Looking Real Good

by C. Morgan

  For some of them, it would be the first thing they’d eaten in days.

  Everyone working the food line waved and called hello to me as I fell into the open spot at the mashed-potato station. A glass divider protected the food from the volunteers and the guests coming in to get food, and it was our job to serve everyone their portions. This kept things fair and equal, avoided potential confrontation between people in line, and followed health and safety guidelines.

  A woman and her young son stepped up in front of me. The boy couldn’t have been more than nine. He wore a ball cap with frayed edges on the visor and a jacket that was far too big for him. His eyes were dark brown and fixed on the steaming potatoes between us.

  I grinned at him and his mother. “They look good, don’t they? It’s torture having to stand up here and serve them when all I want to do is stick my finger in them and have a taste.”

  The boy looked up at me.

  I winked. “Don’t worry. I didn’t do it.”

  He smiled.

  I slapped a hefty serving onto his plate and then his mother’s. Their plates already had some steamed carrots and a scoop of corn on them, and they shimmied down the line to pick their protein. On the menu today was baked chicken and gravy. The gravy was clumpy and beige, not at all aesthetically pleasing, but it smelled like gravy, and that was sometimes as good as it got at the kitchens.

  It was better than nothing anyway.

  More people filled the place of the mother and her son. I offered smiles and friendly greetings to everyone who stopped in front of my station. I asked them about their day and asked a gentleman in a long coat and fingerless gloves how many people were still waiting in line.

  “About three times as many who are eating in here,” he told me with a crooked smile. He was missing three of his front teeth.

  “How long did you have to wait?”

  “I don’t have a watch,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you. But I’d guess it took me an hour or so to get inside. Not bad at all. Not bad at all. Smells good, too. You make this?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “No, and be glad for it. My cooking never turns out. I always put too much salt in things and I overcook it. This stuff here? This is the good stuff.”

  The man flashed me another one of his crooked smiles before carrying on down the line toward the chicken. The rest of the afternoon moved along in a blur. There were no pauses in the steady stream of people filing in and filling their plates.

  There were a lot of hungry people out there to feed.

  I didn’t mind. I liked being busy, and I liked meeting new people. Volunteer work made me feel fulfilled. I could remember a childhood that didn’t feel all that long ago when I’d been the one in need. I grew up in a rough area where people didn’t have a lot of money. My grandmother raised me after my own mother gave me up and lost herself in drugs. Sometimes as a young girl, I used to wonder what it might have been like to have a mother in my life who loved me more than she loved her addiction.

  Now as a grown woman, I could see how warped that thinking was.

  Addiction stripped choices away, among other things. It wasn’t that my mother hadn’t loved me. Quite the opposite actually. She’d left me with her own mother because she knew she would fall short. She knew I deserved a fair shot and the only way I’d get that was with my grandmother.

  And my mother had been right.

  My grandmother was a kind woman who worked too many hours at a bakery six blocks away from our apartment. We made a happy home together, but the money never went far enough. Soup kitchens like this were familiar to me. I ate many meals at collapsible tables with strangers packed in elbow to elbow.

  I even made friends in those places.

  I’d met my best friend in one of the apartment buildings in the complex, for instance. She and I were thick as thieves growing up. We used to play kick the can with the other neighborhood kids. Sometimes, we’d change things up and have a game of capture the flag, but kick the can was our standard go-to.

  I never won, but that wasn’t the point.

  Three hours had passed since I assumed mashed-potato duty. I was happy to take a break when Rodney tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Hey, Kayla,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen doors. “I finally have more coverage in the back to stay on top of the dishes. There was something I wanted to talk to you about. Can you spare a minute?”

  I nodded and handed the spatula to the woman beside me manning the wax-beans station. I gave a coy look and asked if she was sure she could double-fist it.

  She told me to get going so I could come back sooner and relieve her.

  I followed Rodney through the kitchens to the back room where he kept a small personal office. It was from this space that he managed the kitchens. He was a one-man show staying on top of fundraising events, bottle drives, specialty menus, donations, and much more. He had stacks of papers everywhere, including on the one chair at his desk, and he gathered them up and stacked them on top of an already overwhelming pile on the floor.

  “Sit,” he said, nodding pointedly at the chair.

  I sat.

  Rodney leaned up against the wall across from me. “I have a partnership with the local school district to provide free lunches to hungry kids and I recently got word that their funding has been cut in half due to lower donations this year.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Indeed. That means fifty percent of their kids will go without lunches if we can’t get more money together to cover the losses. We’ll have to rely on outside community groups to revive it. Even that’s a stretch. We’re going to need our own manpower to handle deliveries and such. I have volunteers willing to take that task on but I need some help on the ground level to reach out to these community groups and other local organizations to kind of get the ball rolling. I was hoping you’d be willing to lend a hand. It’s never easy asking for money but you have higher success rates than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s the charming smile and the disarming sense of humor,” I said not so humbly.

  Rodney laughed. “I’m not going to disagree with that. I know it’s a lot to ask and you’re already a very busy woman. If you can’t fit this into your schedule, I understand. I can ask someone else.”

  “Who?”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “I hadn’t gotten that far but I always manage to make something work, don’t I?”

  I smiled graciously. “Don’t worry, Rodney. I can handle it. It’s not too much. I promise. Besides, you know this is something I’d love to be involved in. Just to clarify, what do you need from me?”

  “Money,” he said simply. “I need you in charge of donations.”

  “All right,” I said thoughtfully. My mind was already hopping to and from businesses I knew I’d be able to go to. “I have a couple of companies and businesses I can tap. I don’t see any reason why I won’t be able to come through for you.”

  He clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “Excellent!”

  I stood up and rubbed my sweaty palms on my jeans. The soup kitchen was not an easy, breezy place. It was stuffy and warm, especially with so many bodies packed inside.

  Rodney moved in for a grateful hug.

  I let him wrap his arms around me and regretted it immediately. Rodney was a good man. I’d always thought so. But he also had a bit of a thing for me and he tended to get a little too comfortable too quickly when it came to things like this. I’d told him on rare occasions that things between us were strictly professional, and he’d agreed every time, but this hug lasted a little too long to be deemed professional.

  I pulled away and patted him on the shoulder the way two buddies might when they met each other at a bar for beers and a game. I was about to excuse myself when my phone started buzzing in my back pocket. It made for an easy escape, so I ducked out of his office and slipped out of the emergency exit into the parking lot behind the soup kitchen.

  There was a co
ol breeze blowing that chased away the lingering heat in my cheeks as I raised the phone to my ear. “Hello, this is Kayla Goodfellow for Good Fellow’s.”

  My best friend Lisa’s voice filled the line. “Kayla, do you ever check your call display?”

  I giggled and pressed the back of my hand to my head to wipe away sweat. “Not all the time, no. Sorry. What’s up?”

  “Well,” Lisa said slowly.

  I could tell she was building anticipation. “Yes?”

  “I have a proposition for you. It would involve us working together. I know you’re super busy but I think this would be a good thing for all parties involved. Are you interested?”

  “Am I interested? Of course, I’m interested in working with my best friend! Give me details.”

  “Hear me out before you go all in, okay? We’d also be working with Lukas.”

  Lukas. Lisa’s older brother, the billionaire extraordinaire, tech success CEO, cover of magazines, drop dead gorgeous Lukas?

  I swallowed. “Oh?”

  Chapter 3

  Lukas

  Polly, my assistant, nodded along to what I was telling her about the new software development launch. Her lips were pursed thoughtfully, and her eyes were slightly narrowed behind her dark-framed glasses, and she held a red-painted finger to her dimpled chin.

  I paused a beat.

  Polly cocked her head to the side. Her blonde curls bounced just above her shoulders. “Is that all, Mr. Holt?”

  I sighed. “The next time I’m boring you, feel free to tell me you’re not interested, Polly. I never intend to bore you to death with my blabber, but I’ve been told I’m not good at picking up social cues that someone has lost interest in the subject matter.”

  Polly giggled. “I’m not bored with you, sir. Or your subject matter. I just… well, I don’t really understand much of what you’re talking about when it comes to software and programming and coding.”

  “Right.”

  She put a hand on my arm. “I swear I was listening.”

  Someone knocked softly on my office door. Polly released my arm and took a step back to stand beside my desk rather than behind it. She wrapped her arms around herself, and one of the buttons at the top of her silky pink blouse threatened to pop open as her breasts pulled at the fabric.

  “Come in,” I said as I lowered myself into my chair.

  Lisa opened my office door and stepped in. She smiled at Polly.

  “Morning, Polly,” Lisa said cheerfully. Her attention turned to me and she put her weight on her right foot while she waited expectantly.

  Clearly, I’d forgotten something. “Yes?”

  “We’re meeting the non-profit director I told you about in the conference room in five minutes.”

  Polly excused herself and closed the door behind her, leaving me and Lisa alone in my office.

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” I lied smoothly.

  “Sure you hadn’t.” Lisa paced behind my desk to stand in front of the windows. She looked down at the street before turning her gaze up to the sky. “You have the best views in Seattle, big brother. I’ll give you that.”

  “I paid a hefty price for them.”

  “Of your own volition. Nobody forced you to.”

  “Never said they did.”

  Lisa smiled at me over her shoulder. “I have to admit, your office is the nicest one I’ve ever been in. The only thing I’d remove to make it better is you.”

  I chuckled. “Very funny.”

  “I wasn’t joking.”

  A lot of thought and consideration had gone into appointing this office of mine. To say I was a workaholic would be a gross understatement. I lived and breathed this job, so I spent more time within these four walls than I did anywhere else. On some occasions, I’d worked straight through the night writing my own code.

  On the far wall to the right were all my coding computers. Six monitors, three on the bottom and three on top, all concaved inward around a sleek, glass-top black desk. Little lights flashed and blinked on computer towers and other devices tucked neatly into the storage unit under the lowest row of monitors.

  The rest of the office was minimalist and clean. The floors were glossy, light gray marble. My business desk sat in the middle of the room upon a dark blue carpet. The desk was mahogany and had two matching guest chairs on the opposite side from where I sat. Three ceiling lights hung low over the desk, providing ambient light at night that wasn’t too bright and wasn’t too dark. The walls were white, though most of them couldn’t be seen because they were hidden behind floor-to-ceiling bookcases or filing cabinets.

  By the window was a lounge area with four black leather arm chairs, a liquor cart, and a coffee table. I spent the least amount of time there.

  “How much did it cost just to decorate this room?” Lisa asked as she strolled past the only piece of art in the room: a canvas oil painting of the south of France, a place I’d been to several years ago and wanted to revisit when the time was right. I’d purchased the piece from a local artist.

  “That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?” I was playing hard to get but I liked the praise about my office. It represented how far I’d come and the man I’d grown into after all my success. I was no longer the broke, shattered, sad teenager I used to be. I was a builder of empires—a wealthy scion of Seattle.

  My sister turned to me with a smirk that looked much like my own. “Oh please, Lukas. You’re never bashful about discussing how much something cost you. You have six cars that all cost well over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a piece. I know so because you told me.”

  “Well, it didn’t cost that much,” I told her.

  Lisa rolled her eyes, shook her head, and went to the office door. “Come on. Let’s go to the conference room. We don’t want to be late for our own meeting.”

  I followed my sister out of my office and down the hall to the conference room. It was prepped for our meeting, most likely by Polly, who’d laid out three settings on the long white marble table. Each person would have a notepad, two pens, and a cup of water. A coffee machine in the corner of the room was midway through brewing a pot and the whole room smelled like coffee beans.

  Lisa took a seat in front of one of the notepads and crossed one leg over the other. Her foot bounced and she fidgeted with one of the pens.

  She was excited.

  Why?

  Five minutes passed, followed by five more, and irritation welled up inside me. I did not have time to wait around for people to squeeze me into their timetable. That wasn’t how things worked. I fit people into my schedule, not the other way around.

  I sighed.

  Lisa, sensing my withering patience, perked up. “Did I tell you my mom got a new job?”

  I ran a finger along my jaw. “No, you didn’t. Where’s she working now?”

  “A dog grooming company. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it’s called but they’re the highest rated luxury grooming company in Seattle. Mom’s over the moon, of course. You remember how much she loves dogs and anything with whiskers really.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, now she’s practically drowning in them. Since she and I bought that duplex and moved in, she’s adopted two. Can you believe it? How many years did she pine over getting a mutt when we lived in those shithole apartments?”

  “Twenty, give or take.”

  “And now she finally has two.” Lisa smiled. I could tell she was brimming with happiness for her mother. “Bruno and Gauge. I think I have pictures.”

  “Great,” I said dryly. I loved my sister but I had no interest in looking at pictures of her mother’s rescue dogs. Nevertheless, I sat and waited while she pulled out her phone and scrolled through pictures.

  “Here they are,” Lisa said, leaning forward to hold the phone out to me.

  I took it and flipped through pictures of two dogs. One was gray and wiry with longer white fur around his snout. The other had short coppery fur and folded ears. “Cu
te,” I said, assuming this was the word Lisa was fishing for.

  “Aren’t they? She just adores them and they bring her so much joy. I hear her let them outside every morning next door. They get her up early and keep her company in the evenings when I can’t. It’s a best-case scenario really. And the duplex has enough room for her to be comfortable, too.”

  Guilt nudged at my insides.

  I could have bought Lisa and her mother an expensive property years ago, but I’d been too focused on myself and my own mother. I’d been so consumed by my mother’s worsening health that I hadn’t had much energy to share in Lisa’s excitement as her consultant firm grew and she finally had enough money to buy the duplex for herself and her mother. They lived as neighbors, an ideal situation for my sister who cherished her mother more than anyone else, but they could have had a nicer place if I’d been in the frame of mind to help them out.

  Lisa put her phone in her handbag. “How has your mother been, by the way? I tried to go visit her last week but they wouldn’t let me in.”

  “She’s fine.” I glanced at my watch. The non-profit director was over ten minutes late. “She has her good days and bad days. Listen, I’m going to need to reschedule this meeting. I don’t have time to sit around and wait for—”

  The conference door swung open.

  A young woman with long, wavy, dark brown hair shuffled in. Her arms were overflowing with paperwork and folders. Her purse had a long strap on it, and as she closed the door with her hip, it slid right off her shoulder to land in the groove of her elbow. The purse jerked her arm down, and in that hand, she held a travel mug of coffee. A bit sloshed out of the open mouth opening and spilled onto her light gray long-sleeved shirt.

  “Shoot,” she hissed, scowling at the stain. Her dark features pinched together and she finally glanced up.

  My jaw nearly hit the floor when I got a look at her face.