of a long text because she was
taking her sweet time. His food came, and he kept watching the phone as the
waitress arranged the big plates on the small table. Finally, another
ding.
    He was back to tense in a
second, only this time it was with eager anticipation.
    My cousin Ariel met u at the wedding.
She’d like to meet u for drinks tmrow nite at Molly’s. She’s great. Pretty.
You’ll like her.
    The breath he’d been holding
rushed out of him, smothering the spark starting to flame. He didn’t
remember meeting anyone named Ariel at the wedding. He had no interest in
going for drinks with Shannon’s cousin. How the hell had he gotten things so
screwed up?
    Sure. Send me her #. I’ll
call.
    His typing was slow,
each word a punch to his gut. It wasn’t easy to press Send, but he
did.
    The pause that followed gave him
enough time to realize the containers the waitress had brought weren’t going
to be sufficient. His hunger had vanished, and while he wanted to walk out
and leave it all behind, he wasn’t going to. That would be ridiculous.
Shannon wasn’t intentionally hurting him. There was nothing between them,
couldn’t be anything between them. Any interest he’d experienced had been
one-sided. It happened. Not to him, not before now, and that was why he was
caught off guard. Hell, he was just her brother’s friend, that’s
all.
    In fact, what she was doing was
something friends did. It was nice of her to set him up. A few dates would
keep him from getting bored as he waited to get back to his real
home.
    The beep sounded, and he hoped
it wasn’t her saying goodbye.
    It was.
    * * *
    S HANNON KNEW HE WAS HOME . Not because she’d heard him—the one thing this old
brownstone had was excellent soundproofing as long as there weren’t
connecting walls. No, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, Danny had knocked
on her damn door and announced Nate’s arrival. At least her brother hadn’t
opened the door. He knew better. But she especially didn’t want Nate to see
her like this. In her flannel nightgown, scrunched under her covers, TV on
some show she didn’t care about, her laptop open on some website on
marketing she hadn’t bothered to read and a big bowl of Kraft’s blue box of
macaroni and cheese in her hands, the alarmingly orange pasta being devoured
as quickly as she could shove the spoonfuls in her mouth.
    She hummed a bar of “I Feel
Pretty” then sagged against her pillows. How had her life come to this? And
why, why was the nonstarter with Nate the thing that was crushing her
chest?
    It must be transference. Better
to obsess about a guy than the very real fear that she couldn’t save the
plant. That no matter how many times she thought things would be okay, that
the family would move on, that the struggle to hold on to a building and a
brownstone when they were worth enough that her whole family could be secure
for the rest of their lives was idiotic… .
    Yes, better to think about a
guy, when the truth was, she couldn’t let the business go. Everything in her
believed in holding on. That what her family had was precious and worth
keeping, and that money—even barrels of money—was no replacement for the
legacy, the lessons, the heart and soul generations had dedicated to this
life.
    Maybe her crush—and was there
ever a more appropriate word?—on Nate was another way to cling to her past.
It probably had nothing to do with the man he was now. But what he
represented. Continuity. Treasured memories.
    She put the almost empty bowl on
her nightstand, wanting to weep. She should never have taken those
psychology classes at City College.
    Finding the remote, she clicked
off the TV, then logged off her computer and slipped it under her bed. One
click and the room fell dark, except for the alarm clock that mocked her
with it’s big red 8:30. She’d never fall asleep this early. Or at all. It
was ludicrous to try, but she shut her eyes anyway.
    She had no idea what she was
going to do