“Jenna, I’m sure he’s…” My tongue sticks on the word “nice.” Luke isn’t nice. He was never nice. He’s probably more of an asshole now than he ever was. I’m dreading any interaction with him. I’m hoping he’s just going to say a quick hello, then move onto more important businesses.
“I’ve been reading what people say about him online,” says John, another member of my team. “People really hate him. They say he’s this heartless businessman who will sell you out for a nickel. Doesn’t care about his employees. Only cares about profit.”
“Well,” I say in my most chipper voice, “let’s prove to him that we can turn a profit, and our jobs will be safe.”
I’m not sure if my motivational speech would have worked. But at that moment, our receptionist peeks into the room, her eyes wide. “Ellie,” she says, “Mr. Thayer would like to see you in his office upstairs ASAP.”
My mouth goes dry. “Did he say what about?”
She shakes her head, her eyes still big like saucers.
My mind is racing a mile a minute. This doesn’t sound good. As one of the project managers, I am among the highest-paid people here. If he’s going to get rid of anyone to turn a profit, it will be someone like me. And let’s face it, in the programming industry, women are less respected. They probably think I’m more expendable than somebody like Nathan.
I get the fleeting thought that perhaps Luke recognized my name. But no, I doubt it. If he remembers me at all, it’s as Ellie, not Eleanor Jensen. That name won’t look familiar to him at all, I’m sure.
“Good luck, Ellie,” Jenna squeaks. And the rest of my team looks at me like I’m going off to the electric chair.
I hit the ladies room before I go upstairs. Partially because I always have to pee when I’m nervous, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to check out my appearance before seeing the best looking guy I ever met. At least, I need to make sure I don’t have any spinach in my teeth. Although I don’t know why I would have spinach in my teeth, considering I haven’t eaten any spinach today. But it would be just my luck.
I spend a good five minutes checking myself out in the ladies’ room mirror. I look… fine. Probably better than I did in college. My natural hair is a huge mound of frizz that would need its own seat on the bus. My roommate Delia used to jokingly refer to me as Rosanna Rosannadanna, after Gilda Radnor’s character on Saturday Night Live with giant hair. After college, I started getting keratin treatments, which have done wonders. My dark hair is straight and silky now.
Most of my lipstick has worn off, and my eye makeup is fairly subtle, as per usual. I’ve never been a big believer in lots of makeup. I prefer the natural look. But I find myself rifling inside my purse for my darker shade of lipstick and applying a fresh layer.
Hey, it never hurts to look your best when you’re meeting your new boss.
After I’ve prettied myself up, I take the stairs to the floor above us. Luke is temporarily using one of the offices up there. Presumably, he won’t need an office anymore after he finishes stripping and dismantling our company, then selling the pieces for profit.
My stomach is all butterflies as I exit the stairwell and traverse the brightly lit hallway to Luke’s office. My heels echo on the floor with each step. I have no idea if Luke will recognize me when he sees me—I’m not sure whether I want him to or not. Anyway, I’ll have no trouble recognizing him. From what I saw online, he hasn’t changed at all since college.
I turn one final corner on my journey to his office. There’s a man in the hallway dressed in a suit that I can tell from here is crazy-expensive. I see the blond hair clipped professionally short. The classically handsome features. But that’s not him. It can’t be...
Except it is.
A few minutes ago, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought about how different I looked from my former self. But it turns out Luke Thayer’s got me beat by a million miles.
Luke is in a wheelchair.
Chapter 3
There’s something you need to understand about me and Luke Thayer.
I didn’t just hate him because he was rich and handsome and got everything he wanted. I hated him because he tortured me all through that expository writing class. Every single day. It was like he made it his personal mission to always prove me wrong.
Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is about a family that has an unfortunate run-in with a bandit named the Misfit. I don’t want to give away the ending in case you haven’t read it, but just so you know, the bandit was neither a good man nor hard to find. He was clearly the villain in the story.
Except Luke Thayer (the Third) seemed to think the Misfit was in the right. Or at least, that was what he was pretending to think strictly to irritate me.
“The Misfit has a consistent moral code,” Luke kept insisting. “He may be violent, but his moral code never wavers. The grandmother, on the hand… she’s superficial! She only cares about appearances and what people think of her.”
“So being superficial is worse than being a murderer?” I challenged him. “Maybe the grandmother is misguided, but at least she lives her life under the confines of the law.”
Luke got this glint in his eyes and I knew exactly what that bastard was about to say. “See,” he began. “If you had read Hamlet, you’d know that—”
I had made a horrible mistake when I admitted to the class on the first day that I’d never read Shakespeare. From that day forth, any time Luke was struggling in an argument with me, he’d bring up some play from Shakespeare. It was infuriating.
“Oh, please!” I interrupted him. “There are no similarities between this story and Hamlet!”
“Actually,” our professor, Dr. Cole, said. “There are some similarities between Hamlet and this story. Luke, would you like to elaborate?”
Have I mentioned that the female professor always took Luke’s side?
Luke then launched into a spontaneous speech that I was certain was pure bullshit about how O’Connor’s story mirrored Hamlet. It was amazing how he managed to come up with all that on the spot, considering I was ninety-nine percent sure there were no actual similarities between the two stories. But of course, I couldn’t say for certain, considering I never read Hamlet and everyone in the class knew it. Anyway, he managed to shut me up.
When we got out of class that day, I was fuming. My hands were balled into fists and I was grinding my teeth. I couldn’t wait to start ranting about Luke to Delia.
“My God, Ellie.” Delia shook her head at me. “Why don’t you and Luke just skip the foreplay and have sex already?”
That infuriated me even more. Delia seemed to think Luke and I were only arguing with each other because we were into each other. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I wasn’t interested in a boyfriend at all, and I definitely wasn’t interested in Luke. He was too… perfect.
And now it’s sixteen years later. And, well, he sure as hell isn’t perfect anymore.
He isn’t looking at me, and I take the opportunity to blatantly stare at him, trying to figure it out. Is he using a wheelchair because he broke his leg skiing in Vail? But no, I don’t see a cast. And there’s something about the chair and the way he’s sitting in it that makes me think this isn’t a broken leg. This is a forever kind of thing. The chair is too sleek, the wheels are too worn, and he looks too comfortable in it.