Fine, we’re talking insanely dirty.
Okay, I’ll admit it. We’re having sex with words.
We might as well be screwing.
And I need to shut this down, once and for all.
I drag a hand over my face. I must steer this ship back into the appropriate harbor. I built my business on trust, strategy, and doing the right thing. Not on sleeping with my employees. “I need to get it together. I can’t come into your office and have these conversations with you, as much as I want to. This is my fault, and I need to do better.”
I stand, shaking out my hands like I can erase this insane desire for her. Just get it out of my system. Rid myself of it, then bury it underground, hide it forever, and forget it ever existed.
She blinks, straightens her spine, and runs a hand over her hair. “You’re right. That was too risqué. That was inappropriate,” she agrees crisply.
I pace in the small square footage of her office, trying to center myself and my shrinking willpower. “I need to think about something else. Anything.” I gesture to the kitschy glasses on the wall. “Like that. I like those glasses. They make me feel like I just traveled across the middle of the country, blasting some rock music, listening to Journey or Bruce Springsteen, and stopping at some old-fashioned truck stop.”
There. That’s safer. Easier.
Bryn picks up the thread easily. “Where the waitresses wear pastel-pink or mint-green diner uniforms and have names like Flo and Mabel.”
“And they call everyone ‘hon,’” I say. “Or ‘doll.’”
She grins like I’m speaking her special language. “Yes. And the menus are bigger than a blackboard. You feel like you’ve slipped back in time. It’s summer, and you barely have a care in the world.”
I can picture it clearly. That wasn’t my life growing up, but it’s a world I can conjure from images I devoured of road trips and classic American journeys. “I love the way that old-time nostalgic feel of a road trip was portrayed in movies.”
“I loved the way it was for real.” The wistful tone in her voice surprises me. But the words surprise me more. For real.
I tilt my head, curious. “Yeah? Did you collect all of these yourself?”
“Yes, but those are ones I snagged recently. When I was younger, my mom and I used to go on long road trips. Every single summer as a teenager. We’d visit one-horse towns and pull over at rest stops, the kind with vintage signs—vintage because they hadn’t been updated in years. The diners would have shops with these souvenir glasses. We picked up a bunch but lost most of them over the years. So I replenished them recently.”
This intrigues me. All of this. Every detail. I gesture to the Georgia one, the outline of the state in orange, a winking peach on the glass. “Can I touch?”
“Of course.”
I pick it up and study it. “So, what took you on so many road trips with your mom?”
“It’s pretty exciting. Are you sure you can handle it?”
“Sure. Try me,” I say, smiling, charmed by this insight into Bryn.
She clears her throat and adopts a serious expression. “She was an insurance adjuster. We traveled a lot during the summer on her jobs. She turned them all into road trips—so she’d go visit homes that had damage claims from tornados or what have you, and then we’d continue on and make a trip of it. Sometimes we went to ballparks, since she loved baseball and I do too. We saw minor league games and major league games. And we visited all the off-the-beaten-path sites. We collected stuff from everywhere.”
“Did you enjoy the trips?”
“Best times I ever had. We’d find all the quirky, absurd little things in a small town. All the things you have to see. Or maybe we’d research a ghost town and go out of our way to visit it. Or the world’s biggest ball of yarn. Or a neon mini-golf course. We’d travel to all these places, take pictures, grab a bite. My job was to write stories about them.”
“Like travel pieces?” I ask. Their travels sound delightful, and it delights me even more to imagine a young Bryn on these quirky adventures.
“Yes, I was a travel blogger before it was cool,” she says. “I did it on my own. Just for fun.”
“Is that what brought you into this world?” I gesture broadly to her office, including the door to indicate the offices beyond. “Writing, content creation, editorial?”
She swipes some strands of her brown hair off her shoulder. “I think so. I’ve just always done it. I created all sorts of stories about where we went, packaged them up with photos, made websites and blogs for them. That’s where it started—road tripping. We had a blast, chronicling our summer adventures and picking up all these vintage keepsakes from the side of the road. And then later, when I was older and Mom retired, we went scavenging for kitsch together at sales and stuff. We still went on road trips, but we were always on the hunt for little tchotchkes. She loved Snoopy, hence my overpowering drive to snag the Snoopy lunch box.”
Bryn only talks of her mother in the past tense. Gently, I ask, “Did she pass away, Bryn?”
“Yes.”
There’s a hitch in her voice, a sheen in her eyes, and I have no choice but to comfort her. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I say, then I cross the distance, wrap my arms around her, and hold her in a gentle embrace.
It’s not sexual. It’s just a hug. But as she settles against me, drawing a breath then letting go, it sure feels like she needs this right now.
And I can give that to her.
For a few brief seconds, it occurs to me that it’s far too early to do this. We hardly know each other. But it feels wrong not to comfort her.
“Thanks,” she says, her voice a little wobbly as she answers, separating from me. “She died two years ago. She had . . . pneumonia of all things. Healthy as a proverbial horse all of her days. Even two summers ago, we were still road-tripping, picking up souvenirs, telling stories. She got sick in a little town in Pennsylvania. We were swinging by this collectible shop that had a signed lithograph of Snoopy battling the Red Baron, but we never made it there. She was coughing so badly, and we thought it was allergies, but it turned out it was more.” She waves a hand like she can shoo away the sadness, then she grabs a picture of a woman who looks like her, just older, and shows it to me. “This is her on our last summer trip, when we got acos.”
I regard the shot of Bryn’s mom smiling wryly under a roadside sign. “That’s a great picture. But how were the acos? As good as tacos?”
“They were delish.” She sets down the photo. “Anyway, that was very sweet of you to give me a hug.”
I narrow my eyes, growling. “Don’t let the badass persona and tough-as-nails personality fool you. I’m a softie underneath. I kind of have to be—I’m raising a little girl.”
“Funny, Logan, but I never thought you were tough as nails,” she teases.
“Hey, now. I’m super manly.”
