“Hey, baby.” Justin put an arm around her. “Show this lady your finger.”
Lisette had a moment of panic that Sasha might make a crude gesture in front of Aunt Corky and her mom. She jumped to shield them from the sight.
“It’s a beaut, right? You were right, Liz. The brilliant cut was the one she liked best. Girls dig diamonds. At least Sasha does.” He leaned over and put a big, messy kiss on her face. “So, yeah. Thanks for being such a brick about it, congratulating me and all. I was a little worried you might be ticked off at me, since I kinda made you think I was into you and stuff. Had to do it so the professors would cut me some slack. They all thought you were hot and wouldn’t fail me if I had the teacher’s pet as my arm candy and stuff during school, right? But I can’t sail on your looks forever. Gotta be a man and stuff.”
His logic dizzied her. As did the situation. Her ankle wobbled.
“Well, yeah. So, thanks for all the fun study sessions. And the make-outs. Those I will probably miss. Sasha, you wouldn’t mind if I got together with Liz now and then like old times, would ya? Oh, just pranking ya. Totally.” He lifted Sasha up by her arms, and she wrapped her legs around his waist as they waddled off, kissing.
Lisette grabbed the back of a nearby folding chair for support. It was the plastic outdoor kind, so it didn’t do much good. Her insides suddenly went hollow and echo-y.
“Oh, no. No. Say it isn’t so.” Aunt Corky looked horrified.
Lisette just nodded as her insides disintegrated, leaving her just a shell. Aunt Corky took Lisette by one elbow, and her mom grabbed the other. The two of them began to steer her off the football field and toward the towering set of concrete stairs they’d need to climb to exit this pit of despair.
“Oh, sweetie.” Her mom patted her. “There are more fish in the sea. Fish with brains.”
Lisette sniffled. But she wanted that fish. That jerkfaced fish.
What just happened? Justin dumped her for the waitress—who he’d apparently been seeing all along, while kissing Lisette on a regular basis—effectively making Lisette “the other woman.” The hollowness from her core spread to her shoulders and hips. She knew her face couldn’t be anything but a mask of itself.
“Justin,” she stuttered, hardly knowing what she spoke. “He took me ring shopping.” Sort of. She hadn’t tried anything on, exactly. But they’d been together looking at rings. “I know I didn’t make up this relationship.”
Aunt Corky squeezed her arm.
“No one dreams you made anything up, sweetie,” her mom said. “It’s a horrid shame. But I never liked him.” Mom wagged a finger in the air.
“You never met him.” She’d still never met him. All of a sudden, Lisette saw how little she’d known the guy at all. Was he what he appeared to be now? Someone just using Lisette? Had he only seen her as a pretty face, a way to get what he wanted from the professors, a place holder? Someone to make out with while his real girlfriend was waiting tables at Baby Doe’s?
A gaping crevasse ripped open inside her.
“Oh, I really liked him.”
“Only because he was a jerk,” Aunt Corky muttered.
“What?”
“You go for these jerks every time, Lisette.”
“I can’t help it. The heart wants what it wants.” And she’d wanted that jerk so much. Mrs. Justin Fox. She’d never get to wear the title. Sasha the Short Waitress would.
“Let’s pretend he doesn’t exist.” Aunt Corky picked up their pace, almost into a march. “I hereby declare that he shall henceforth no longer be named by his given name but shall be called—” She paused, shooting Lisette a prompting look.
What? Like Voldemort? Lisette stammered a second then responded, “Jerkface.”
“Jerkface! Down with Jerkface!” Aunt Corky hollered. Luckily, the din of the crowd prevented much carriage of the sound. Still, it was empowering. Corky was right. Justin didn’t deserve this much of her emotion. Down with Jerkface.
“Man,” Lisette said. “I’d like to pomp his circumstance. And I hate being called Liz.”
“Why did you let him?”
“I—I don’t know.” So many things Lisette didn’t know. Like what she was going to do with her free time or her social life. At least she had her job set, provided her mom still agreed to front her the capital.
Folsom Field was a crater in the earth, with the parking lot at the top of the west set of bleachers, a long climb in heels. They climbed the first flight of concrete steps out of the stadium toward the parking lot so fast Lisette’s mother insisted on a break at the first landing.
“So, dear, change of subject,” her mom said through labored breathing. “What do you think of coming to work for your father’s company? Pannebaker Capital needs a linguist.”
“No, Mom. Pannebaker Capital needs people to answer the phone in Mandarin.” Lisette had no intention of doing that. Not after all the effort of earning an MBA. Working at her father’s company wouldn’t even be a lateral move. It’d be regression at its most defeating. “Aunt Corky promised to help me find an office downtown next week. I’m setting up shop, getting my internet marketing started. It’s a good idea. I can make this work—I know it.”
Mom lifted that dubious eyebrow, the one Lisette had inherited, along with her mom’s straight fair hair and eyes. From her dad, Lisette got long legs and good bone structure, much to Amanda Pannebaker’s delight. It was a way to see a remnant of her late husband, even though he’d been gone over five years.
“What? Are you backing out on me now, Mom? We’ve talked this over. We signed a contract.” It was a contract on a dinner napkin, but it meant something. “I’m not taking the job at Pannebaker. I’m going to do this on my own, use the skills you and Dad made sure I learned.”
Mom winced, and they started up the next long flight of steps. “Fine, fine. I did agree. It’s just I never meant for you to end up here.”
“In Colorado? You know I love it here. We came every summer to be with Aunt Corky. It’s home, if I ever had a permanent one.” Her dad’s jobs took them all over the world when she was a kid—first in the State Department, then when he’d started Pannebaker Capital. It was how Lisette became fluent in Chinese. And Japanese and French and German and Norwegian. As a kid she’d lived in those countries and soaked them into herself like a high quality, name brand paper towel. There were other languages—Tagalog, Finnish, Spanish, Icelandic, a smattering of Welsh, one of the African click languages—but her father’s work assignments in those places had been brief. The main five, she could still dream in.
It had been a whirlwind of a childhood.
“I meant ‘here’ here.” Mom waved a hand down Lisette’s graduation robe and shoes. “Single, done with school, with no real prospects of marriage and family.”
That was ill-timed salt in her just-dumped wounds. “Thanks, Mom. Can we not talk about that right now?” Her mom went to a year of college, got a job as a secretary in a government office, and at nineteen landed Dad as her husband. In Amanda Pannebaker’s universe, that was the prescribed order of things. “We were talking about my business plan—and the fact that with your generous help I’m going forward with it starting next week.” She had to give herself this forward-looking pep talk or she’d crumble. Justin had dumped her. In public. And someone named Luke knew about it even before Lisette did.
They got to the top of the stairs. Lisette wasn’t looking ahead, an error because up loomed a very tall, very messy-haired graduate in thick glasses, holding his diploma and looking a little nauseated.
“Oof!” Lisette ran smack into him, and the force of the collision bumped her backward toward the long flight of steps. “Whoa.” Her arms windmilled. She stutter-stepped backward and began to topple.
“Ó, nei!” The guy said something weird and unintelligible, a look of horror on his face as he grabbed for her graduation robe, catching it in his grip and stopping her fall, as well as her possible concussion or death on the concrete stai
rcase. He looked terrified as he pulled her upward to him, righting her on the top step in safety. He spoke with a heavy accent. “I’m so very sorry. Please, you will forgive me?”
“Sure.” Lisette’s heart pounded hard in her chest, and the pulse went into her ears. That was a close call. “I should’ve seen you there.”
She patted her dress and her arms just to make sure they were still attached. They were, and her breathing returned to normal. She looked up at the guy. He had that look in his eye she’d seen many times before—the one where the hopelessly geeky man got a glimpse of her, and his eyes shone. It didn’t matter that this guy had nice smile lines outside his thick glasses and under that messy hair. It had been a long day already.
“Please. Let me make it up to you. I can take you to dinner, yeah?”
No. He couldn’t.
“Oh, that’s really kind, but I have plans.”
He looked crestfallen, but she couldn’t do anything about that. It’s not like she could take her broken soul and entertain some stranger over dinner. Her emotional reservoir was in the red zone.
“Oh, all right.” He swore in some Scandinavian language, a nice touch. She recognized it vaguely from junior high in Norway, the age where all the swears come out. A lot of the Scandinavian languages had strong similarities. “Good luck with your business plans.” When she gave him a double take, he added, “Fellow MBA student, laglegur andlit,” and patted his diploma. He let out his breath and rolled his eyes like he was embarrassed. His little addition meant “pretty face.” Fabulous. Even the klutzy foreign students thought of her as just another pretty face.
So. Fitting.
“Well, thanks. See ya. Good luck to you too.” Lisette’s head was starting to pound. Maybe she should have let go of his arm and fallen down those stairs, put herself out of her misery.
This whole day, Jerkface’s dumping, the stock speech from Mom, the near-death experience at the hands of the foreign nerd, had the same sad theme: wastin’ away in Total-Loserville, searching for her lost shaker of woe.
Aunt Corky took Lisette’s arm so they could keep walking toward the car. “You get that all the time, I take it?”
“What?”
“Men just asking you to dinner. That’s twice today.”
“I guess.” It was cold comfort in present circumstances. The only man she wanted to go to dinner with was Justin. The Jerkface.
Later, at The Black Cat, Lisette set her wallowing aside. Who could wallow in The Black Cat? It smelled far too good in here, and the warm wood paneling and smoky atmosphere were too cozy for self-pity. Focusing on her business would be good medicine. She needed to make sure Mom was all in.
“Look, Mom. I’ve got my business plan. You read it and approved it. Even Mort Bartholomew at Dad’s company looked it over and said it was sound. I only need the startup capital, and I can make this go.” Lisette shook out her dinner napkin and took in her mom’s dubious eyebrow raise again. “Fine. Look. I know you’re skeptical. I get that. And I know you think Dad’s company is my best bet.”
“I just think you could find a nice young man there. They hire so many, and they make good money. It’s not like I’m telling you to be some mercenary, to marry just for money—”
Like you did? Lisette asked silently then berated herself. Dad wasn’t rich when Mom snared him, not really. And he’d died without a lot of cash, having poured so much into Pannebaker Capital in those last years.
“But a girl needs security. It’s not a question of being selfish, it’s about being smart. With your looks, you can have any man you choose. Choose well. And put yourself in situations where you have several to choose from.” Mom sipped ice water from her goblet.
Aunt Corky interjected with a selling point. “Amanda, I think Lisette might have a good thing going with this plan of hers. Only the wealthiest business people will be able to afford to hire her as a linguist. It’s going to be a good pool to draw from.” She aimed her fork’s tines for emphasis.
Geez. Great. Now her mom would think Lisette was only starting this business to catch a rich husband. And she’d expect Lisette to be actively looking among the clients—a complete no-no on Lisette’s ethical standards. She’d even written it into the boilerplate contract she expected to have every potential client sign. Aunt Corky meant well, of course. Lisette could forgive easily. At least what Corky said worked—there was a visible relenting in her mom’s countenance.
Lisette pounced on that. “Look, Mom. I have a proposal. Give me three years at this. That’s a reasonable amount of time for a startup company to either make it or break. If I haven’t both paid you back and paid off my student loans in that amount of time—in full, to the penny—I’ll come take the Mandarin job at Pannebaker.”
Mom took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and relented. “Fine. But three years. Every penny. It’s a deal.” She put an arm around Lisette’s shoulder. “I know you can do it. Of course, I’d really rather see you fail.”
“Amanda!” Aunt Corky scolded.
“No, not that. I just want to see her settled and having a family by then. It’s not business success that I count as a real measure.”
Lisette had just been forcibly booted from a relationship not an hour ago. Now was not the time to debate the merits of marital bliss.
“Three years. You’ll only be twenty-seven by then. There will still be a chance of happiness.” Mom sighed, but Aunt Corky squeezed Lisette’s hand and gave a happy little jump and a squeal.
“Ooh! If we find a perfect office space, can we paint it robin egg blue?”
If you enjoyed this chapter and would like to read more, Immersed can be found at:
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Second Chances 101 (A Ripple Effect Romance Novella Book 5) Page 11
