food delivered and it helped, but he used an app and that meant looking at his phone and there was nothing happening on his phone that he wanted to know about.
Enjoyment factor. Zero out of ten.
By the time he’d sorted through old drumsticks for fan prize packs, he was done with phone watching. He switched it off, shoved it in a drawer and went and sat on his deck with the singular objective of getting comfortably drunk so he wouldn’t care.
He got hammered.
He still cared.
Zero stars.
He played Minecraft and kept dying in survival mode and losing all his inventory.
Horrible job.
If he’d had Mena’s number, he’d be drunk texting like a drunk fool.
Un-fucking-believable.
Do not recommend.
THIRTEEN
Vera’s idea of exercise on a Sunday morning was to find the nearest coffee shop and order something sweet with her macchiato. Mena gave up trying to drag her along the coast walk and they settled in a café with a view of the sea.
Vera’s idea of getting Mena to talk was to assume the worst and make Mena correct her. Mena wasn’t falling for it.
Tucking in to her blueberry hotcakes, Vera said, “You finally got the courage to boff him and he knocked you back.”
Mena sipped her smoothie and came back with. “Tell me about your new designs. Are you showing in Europe next year?”
“I see.” Vera waved a fork at her. “He couldn’t get it up for you and all your fantasies were crushed.”
Mena made a rude noise with her straw and then said, “What are the new season colors going to be?”
“They’re going to be shades of blush.”
Ah victory. Vera loved talking about her showings. Mena poked at a piece of mango at the bottom of her glass that was too big to suck up her straw.
“Blush and smug,” said Vera.
“Smug is not a color.” Although in fashion, the kind Vera designed, it could be one. Fashion-conscious women would be wearing smug in droves in about two years’ time.
“It is when you wear it.”
Oh, blush and smug. Mena pushed her empty glass away defeated. “Do we have to talk about this?” That recalcitrant piece of mango was a bit like her feelings, she couldn’t suck them up and fully digest them.
“There is nothing that interests me more.”
“It’s bad enough I will need to be forever grateful for your care package delivered in the nick of time, talking about what happened is another breach of ethics and privacy.”
Vera stabbed a wandering blueberry and popped it in her mouth. “You are gagging to talk about it.”
“You’re way off about that.” Mena had spent far too long thinking about all the ways the night with Grip was incredible and all the ways it was incredibly thickheaded of her to let it happen. Just because there was a history, no matter how one-sided. Just because they were obviously attracted to each other. Just because she found Grip impossibly brain-on-fire exciting to be near. Did not mean that she hadn’t fucked up and now she had to deal with it. She simply hadn’t worked out how without screwing over her entire career.
“You’ve done nothing but alternate between blushing and looking smug since we got here.”
“It’s a heat rash.”