Chapter 37
Anna
Mackenzie was still down there when I gave Flynn a perplexed look. As our gazes locked, I felt myself swallow. He wasn't happy, and it was easy to see why.
For someone who was supposed to be his girlfriend, I was definitely coming up short. I mean, a normal girlfriend would be livid by now, watching a so-called friend putting the moves on her guy.
Going for a recovery, I lowered my head and peered under the table. Mackenzie was still down there, holding her cell phone in one hand and her napkin in another. She was eying Flynn's crotch like she was seriously considering going in for a taste. When she saw me looking, she frowned.
With a frown of my own, I said, "So, do you see anything you like?"
She gave a little huff. "Yes, in fact. My napkin." As if to drive the point home, she gave the napkin a quick flutter. "See? I just found it."
Oh, please.Obviously, she was forgetting, I'd dined with her before, plenty of times in the distant past. If her napkin ever hit the floor, she wouldn't be touching it with a ten foot pole.
Of course, her attentiontodayhad been consumed by a totally different kind of pole – andnotthe one attached to her fiancé.
When Mackenzie and I reappeared from under the table, both guys were staring – Preston at Mackenzie and Flynn at me.
Preston's expression was easy to read. He wasn't happy, but he wasn't surprised either.
Yeah, that made two of us.
I'd known Mackenzie for a long time. She flitted from guy to guy, always trading up – until something went terribly wrong and she started back down at the bottom.
As for Flynn's expression, it was nearly unreadable. He wasn't overjoyed. That much was obvious. But other than that, I had no idea what exactly was going through his head.
Probably, he was wishing that he'd offered the job to Mackenzie instead of me – because one thing was for darn sure, she was showing a lot more initiative thanIever had.
Ignoring her fiancé's growing unhappiness, Mackenzie spent the next few minutes telling Flynn how much she loved his movies, as if she hadn't said so already.
By now, I was feeling seriously bad for Preston, who was growing more sullen with every passing moment.
It was sympathy for him that finally spurred me to take a more active role in the conversation. I gave him a friendly smile. "So you're in banking, huh?"
He frowned. "Finance."
"Oh, right. Sorry." Still, I kept my smile plastered in place. "That must be interesting."
From the other side of the table, Mackenzie said, "Speaking of interesting…How'syourjob, Anna?"
I stiffened. She'd been ignoring our side of the booth for the last several minutes, andnowshe wanted to have a group conversation? But of course, I knew why. When it came to careers, I was no banker – or financier for that matter.
I said, "It's fine."
"Oh, really?" she said. "I heard you were fired."
Belatedly, I realized which job she meant. The last time I'd seen her, I'd been working in the hospital cafeteria. She was right. Ihadbeen fired.
It wasn't that I was terrible at my job. Rather, it was because the hospital was forty minutes away from our crummy little apartment, and my car kept breaking down at the worst possible times.
In fact, this was one of the reasons that I'd taken the job at the waffle place. It was only a five-minute drive – or a fifteen minute walk if something went wrong with my car, which it did quite frequently.
But none of this was Mackenzie's business, so I tossed out a question of my own. "How aboutyourjob?"
"What about it?" she asked.
In truth, I had no idea what she did. In high school, she'd wanted to be a poet. How that translated to a career, I had no idea.
