Yes & I Love You (Say Everything #1) - Roni Loren Page 0,13
leave your name at the door with an open invitation.”
Jasper needed to shut up. This wasn’t happening. Fitz was selling him some oceanfront property in Arizona. Who would want to invest in him? Pay a few bucks to see him act like an idiot onstage and make people laugh? Sure. That, people would do. Convince businesspeople that the hyper dude who dropped out of college because he couldn’t pass a math class was capable of handling their money and running a business? No freaking way.
He wouldn’t invest in him. How could he ever expect other people would?
Hell, he couldn’t even get the woman upstairs to trust him to make her coffee.
He promised Fitz that he would text him, but when he ended his shift for the day, Jasper vowed to put the ridiculous idea out of his mind.
He was done going down dead-end roads.
Chapter Three
“You do not need a new office. You can’t give up on the plan.”
Hollyn tucked her phone against her shoulder and shoved a frozen pizza in the oven before responding to her best friend Cal’s frustrated words. She bumped the oven door shut with her foot. “It’s not giving up on the plan. I’m just not sure if it’s the right work space for me anymore. It’s a lot of extra money to spend, too. There’s a cheaper place in Metairie.”
“No hella good way,” Cal said, one of his regular verbal tics sliding in. “You’re being a panic station chicken.”
Her brows lifted. She was so used to Cal’s tics that they were like background noise these days, but that second one caught her attention. “Panic station? That’s a new one.”
He grunted. “Yeah, it’s a Muse song. Great riff. And my brain panic station clearly thinks it’s a great title. Hella good.”
Cal loved music and played lead guitar with a local band in Baton Rouge, where he was finishing up his master’s degree in digital media arts and engineering at LSU. Music had always been the thing to give him some relief from his Tourette’s, but the side effect was that he often picked up verbal tics from the lyrics. He had to be careful what he listened to. In third grade he’d been stuck with hokey pokey! as a tic for months.
“That one’s strangely appropriate right now. I think I take the train to Panic Station every day I go into WorkAround.” She pulled a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a can of sparkling water out of the fridge. “And I’m not a chicken. I’m just not sure it makes sense for me to put myself through that every day. It’s distracting me from my actual work. WorkAround might just be too big of a leap.”
“Oh, don’t hella good give me that bullshit,” Cal said dismissively. “You love your panic station office. Plus, you and Mary Leigh came up with this plan for a reason. This is the next logical step. You shouldn’t be surprised that people are starting to strike up conversations with you. Hella good. They’re reaching out to you because you’ve been there a while now, and people like to get to know their coworkers. That’s a positive thing. You can’t go back to working from home. You’ll end up back at square one. Or worse, moving back home.”
Square one. She didn’t want to think of square one. And she especially didn’t want to think of moving back home.
“I promise I’m not going back to how I was. I go out at least three nights a week now for content for the Miz Poppy posts,” she said, her fingers tapping in her four count. “I promise I won’t become a shut-in.”
But the words didn’t come out with the amount of force she’d been hoping for. She’d been spurred to seek online therapy with Mary Leigh almost a year ago when she’d realized that she hadn’t left her house for a month except for a handful of Miz Poppy assignments. Delivery groceries. Takeout. A month and she’d barely noticed. That had scared the hell out of her.
She couldn’t risk that again.
The image of her rental house with aluminum-foil-covered windows, six cats, and ceiling-high stacks of newspapers filled her mind. Ugh. She’d watched too many reruns of Hoarders. She didn’t even subscribe to a newspaper. How would she end up with stacks of them? Plus, she was allergic to cats. But still, the image was imprinted on her nightmares.
“I’m going out tonight, in fact,” she added for good measure. “I’m still working the plan.”