The flutters in my stomach tell me that I hope it’s the latter.

Christa begins busying herself with the pens next to the activities clipboard, lining them up in a perfect row. Is she an obsessively neat person?

Or is she suddenly nervous?

At forty feet away, I note that Kyle is lean but has a muscular frame. At thirty feet, I’m able to size up his solid, angular jaw. At twenty-five feet, I decide his faux Mohawk suits the shape of his face just fine. At twenty feet, the sun flickers off his full mouth and I notice the silver ring through the left corner of his bottom lip. At ten feet, I realize he has my favorite type of nose on a guy—long and slender, not too prominent. At five feet, he slides off his sunglasses to show me irises the color of burnt sugar.

My gut was one hundred percent right.

“Oh! Look, there’s Russell!” my mom exclaims. “Come on, Piper, I want to introduce you to him before he disappears again,” she urges, hooking a slender hand through my arm.

“Uh . . . But Ashley is going to give me a tour . . .” I stall, eagerly waiting to hear Kyle speak.

“I’ll find you over there in a minute!” Ashley waves me off, her excited eyes glued to Kyle.

I guess that settles that.

With a small huff, I let Mom pull me toward the mud-brown building and the man in a black-and-white checkered cook’s uniform, peeling carrots into a bucket at the picnic table. “Get on Russell’s good side and he’ll give you a double helping of his homemade chocolate pudding whenever it’s on the menu,” she says in a low voice. “And trust me, that stuff is currency around here.”

“Just like prison.”

“Hush!” She swats playfully at my arm. “Your aunt Jackie and I never had any money to buy candy at the canteen, so we’d trade our bowls to kids for . . .” She rambles on about SweeTarts and Snickers bars; meanwhile I glance over my shoulder.

Kyle is chuckling at something Ashley’s saying as he shifts from foot to foot, a red nylon welcome bag dangling casually from his fingers.

“Piper?” my mom calls out, slowing. “What do you think?”

“Uh . . . Yeah, sure.”

“Were you even listening to me?”

I meet her gaze. “No. Sorry. What?”

Frowning, she peers back to see where my focus was, just as Kyle turns to find our eyes on him. He smirks and casts a small wave.

“Ahh . . . I see,” Mom murmurs knowingly. “So it’s going to be the boy with the Mohawk, is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble, my cheeks heating. “And it’s a Fauxhawk.”

 

 

Chapter 3

 

NOW

When I unlock and open the front door to my condo that evening, my mind is still swirling with memories.

Kyle has lingered in my thoughts all afternoon, like the constant prick of an embedded thorn—impossible to ignore. I was late for my one o’clock meeting and mentally absent for all of them, as a summer long since filed away into the past came flooding into my present. Even David, normally too self-involved to notice anyone else’s struggles, paused his relentless press to confiscate Mark for his own needs long enough to ask if I was feeling all right.

My door connects with something solid just inside.

“Hello?” I holler through the crack.

“Piper! Hold on! Let me move that!” comes the responding shout.

Bare feet slap against the hardwood, followed by a series of grunts and the sound of a heavy object sliding across the floor, and then the door flings open and a freckled face appears.

“Sorry!” Ashley exclaims, panting. “I meant to move those earlier, but I got caught up with unpacking.” She takes a deep breath, exhales, and then grins. “Hey, new roomie!”

I laugh as I hip-check the door shut and shimmy past the wall of stacked blue containers to set my purse on the kitchen island. “Is this all your party-planning stuff?”

“Yeah,” she admits, smoothing over the lifted corner of a label marked “Ribbons.” “I’ll make it all fit in my room, though, I promise.”

“No worries. How’d today go? Did security give you any problems?”

“Nope! They even met the movers at the service elevator.” Ashley runs her slender fingers over her hair, attempting to tame the strawberry-blonde halo of frizz around her messy topknot, to no avail. The only day of the week that it’s truly ever smooth is Friday, if she goes for a blowout at the salon. And if it’s a humid day? Forget about it. Even that won’t last an hour.

“Good. I stopped by the front desk this morning to make sure they remembered, but you never know with them.”

“That shade of green looks amazing on you,” she murmurs, dusting her hands over the ratty concert T-shirt she obviously threw on to unpack. The disheveled, frumpy outfit is so opposite her usual feminine boho-chic look.

“Thanks.” I kick off my heels with a groan, stretching and wiggling my toes. I’m going to need to swallow my pride and start changing into running shoes for the fifteen-minute walk from work. “Is Christa home yet?”

“On her way. And she’s bringing dinner, so don’t order in.”

“Thank God.” Christa is the general manager at a popular steak house nearby, with a staff of seventy-eight, open 364 days a year. On the rare occasion that our schedules cross paths over dinner, she usually brings a fully prepped meal, hot off the grill, saving me from day-old sushi and wilted salad.

I round the island and wander over to the adjacent living room, to take in the charcoal-gray velvet sectional. “So, this is the infamous couch.” The one that sparked the colossal fight between Ashley and Chad that ended in their breakup. The one that Elton, Christa’s severely cross-eyed Siamese cat, is currently perched on, calmly and methodically licking away at his paw.

“I told you it would be perfect for this room,” Ashley says, her gaze assessing the space with a smile of satisfaction.

“It’s starting to look like an actual home in here,” I agree. When I ended things with David, I left with my bedroom set and two white leather chairs. Everything else was his and I didn’t want any of it. My dad offered me this place—a spacious three-bedroom, four-bathroom penthouse unit in CG’s newly completed Posey Park project. It’s far too spacious for one person but it’s close to work, so I happily accepted, having every intention of hiring Marcelle, my mom’s interior decorator, as soon as I had time to care about things like furniture and artwork.

For all the effort I put into decorating my office, I’ve put in the opposite amount here. Almost four months have gone by, and the generous space still sits mostly empty and undecorated. Christa moved in last month and brought with her a flat-screen television to hang over the gas fireplace, a chunky oak coffee table that is heavy enough to break shins, and a four-person round-tabled IKEA dining set that screams of low budget.

Basically, we’ve been living like a couple of college students who found a penthouse to squat in.

But now, it’s starting to come together. With some style, too, as Ashley’s beautiful, huge sectional and geometric black-and-white rug complement my white leather chairs perfectly.

I sink into the couch to test it out. “Oh . . . I’m not getting up again tonight.”