Anyone But Nick

by Bloom, Penelope

  I bit back a smile. “Maybe. But if you told me what got Nick to agree to come back, I’d consider it a done deal. No more glaring.”

  “Nick, huh? As the last surviving member of the Overlook Point Oath Squad, I wouldn’t peg you as the one to be curious about Nick—you know, considering he’s supposed to be the only man in the world you’d never date.”

  “Maybe curiosity and a desire to date aren’t necessarily synonymous?”

  He held up his palms. “Point taken. But I guess I’ll have to deal with more glares, because Nick’s reasons aren’t mine to share. If you want to know badly enough, maybe you two will have to stop playing chicken and finally talk.”

  My water bottle crinkled between my fingers when I thought of Nick. When I really thought about it, Nick made me feel pathetic more than anything else. It had been seven years since I had had a crush on him. Seven years since he had asked Kira out instead of me and made it painfully clear that he wasn’t interested in me that way. It might not have all seemed so humiliating if I hadn’t written him that stupid poem the day before he had asked Kira out. I still cringed when I thought about it. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of thing that should’ve warranted an eternal grudge. And if I was honest with myself, anger wasn’t what kept me from wanting to fix things with him. It was the fear that he’d break my heart again.

  When Rich had come back to West Valley, he’d practically gone straight from the plane to Kira’s school and tried to apologize for what had happened seven years ago. Cade hadn’t been in as much of a hurry, but he’d still found his way back to Iris. Nick, on the other hand, had avoided me like the plague.

  That didn’t normally bother me, but I guessed I was feeling a little sorry for myself, considering the events of the last twenty-four hours. I’d broken up with the boyfriend everybody thought was perfect for me and lost the job everyone thought I was amazing at.

  I might not have been certain of a whole lot at the moment, but I knew one thing: all I wanted was for things to go back to normal, even if I was starting to have more and more trouble figuring out what normal was.

  “Hmm,” Rich said. He was watching me with an annoyingly perceptive expression, like he knew exactly how not fine I was. He pointed to my hands. “It looks like you’re thinking about taking that poor water bottle into the bathroom and interrogating it.”

  I relaxed my grip on the bottle. “I’ve been better,” I said. “But, no offense, it’s not something I really want to talk about.”

  “Just remember that it’s not good to bottle it up forever. You’ve got me, Kira, Iris, and even Cade—if you feel like venting to a brick wall that spits out bad puns and laughs at its own jokes, that is.”

  I smirked. As if on cue, Cade grew considerably louder. Both Rich and I stopped talking to look toward him.

  Cade’s palms were pressed together, and he was doing some kind of swimming motion, maybe still imitating a snake. Kira was pressing her hand to her forehead, and Iris was watching with a confused expression.

  “Do you mind apologizing to everyone for me?” I asked Rich. “I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I think it’d be best if I head home and get some sleep.”

  He watched me with a funny expression. “You sure everything is okay? Aside from the obvious issues, I mean.”

  “Fine,” I said, and then I laughed after a short pause. “And that’s not code. Really, I’m fine.”

  But I couldn’t help thinking how far from fine I was as I headed out of the bowling alley. I didn’t let myself dwell on any of that. All I had to do was what I’d always done. Look forward. Focus on working my ass off and chasing my goal, even when the thought made me want to curl up and aggressively breathe into a paper bag.

  I can do this.

  The only slight hitch in my plan was my friends would all laugh their asses off when they found out where I was planning to interview tomorrow.

  Chapter 2

  NICK

  Everybody lived for something. Some spent their whole lives searching for that something; others found it but never quite reached it. I’d found mine a long time ago, and I woke up every day hoping for another taste. I lived for a challenge. It was my drug. When I was younger, it had been enough to find something hard and overcome it.

  I’d always been clever, and that let me overpower almost every obstacle I’d come across. Then I realized it wasn’t enough to just overcome the obstacles. There were countless ways to get through a locked door, but only one perfect way: the key. My addiction evolved until it wasn’t enough to succeed. I had to succeed in a clean, precise way. A perfect way.

  Take my man-child of a brother, Cade. Keeping him alive was a challenge that probably should’ve required a full-time staff of handlers and experts. It probably should’ve also required specialized tools like cattle prods and traps to keep him under control during his more adventurous moments. But it was technically a task that could be accomplished in any number of ways.

  I believed there was a perfect solution to every challenge. Finding it was what gave me a rush. I loved the process of searching for the secret, whether it was subtly convincing my brother it was actually a bad idea to ride a shark—yes, even if he was wearing full-body chain mail—or finding the one faulty cog in the complicated machinery of a failing company.

  I craved the perfect solution. Precision. There was a kind of poetry in the efficiency of doing something just right—without an ounce more or less effort than was required.

  My brothers and I owned a company called Sion, and our work was all about that kind of precision. We found businesses that were on their way to financial collapse and turned them into virtual money-printing machines. When we showed up with checkbooks and wrote down enough zeroes, they were always willing to sell off their burden to us. After that, my job was to trim the fat. When necessary, I’d step in as a temporary CEO until I could find the key to getting the company back on track. Nothing ever quite matched the feeling of finding the one loose thread—that sometimes-minute adjustment to let every other piece fall back into place.

  Today, Bark Bites was going to become Sion’s newest acquisition. It was a restaurant franchise where the menu also included a selection of items for your dog. The dogs were given a little doghouse beneath the table and a tether to be leashed. Based on the information I’d seen, Bark Bites was about six months away from declaring bankruptcy, whether the management knew it or not. They weren’t a publicly shared company, so the hostile takeover route was off the table. Instead, I was going to go the simple route. I had a meeting scheduled in half an hour, and I was going to show up with a fat check in my hand.

  My brother Cade sat beside me in the lobby. It was rare for him to join me on business outings. For that matter, it was rare for Cade to do much work in general. My brother had an unfortunate tendency to attract disaster and avoid responsibility. Unfortunately, the work he did do was borderline genius, and we always knew we could bring him in when negotiations reached a standstill with important clients. Cade could convince just about anyone to do just about anything. If he wasn’t so annoyingly useful, we could’ve just told him to stay home and skipped the hassle. But becoming a father seemed to have pushed him to be a little more proactive in being a regular part of the business. He’d never admit as much, but I wondered if he was trying to be a better example for Bear.

  I always felt slightly obligated to spend time around Cade, if for no other reason than to keep him from accidentally offing himself. I imagined it wasn’t much different from being in charge of a two-year-old, at least if that two-year-old was hypercapable and clever in the dumbest ways imaginable. I’d saved him from countless near-death experiences. There was the time he’d called to complain that the constant beeping of his carbon monoxide detectors was giving him a headache and making him nauseated. There was also the time he plugged in a drenched extension cord outside to prove it was safe—it wasn’t—and if I hadn’t kicked him away from the cord, I’m not sure he would’ve been able to let go.


  Cade leaned his head back against the wall while he played a game on his phone that looked like it was designed for children.

  “Can you at least turn the volume down?” I asked.

  Cade shot me a withering look. He and my brother Rich were twins. Cade’s life of mischievous living and trouble had somehow managed to make the two of them pretty easy to tell apart. Cade was the one who looked like he’d throw a party at a moment’s notice, and Rich was the one who looked like he’d shut it down and tell everybody to get back to work. They were as close to polar opposites as you could get, but I supposed that wasn’t a shocker from identical twins. Everyone wanted an identity, but twins had to work harder to carve out their own since they were always being compared.

  Cade tapped the buttons on the side of his phone, and I was fairly sure the game got louder. “How’s that?” he asked.

  “Remind me again why you decided to tag along for this?”

  “Because of your little speech?” He tried to change his voice to imitate mine. “Rich and I are so busy pairing off and getting in relationships that we’re going to neglect the business.” He paused, mimicking pushing a pair of glasses up his nose. “Blah, blah. You’re worried that it’s going to all fall on your shoulders. Blah, blah. You have a fetish for women dressed as pirates, and you fantasize about what they’d do with their peg legs. What was it you said, again? ‘I want ’em hilt deep in me dark star’? Or was it ‘elbow deep and harrrrd.’ Emphasis on the ‘arrr.’”

  I sighed but couldn’t help grinning a little. “Why is that so weirdly specific? Also, that’s disgusting. Dark star? Do you seriously talk about assholes enough that you need to get that creative in nicknaming them?”

  “Every good fetish is full of details. Like I knew this woman once who wanted me to role-play a crow.” Cade leaned in and lowered his voice. “But she had clipped my wings, and she was keeping me prisoner. Like a sex slave. But a crow, so I had to kind of—” He started trying to do something to me with his arms outstretched like two big, stiff wings.

  I stared at him, and the look on my face made him trail off. “I was going to say you should be less specific, because it makes me wonder if you could make something so obscure up. But now I see you’re just pulling from past experiences.”

  He shrugged. “You’ve never been with somebody who was into the pirate stuff?” He made an imaginary hook with his index finger and tried to pull my shirt open while making vague, raspy pirate noises. “Where do you keep the booty?” he demanded.

  I chuckled and slapped his hand away. “Jesus Christ. No wonder we stopped trying to talk you into working more. It’s like bring-your-kid-to-work day.”

  “You wish I was your kid.”

  “What is that even supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Just know that if your genius plan to give Dan a huge check fails, I’ll be right here with my unstoppable negotiation skills.”

  “The big-check plan never fails,” I said. “Give me two minutes in there, and Bark Bites will be ours.”

  “Bark Bites will be ours,” Cade mocked. “You sound like a supervillain.”

  I shook my head and tried to get my head back on the work. This wasn’t the typical company we tried to flip at Sion. Usually, we aimed for the big, national kind of companies. It had always amazed me how even the biggest failing companies had one problem at the root of all their issues. If you identified all the symptoms and worked your way backward, you’d eventually find that single, glaring problem. The key. Sometimes, it was an employee, a company policy, a branding error, or even a clerical mistake. Whatever it was, I loved the challenge of finding it and fixing it.

  The door to the lobby opened, and I stared for a few moments before I realized who I was looking at.

  Miranda Collins. The afternoon sun blazed in behind her so at first all I could make out was the vague, glowing outline of her. I had to stop myself from thinking she looked angelic in that moment. It was just a trick of the light. She walked a straight line past the bench where Cade and I sat. Her head was held high, and her eyes never so much as flickered from staring straight ahead.

  Seeing her always made me feel strange. I knew she still wanted nothing to do with me, but she took it a step further. Miranda was aggressively indifferent toward me, and not just the kind of indifferent that meant she’d intentionally avoid saying bless you if I sneezed in front of her. No. It had gone far, far beyond that. There was a kind of hatred in her eyes that, like good wine, had fermented and grown stronger over time. On the rare occasions I’d caught her looking at me since my brothers and I had come back to West Valley, I could’ve sworn my soul had tried to shrivel up and hide from the intensity of those eyes.

  But, I had to admit the fact that she loathed me so much was also a little bit sexy. I also couldn’t help thinking that she was the Mount Everest of challenges. I mean, what possible key could there be to a problem that complex? What could I find in that tangle of old, sour bitterness she called a brain that would get me in? Sometimes, I thought the only way to fix what had gone wrong between Miranda and me was time travel. Hell, maybe that was why I’d always had such a nerdy fascination with the topic.

  Without going back in time, how could I possibly fix what was broken between us?

  It was an old question I’d asked myself a dozen times before, but it didn’t stop me from looking at it again. I studied her as she passed, as if some subtle hint in her body language might hold the key. She wore her long blonde hair in a braided ponytail down her back. Her outfit was crisp and pressed, like she’d somehow managed to commute here without sitting down and putting the slightest wrinkle in her skirt. I distantly decided I wouldn’t have put it past her to own a portable steam press to touch up her clothes throughout the day.

  She was beautiful, confident, and successful. None of it surprised me. Seven years ago, I’d had a massive crush on her when we’d gone to high school together. I’d often thought about how things played out back then. It seemed like one or two different decisions could’ve set us all on a different course. Instead, I’d wound up dating Kira after she’d written me that poem out of nowhere. Cade had brought those idiotic pot brownies for Iris, and Rich had ratted Kira out to his coaches. In three fell swoops, we’d managed to set off the romantic equivalent of a nuclear bomb between ourselves and the girls. It had all culminated in the infamous vow Kira, Iris, and Miranda swore on Overlook Point. No matter what, they’d never date me or my brothers. Except Miranda seemed to be the only one who still cared about the oath.

  I waited for her head to turn or even her eyes to shift toward me, but she didn’t so much as glance our way as she passed.

  Cold, as usual.

  Cade leaned over and whispered, “Go to her.”

  As much as I hated doing anything my brother suggested, I knew the curiosity was going to eat at me if I didn’t try to talk to her. I wasn’t chasing after her for the reasons my brother probably thought, though. Yes, she was the challenge of all challenges, but I also wasn’t planning on tackling her—or the challenge she presented—yet. Part of what made me good at what I did was my patience. I knew if I just waited long enough, an opportunity would present itself.

  To do my job well, I needed as much information about Bark Bites as I could get. The moment Miranda walked through the door, she’d become a piece of information. That was all. For now.

  The lobby led into a long hallway lined with doors, most of which seemed to be offices. I was about to call out to Miranda when I saw her pause outside the door at the end of the hallway. Her back was still to me. She took a few deep breaths and half turned like she was about to head back the way she’d come, but then she reached for the door. She pulled her hand back suddenly and muttered something under her breath.

  Why was she hesitating? My brain quickly churned through the most likely outcomes. A job interview she was nervous for? Delivering bad news to someone in that room? A boyfriend who works her
e?

  I was surprised when the last possibility made me feel tight in the chest. I knew she’d been dating Robbie Goldman for a few months now, and I hadn’t felt anything when I’d heard they had recently split. So why would her finding a rebound guy bother me in the slightest? Besides, I’d been dating my way through every eligible woman in West Valley to get my matchmaking parents off my back, even if I was currently single. I was the last person who had any right to be jealous if she had already found someone new. Except maybe it wouldn’t feel as loveless and cold as all my failed dates had felt. Hell, I hadn’t even slept with any of the women—a fact that was getting me an unfortunate reputation around town, but I hardly cared about that.

  Without warning, Miranda turned and yanked on a door handle to her left. It didn’t budge, so she tried another door. When it opened, she stepped inside and closed it behind her.

  I had been curious before, but now I was intrigued. The Miranda I knew was the kind of well-oiled machine I had always admired. She knew her purpose, and she pursued it relentlessly. Whatever I’d just seen in the hallway didn’t add up. No matter the reason, she had hesitated. It was a chink in her icy armor of indifference.

  I walked slowly down the hallway until I was standing outside the door she’d gone inside. I pressed my ear to the wood and listened.

  There was a strange rustling sound inside. I frowned as I tried to imagine what it could be. An aluminum can crunching? Papers brushing together? But there was a chewing noise too.

  I slowly pushed the door open and looked inside.

  Miranda was sitting on the ground with a bag of pretzel sticks in one hand and a chocolate candy bar in the other. She took a violent bite of the candy, then tipped the bag of pretzels back and practically inhaled a few. Once she was done chewing the pretzels, she put the bag to her mouth and started hyperventilating into it. She had to stop and cough after a few seconds, probably from inhaling pretzel salt at a high velocity.