Sweet Love

by Kayla, Mia

  “Where do you live?”

  “Inverness.”

  So, she came from money.

  “That’ll be a fifty-dollar car ride. I’ll drive you.”

  She shifted, looking visibly uncomfortable. “I … I don’t know …”

  I opened the takeout box of fried rice and the rest of the food. “How about I eat, and you tell me about your ideas? Later, we can figure out how you’re going to get home.”

  “Uh …”

  “Charlie, sit down.” I used my authoritative voice, the one that I used in the boardroom or in a liquidation scenario at the bank.

  “When did you get here?” She unbuttoned her light jacket and hung it on the back of her chair. She was wearing jeans that nicely hugged her frame and a red V-neck knit top that accented her—

  I swallowed and forced my eyes up to her face.

  “I’ve been here all day. So, I’ve been going over the numbers that Alyssa gave me yesterday.” I undid the collar of my shirt just a tad, wondering how the hell the heat index had jumped a few notches in the room.

  “So, how is it looking?”

  I stood up and moved to the thermostat just to check that it was set at a reasonable temp. Sixty-eight degrees felt like eighty today.

  After a beat, I sat back down. “Not looking too good. The rate of expenses does not match income. It’s the fall season, which is one of our busiest seasons, but our sales numbers are not meeting what they did last year.” I grabbed a plate, and started pouring the rice and the chop suey onto it. Then I plucked an eggroll and placed it on my plate.

  “Well, we’re going to turn that around, aren’t we?” Her cheery voice almost broke me from my sullen mood. Almost because I knew that nothing was a guarantee.

  “We have to, or layoffs will begin in February.”

  It was a hard conversation I’d had with Alyssa today, and one of Alyssa’s strengths was her no-bullshit attitude. This would hurt her as much as it hurt my father. Alyssa had grown to know the employees at this company.

  “All righty then, we have to get started.” She opened her sketchbook, which was a different sketchbook than the pocket-sized one she’d had in her purse at the bar. Opened, it occupied a good portion of the table. “Should we just start writing ideas first?”

  “Sure.” My mouth was still full with food, so I placed my plate on the table to concentrate.

  “I was telling Alyssa and Casey that when I think of Colby, I think of the family feel, the way you guys treat your employees like family, how you invite them over to your house. I feel like we need to brand to that.” She wrote down one word on the top of the pad. “Family.”

  Her eyebrows scrunched as she searched the word for some underlying meaning.

  “Family. It’s such a heavy word, don’t you think? There’s so much meaning behind the one single word.” Her voice was full of emotion, and I had an underlying need to know about her family.

  “Tell me about your family.”

  The question—or more like a command—startled her, and her eyes met mine.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Everything.

  “Whatever you want to share. Do you have any siblings?”

  She laughed, and one hand flew to the top of her bun. “Well, I have an evil stepsister.” The side of her mouth crept up. “She’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful, but like the saying goes, Beauty is only skin deep.”

  “How about your parents? Tell me about them.”

  I didn’t know how the branding/marketing session had turned into a me-wanting-to-get-to-know-her session. Yet here we were.

  Her smile slipped, and she inched back, shrinking smaller into her chair.

  “My mom remarried. And … I guess I like him. The new guy.”

  She was almost the color of her red shirt. “I didn’t mean it that way. Richard is a nice man.”

  After waving a hand she pulled at her neckline, and I shifted in my seat because my eyes flew back to her fingers … which were near her exposed creamy skin by her collarbone. I tore my gaze away and focused on her face.

  What the hell is wrong with me? It was as if I were a teenage boy going through puberty and had never seen breasts before.

  “My stepdad treats her like a queen, and she deserves to be treated as such. She’s not used to anything less because my father treated her like a queen all the way down to his last dying breath. I mean …”

  My heart seized.

  Charlie dropped her stare to the table, and I couldn’t read her eyes. I placed a hand on her fist, my thumb brushing against her knuckles. Only then did her gaze flicker up to meet mine.

  “I’m sorry about your dad. What happened?”

  “Cancer.” Her tone was heavy with sorrow, and my heart sank.

  I released a deep sigh, and I had this undeniable urge to hold her. But I kept steady. As I’d grown up in a no-parent household, it was my grandmother who had taught me about kindness and sympathy toward others. It was how I’d helped raise my brother. My parents had been too busy with raising a business instead of raising us.

  She pulled her hand from under mine and rubbed at her brow, her fingers trembling. “He was in hospice toward the end, and that was really, really tough. Quite honestly, it’s still really, really tough.” Now, both her hands made it to her temples, as though reliving the memory was too hard for her to handle.

  “You want to know the real reason I don’t care for chocolate?” Her shoulders dropped, and when she lifted her head, I saw all the emotions swimming in her green-as-emerald irises. “It’s because”—a slow, heavy breath escaped her—“when we were in the hospital, I’d go to the vending machine and grab a chocolate bar while waiting for his results or when he got his treatments. Almost every day, I’d go and get a chocolate bar, and now, I just can’t do it anymore. It brings me to a part of my life I want to forget.”

  Silence stretched between us. It was as though I could tell her mournful misery came off her in waves, and it sucked. Life sucked sometimes. Out of everyone, I knew that the most.

  “I’m sorry,” I found myself saying again. “About your dad. About your hate for chocolate now. About everything.” I decided to focus on the positive then. “Your mom is so lucky to have you.”

  “Thank you.” Her eyes briefly met mine before her gaze fell somewhere over my shoulder, seeing nothing. “When she found someone, even though my life was set in Wisconsin and I had a job and my friends, I just wanted her to be happy, so here I am. Implant.” She ended that sentence with a smile, but it was a forced smile that didn’t meet her eyes.

  “That’s selfless of you. Really. Given that you could have stayed back in Wisconsin. It’s not like you’re seventeen, not legal, barely out of college, and you need your parents.”

  She shook her head. “I’m far from a saint, let me tell you. Half the time, I’m trying to think of ways to secretly torture my stepsister.” She laughed at her own joke, and it was a beautiful laugh. “But honest to goodness, my childhood and family mean everything to me. My childhood was filled with laughter—like, I’m talking belly laughs till I couldn’t get up—and on the daily. How many families can say they’re like that? We were one unit. Even though I didn’t have any siblings, I never lacked a thing.” Her smile widened, and it was natural this time. “At times, my dad was a big, old kid, constantly joking around.”

  I wished I had memories like that. Endless laughter with my parents? It never happened. But I did have laughter in my memories. They consisted of Nana and Papa and Kyle. Memories of them playing board games with us, going to the movies, taking us to football practice, and sitting in the front row to watch our games. But in those memories, my parents were not present.

  “You’re lucky, you know that? Having my parents present is what I lacked in my childhood. We had a ton of toys and we got whatever we wanted, but they were never around.”

  Our gazes locked, and there was no pity in her eyes, but I could read a deep curiosity on her face as
she tilted her head.

  So, I answered the unspoken questions, “See … my grandfather—my dad’s father—had a dream. I was never close to that side of the family, just my mother’s side. My grandfather started that dream, and my father, he’s the one who brought that dream to reality.” A tightness formed in my chest, as it did every time I thought of what they had sacrificed to get here. “My dad and my mother hustled and worked endless days and nights, selling their products to whoever would take them. Going from store to store to manufacturer to manufacturer to meeting and meeting after meeting, begging for a chance to be sold. Then, they were. And their success snowballed.” There was a sour taste in my mouth, the bitterness spreading to my gut.

  Because behind every success story, there was a downfall and liabilities, and the outcome of my parents’ success was my bitterness toward them for just not being around when I had been younger. At times, I felt like I had been adopted by my nana because I hardly ever saw them.

  “I think they only had Kyle because they felt sorry for me, that I didn’t have a playmate.” My voice was tinged with sarcasm as I shook my head. “I shouldn’t say that.”

  I cleared my throat to get down to business. I pointed to the sketchpad and underlined the word family with my finger. “It’s all about perception, you see. Dad’s perceived to be the perfect businessman and perfect father even though he didn’t raise us himself.” I bit my tongue because at the end of the day, my childhood was what it was. It was what I accepted it to be. As an adult, I made my own path now.

  Still, hearing Charlie’s story of her happy family had brought all this history back to the forefront.

  “I think we should expand on this word. I do believe that my father loves his employees and cares about them deeply. I mean, some of the people on the management team helped him get to where he is today, so if anything, they are more family than I am.” I stood because I’d lost all self-control and just had a case of diarrhea of the mouth. “You know what? Excuse me. I’m just gonna use the restroom real quick.” I smiled. “I’ll be right back.”

  Charlie

  I turned Connor’s words over and over in my head, and I realized one thing: no one family was perfect. Everyone played their part, and people had their flaws. At the end, one thing remained: love. Connor had a deep bitterness toward his parents, but he wouldn’t be here, trying to save their company, if he didn’t love them.

  It was hours later. Papers had been strewn everywhere, tossed on the floor, on the desk, and in a couple of chairs. So much time had passed that I had finished the rest of the Chinese food.

  And still, it came down to one word: family. We were in agreement with that; otherwise, we had nothing. No slogan. No idea on packaging on the rebranded chocolate bar. Nothing.

  “Why don’t we get the marketing people involved? Why aren’t they here in our brainstorming sessions?” Because obviously, I wasn’t any added help.

  Connor was hunched over, hands threaded through his hair, elbows on the table, staring intently at the paper in front of him. I didn’t think he’d heard a word I’d said.

  I wanted to tell him this was a bad idea, getting me involved.

  “Connor? Anyone home?”

  I knocked on the table twice, and his eyes shot up to mine.

  His hair was a disheveled mess. It was probably because he had run his hands through his hair a million times. But man, oh man, did he look sexy. His hair kind of reminded me of one of those guys in those underwear commercials, jumping around with nothing on other than the boxers that they were advertising, with bedhead that screamed sexy.

  “I think we need to include the marketing team on our brainstorming session,” I repeated.

  He leaned back against his chair, running his hands through his hair again. Then, he placed both hands on the top of the table in a prayer-like motion.

  “No. We need new blood for our revamp. That I’m sure of. Not saying that their ideas aren’t great, but they’re not stellar. It’s not good enough for what we need.”

  He said we like we were one team and it was only us who could save this company. Honestly, it was too much pressure for me to handle. But I empathized with him because I knew how much was riding on this.

  “How about we continue next week then? I mean, it’s late. It’s already …” I reached for my phone in front of me and nearly dropped it on the table. “It’s two a.m. It’s two o’clock in the morning.” I had to repeat it twice just to hear myself. “Oh, Colby, crapola, it’s over.” I stood.

  Connor laughed, and it was a full-on body-shaking laugh.

  He was laughing so much that it was like he had this contagious laughter. The more he cracked up, the bigger my smile became.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I don’t know.” He swiped at his eyes. “I think I’m just going crazy, but you said, ‘Oh, Colby, crapola,’ and then I was just thinking about chocolate and melted chocolate and crap and …”

  It wasn’t funny, but I blamed it on it being so early in the morning and that we were way past delirious.

  I pointed and shook my finger at him. “It’s a thing, you know.” And then I began to laugh again. “My dad would use that, and I got the saying from him. When I was in a mood, he’d take a chocolate, chew it in his mouth, and open his mouth for me to see, which was kinda gross, but as a kid, I thought it was funny because chocolate and crap.”

  We were at the point where we were all giddy and laughing for no reason, and practically anything could set the giggles off.

  “Your dad sounds like he was a fun guy.”

  “He is. You will love him.” Those words flew out of me so fast that it hit me directly in the chest, and I paused. “I mean …” My gaze dropped to the table, and my eyebrows pinched together. “I mean, you would have loved him. I did.”

  All humor erased from the room, vanished as though a vacuum had sucked it up, sucked up all the laughter because of memories.

  Sometimes, talking about him and reliving memories felt so real, so tangible that it was like he’d never left this earth.

  Connor broke me from my thoughts when he leaned in and got into my line of sight. “Let’s go. We’ve worked hard enough, and it’s been a long night. I’m driving you home. No arguments.”

  Chapter 10

  Charlotte

  As all cars went, Connor’s car was fancy. It was evident by the leather seat that warmed my butt. I pressed a button on the dashboard, and it pushed the seat forward. I pressed the back button and the forward again just because I was fascinated by the functions. Then, I amped up the seat warmer. I was acting like a little kid, but all we’d had when I was growing up was a rusted Toyota Camry until it died and we had to buy another beat-up car. And this car had not only its seat warmers, mini fridge built in the center console, the iPads built in the headrests for each passenger in the back row, but it also had a heated steering wheel.

  A heated freaking steering wheel.

  He laughed beside me, but I ignored him.

  “Thanks again for driving me home.” I was undoubtedly thankful, given that it was raining—and not just pitter-patter rain, but typhoon rain.

  “It’s not a problem, Charlie. Plus, you wouldn’t want to get caught up in this.”

  His hands were on ten and two on the steering wheel, and I didn’t blame him because I could barely see through the windshield.

  I thought of today, what had transpired by trying to help Connor figure out this new launch.

  I wished I had gone to school for something I liked. I wished I’d trusted my dad and not listened to my mom’s nagging voice, spouting off about important career choices that made money because we didn’t have any.

  Maybe if I had gone into marketing, I could have been some sort of help.

  What a wasted day. What a wasted night for Connor.

  “I think you need to bring a professional in,” I said.

  “What are you even talking about? We have the family concept. You thought of tha
t, all on your own. It’s brilliant. We just need to expand on that.”

  His eyes flipped to mine and then back to the road in front of us where his windshield wipers were going wild. “I don’t need anyone else. I have you. Raw, uninhibited talent. What you have in you is innate. I already have my marketing team. You’re just the missing piece.” There was a lightness in his tone, and it filled my heart.

  I was so used to my mother telling me that my art was just for fun and that no one would ever take me seriously. But I would show her. This exhibit would show her.

  “You sound just like my dad.” Nostalgia hit me full force, and I swallowed down the lump in the back of my throat. “He … he had me believe that I could do anything. Absolutely anything. Like my paintings would be in the Louvre or some museum where they would pay top dollar to showcase my work.” I waved a hand, dismissing my comment because, really, it sounded ridiculous. Me? At a museum. How crazy and absurd, and yet it was totally my daddy.

  I exhaled a heavy sigh, one that was audible, and it had Connor gazing in my direction again.

  “You should believe him,” he said, voice soft. “I want to know more about this incredible man.”

  “Why?”

  Sometimes, little glimpses of my dad would push through my thoughts. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about him. And I missed him terribly. I thought about him on a daily basis, and there were times when I was drinking a caramel latte, and his face would push through my thoughts. I’d picture him sitting opposite me on the kitchen table with his black coffee in hand. We used to have regular coffee dates. It was everything. We’d even taken a class on how to work as a barista for a day.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just been talking about him way too much because I’ve been thinking about him way too much recently. I can’t help it.” Honesty seeped out of me.

  It felt nice for once, not having to put up a front, not having any pretense. I wished I could talk to my mom about him, but she had Richard now, and it wouldn’t be the same.