up on it. “Want to do my yoga for me? I’m too tired.”
“I’ve fallen off my firefly pose fifteen times today, so no. You’ll have to fall off your own poses.”
“So you’re not suffering irreversible psychological harm from dealing with Miles Crowe?”
“No. In fact, check this out.” I scurried into my room and came back with the Billy Reid bag. “Look what he got me.”
She made grabby hands and snatched it from me, lifting out the cashmere shirt. “Oh, nice. But why?”
“Remember I told you he spilled coffee all over me the other day? This is him replacing it.”
She dug out the price tag. “For three hundred dollars? Dang. Can you ask him to spill some coffee on me?”
I nestled into the other end of the couch. “He’s different from what I expected.”
“I mean, he’d have to be, right? You can’t be obsessed with someone then have them live up to your expectations. It doesn’t happen.”
“I was only obsessed with him for like four months until the meme. Then it was more like a deep hatred.”
“But now you’ve met the enemy and found his humanity?”
“Something like that.” I had the uncomfortable feeling that if I’d only known Miles through his last three albums, I might have been really drawn to him as my grownup self. “His newer music is interesting. Strong John Mayer vibes.”
“But younger and sexier?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She shrugged. “Didn’t have to. I Googled him myself a few days ago when you told us he’d turned up like a bad penny. Agree on the sexy John Mayer sound. But also agree with myself that he’s sexier.”
“I don’t know about that.” I was lying. He was objectively sexy. But falling for his smile and his soulful eyes was a mistake that had ruined my life once, and I wasn’t going there. “What I know is that he’s grown up since he was sixteen.”
“Yeah, he has.” She waggled her eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes. “I mean emotionally. I’ve had clients with a fraction of his money act ten times more pretentious. He’s low-key. I didn’t expect it.”
“So you’re saying it’s not going to suck to work with him on this club?”
“I’m saying I’ll live.”
“Hallelujah. Let’s toast that with wine and a Clueless re-watch.”
“You don’t get tired of that movie?”
“Nope. It’s like potato chips. Nobody gets tired of potato chips. Clueless is potato chips for the brain.”
We settled in to watch Cher and Dionne do their thing, but my mind kept running through Miles’s music. One song played on a loop, one titled “Longing for Home,” a mid-tempo ballad about finding your place. The chorus said, “Shouldn’t have left, it’s all such a mess/Want to go back, I can only confess/Do I crave a real place or just a quiet mind/I think I’ve been looking for a home I can’t find.”
I was never going to be a Miles Crowe fangirl again.
I wasn’t going to stream his music or scrawl his name in notebooks or stalk his social media.
But that last part—finding a home—that I would do for him.
Chapter Eight
“I love the vibe.”
I turned to smile at Miles, who had stopped several feet behind me in the middle of the sidewalk. “Of the sky? The concrete?” I teased.
“All of the Bywater. This is it. My place is here. I know it.”
“It’s pretty great,” I agreed. We were standing on Dauphine, the “busiest” street in Bywater, “busy” being relative. Like most of the streets in the neighborhood, it was mostly lined with houses and a café or corner grocery tucked in here and there.
“I can’t believe how much it’s changed since I lived here. Well, since I lived in Metairie. Back then, it was rougher.”
“Things change.” People too, I wanted to add. I did. Maybe you did.
“You said you grew up here?”
I walked back to join him. “Yes and no. I grew up in Kenner, but my family has owned property here since before I was born.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “So you’ve known this whole time how cool the Bywater is and didn’t show it to me?”
I shrugged. “Not everyone gets it. And not everybody deserves it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I don’t take every client to look at Bywater properties. Pretty much everyone in the Bywater is protective of it. We don’t like corporate clients coming in. Homegrown or get out.”
“You’re saying I’m lucky you agreed to show it to me? I passed some kind of test?”