“Holy crap,” I said out loud to myself as I stood there gawking at my phone. The world’s worst meet-cute had been turned into an adorable romantic comedy that everyone was talking about.
Starring me.
Chapter Two
Hayes
1:07 p.m. My cousin Perrine was exactly seven minutes late to our standing biweekly lunch date. Not one to waste free time, I waited for her on the sidewalk while scanning through work emails on my phone, tapping out one-word replies and filing every message in its appropriate home until my inbox was back at zero. My shoulders relaxed an inch the second the last email was deleted, only to rise back up when a meeting alert popped on the screen for my call at two thirty.
“Hey,” Perrine said with the huff of someone who had just jogged three blocks, tapping at my arm. I gave her The Look—yes, she’d dubbed it this sometime in high school—and leaned in for a hug. The Look was part scowl, part exasperation, part adoration. Perrine and I always fluctuated between laughing at and being annoyed with each other. “Staff meeting ran late,” she said with a shrug as we queued up at Greener Things behind every other hungry New Yorker working in Midtown Manhattan. She never apologized for work, and I never expected her to. “I literally save lives, Hayes,” she’d said to me the one time I complained about her being late for a breakfast we’d scheduled. I’d kept my mouth shut after that.
“Well, my day has been hellish, so don’t worry about it.”
I counted the people ahead of us, doing the math in my head as I tried to figure out how long the line might take, plus the minutes spent eating, and then the walk back to the office. Fifty-two minutes at least, which cut it close to the call I had scheduled about possibly expanding to a Seattle office. Plus, I was leaving work early tonight for a dinner honoring what we’d done last year revolutionizing the environmental investing space. And there was a six-mile run penciled into my calendar for five forty-five tomorrow morning that I never missed. I took a deep breath, trying to recalibrate and remember that family time was important too.
“Let me guess—another write-up in the New York Times? Too much money being made?” Perrine was so altruistic and kind and painfully polite that most people had no idea how damn sarcastic she really was. Lucky for me, I’d had a front-row seat to her many contradictions my whole life. “And where’s your jacket, by the way? Did someone dare you to leave the office without it?”
She also never missed a thing. I gave her the rundown of my weird morning on the subway in a few short sentences. When I finished, her face had gone from unimpressed to utterly baffled.
“Wait, explain this to me again.” She had stopped fiddling with her hospital ID badge that hung from her scrubs to stare at me, her head cocked to the side. “Her dress caught in the subway doors and ripped? Dear god, what a nightmare. That’s like having your fly down in front of the whole class at school, but a million times worse. Remember when you—”
“Please don’t,” I interrupted before she could continue with the story of me accepting the Senior Prize in Mathematics in front of our entire high school with toilet paper coming out of the back of my pants. She’d told the whole story in mortifying detail in her toast at my rehearsal dinner. I didn’t need to hear it again. “Okay, so if I am following this correctly, you gave her your jacket. A stranger?”
“I told you,” I said as the line moved forward an inch. “I was only trying to help. It was no big deal.”
I shook my head, exasperated, and paused to order, finally—arugula, beets, cucumber, grilled tempeh, lemon vinaigrette. The man working behind the counter nodded in recognition. It was the same thing I ordered every day.
“You know, you really should try something else,” Perrine teased, poking me in the ribs with a laminated menu. “Chickpeas or avocado. Or, oh, I know, maybe add some cheese. Now that would be wild.”
I didn’t give her more than a quick smirk. The teasing had been the same since we were little kids, because, well, I guess I hadn’t changed much. My mom lovingly called me “particular”; Perrine called me a “high-maintenance diva.” I was an acquired taste, apparently.
I’d never felt insecure about my personality until I read the documents served to me by my ex-wife’s lawyer. Incompatible. This had been Angie’s reason for our divorce, and the word had secretly haunted me for the past three years, lurking behind me every time I struck up a conversation or considered a first date. Incompatible. This was the label I wore every day now, tucked into my jacket like a pocket square. Even, I guess, when my jacket was now on the back of a stranger.