Four Reasons to Come

by Sarah J. Brooks

 

  I walked into the nursing home and didn’t see Dakota at all. There were dozens of men and women sitting at tables throughout the main room, but I couldn’t see Dakota anywhere. I did see my good friend Luanne who I had helped with her investments the previous fall. So I sat down to talk to her for a minute while I waited to see if Dakota showed up.

  “Grandma Lou, how are you?” I said as I hugged her.

  She wouldn’t accept any other greeting than a giant hug. It wasn’t normally how I greeted people, but she was a kind woman, and I was happy to oblige her request.

  “I’m doing wonderfully. Your investment advice helped me a lot you know. I’m almost a rich woman.”

  We both laughed. Luanne wasn’t rich by any means, but I hoped that my investment help had stabilized her retirement. Her goal was to earn enough interest to pay for her day to day living and have a little bit of a return that could be compounded for her family. We were able to accomplish that, and she had been very happy with the changes we made.

  “Pretty soon I’ll be coming to you for investment advice,” I teased.

  “I know a little building downtown that needs a new buyer. You should buy it and make it into something fabulous.”

  “Sounds like a good option. Where’s it at?”

  “What are you doing here!” I heard a woman say.

  Slowly I turned around and it took me a moment to realize that it was Dakota standing over Luanne.

  “Hi, Dakota,” I managed to say.

  “Grandma Lou, do you know him?”

  “Yes dear, this is my friend, Wyatt Edwards from Stanley and Associates. He’s been helping me with my investments,” Luanne said with a big smile. “He’s making me rich so I can give you all my money when I die.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here, but you need to leave,” Dakota said as tears started to well up. “This is my grandma; don’t play games with her. She’s all I have.”

  I saw the emotion in her eyes, and I wanted to push her to listen to me, but I also didn’t want to hurt her. I had clearly already done enough to hurt Dakota, and the last thing I wanted was to make it worse.

  “I’ll leave,” I said as I hugged Luanne and stood up to leave.

  Chapter 16

  Dakota

  Raw emotion was about to explode from me as I tried to make sense of how Wyatt had known where I was. Why was he sitting with my Grandma Lou? No one messed with my grandma, and I wasn’t in the mood for whatever game he was trying to play.

  “Yes, leave,” I managed to say before my voice started to crack.

  He was just about to leave when he turned and looked at me, and I knew I couldn’t hide the hurt that was in my eyes. What had I done wrong? It didn’t matter now. He had shown me who he was, and as much as it hurt my heart, I couldn’t figure out what had happened.

  “You better talk to him before he leaves,” Grandma Lou said.

  “Grandma, he’s a jerk. You don’t even know what happened.”

  “Talking won’t hurt. It’s better to end with a clear understanding of what happened.”

  Wyatt smiled at her words, and I could see that she liked him. Had he really helped her with her investments? I remembered her talking about a nice young man who had come to work with her the previous fall; his help had been very useful for her in figuring out what to do with the money she still had in her savings account.

  “Fine.”

  His green eyes melted me as I looked at him. They were bright and soft all at the same time, and I wanted to hate him. I wanted to run and scream and never have to feel the hurt like I had felt that morning ever again.

  “Just let me tell you what happened, and then we can go our separate ways if you’d like.”

  “You mean what happened that made you leave my house without even saying a word to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, please explain what life altering emergency took place that made this all alright. I’d love to hear it.”

  “No emergency. I saw a text from Emma come through on your phone. It said something about me falling for it and you seducing me with your lies. I was hurt so I left.”

  “What? Oh, my God. That was an inside joke between us. It wasn’t really me lying to you. Is that seriously why you left? You could have just asked me about it, and I would have explained.”

  “To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have been able to listen. My mind was in a bad place with that dating app and running into you.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Emma,” he said with a large smile.

  “Did she threaten you?” I joked.

  Luckily, he got the joke and laughed. Emma wasn’t the kind of person that you messed around with. If you were on her bad side, you better hope that you figured out how to get on her good side before she decided to take care of you. Emma was a sweet, vibrant, artsy woman that would cut off a finger if she had to prove her point and was angry enough.

  “Sort of. She came with Merrick to our investment club meeting this morning and explained what the text had been about.”

  I was mortified. Had she really told Wyatt how insecure I was? How I needed to make believe I was someone else in order to feel sexy. My face flushed red with the idea that he actually knew the truth about my seductive walk with him the night before.

  “Oh,” I mumbled as I looked down at my feet.

  “You’re the sexiest woman I’ve met in a very long time. Just so you know; I don’t think you’ve got to pretend to be anyone else but yourself.”

  I liked the words he was saying, but my mind just couldn’t get wrapped around them. I still felt so jilted from the morning. When I woke up and realized he had just left without a single word, it had been devastating and had really affected my thoughts.

  Guys usually bothered to make some sort of excuse up if they were just there for a one-night stand. They didn’t just up and leave. And I had never actually had a man come to my home and leave. Typically, I went to their home and listened to their trumped up excuses about having to leave right away in the morning because they had work. It was such a turn-off, but then again, it was expected in those situations.

  That morning had hurt me because I genuinely hadn’t expected it. I hadn’t thought at all about him just leaving me like that. I had not considered the idea that he was just in my bed to get laid and then was going to leave as early as possible without even waking me. And because I had not mentally prepared myself, I wasn’t ready at all for the emotions that I felt from that morning.

  But now here he was, and he was apologizing for this big miscommunication. I felt his apology was real. I saw the reality of it in his eyes, yet I still felt such pain running through my veins from the morning.

  A girl never likes to be rejected. It’s not a good feeling and not something that you can just forget because a man apologizes. As much as I wanted to believe his apology and just move on from it, I had the reality of my own mind weighing me down.

  “Kiss her already,” Grandma Lou yelled from her table only a few feet away from us.

  She wasn’t helping me at all. I did want to kiss him. I wanted to be back in my bed naked with him and forget this whole day had even happened. But I couldn’t go back in time, and that meant I had to figure out what happened and how I could possibly forget about waking up alone after one of the best nights of my life.

  “So Emma told me you were here, and I came out to see you. I think we should stick with this; I mean we are a one hundred percent match.” He laughed. “I am sorry. So truly sorry for leaving this morning, but I am very happy that the dating app brought us together.”

  “Speaking of that dating app. Did it tell you to come here?” I asked.

  “I haven’t looked at it since we talked on there. It was Emma who told me where you were.”

  The dating app had been such an enigma in this whole situation. I really wasn’t sure what part of our meeting the app had played and what part Wyatt and I had
played. But I was happy that we were there standing with each other, and I was willing to give him a second chance for sure.

  I pulled my phone out of my purse to see what my app said, and he did the same. We both stood there looking at our Date Tonight app, and a smile crossed our faces.

  “What does yours say?” Wyatt asked.

  “What does yours say?” I asked him back.

  “Happily Ever After,” we both said as we turned our apps around and showed each other. I had to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.

  ***

  “Wyatt! Come here; Brandon’s on television!” I screamed as I turned on the morning news.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He just sold another app.” I laughed.

  “What’s this one do? Marry people? Feed them breakfast in bed?” He raised a laugh.

  We both sat and watched as the newscaster introduced Brandon, or Ren as Wyatt liked to refer to him. Ren was dressed in a dark blue suit and actually looked very professional as the camera panned over to him.

  “So one million dollar app wasn’t enough for you, and you’ve gone and developed another?” the host asked him.

  “Yes, Donna, as much as I love the Date Tonight app, and I’ve had friends who have been very successfully matched on there, I still was full of ideas and decided to try my hand at an investing app.”

  I looked over at Wyatt, who was smiling ear to ear. He clearly had already heard about Ren’s app, and this news story wasn’t a surprise at all.

  “Tell our audience more about Invest Tonight,” the host asked.

  “Well, two of my close friends met about six months ago through the Date Tonight app. They were actually the only couple I knew that had a one hundred percent match,” Ren started to say.

  “He’s talking about us!” I screamed with excitement.

  “Well through a misunderstanding, they ended up arguing and finally made up when my friend Wyatt went out to help Dakota’s grandmother with her investments. When they told me the story, something just clicked. There isn’t an investment app that is designed specifically for the beginning investor.”

  “There are a lot of investment apps, though.”

  “Sure, if you’re a dedicated investor, there are a lot of options. But what if you’re just Grandma Lou, sitting in your nursing home and wanting to put your money in a decent investment that isn’t complicated. That’s what Invest Tonight is here to help with. This app isn’t for day traders. It’s not for people who want to learn everything about the stock market. The app offers ten simple investment options and clearly describes each one.”

  “So your friends love story inspired you to make another ten million dollars?” the host asked as he laughed.

  “I guess so.”

  “He made ten million dollars from his app?” I asked in total shock.

  “Yep, he’s getting to be a pretty damn rich twenty-four-year-old,” Wyatt said with a laugh.

  “How long did you know about this?”

  Wyatt smiled at me like he always did, and I knew I was in trouble. Over the last six months together, there was one thing I had learned very well, I had no willpower when he turned on that amazing smile of his.

  “He was fixing some bugs in the dating app, and I told him about the night we met up with Grandma Lou. I saw his spark when I explained how I knew Grandma Lou and how she had tied us both together.”

  Suddenly there was a spark of memory of my own. It was Grandma Lou who had been the connection between us all along.

  “Did the dating app ever ask you where you volunteered or anything about Grandma Lou?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. There were like a million questions.”

  “One question asked me about the closest person in the world to me. I answered with her name. Later when I was asked about places I frequented, I had put her nursing home on there.”

  His eyes lit up, and Wyatt pulled me toward him. I loved when he pulled me close to him like that. It made my whole body light up. The last six months had been absolute perfection, and I couldn’t have asked for a better man in my life. The Date Tonight app had done that for us, but we had made the most of it.

  “I answered that the nursing home had been a place I visited too. It was listed as one of the most important things I did that year.”

  It had bugged me since we met that we were rated a one hundred percent match, yet we were totally different. But at that moment, I realized that we didn’t have to like all the same things or have the same jobs, or even vote for the same political party. Grandma Lou was the most important person in my world and helping her had been the most important thing he did that year. For that reason alone, I knew the Date Tonight app had been right after all. We were a 100% match.

  PART II

  Chapter 1

  Dean

  “If we invest everything into the new live streaming app, I think that would be our best bet,” Brandon, or Ren said as we started our weekly investment club meeting.

  At twenty-four years old, Ren wasn’t the kind of guy I usually hung around with. His cockiness and insistence on knowing the technology field wasn’t useful to me at all, but this was our weekly investment club meeting and I could endure him for the short amount of time we had to be together.

  “Of course you want all our money to go into technology, but for those of us who hate technology, this is the worst investment ever,” I added. “I have a really hard time taking any advice from a guy who can’t even get laid.”

  “I get laid more than you old man. How can you hate technology? It’s all the girls posting on Instagram and Twitter that have you relevant in today’s world anyway. I mean, I wouldn’t even know who you were if it wasn’t for technology. Most of your movies came out when I was a baby,” Ren replied.

  He was a little shit, and I hated that I actually liked the kid. It was the truth, though, and I loathed that even more than being jabbed about my age. At 48-years-old, I certainly wasn’t a young Hollywood star like I used to be. Luckily, there were still much older stars like George Clooney who were continuing to be profitable, so I was holding out hope that I could land a movie that would bring the excitement back into my life and keep me going in the industry.

  After being on Broadway for over a year, I was ready to get back to the relatively dull life of shooting movies. Broadway required me constantly to be in one place and to work six days a week, every single week. Although I had become accustomed to the schedule, I wasn’t in love with it at all. I missed the days of shooting movies for six weeks and then taking six weeks off to travel with delicious women and lay on the beaches of Mexico.

  Movie star life was so much different than Broadway star life. In my day to day life now, I felt like a normal guy. I went to work, did my job, and then headed home every night. There was a small window of time after a performance where I might find some fans outside the show, but as soon as I signed autographs and took some pictures, they were gone. In the morning light, I was just some dude who was walking around the city.

  In front of my hotel there were paparazzi on some days, but not all of the days. It really just depended on the news stories that were swirling around. Most of the time, they simply snapped a few photos and then went back to their day to day lives. They didn’t follow me too often, only when I had a beautiful date on my arms.

  My agent had insisted that doing Broadway would help me become well known again. It wasn’t working out that way, though. Although people in New York certainly recognized me more, the overall country didn’t seem to care all that much about what I was up to. I really needed some publicity if I was going to land any decent parts in movies.

  Occasionally, there was a story about a movie I had done in the past which would get some excitement going. I’d get a few interview requests and sometimes even enough attention to keep me busy for a week, but it always died down. Without an upcoming release to talk about, there was a dead zone between me and the media. You could only talk abo
ut your Broadway show a certain number of times before everyone had heard it all before.

  “I’ll have you know my agent just signed an endorsement deal for me with Instamatch,” I blurted out, only barely knowing what the phone app was. “I’m hip. I know what my fans like so don’t try your little games with me,” I laughed.

  “Really?” Ren said as he couldn’t hold back his surprise. “You’re on Instamatch? Are you sure it isn’t GrandpaMatch?”

  “Shut it little man, I’m one of the big new marketing names for Instamatch,” I said as I tried not to punch the kid in the face.

  I did my best to disguise the uncertainty in my voice though, because I barely knew what Instamatch was. All I knew was my agent insisted it would make me more relevant with the younger generation. I was supposed to talk about it on social media or something, and I’d magically become hip again. Even the thought of it all made me laugh; I felt like I had moved into the ‘Dad role’ world and couldn’t see that ‘hip’ roles were in my near future. But I trusted my agent, so I was going to roll with whatever she thought was best.

  “Isn’t that app geared toward the twenty-something crowd?” Wyatt chimed in and laughed under his breath.

  “I have no idea. To be honest, I just love my agent and all the work she’s getting me. If she thinks this is a good idea, I’m all for it.”

  Wyatt had met his new girlfriend Dakota online, but up until he met her, I wouldn’t have ever thought anyone could meet a decent girl online. Sure, I’d messed around with the online programs, but it was all fun and games. Wyatt and Dakota’s love increased the possibilities for me, and really the two of them were the only reason I hadn’t freaked out when my agent said she signed the marketing contract with Instamatch before running things past me.

  For years, I had self-managed every detail of my career. I said yes or no to things my old agent signed me up to all based on my gut. But my Broadway show was ending soon, and I still didn’t have a big Hollywood movie deal, so I needed a new plan and Bella Haden, my young hip agent, was just the person to bring me into the next phase of my career. Her husband was a casting agent, and I knew her father from way back; I trusted Bella and knew she would only have my best interest at heart.