Dating You / Hating You
Page 71

“Two million dollars,” Steph says quietly. “Guess it wasn’t just expenses under your name.”
“Just mine most recently—everyone else he used is gone.”
“And now bye-bye, Brad,” Daryl says.
The morning after our trip to Brad’s home, Eric walked casually into Brad’s empty office, drafted a new email to the FBI, and attached all the files I transferred to the thumb drive. The FBI would never know I had anything to do with this, but Brad would.
I’ve had dozens of pretty amazing orgasms with Carter, but I won’t deny that one of the most euphoric feelings I’ve ever had was watching the FBI emerge onto our floor amid a deathly hush and move like a mob of righteous justice toward Brad’s office.
They knocked on his door, ignoring Kylie’s anxious yipping that he was busy. In fact, two agents quickly identified Kylie, pulled her aside, and took her into the conference room for questioning.
Brad opened the door, face stark, and looked right at me. I lifted my chin and smiled.
“Mr. Kingman, we have some questions.” The voice of the lead agent carried easily down the hall. “If you don’t mind coming with us, we can ask them in a more private setting.”
I wanted Brad to refuse. I wanted them to question him right there, right in front of me. But it was also nice to watch him leave under the wide-eyed rubbernecking of everyone in the office. He moved, surrounded by the law, down the hall.
The elevator doors sealed around him, and then he was gone.
Bye, Brad.
I left P&D by choice that same day.
“So now I need to figure out what I’m going to do,” I tell my friends, folding up the newspaper and tucking it back in my purse.
“You could come back to Alterman,” Steph says with a hopeful smile.
“You could come work with me.” The voice comes from behind me and we all turn. Carter has materialized, and looks . . . stunning. Flushed with some exuberant emotion, he’s clearly just come from a meeting: neatly pressed suit, dress shirt open at the collar, tie loosened around his neck. I feel all of us exhale in a swoon in unison.
A swoonison.
“Or,” he says, grinning as he walks toward us, “I could work with you.” Pulling out the barstool beside me, he adds, “Or, I don’t know, we could figure out how the hell to work together.”
Carter sits down and pulls out a piece of paper folded into thirds. He carefully opens it, flattening it against the table for us to read. It’s an agent contract between Dan Printz and Carter Aaron—just Dan, just Carter.
“I’ve secured twenty percent of fifteen million,” he says with a casual grin. “If I did this on my own I could only take on one, maybe two more clients. It would help me out a lot if you could join me, show me the ropes?”
I stare at him, feeling my eyes fill, and he reaches up, pretending to be shocked by the presence of tears.
“Is that a yes? Are we going rogue?”
I surprise the hell out of my friends by launching myself into Carter’s lap, but no one seems to mind. I think we all realize in this moment that I’ve worked my entire career so far for this—the opportunity of a lifetime.
Chapter twenty-six
Carter
As it turns out, you can’t manage the career of the Next Big Thing from the kitchen of your tiny, one-bedroom Beverly Hills apartment.
It took approximately two weeks to come to this conclusion. Two weeks in which Evie and I shared the pantsless joy of not having an actual office to go to every morning or an actual boss checking in on us, and being able to have sex on the kitchen table whenever we want and not even have to close the door.
It was a beautiful time.
But eventually the pants had to go back on and we had to decide how we were going to do this. I had Dan and a handful of other clients but needed somewhere I could take meetings and . . . well, work.
Evie had toyed with the idea of going back to Alterman, but had already come to the conclusion that while she loved the people and the job, she could no longer stomach the games that seemed to inevitably dominate big-firm work. Luckily, Adam Elliott and Sarah Hill had signed on with Evie at P&D for project-by-project contracts only, and those two would follow her anywhere, it would seem.
And boom—we had an agency.
So going rogue meant we needed an office.
This is when I realized exactly how connected Evie was. Having already helped me find a great legal adviser, she found us a screaming deal on a handful of vacant offices . . . in a very nice building next to P&D.
• • •
There isn’t any sort of official grand opening at Abbey & Aaron, but the Wi-Fi is connected on a Tuesday, and I get the password to the security system the day after that, which is good enough for us. We have the entire space repainted, line the lobby walls with Jonah’s new black-and-white prints, and install the best Keurig machine money can buy. There isn’t a need for a row of sixteen well-groomed and neatly arranged assistants, but there’s more than enough need for Becca and Jess.
Becca and Evie spend thirty minutes on the phone—during which they immediately bond and become best friends forever through a rousing version of Carter Aaron’s Top Ten Most Embarrassing Moments. Evie offers her a job and Becca—thank God—accepts. I am ecstatic. I will be surrounded by the two women who call me out the most, but I will never be disorganized or undercaffeinated again.
That first morning at the official office is fucking surreal. The sky looks exactly like it did my first day in LA—powder blue with just a trace of haze along the edge—and I make the familiar turn into the parking garage.
It’s already warm as I climb out of my car just after eight and start the walk from the third-floor terrace of the garage to the lobby. Making a right turn instead of a left, I head into Building A, site of our new endeavor.
I make a quick check of my reflection in the door. Hair: good. Tie: Ol’ Lucky this time around, not some fancy new mistake. I burned that one.
It’s mid-March, but I’m hit in the face with the same rush of refrigerated air as soon as I step inside. My blood feels carbonated; my stomach is tied in a hundred knots as I cross the marble floors.
In Building B—owned entirely by P&D—there are giant screens with scrolling head shots and posters for some of the larger clients the firm represents. But in Building A, it’s more subdued. A simple gold plaque affixed to the wall lists the several offices housed inside the building, and there we are, Abbey & Aaron: Suite 303. Whereas P&D required floors and floors of staff and a step short of a retinal scan just to get into the elevator, it’s pretty much just the two of us, a legal adviser we keep on payroll, Becca and Jess, and hopefully Steph, if we can ever convince her to come over with us.
I haven’t seen Evie since I left her apartment this morning, and my fingers already itch with the need to touch her. We all met up yesterday for Morgan’s birthday in Griffith Park, complete with food trucks and the biggest bouncy house I’ve ever seen.
Evie’s favorite people hung with my favorite people, and seeing them all together—my future and my past—felt like stretching out a leg and putting my foot down on the right path. Michael Christopher is already planning my bachelor party. Which . . . isn’t official or anything, but . . . you never know.
I followed Evie back to her apartment at the end of the night. Her kisses still tasted like sunshine and birthday cake, and she giggled while I checked every other inch of her to see whether the rest of her tasted like frosting, too. I left this morning just before five, feeling the best kind of exhausted, pressing kisses to her mouth and saying I’d see her at our office. Which is a really great thing I get to say now.