“No shoes, no shirt, no service doesn’t apply here, then?”
I grab two plates from my cupboard.
Avoiding the issue at hand? Check.
“It’s not that fancy of an establishment. Now, cover your ass before I forget which round of seconds I’m looking to eat,” I reply sternly, taking what I hope is the difficulty out of the situation.
She rolls her eyes and complies.
I bite back a smirk at the thought of her seeing Scott Construction inscribed along the back of the T-shirt and then underneath in a smaller font: My Toolbox Is Bigger Than Yours.
A gift and potential marketing ploy from Erica I’d finally found a use for.
“What were you working on?” Hallie asks, tilting her head to my now-abandoned laptop, a forkful of schnitzel poised before her lips. “New T-shirt designs, I hope?” She pulls at the fabric draped over her full breasts.
I had been emailing potential new funders for my charity. While I had the costs covered for my own apprentices, the charity was set up to help fund the learning and development of young people in other local businesses—some of their life expenses, too, if they really needed the assistance. In the last year, I’ve been able to support over a dozen young people into employment, a fact I’m more than proud of. With the continued offer of funding from Johnathan Cairns, I’d upped our KPIs and given the okay for further referrals. With young people having already started the process, it wasn’t something I wanted to have to rescind on. The money, up until recently, hadn’t seemed like a big deal. It’d seemed like something my future self would deal with. However, after the last two weeks and the most recent bouts of phenomenal sex, I’m reconsidering the potential fallout if I can’t get Hallie on board.
“How do you know I was working? I could’ve been watching porn.”
Her laugh is easy; I would go as far as to say it sounds relaxed. “I shudder to think about the type of porn you’d need to watch in order to put concentration frown lines between your brows.” Her finger points toward my forehead and the frown lines that routinely take up residence there.
“Really high-browporn, obviously,” I reply with a nonchalant shrug, my mind too full to be worried about the appalling dad joke.
I might pride myself on working hard, but I’d never wanted to advertise the struggles that come with it.
“Obviously.”
We eat in comfortable silence, and I try not to think too hard about just how easy it feels to share a meal together. More accurately, how easy it’s been to spend the day together, spend time with family together, and then come home together. Because that’s really what we’ve done—a bizarre social experiment of what our lives could’ve been like. It would be intimate, honest, and real if not for the undercurrent of things currently unsaid and the truces, both ours and Julian’s, holding this shamble of a thing together. However, none of that makes it any less enjoyable in the moment.
“You never ended up telling me what you do now for work, other than not answering questions to men you don’t want to give your time to, that is.” I repeat the scathing phrase she had thrown at me just a few short weeks ago.
“You care?” she asks good-naturedly.
I try not to read too much into my own curiosity. “Well, we could keep talking porn preferences, if you want. The semantics of the industry, the rights of the workers involved. Personally, I think the women could be making more money, and intimacy directors should be standard practice, but that’s just me.”
My tone might be droll, but my opinion is the absolute truth.
“For such an ass, your opinions aren’t horrible.” She takes a moment, eyes on mine, as if wondering how much more of her life she could possibly want to share with me, considering she’s already made her body fair game. “I work in user experience design.”
This is not actually news to me, but I’m not one to admit to web searches of my ex’s LinkedIn. “Do you like it?”
“I do. It’s people focused without, you know, having to deal with people all that often.”
“Perfect for you, then.”
“Exactly. I can also do the work from basically anywhere, which is handy.”
“So that’s the plan, then, to keep working and traveling?”
She nods. “For now, at least. I love Edinburgh, and when I get sick of the sideways rain, I can go somewhere warmer for a little while.”
“You still have walls to see, then?” I ask, ever so gently, crossing the line into our past, regardless of the rules.
It doesn’t feel like all that long ago on a hot summer afternoon when I’d snapped my fingers in front of Hallie’s face to get her attention as she’d been staring at the wall. When I’d asked her what she was thinking about, she’d simply said, “Seeing the world,” and when I’d laughed and asked what she would see, she’d deadpanned, “Walls. I’d see all the famous walls. China, Berlin, and Jerusalem, I’d see them all.”
“Berlin is currently at the top of the list.” She puts her utensils down on her plate.
I stand, stacking her dish on top of my own as I head for the kitchen. “I thought Berlin would’ve been one of the first you visited.”
