When Stars Collide

by Sara Furlong-Burr

  “If only,” I sighed. “Phineas is at most a half-dozen years older than I am, and he just so happens to be the person who signed E.V. Cartwright. The man’s brilliant.”

  “Eve who?”

  “E.V. Cartwright. She’s the author of the Soldiers of Atlantis series. The first book was adapted into film and premiers next spring. It was a huge deal in the publishing industry and quite the discovery for Phineas.”

  Jo shook her head, her expression blank. “And now he’s going to discover you in your undies.”

  *****

  Great. Not only did I send lewd photographs to my boss, I’m also going to be late to work.

  I stared out the window of my cab, anxious. Anxious over the time ticking away at the speed of an Olympic hurdler; anxious over how Phineas was going to react. Normally, I would have walked the twenty minutes to the office and saved myself the cab fare, but with running behind, I naïvely thought the cab ride would be quicker, making up the time I’d spent lamenting my gaffe to Jo in nothing short of a fuck-my-life conversation that lasted entirely too long with an unsatisfying conclusion. There was no protocol for this, no rule in a handbook about how you can make your boss unsee your cleavage in a lacy push-up bra you’d kept tucked away in your drawer for a special occasion.

  My fingers tapped the seat, beating it like a drum in the hope that it would either speed up the cab or make the cars in front of us magically disappear. I would have expected a call or even a reply text from Phineas by now, and envisioned him on his way to the office just like I was, contemplating what to do about me. Then again, it never seemed like Phineas had to contemplate anything. He relied solely on instinct, and his instincts were solid. They were a part of what had made Drake Publishing a premiere boutique publishing powerhouse in New York after only a year in operation.

  “Miss.” The cab driver, an older gentleman who had been delightfully tight-lipped up until now, glanced at me in the mirror.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve been sitting at your stop for just about a minute now.”

  *****

  When I exited the elevator and entered Drake Publishing’s suite, all I could think about was how much I wished I would have called in sick. My stomach was in knots, the product of nerves, not to mention I was quite certain I was going to hurl. That feeling intensified further the closer I came to Phineas’s office. His blinds were open; the light in his office was on. Normally, I would steal a glance through the glass wall to see him working as he always was before any of the rest of us arrived. I would then give him a little wave and he would acknowledge my existence in return. However, as I passed his office, I couldn’t so much as look in his general direction, even though I knew he was in there. The sound of his fingers striking the keyboard told me as much.

  Okay, Mena, you have a couple more minutes to think about how you’re going to explain yourself to him and why he shouldn’t send your ass packing.

  I nodded and smiled at my other co-workers, politely acknowledging their too-early-for-this-shit pleasantries as I made my way to my cubicle and stowed my purse underneath my desk.

  Think, Mena, think. It’s what you’re best at—talking yourself out of sticky situations.

  I’d completed about a dozen laps around my work area when the sound of my desk phone ringing snapped me back down to reality. It was Phineas calling from his office. My time had decidedly run out.

  “H-Hey, Phineas,” I answered, my voice just as shaky as the rest of my body.

  “Hey, do you mind popping in for a sec?”

  I’d rather have a colonoscopy with a broken beer bottle.

  “Be right there.”

  I stepped out into the hall, commencing my walk of shame to Phineas’s office. Despite knowing I was being paranoid, it felt like all eyes were on me. From Cheryl in accounting to Bradley our courier, in my mind, tales of my indiscretions were being sung in my wake, building to crescendo as I neared the end of my journey.

  Phineas’s door was open, his back turned to me. I walked in, discreetly closing the door behind me. He looked up from his laptop as I meekly took a seat in one of the wingback chairs situated in front of him.

  “Mena Straszewski, have I been eager to speak with you this morning.”

  “It was a mistake,” my mouth blurted out without waiting for my brain’s approval. “Those pictures I sent to you, they were meant for my boyfriend. I should have double-checked that I was sending them to the right person, but it was just so late, and I …”

  Phineas stared at me, eyebrow cocked, brown eyes reflecting a perfect cocktail of amusement and confusion.

  “And you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  He shook his head. “No, but that’s not saying much. I generally have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time.”

  “Fair enough.” I glanced down at his cell phone resting on his desk. “I suppose I should start from the beginning, then?”

  “That would be preferable.”

  “Look, I sent a text to you last night.”

  “You did?” He turned to pick up his phone.

  “No, no, no, no!” I lunged forward, grabbing his wrist, instantly wishing I hadn’t. “I’m sorry … again,” I apologized, pretending to brush off his suit jacket. “Just let me finish my story before,” my stomach sank, “you open up any texts from me.”

  “This has to be good.” Setting the phone back down in front of him, he leaned back in this chair.

  Here goes everything.

  Unable to make proper eye contact with him, I regaled Phineas with the tale of my attempted foray into softcore porn, including my delightfully relatable faux pas, wherein said pornographic material had made its way onto his mobile device instead of to its intended recipient.

  “I never do this … and you can bet for damn sure I never will again.”

  “What? Get naked? I don’t proclaim to be an expert on your personal habits, but I’m pretty certain that’s a statement that won’t hold true.” The gleam in his eyes was undeniable.

  Is he enjoying this? Does he like having something over me?

  “Do my ears deceive me or was that an actual joke from the Phineas Drake?”

  He smiled. “What is life if we can’t have a little fun once in a while?” He picked up his cell phone again, sending the butterflies traveling right back into my intestines. “And what is life if we let one mistake define the rest of our days?” He handed me his phone. “The pin to get in is 76590.”

  “For the record, I wasn’t nude.” With an appreciative glance up at him, I plugged the pin number into the phone, unlocking the screen. The icon for his text messages was located right on his home screen. Fingers shaking, I opened his texts, finding mine in the middle of a heap of unopened messages, and deleted it.

  “Are we all set, then?” he asked.

  Grateful, I handed his phone back to him. “Yes. Thank you, Phineas. Truly.”

  “No need to thank me. As you saw, I receive quite a few texts—too many to keep up with. So, I don’t keep up with them. I despise text messages, always have. They’re too impersonal for my liking. Chances are your text would have remained buried, lost in the abyss along with all the others.”

  “That would explain why I never got that raise I asked for.”

  “Really? You send me explicit photos of yourself and you then have the gall to mention a raise?”

  “I thought we were putting this all behind us?”

  “This all literally happened just two minutes ago.”

  “There you go bringing up the past again.”

  “There’s our Mena back.” He chuckled. “Frankly, that timid little thing who entered my office five minutes ago scared the shit out of me.”

  “Because she thought it would be the last time she would be entering your office.”

  He reached for a manuscript at the other end of his desk and set it down in front of him. “On the contrary. It would appear as though you’ll be ge
tting that raise, after all.”

  “Come again?” It was my turn to be confused.

  He held up the manuscript he’d set down in front of him. It was one I’d given him to review; a paranormal romance novel culled from the heap of manuscripts that had trickled in over the last few months. “This is our next Soldiers of Atlantis, and you discovered it.”

  “I mean, it’s good.”

  “It’s better than good. It’s great.” He flipped through the pages, reading some of the selected passages I’d highlighted. He’d made notes of his own next to many of those highlights. Phineas customarily gave novels the first twenty pages to capture his attention. If they failed to do so, the manuscripts were cast aside. As he flipped through this one, I saw the etchings of his blue ink pen throughout. “This brings me to the reason I asked you in here. This was an unsolicited manuscript, which I would have normally written off as most likely drivel and not worth our time and investment, but you, Mena, you gave this the chance it deserved. Instead of missing out on a great opportunity, we’ve struck gold, which is why I want our firm to begin accepting unsolicited manuscripts.”

  “That … that’s great, Phineas. It’s just that, as I’m sure you know, for every great novel, there are ten thousand others that are complete garbage.”

  “And from now on, along with your editing work, your job is going to be heading the department that sifts through the lumps of coal to find those diamonds.”

  Flabbergasted, all I could do was stare, mouth agape.

  “This is turning out to be a real banner day. First a meek Mena, and then a speechless Mena. Now I’ve seen everything.”

  “No, you haven’t,” I reminded him.

  “You got me there,” he chuckled.

  I couldn’t be sure, what with the horrible fluorescent lighting, but I thought I noticed the faintest hint of a reddening on his cheeks.

  “So,” he began, “what do you think?”

  “I think … yeah, sure. Let’s bring it on and hope our luck holds out.”

  *****

  “Let me get this straight.” Jo propped her feet up on our coffee table, listening intently while I recounted the day that would go down in infamy in the Book of Mena.

  “That’s the first time you’ve ever said that.”

  “Like I haven’t heard that one before,” she retorted, chucking the throw pillow I’d made last summer at my head. Crocheted with an inscription proclaiming Life’s a Bitch, instead of the Life’s a Beach the instructor of the class at Annie’s Fabric Store had intended, the pillow landed safely in my arms. For some reason, the former statement just seemed to be a more accurate reflection of my life than the latter. Needless to say, I was never invited back to take another class.

  “You send your boss half-naked photos of yourself, and instead of a stern warning, suspension, or, hell, even a finger wag in your general direction, you get a promotion? Meanwhile, on the subway ride to work this morning, someone hurled on my shoes and I had to spend the majority of the day walking around the office in my stocking feet while they aired out on the balcony.”

  “What can I say? Life’s a bitch,” I replied, holding up the pillow she’d used to assault me.

  “Either that or Mister-Too-Young-To-Have-The-Name-Phineas has the hots for you.”

  “Right. Because I couldn’t have possibly landed the position based on my own merits?” I countered, more irritated by Jo’s assertion than I should have been.

  “Of course not. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Just maybe the reason why his reaction to what happened was so muted is because he kind of digs you, is all.”

  “He didn’t even see the photos. It was a no harm, no foul kind of deal.” I leaned back into the couch cushion. A nagging thought that had implanted itself inside of my mind the moment I deleted my text from Phineas’s phone came roaring back like an errant grass fire. “Of course,” I began, my brain quickly stopping my mouth from vocalizing the thought any further.

  “Of course, what?”

  “Nothing. A thought that left as soon as it arrived.”

  “Isn’t that called dementia?”

  “No, it’s called it’s getting late, and I should probably fill Peter in on the events of the day.” I yawned as I stood up from the couch, throwing a salute in Jo’s direction.

  “Just do me a favor and refrain from waking me up with a blood-curdling scream tomorrow morning, will ya?”

  “I make no promises.”

  On my way to my room, the pervasive thought holding my brain hostage flashed through my head again as though my going to bed had given it some sort of unspoken permission to force me think about it—to really analyze it in ways that would keep me awake for longer than I wanted to be.

  Phineas hadn’t been exaggerating. He really had received an abundance of text messages, none of which had been opened. Except for one.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I saw him before he saw me. Propped against a column next to the baggage claim, Peter intently scanned the crowd, looking for me. It wasn’t often I was grateful for being short, but as I watched his face searching for me in anticipation, I was happy that my stature allowed me to remain undetected, so that I could see how his face looked when he saw me for the first time in three weeks.

  As I drew nearer, I felt compelled to hurl myself at him, jump into his arms, and wrap my legs around his waist, just like every chick in every episode of The Bachelor ever made always did. That idea, though, was promptly extinguished when I mentally calculated the distance between his waist and the ground, concluding that I would never be able to get sufficient air and would probably end up straddling his thighs, instead.

  Reluctantly, I managed to contain myself and even made my way to the opposite side of the column undetected, leaning my body against it in the same fashion he was.

  “Excuse me, sir. Have you seen my incredibly sexy boyfriend, by chance?”

  From out of the corner of my eye, I caught just the hint of a smile from him. “Incredibly sexy, huh? Could you describe him for me?”

  “Well, he’s tall … like freakishly big. We’re talking Paul Bunyan lumberjack huge. You would think he’d be, I don’t know, a basketball player, but he can't even walk across the room without tripping over himself. The man’s basically all legs and feet. And then there’s that hair—dark and disheveled, like he woke up and said, ‘Screw it, the world is gonna get the hair I give to it.’”

  “He certainly sounds dreamy,” he scoffed. “A giant, clumsy, big-footed, unkempt, lumberjack Sasquatch. You’re right. What woman wouldn’t want that?”

  “Right? And then there’s his eyes.”

  “The kind that haunt your nightmares?”

  “The kind you hope to see in your dreams.” I met him on the other side of the column, watching him watching me. “They’re the kind that stare so deeply into yours, you swear they can see directly into your soul. The kind that see you for who you really are, yet they love you regardless.”

  Peter caressed my cheek with the back of his hand, his fingers becoming entangled in my hair as he leaned down to kiss me lightly on the forehead. “I’ve missed you.”

  “God how I’ve missed you, too.”

  “So much so that you’re sending nudes to your boss?” He laughed, wrapping his arms around my body in a tight embrace, meant both as a hug and as an assurance that I wouldn’t be able to free my arms to punch him in the face.

  “One more wisecrack out of you and I may very well board the next flight back to New York.”

  “I’ve got it all out of my system now.”

  “Good.” I adjusted the straps of my carry-on bag and slung it back over my shoulder. One good thing about our short weekends together was that I never needed to carry more than my small canvas bag that contained only the essentials.

  Peter’s fingers searched for mine, finding them and then fusing our hands together. “Although, I must ask—”

  “Yes, I am wearing the same bra and underwear I wa
s wearing in the infamous photos.”

  He groaned. “Great. Now I’m not going to be able to think straight on the ride to Charlie’s.”

  “Charlie’s?”

  “Yeah, Luke called right before I left to pick you up. He and Elle want to meet up for dinner, if that’s okay.”

  “Elle probably wants to discuss wedding bullshit.”

  “Wedding bullshit,” he repeated, chuckling. “You’re going to be one bang-up maid of honor.”

  “You know what I mean. Elle has probably already made out a to-do list with a corresponding timeline for completion of each and every one of the tasks on it. Basically, my life has already been planned out for me for roughly the next eight months.” Peter took my carry-on bag from me as we approached his car. “I’m going to be up to my ass in satin, tulle, dress fittings, decorations, bridal showers, cakes, wedding photos, speech writing, and …” I paused to accentuate the last part with an exaggerated shiver, “lots and lots of smiling.”

  “You’re right, that does sound pretty awful,” he agreed, opening my door for me. “All I have to worry about is my tux fitting and trying not to run away with one of the strippers at Luke’s bachelor party.” He winked at me, shutting my door before I had the chance to respond.

  *****

  Charlie’s was a quaint sports bar tucked inside of a strip mall on the outskirts of Roanoke. From the license plates on the walls, to the posters depicting local sports teams, and the greasy cheeseburgers the size of dinner plates, it screamed Luke Hutchins.

  “Tomorrow’s the big day, right?” Elle asked, shifting in the booth she shared with Luke. “You’re finally going to meet Jackson, the mini Monroe.”

  “That bad, huh?” I replied, squeezing Peter’s arm.

  “He’s a great kid,” Luke added. “Thankfully, he has his mom’s genes to …” He paused, snapping his fingers together, clearly flustered. “To … uh …”

  “To counteract,” Elle added.