My Brother's Billionaire Best Friend - Max Monroe Page 0,1
in way over my head.
Maybe
“Yoo-hoo, Betty! Where is Maybe? I thought she was going to man the front for a few hours?” my dad shouts, his voice filtering with ease into the back room of the floral shop.
Just the sound of it makes a deep, cavernous sigh escape my lungs.
And the fact that he’s asking about my whereabouts? Now that’s worthy of a tight chest.
“I think she just needed a minute to—” my mom starts to reply, but she’s cut off before she can convey any real information. Bruce the super-sniffing shark only needs a trace of blood in the water to attack.
“Needed a minute?” He guffaws. “I’ve needed a minute for the past thirty years, but you don’t see me dillydallying around.”
“Bruce,” my mom chastises. “Stop being such a grumpy bastard.”
My dad’s been on the warpath since he found out our shipment of Gerbera daisies is running behind schedule, but his behavior really isn’t the slow delivery’s fault. Today, when it comes to Bruce, isn’t any different from any other day.
He always has zany criticism for me and my mother—what we call Bruce-isms—and an overabundance of dad jokes locked and loaded and ready for use.
Deep breaths, I coach myself as I finish up an email to a potential publishing house. This is only temporary.
Too bad it doesn’t feel that way.
I’ve only been back in New York for two weeks, but it may as well have been an eternity.
I just completed graduate school on the West Coast and moved back here to find a career in publishing, and all in all, I felt like I was making the right moves. While I had friends in school, I never found the core group of people that would be mine for life, and in New York, I have an emergency support system.
Plus, New York has far more options for a career in publishing than California and over eight and a half million people who could be potential friends.
Honestly, before turning in my final thesis, it all sounded pretty simple.
Find a job—preferably as an editor at a prominent New York publishing house.
Get an apartment.
Find new friends.
Find a man etc, etc.
Alas, things in real life are never as easy as they are on paper, and as a result, I’m currently spending forty hours of my week working side by side with my parents and living out of my brother Evan’s old bachelor pad in Chelsea.
As I’m the blood sister of the former resident, the single-guy paraphernalia littering the place is an actual nightmare. But hey, I guess I can thank the stars, the sun, and the moon that I’m not living in my childhood bedroom.
Still, my New York friend count is at a staggering zero, and I’m not even going to address the reality that when it comes to the whole find-a-man task, I’m woefully behind the curve.
I just kind of forgot to make it a priority.
I was too busy reading Stephen King novels, studying hard to keep a perfect GPA, and chasing a level of perfection high enough to trigger unmistakable pride from my hard-to-please father.
Bruce Willis—aka my dad—is a man of too many words and most of them are stubborn, cantankerous, and filled with enough sarcasm to make Amy Schumer’s new Netflix special look watered down.
For as long as I can remember, his life has revolved around two things: his family and his business—Bruce Willis & Sons Floral. Established in 1980, my family’s florist shop has become one of Chelsea’s pride and joys.
Ironically, my dad only has one son, my brother Evan, who lives in Austin, Texas.
So, really, it’s just Bruce Willis & Wife & “Temporarily Back Home from Graduate School but Not Planning on Working Here Forever” Daughter Floral.
But that’s too long to fit on the storefront marquee, so I’m stuck dealing with all the looks I get, wondering if I’ve undergone gender reassignment surgery.
And now I, Mabel Frances Willis, am a twenty-four-year-old, college-educated, sexually stunted woman, who’s barely held a penis in her hands.
Prospects on penis-encounters aren’t looking great with that old-lady moniker, but thankfully, everyone calls me Maybe. A nickname that was created because my parents realized about two years into my life that the name Mabel wouldn’t suit me until I reached an age where senior citizen discounts and Melba toast became a constant in my daily routine.
Although, maybe Maybe isn’t the world’s greatest nickname.
The utter definition of the word revolves around indecisiveness.