Page 74 of All the Ugly Things
“Lilly, please,” she corrected Stephanie.
“And thank you.”
She wore another thin, inexpensively made dress much like she wore the last time she was here. On Fridays, most of the office emptied out by three o’clock but while we were here, the office was casual. All except Dad. He always wore dress pants and a dress shirt. On Fridays, his idea of a casual dress was forgoing his standard tie.
As for me, I wore black slacks and a short-sleeve polo.
Lilly out dressed us both in her navy and white striped dress, a thin yellow belt tightened at the waist. Her shoes, navy sandals, looked new.
And it hit me. None of this was secondhand. None of it was faded and reused.
She made an effort with this. Both times.
And she did it while looking beautiful and put together and most likely, exactly how she would have dressed all those years ago.
Yes, Lilly was surprising in all the best ways.
“Mr. Valentine, Hudson,” she said to us, nodding in each of our directions.
“How many times—”
“David,” she corrected immediately with a shy smile. “Unless you prefer employees to call—”
“David. Everyone calls me David. In fact, you’re the only one who’s called me Mr. Valentine in probably thirty years.” He grinned at her and motioned for a chair. “Please. Sit.”
Like last time, she took a seat on the other side of the table.
This time, she did look at me, and when she did, I caught that darkening pink on her chest and throat. Hopefully it wasn’t an anxiety attack but something better. Melissa used to call them butterflies.
I called them hormones.
Regardless, I knew exactly what I was feeling while Lilly took her seat, opened up the file folder, and after a brief catch-up with my dad about her new apartment, she slid a piece of paper in his direction and said, “I’d like to apply for this job.”
Yeah… that feeling was respect. And I was feeling a whole hell of a lot of it.
“This is…” My dad trailed off and bit the bottom corner of his lip. His head lifted enough to glance suspiciously at Lilly. “This is really what you want?”
She sat across from us, poised and professional. Her hands were clasped together, softly, at the edge of the table and her back was straight. Like all the other times I saw her outside the diner, her makeup was minimal. Her hair was down this time, in a shining sheet of caramel and honey. Blue eyes sparkled.
Probably, if I leaped over the table and slammed my mouth to hers to taste her glistening pink lip-gloss that wouldn’t end so well.
“What one?” I asked and Dad slid the paper in my direction.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. With as much effort as Lilly put into fighting help, that she chose the job we offered with the smallest hourly pay and least amount of qualifications should have been a given.
Yet, I now understood Dad’s question. She could have worked with Stephanie, and I felt that same disappointment Dad showed. We’dwantedher to choose that job. And she hadn’t gone the design route with Miles which surprised me, too.
“You sure?” I asked. “You’ll be working with Brandon, a great guy, actually. But he does the financial planning for our projects.”
“I’m sure. It’s what I’m going to school for. You might be giving me these opportunities, but I can’t accept the others. It’s too much.”
“Lilly—”
“No.” She meant it fiercely and hell if my chest didn’t swell with more respect. Unfortunately, her chin wobbled as she struggled to take a breath. Next to me, my dad tensed.
“I’ve lost a lot,” she said, voice catching over her words in a way a pain went straight to my soul. “I’ve lost almost everything. The one thing I can salvage is my pride, and while I will accept help, I will not accept anything more than what I know I’m capable of. So I would like to interview for this position.”
Goddamn. The fire in her eyes was something so different than I’d seen before. So much less anger, so much more determination.
