yet,” I told him. “I’m planning to at the end of the week.”
Because it was true.
After that last conversation with Gunner, I knew I needed to get out of the gym. I needed to get Deepa out of there. She had a good heart, and she was smart and detailed, but there were a couple people who I didn’t trust or like that she was too friendly with. She had moved to Houston for school, but I knew she hadn’t registered for this upcoming fall semester. I kept on top of her because I knew no one else other than her mom did, but….
I had to pick my battles, like I was sure Connie had to do with me plenty of times.
I knew how lucky I’d been that, even though my parents hadn’t been very active in my life, I’d had other people who stepped up and held me accountable. That rooted me. The older I got, the more I realized how important things like that were.
That was partially why I wouldn’t just leave her knowing her only family member was a few hundred miles away.
If anything, I was just so much more grateful to have something waiting for me outside of the gym.
Hating my boss was exhausting. There were good parts and bad parts about focusing all of my time on The Lazy Baker, just like with every job. People talked a lot of shit in the comments section and in social media, it was a lot of work since I did just about everything myself, and it was a hell of a lot more stressful now. It hadn’t been years ago. But that was before I’d started to see it as more of my future and less as a fun hobby I did on the side.
“There was no such thing as a perfect job,” Boogie had told me one day when I’d gotten one of the first ugly comments on my videos and he’d found me crying.
But if I was going to get pissed off, at least it would be on my own terms.
And even though I had never started vlogging with any real expectations, it didn’t mean I wasn’t going to take it to the next level if I could. You didn’t squander opportunities in life—at least I wouldn’t.
So I was going to do this shit and do it right.
Part of that was to finish putting together my recipes and finally hire a photographer for my cookbook. I also needed to see about revamping my site so I could have more space for ad revenue on it. Lastly, I needed to make more business-conscious steps too, because I hadn’t taken advantage of my reach until almost too late. I hadn’t taken it seriously enough for too long.
But that was shit to think about at work or at home. My plan B, C, D, and all the ones after that. My future.
Anyway.
I was pretty sure the man who, now that I got to see him again without nerves, had to be around my age with big, brown eyes, and a couple of cystic acne scars on his cheeks, nodded once. “What are you going to make?”
I walked in and waited for him to close the door behind me. “I’m tweaking an old soup recipe, and I was thinking about trying to make brownies.”
“Brownies?” Zac’s roommate asked as we headed toward the kitchen. He had to be five-ten, maybe five-eleven, max.
I spotted a male figure dart from the kitchen in the direction of the corner where the stairs were. Who the hell had that been? I was pretty sure I’d seen gray pants and a white shirt. Hadn’t that been what Trevor was wearing earlier? I wondered but focused back on CJ’s question. “Yeah, but I don’t want to use eggs.”
CJ genuinely “hmmed” beside me. “What are you going to use instead? A flaxseed egg?”
A flaxseed egg? How many of my videos had he seen? I didn’t use them that often. I glanced at him. “Nah. I was thinking bananas could work to hold everything together. What do you think?” I asked when we stopped in the living room and kitchen area. Zac wasn’t around. I had messaged him on the way over, thinking it was better to give him some notice in case he was busy and needed to bail on me before I got here. But he had texted me back and hadn’t said anything about being busy.