He wouldn’t invest in him. How could he ever expect other people would?
Hell, he couldn’t even get the woman upstairs to trust him to make her coffee.
He promised Fitz that he would text him, but when he ended his shift for the day, Jasper vowed to put the ridiculous idea out of his mind.
He was done going down dead-end roads.
Chapter Three
“You do not need a new office. You can’t give up on the plan.”
Hollyn tucked her phone against her shoulder and shoved a frozen pizza in the oven before responding to her best friend Cal’s frustrated words. She bumped the oven door shut with her foot. “It’s not giving up on the plan. I’m just not sure if it’s the right work space for me anymore. It’s a lot of extra money to spend, too. There’s a cheaper place in Metairie.”
“No hella good way,” Cal said, one of his regular verbal tics sliding in. “You’re being a panic station chicken.”
Her brows lifted. She was so used to Cal’s tics that they were like background noise these days, but that second one caught her attention. “Panic station? That’s a new one.”
He grunted. “Yeah, it’s a Muse song. Great riff. And my brain panic station clearly thinks it’s a great title. Hella good.”
Cal loved music and played lead guitar with a local band in Baton Rouge, where he was finishing up his master’s degree in digital media arts and engineering at LSU. Music had always been the thing to give him some relief from his Tourette’s, but the side effect was that he often picked up verbal tics from the lyrics. He had to be careful what he listened to. In third grade he’d been stuck with hokey pokey! as a tic for months.
“That one’s strangely appropriate right now. I think I take the train to Panic Station every day I go into WorkAround.” She pulled a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a can of sparkling water out of the fridge. “And I’m not a chicken. I’m just not sure it makes sense for me to put myself through that every day. It’s distracting me from my actual work. WorkAround might just be too big of a leap.”
“Oh, don’t hella good give me that bullshit,” Cal said dismissively. “You love your panic station office. Plus, you and Mary Leigh came up with this plan for a reason. This is the next logical step. You shouldn’t be surprised that people are starting to strike up conversations with you. Hella good. They’re reaching out to you because you’ve been there a while now, and people like to get to know their coworkers. That’s a positive thing. You can’t go back to working from home. You’ll end up back at square one. Or worse, moving back home.”
Square one. She didn’t want to think of square one. And she especially didn’t want to think of moving back home.
“I promise I’m not going back to how I was. I go out at least three nights a week now for content for the Miz Poppy posts,” she said, her fingers tapping in her four count. “I promise I won’t become a shut-in.”
But the words didn’t come out with the amount of force she’d been hoping for. She’d been spurred to seek online therapy with Mary Leigh almost a year ago when she’d realized that she hadn’t left her house for a month except for a handful of Miz Poppy assignments. Delivery groceries. Takeout. A month and she’d barely noticed. That had scared the hell out of her.
She couldn’t risk that again.
The image of her rental house with aluminum-foil-covered windows, six cats, and ceiling-high stacks of newspapers filled her mind. Ugh. She’d watched too many reruns of Hoarders. She didn’t even subscribe to a newspaper. How would she end up with stacks of them? Plus, she was allergic to cats. But still, the image was imprinted on her nightmares.
“I’m going out tonight, in fact,” she added for good measure. “I’m still working the plan.”
“That’s not the same thing. You go out hella good anonymously. You don’t talk to anyone. You’re a panic station ghost, Hollyn.”
“Anonymous is the whole point of Miz Poppy,” she said, losing her patience with the conversation. Cal’s intentions were good, but she was not in the mood to be armchair psychoanalyzed. She had Mary Leigh for that. “No one knows who I am so I get the same experience as anyone walking in off the street. I can do a legitimate review.”
“I get that, but it doesn’t have to mean you’re anonymous in your actual life,” he said, words firm but tone gentle. “You said you were going to WorkAround so you could meet rolling stone people, get used to being social, maybe make some friends. This is supposed to be getting you ready for job interviews and working in an office full-time somewhere. Hiding in your office and praying no one talks to you—or worse, leaving all together—is not moving the ball forward.”
“Cal.”
“You know I love you and don’t want you to be stressed out, but the only way you’re going to get over your phobia of talking to people is to talk to them.”
“Oh is that all?” she said, her sarcasm going to eleven. “Wow, so super easy, Dr. Cal. Okay, let me just do that. I never thought of actually talking to people. Genius!”
He groaned. “Don’t try to bitch me away. That doesn’t hella good work on me. All I’m saying is that you don’t need to hide from people. If you’re ticcing out, just tell them, ‘Oh, by the way, I have panic station Tourette’s.’ You’ll be surprised by how cool people can be. We’re not eight years old and on the hella good playground anymore. No one’s going to call you names. People aren’t out to hurt you.”
She winced, the horrible memories trying to leak into her brain like a poisonous fog. She shook her head and popped the top of her drink. “If I tell people, then that’s all they’re going to see. I don’t want to be that ‘chick with the tics.’”
“Holls, you are the chick with the tics. Just like I’m that loud dude who blurts out random words. That doesn’t mean it’s all we are. You’re also rolling stone a great writer, a fantastic reviewer, and a good person. I’m clearly a rock god. We all have our crosses to bear.”
She laughed. “A rock god?”
“Obviously. All I’m saying is give people a chance to not be assholes.” He let out a string of hella goods before clearing his throat. “Worst-case scenario, you come across a few jerks. So what? They don’t deserve your time. But right now you’re panic station rolling stone poisoning the whole lawn, killing all the potential flowers just to avoid a few weeds.”
Hollyn tipped her head back to stare at the water-stained ceiling, hearing the words but having no faith that she could implement them. Cal understood her situation on so many levels. They’d been friends since they’d met in a therapy group when they were kids. But Cal had never had any shyness. Probably because there was no hiding his version of Tourette’s. She’d never had verbal tics beyond some throat-clearing and humming noises. Her twitching muscles could sometimes be hidden with hair covering her face or by turning away or pretending to sneeze. Plus, her mother had plucked her out of school and homeschooled her once the teasing had gotten bad. Cal, on the other hand, had been forced to deal with the schoolyard bullies.