Window Shopping

Maybe I should skip the meeting and go downstairs to the window box where she’s working. Just to be positive she’d smirk. Hell, I’d take a smirk over not seeing her at all. I’ve held the girl in my arms one damn time and now all I can think about is doing it again. Sitting down with her in my lap, letting my hand roam freely up the softness of her wool tights. Watching awareness dawn on her face that I’m nothing in bed like I am in the street.

Not even close.

Christ, don’t think of that now or you’ll embarrass yourself.

We reach the entrance to the conference room and Linda, the receptionist who has been here longer than me, comes stomping out with a pinched expression holding a pitcher of water. “They don’t want it cold,” she says, somewhat hysterically. “They want it room temp. Last time they wanted it freezing.”

“Maybe we should have the water blessed by a priest and burn the demons out of them,” Leland suggests. “St. Patrick’s is only a few blocks away. I could be back in no time.”

“Forget the water, Linda. I’ll handle them.” I lean down and whisper near her ear. “There’s a bottle of bourbon in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk. Go take a swig.”

Her shoulders drop down from around her ears. “Bless you, Aiden Cook.”

“Leave a drop for me,” I chuckle on my way into the conference room. “I’ll need it,” I murmur under my breath as I come to a stop at the head of the table, taking in my family members and their shared air of impatience.

Closest to the window overlooking midtown is my grandmother, Shirley, and her grandson—my cousin—Randall. Randall will not look up from his phone once during this entire meeting and frankly, I’m good with that. He tends to say things that make me want to pop a blood vessel, Leland-style. Across from my grandmother and cousin sits my father. Bradley Cook. He looks over at me briefly when I walk in, then goes back to studying the skyline.

“Merry Christmas, everyone,” I say, taking a seat. Leland flops down into the chair beside me like he’s about to get a tooth pulled without Novocain. “I hope you didn’t hit too much traffic coming in from Long Island.”

“Of course we did,” Shirley draws out, fingers wrapped around the straps of the purse in her lap. “This is Manhattan and we’re nine days away from Christmas. The bridges and tunnels are full of people wanting to shop.”

“For which we are eternally grateful,” I say briskly, spreading my paperwork out in front of me. “Where do you folks want to start?”

“Folks?” My father snorts. “Where on earth did you come from?”

Shirley cranes her neck to look out the conference room door, probably wondering where Linda is with her room temperature water. With any luck, Linda is feeling no pain right about now. I’m not going to make my receptionist run around for water when I’m sure my grandmother’s limousine is waiting downstairs stocked with nine flavors of seltzer. “It’s Edna’s influence, Bradley,” she drawls. “The fault lies with you for sending him to live down south with that loon for so long.”

My skin turns hot under my clothes, but I refrain from taking issue with that statement. If Edna were here, she would laugh and say, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are just a representation of the speaker’s insides—not me. And not you.

I clear my throat. “Moving on from family matters—”

“I had to send him. You know my hands were tied there,” Bradley slides in smoothly, gesturing to me. “At least he got a decent education while living in Tennessee. I’m not sure how Edna managed to get employed at a prestigious boarding school as an art director, but they obviously knew what they were doing.” I’m caught between skepticism and shock that my father just gave me a rare, if roundabout, compliment, but skepticism wins when he tacks on, “So he occasionally sounds like a country bumpkin. You take the good with the bad.”

“I suppose,” my grandmother murmurs, looking at the door again.

“Yes!” Randall cries out, excited about whatever just happened on his phone.

Shirley smiles at him indulgently.

Leland is blinking so fast and so hard, I already know we’re looking at a doctor visit. The tip of his pen has already ripped a hole in the page of his notebook and he’s only written the date.

“Down to business,” I say quickly when my father tries to continue the conversation with his mother. “Our holiday shopping numbers are not quite back to pre-pandemic levels, but we’re getting there and we’re making up a lot of the deficit by focusing on online sales and marketing.” Shirley snorts at this. She thinks online shopping is tacky. She also thinks shopping in real life is tacky. I have no idea how she does her shopping. “It has been our saving grace through all of this, really, and based on focus groups we’ve been holding, I believe people will continue to shop this way, so we’re increasing the budget for online customer acquisitions.”