Grumpy Best Friend: A Second Chance Romance Read online

  “But no more talking about the good old days. I don’t want to do the whole nostalgia thing with you.” She pushed my shoulder gently, making more space between us. “Do you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear,” I said. “Reminisce openly and as often as I want. Get as explicit as I can.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t piss me off and make me regret this already.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  She sighed and gave me another look, but we didn’t argue on the ride back to her place, and she even let me drop her off in front of her door. I watched her go inside, eyes on her long legs, and I wondered how long this good will would last—days, maybe, probably not weeks.

  5

  Jude

  For about an hour after watching Bret toss that drunk idiot on his ass and help that poor woman, I felt like maybe we could fix things.

  That feeling slowly wore off, until the next morning I sat in my kitchen drinking coffee and staring at the wall and thinking about coming into the office every day only to see his smug face smiling at me. Every day, day after day, I’d have to deal with him in some capacity, whether I liked it or not.

  I thought I might go crazy.

  I knew it wouldn’t work. From the second we sat down to dinner, and he gave me that charming smile, I knew I couldn’t learn to run a company with that man breathing down my neck. As much as I thought he might’ve changed, I still couldn’t bring myself to accept that he was back in my life.

  It wouldn’t work. Sooner or later, something would go wrong—and I didn’t want to be the one suffering when that happened.

  There was only one solution. I checked the time in London, just to be sure, then called Lady Fluke.

  She picked up on the third ring. I half expected to leave a message, but she sounded surprisingly chipper. “Hello, Jude,” she said. “How is my former assistant doing?”

  “I’m doing good,” I said, and began to pace across my apartment. “I had a productive day with Bret yesterday.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, and I heard her moving around on her end of the phone, shuffling papers. “I was just looking at an email from him. You found office space, I hear?”

  “Right,” I said, and stared up at the ceiling. Of course he was in touch with her. I didn’t know why I thought I’d be the only one with direct contact. “The office looks nice, and it’s within budget.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, although I realized that we’d never actually hammered out a budget at all. “Tell me, how does the factory space look?”

  “With some work, it’ll be nice,” I said, nodding to myself. “But I’m sorry, Lady, can we talk about Bret?”

  A short silence. “What about him?”

  “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m going to just come out and say it.” I sucked in a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I don’t think we can work together.”

  A long, deadly silence on her end. I was so stupid. I didn’t know why I couldn’t just let this go and move on with my life. Bringing it up to Lady Fluke was the absolutely worst thing I could do. Now she’d be forced to choose between the two of us, and he was the one with money—I was disposable.

  “I’m not happy to hear you say that,” she said slowly, using her clipped diction again, like a sword against my chest. “I’ll tell you something, Jude. During my conversation with him last night, he offered to double his investment, and I accepted it.”

  I stared down at the floor and suddenly felt sick. I leaned up against the wall, dizzy and afraid I might fall.

  He doubled his investment. I didn’t know how much that actually was—but I guessed a lot, considering how much access she was giving him, and how important he seemed. I couldn’t imagine her letting him in on this venture without some big show of good will, since he was a stranger, and she put a lot of stock on relationships.

  Doubling that meant he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I guess you’re telling me that I’d better get over my issues,” I said, and almost laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “I guess so,” she said, and let out a sigh. “Listen, Jude, I know this is a lot. I understand that I have given you a lot of responsibility, with very little preparation or training, and it’s very overwhelming. But I don’t know many people in America, and those that I do, well, we’ve had a bit of a falling out. I need someone I can trust, and I need someone with experience. You, I can trust. Bret, he has experience. I very much want you to work well together.”

  “I understand,” I said, trying to steady my breathing but it was like my heart might break out of my chest. “You know what? He’s fine, I shouldn’t have called at all.”

  “Jude,” she said slowly. “If you need help, and you’re in over your head, you can say something. We can find you a different job.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want that at all. I’ll make this work.”

  “Please see that you do,” she said. “This is important to the longevity of my company. Don’t let me down.”

  And with that, she hung up.

  I threw my phone against the couch. It rebounded and clattered onto the floor. I stood there breathing hard, about to pass out, and cursed myself for being so freaking stupid. Calling Fluke like that was so childish and dumb, but being around Bret again made me feel like a goddamn teenager. It was like he transported me back to that time, when I was awkward and uncomfortable in my own body, and it was a horrible thing. I worked hard to escape those days, to grow up and to become someone better than that girl languishing in Levittown, hanging around the empty playground, kicking dirty, dented beer cans into the stream filled with radioactive catfish with their big, grinding teeth. He made me feel like that girl again, lost and alone, growing up in a house packed full of angry silences, desperate to escape. Desperate to be someone, or at least to be someone else, anyone at all.

  It wasn’t his fault. I knew it, and yet I blamed him anyway.

  Just last night, I told him we could work it out. And then this morning, I called Lady Fluke to try to have him removed from the project. I was hopping around between two extremes, unable to find my footing, and I felt like I was slipping away more and more every day.

  I needed to make a choice, and the choice seemed clear, even if it wasn’t a choice at all, even if it was forced on me, and there was no turning back.

  Sarcone’s was a small sandwich shop tucked into a tiny storefront that smelled like baking bread and deli cheese several blocks south of South Street. I sat on a small black bench in the shade of an awning and watched people walk past under the trees—girls in sundresses, men in shorts and button-down short-sleeve shirts, smiling and laughing, like the world was okay, and not slowly falling to pieces.

  I saw him turn the corner and I squirmed in my seat. Bret wore jeans and a t-shirt, tight around his muscular arms, his hair pushed back in a perfect messy wave like he’d spent hours on it, but I knew he probably rolled out of bed and looked like that. He lingered near a tree, a few feet away from me, leaning his broad shoulder up against it, squinting at me like he couldn’t tell if I were real or some kind of imaginary friend.

  He broke the silence first. “Bread’s really good here,” he said, nodding toward the shop behind me.

  “I know,” I said, “it’s my favorite.”

  “You getting anything?”

  “I thought I might, but I’m not hungry.”

  He didn’t move. I wished he’d say something about last night, but instead it was like that never happened, like even if we tried to move forward, I’d always end up dragging us right back.

  I had to stop the cycle.

  “I made a decision,” I said, my hands curling into fists at my side. I wanted to get up and leave and forget about all this—I could find a job somewhere else, doing anything else.

  “What did you decide?” he asked, a little smile on his lips like he knew exactly what I was about to say.

  I stood up suddenly. I couldn’t keep sitting still, not with him staring at me like that. I started walking, heading south, and he hurried to catch up. He walked with his hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders rolled forward, and that tense, closed-off posture somehow worked for him, like he made it confident instead of introverted, like the world would come to him whether it wanted to or not.

  We passed row after row of parked cars and houses, doors looming at the top of concrete stoops, bars over the bottom windows of some. Stop signs hung loose, and across the street, a restaurant served beer through a small side window and couples sat at iron tables drinking from cans.

  “We’re going to work together,” I said as he drew close at a crossing. He looked at me, then was quiet as we moved in front of a truck. It sped through the intersection once we reached the sidewalk.

  “I already knew that,” he said.

  “I called Lady Fluke,” I said, plowing forward, heedless. “I asked her to remove you from the project.”

  He didn’t seem surprised or angry. I expected him to be pissed off—but instead, he only looked at me with a curious frown. “I thought dinner went well,” he said. “Aside from those drunk assholes.”

  “It did,” I said, “but how’s one dinner going to fix all the awkwardness between us?”

  He screwed up his face for a second, like he was lost in thought. I’d seen that look a thousand times, and I almost smiled. It was the old Bret, the one I knew from back in the day. He gave me that look whenever he came to me with some stupid idea, like this one time he wanted to fill a Snapple bottle with gasoline and use some newspaper as a wick, and I told him we’d burn down half the woods if we did something so insane, and he gave me that look then, trying to see how my logic worked. He gave me that same look once when I told him that if he left me behind, he’d break my heart.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “But I’m also guessing Fluke refused to get rid of me.”

  “You gave her more money, didn’t you?” It wasn’t really a question, since I knew the answer already, but a smart person once said you never ask a question unless you know how it’s going to go.

  “It’s a good investment,” he said, and he seemed genuine, although I didn’t believe that was why he did it.

  We kept walking in silence. I didn’t know where I was going—it didn’t really matter. The act of moving kept my mind from spinning in circles.

  “If we’re going to do this, then we need some ground rules,” I said.

  He laughed and gestured at me. “All right, Jude. What rules do you want?”

  “First rule, no more talking about our past.”

  He pulled his hands from his pockets and put them in the air. “I’m pretty sure you’re the one that keeps bringing up what happened.”

  I gave him an annoyed look and pushed forward. “Second rule, we keep it professional between us. No more acting like we have a history. As far as I’m concerned, we’re strangers.”

  He stroked his chin and stopped walking in the shadow of a long brick wall that skirted along the side of a rowhome, blocking its back yard from the sidewalk. He leaned against it, toe pushing into a crack in the sidewalk, moving around some dirt and crushing a small green weed. His arms crossed over his chest and he sighed then ran a hand through his hair.

  “I can do that,” he said. “Even though I don’t want to.”

  “How else are we supposed to do this?” I asked him, genuinely curious about how he seemed totally fine with this situation, while I was a constant mess of emotions.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m not a good actor. I don’t think I can pretend you’re a stranger.”

  I clenched my jaw and tried not to shout at him. “We haven’t known each other for almost ten years,” I said softly. “As far as you’re concerned, I am a stranger, do you get it?”

  His face fell slightly, and I saw something dark pass across his expression as he turned his chin toward the traffic. A young girl with a big red backpack walked past, headphones in her ears, hair up in a cute bun. Cars slowly rolled down the street, and sunlight glinted off their windows.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll try to play along, but I want to make a rule, too.”

  I tugged at the hem of my shirt and tried not to fidget. I didn’t want him making any rules—I didn’t think he deserved any, but if this was what it would take, then I’d hear him out at least.

  “Fine,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Stop trying to cut me out,” he said. “No more going to Fluke behind my back. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it as a team. No more bullshit.”

  I chewed my lip hard enough to hurt, but I nodded once. “All right,” I said. “That’s fair.”

  “Good.” He pushed off the wall then thrust his hand toward me. “We have a deal? Keep things professional, do this together.”

  I stared his hands, at the calluses on his fingertips, and I wondered just how much of him I was missing, how many fights and heartbreaks and triumphs, and I imagined I didn’t know a lot, as much about him as he didn’t know about me, but even that ten-year gap, that decade of my life, seemed to pale in comparison to what we shared.

  “Deal,” I said and shook. He held me a little too long, like I knew he would, but when he released, I felt a strange sense of lightness.

  I’d finally accepted what I couldn’t change, even if I hated it.

  “I have a contractor coming into the factory tomorrow,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Wants to start taking measurements, maybe get an idea of what sort of tooling we’ll need.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, turning away from him. “I have a list of machines we’ll need and a process workflow we can go through.”

  “Good,” he said. “Bring that along.”

  “Who’s the contractor?” I asked.

  “A guy I know,” he said. “Friend of a friend. I’ve done work with him in the past. He’s solid and worth the cost.”

  “Fine,” I said, nodding to myself. I didn’t like that he’d reached out to someone and make such a big decision without me, but I also knew that this was his specialty, and the whole reason we’d brought him on. I couldn’t start undermining all of his decisions, not after we just decided we’d try to work through this together.

  “See you tomorrow then,” he said, and watched me for another second like he wanted to say something more, then turned and walked off.

  I went too far, asking Lady Fluke to remove him from this project. It was stupid and impulsive, and I knew it was the wrong thing to do. But this felt better—at least I was being up front with him, and now we’d find some way to move forward. I learned a long time ago that I could easily stay in one place, wasting my time on nothing, painting my nails endlessly, watching Dawson’s Creek reruns until my eyes gave out, or I could force myself to keep trying to improve.

  I thought of my mother, sitting in the kitchen with her plastic cup of Sprite and cheap vodka, smoking a cigarette, on her tenth pill of the day, barely aware of anything around her, always on the verge of being sick, always one misstep away from getting fired from another job—and I never wanted to end up like her, stuck in her own small world, stuck in her dependencies, stuck in her misery.

  I started walking, and with each step, I felt a little bit better. I had a goal. I had a target. I’d keep going.

  6

  Bret

  Nicky Shame scratched his square jaw and frowned at the open space. I could only guess what was going on inside that brain—mental calculations of square footage, materials, manpower, and money. We’d worked together on a couple other factory projects in the last few years, and while Nicky looked like a typical South Philly guy with baggy, cheap jeans and a ratty long-sleeve shirt, gut barely held in check by his poor, overworked belt, the ghost of a beard on his face, bags under his eyes, I knew the guy was sharp as hell and good at what he did. He was dependable, and that above all else mattered in my business.

  “One hell of a spot you’ve got here,” Nicky said, tapping a pen against his clipboard, and scribbled a note in what looked like a foreign language, but was probably poorly written English. “I used to drive past this place when I was a kid, you know, the whole goddamn road smelled like cookies.”

  “I know,” I said, breathing deep. The cookie scent was still there, lodged deep into the steel and the concrete. “It’ll smell like that again if we can get her up and running.” I glanced to my left and watched Jude skirt around the edges of the room, looking up at the windows and at the long streaks of light that cut into the workspace.

  “I’ll admit, I’m not excited,” Nicky said. “She’s an old building, you know? Not up to code, so there’ll be a lot of extra fucking around to get it legal, then we’ll have to put the tooling and machines in place.”

  “But it’s possible?” I tilted my head as Jude picked up a rock and sent it skipping over the concrete.

  Nicky winced when the rock smashed into a pillar and skittered away. “Yeah, doable, so long as your partner don’t fuck something up in the meantime.”

  “Hey, Jude,” I called, waving.

  She smiled a little like she’d been caught doing something wrong and walked over to join us. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I guess I got a little distracted.”

  “Nicky was just telling me that we can make it work,” I said, looking at him.

  He sighed and scratched his neck with the pen cap. “Yeah, all right, I can do it,” he said. “Won’t be fucking cheap though. And it won’t be fast, either.”

  “How slow are we talking?” Jude asked, frowning slightly. That was my question, too— the sooner we got off the ground, the better. Lady Fluke was liable to change her mind at any moment, and I wanted to sink as much cash into this project as possible before that happened. Otherwise, it’d be too easy to pull the plug.

  Fluke seemed like a proper English lady. She came from a long line of rich people, and she had that certain sort of breeding that made her seem unapproachable. But from my brief time with her, I’d realized she was a flake, like her last name suggested—that she was prone to mood swings and irrational thinking, though she hid it well behind good posture and a look that sent chills down my spine, like she was judging me, and she found me lacking. That look could make a lesser man crumble.