My friend’s shoulders fell. “If you must … not that it would help my case anyway. I don’t think I need extra assistance for that.” She paused, sighing sadly. Making me want to reach out again and tell her that her prince would eventually show up. She just needed to stop picking up only the assholes. My relatives included. “But before that, we can actually talk about your horror story.”
Oh. That.
“I already told you everything about it.” My gaze fell to my hands as I played with the label on the bottle. “I gave you a play-by-play recap. From the moment I blurted out to my parents that I was dating a man who doesn’t exist to the moment I somehow made my mom believe his name was Aaron because of a certain blue-eyed jerk who had appeared out of thin air.” I scratched harder, ripping the label completely off the plastic surface. “What else do you want to know?”
“Okay, those are the facts. But what’s on your mind?”
“Right now?” I asked, to which she nodded. “That we should have picked up dessert.”
“Lina …” Rosie placed both arms on the table and leaned on them. “You know what I am asking.” She glanced at me sharply, which, when it came to Rosie, meant patiently but without a smile. Or a smaller than usual one. “What are you going to do about all of this?”
What the hell do I know?
Shrugging, I let my gaze roam around the coworking space, taking in the chipped, old barn tables and the hanging ferns adorning the red brick wall to my left. “Ignore this until my plane touches Spanish ground and I have to explain why my boyfriend is not with me?”
“Sweetie, are you sure you want to do that?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Yes.” Bringing both hands to my temples, I tried to massage away the start of a headache. “I don’t know.”
Rosie seemed to take that in for a long moment. “What if you actually consider him for this?”
My hands dropped from my temples to the wooden surface, and my stomach plunged to my feet. “Consider who?”
I knew exactly who. I just couldn’t believe she was even suggesting it.
She humored me by replying, “Aaron.”
“Oh, Lucifer’s favorite son? I don’t see how I should consider him for anything.”
Watching how Rosie clasped her hands together on the table, as if she were readying herself for a business negotiation, I narrowed my eyes at her.
“I don’t think Aaron is all that bad,” she had the nerve to say.
All I gave her was a very dramatic gasp.
My friend rolled her eyes, not buying my bullshit. “Okay, so he’s … a little dry, and he takes things a little too seriously,” she pointed out, as if using the word little would make him any better. “But he has his good traits.”
“Good traits?” I snorted. “Like what? His stainless steel interior?”
The joke bounced right off. Ugh, that meant serious business.
“Would it be that bad to actually talk to him about what he offered you? Because he was the one who offered himself, by the way.”
Yes, it would. Because I still hadn’t figured out why he had done that in the first place.
“You know what I think of him, Rosie,” I told her with a no-nonsense expression. “You know what happened. What he said.”
My friend sighed. “That was a long time ago, Lina.”
“It was,” I admitted, averting my gaze. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t mean that just because it happened a handful of months ago, it’s now somehow been written off.”
“It happened over a year ago.”
“Twenty months,” I corrected her far too quickly to hide that I had somehow kept count. “That’s closer to two years,” I muttered, looking down at the crumpled paper sheet that had wrapped my lunch.
“That’s my point, Lina,” Rosie remarked softly. “I have seen you give second, third, and fourth chances to people who have messed up far more. Some even repeatedly.”
She was right, but I was my mother’s daughter and therefore stubborn as a mule. “It’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
Her green eyes turned harder; she was not letting this go. So, she was going to make me say it. We were going to talk about it.
Fine.
“How about because he told our boss that he would rather work with anyone else in InTech? On his second day of work.” I felt my blood rushing to my face at the memory. “Key on anyone. Even Gerald for crying out loud.” I hadn’t overheard Aaron mention Gerald in particular, but I was sure I had heard everything else.
“Anyone but her, Jeff. Just not her. I don’t think I could take it. Is she even capable of taking on this project? She looks young and inexperienced.”
Aaron had told that to our boss on the phone. I had happened to walk past his office. I had accidentally overheard, and I hadn’t forgotten. It was all etched in my memory.
“He had known me for two days, Rosie. Two.” I gestured with my index and middle fingers. “And he was new. He came here and discredited me to our boss, indirectly kicked me out of a project, and put in question my professionalism, and for what? Because he didn’t like me after the two minutes we talked? Because I looked young? Because I smile and laugh and I’m not a cyborg? I’ve worked hard. I’ve worked my ass off, getting to where I am. You know what comments like that can do.” I felt my voice pitch high. Same went for the pressure of my blood now pumping into my temples.
Making an effort to calm myself, I released a shaky breath.
Rosie nodded, looking at me with the understanding only a good friend would. But there was something else there too. And I was under the impression I wouldn’t like whatever she had to say next.
“I get it. I do, I swear.” She smiled.
Okay, that was good. I needed her to be on my side. And I knew she was.
I watched her walk around the table and take a seat beside me. Then, she turned and faced me.
Uh-oh. This wasn’t all that good anymore.
Rosie placed a hand on my back and continued, “I hate to remind you of this, but you didn’t even want to be on the GreenSolar project. Remember how much you complained about that client?”
Of course I’d had to go and find a best friend who had a borderline photographic memory. Of course she remembered that I had been glad to be relocated to a different project.
“And,” she continued, “as you very well said, Aaron didn’t know you.”
Exactly. He hadn’t bothered to do that before he decided to label me as a hindrance and talk shit about me to our boss.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “What’s your point, Rosalyn?”
“My point is that, sure, he judged you based on only a couple of days,” she patted my back. “But you can come across a little … informal. Relaxed. Spontaneous. Sometimes loud.”
My scoff was heard all the way in Spain. “Excuse me?” I gasped loudly. Dammit.
“I love you, sweetie.” My friend smiled warmly. “But it’s true.” I opened my mouth, but she didn’t give me the chance to speak. “You are one of the hardest workers here, and you are amazing at your job while you manage to create a light and fun working atmosphere. That’s why you are a team leader.”
“Okay, I like this direction far better,” I muttered. “Keep going.”
“But Aaron didn’t have a way of knowing that.”
My eyes widened. “Are you defending him? Shall I remind you that we—as friends—should hate each other’s enemies and nemeses? Do you need me to print a copy of the best-friend code for you?”
“Lina”—her head swiveled, looking frustrated—“be serious for a minute.”
I sobered up immediately, deflating in my chair. “Okay, fine. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“I just think you were hurt—understandably so—and that bothered you enough to write him off this long.”
Yes, I had been outraged and hurt too. Something I despised was people making judgments based on shallow impressions. And that was exactly what Aaron had done. Especially after I had gone out of my way and tried to welcome him in the division with the best and warmest intention. I couldn’t believe I had shown up in his office with a stupid welcome gift—a mug with a funny quote about being an engineer. To this day, I didn’t know what had come over me. I hadn’t done that for anyone else. And what had Aaron done? He had just looked at it in horror and gaped at me like I had grown a second head as I cracked jokes like a total awkward dumbass.
So, to overhear him say that kind of stuff about me not more than two days after that … it had just made me feel small and all the more pathetic. Like I was being shoved aside after not measuring up to the real adults.
“I’m going to take your silence as confirmation of what I said,” Rosie told me, squeezing my shoulder. “You were hurt, and that’s okay, sweetie. But is it reason enough to hate him forever?”
I wanted to say yes, but at this point, I didn’t even know anymore. So, I resorted to something else. “It’s not like he has been trying to be my friend or anything. He has been a constant pain in my ass all this time.”
Except for that life-saving homemade granola bar, fine. And those papers he’d printed out for me when he didn’t have to, sure. And maybe for the fact that he’d stayed late, working with me on Open Day last Wednesday.
Fine, okay, except for those three occasions, he had been a constant pain in my ass.
“You have been too,” she countered. “You two are equally bad. Actually, it’s even cute how you two have been looking for excuses to trip each other and—”
“Oh, hell no,” I cut her off, turning in my seat to fully face her. “Let me stop you right there before you launch yourself into this weird shit about looks and whatnot.”
My friend had the nerve to cackle.
I gaped at her. “I don’t know you anymore.”
She recovered, pinning me with a look. “You are oblivious, sweetie.”
“Am not. And you seem to need a reminder, so here’s how things are.” I pointed in the air with my index finger. “Since I overheard him saying those ugly and prejudiced things about me, to our boss no less, his name has been on my black list. And you know how seriously I take that. That shit is carved on stone.” I punched my palm with my other hand to be clear. “Have I forgiven Zayn Malik?”
Rosie shook her head, snickering. “Oh, Lord knows you haven’t.”