Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,11

I’d been truly happy. My year abroad. It hit me then that I no longer knew the young woman who had fallen in love with Colin and Jean Claude and Marcellino. I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to be topsy-turvy, dizzy from a smile, ass-over-teakettle crushing on someone.

Was I even capable of those feelings anymore? I didn’t know. But there was only one way to find out. I had to see them again. The thought of leaving, just leaving, everything and everyone to return to Europe and find the three men who’d once meant so much to me was positively terrifying. It was also the first time I had felt fully alive in years. There was no doubt in my mind. I had to go back.

chapter three

THE THING IS, I quit,” I said.

“Beg pardon, what?” Aidan Booth removed the earbuds from his ears and held them up for me to see. “I was doing my daily meditation.”

“Oh, sorry to interrupt,” I said. I glanced around the office, trying to gather the same strength of purpose I’d had a second ago when I uttered the words I quit. It had taken me three cups of coffee and a quick sesh of listening to Beyoncé’s “Flawless” to get pumped for this. I’d been as ready as I’d ever be, and now I was . . . not.

Aidan was sixty-two with a long gray beard that touched the second button of his Henley. He wore his thick curly hair—also gray—in a ponytail, which started at the nape of his neck and reached down to the middle of his back. He was a vegan who was into the environment, so despite being the general manager in charge of corporate fundraising for the American Cancer Coalition, he shopped at thrift stores, limited his use of plastic, and had a hydroponic tower garden in the corner of his office, where varietals of lettuce grew in front of the window like big leafy flowers on a large metal cylinder that resembled a plant stalk.

“No worries,” he said. He said this all the time. It was, in fact, his catchphrase. In all the years I’d worked for Aidan, he’d never seemed to worry about anything. “What was it you needed to tell me, Chelsea?”

“I quit,” I said. It came out more abruptly than I’d intended, and I cringed.

Aidan blinked. He jammed a finger in his right ear and wiggled it as if to remove wax, then he nodded. It was a slow bob, as if he was acclimating to the unexpected conversational direction. “I can dig it. Mind if I ask why?”

I blew out a breath. How much did I want to say? I wasn’t sure. How could I explain that my father was getting remarried, I was freaking out, and the last time I could remember laughing that didn’t involve a video of a pudgy kitten getting stuck in the narrow leg of a pair of tapered pants seemed like a lifetime ago?

“I need to go find myself,” I said. It sounded vaguely bohemian, so it was something I figured Aidan could understand.

I reached up and adjusted the tie that held my hair at the nape of my neck, then I fiddled with my earring. I was fidgeting, which made me look nervous and was not how I wanted to present myself. I clasped my hands in my lap to keep from doing it again. I wasn’t nervous—really, I wasn’t. I knew this was the right thing to do. My life had become as predictable as gravity, and it was time to shake it up.

Aidan stroked his beard. It was a mannerism that had developed with the facial hair. When I had first come to work for the corporate-fundraising arm of the ACC, he’d had short hair and been clean shaven. In the seven years I’d been there, Aidan had been undergoing a slow transformation, like erosion on a beach, except his landscape was more like a reforestation involving beard oil and braids.

I glanced at my reflection in the window behind his desk. It hit me then that I had not changed a bit in seven years. I was wearing my usual slim skirt and tailored blazer over a silk blouse that buttoned to my throat. This was my uniform at the office, paired with narrow-heeled pumps that added two inches to my height, making me five feet nine inches. Today’s skirt was navy, as were the pumps, my blazer was sage green, and my