Page 41 of Fly with Me

No… If she believed that, she wouldn’t have come to see her yesterday. After a few minutes of silence, she crossed her legs and sat beside Gus, giving him a few apologetic tummy rubs. “She communicated really well. She looked me in the face and said, ‘I want you to be my girlfriend.’ And then made it impeccably clear a second later she meant fake girlfriend.”

Derek grabbed the pen from Olive and the pad from Joni. “Stella might be completely bonk—”

“She is not bonkers. She’s desperate.”

“Why?” Joni said pensively.

“Why what?”

“I know you said it had something to do with men being promoted above her, which I can definitely understand, but really, why? Like why now?”

Olive opened her mouth to mention what Stella had said about her dad, but as if in answer to this question, Olive’s phone began vibrating on the coffee table.

Closest, Derek snatched it first. “It’s her. It’s her.” He leaped over the couch. “Speakerphone? I’m thinking speakerphone.”

Olive pushed the part of his hip that had been ticklish since they were kids, and grabbed it from him. “Not speakerphone. Goddamn it. Gimme.”

She fled to the bathroom and locked the door. She squinched her toes into the carpet, like that would ease her thundering heartbeat.

After taking a breath as if she were about to dive into the deep end, she swiped to answer. “Hey, Stella, how are you doing tonight? Did you have a good day at work? It was good to see you on Monday. Nice to talk to you.”

Yup, Olive was the coolest.

“Hi, Olive.” Stella’s voice was always like sunshine but it seemed to quiver tonight. “I called to apologize. To be honest, impulsive is not something that really works for me, and I was in a bad place, and disappointed by some bad news… at work… I wanted to call and tell you over the last day I’ve been rethinking everything, and I don’t think it’s a good idea because I don’t want to put you in this position. Basically, I’m sorry I showed up at your place of employment and asked you such an incredibly inappropriate favor. There is absolutely no excusing my behavior, and—”

“Stella.”

“Yes?”

“Breathe.”

“Okay.”

And Stella did. She took several deep breaths, drawing out the exhales as she seemed to always do when she was nervous or stressed.

Olive looked away from her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Because I was going to say yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I’ll be your fake girlfriend.”

“You’ll what?”

Olive dug her fingers into her mess of hair, massaging her scalp. “Didn’t you show up at my hospital on Monday and ask me to be your fake girlfriend, or did I have an aneurysm?”

“I did, but—”

“I accept.”

“You can’t mean that. Me even asking you was absurd.”

“I’ll go to the events. It’s fine. I’ll need to check my schedule, but my hospital actually already sent me a few emails about publicity events after the whole stupid viral video thing, so I think they’ll be into this. They keep telling me they’re trying to leverage the press coverage into getting a few more donors to redo the waiting area of the ER. They want me to do a few of the interviews to stir up more press. Guess everyone likes this story, like you said.”

“Are you sure?”

Nope, not even a little bit. “Absolutely.” Olive leaned on the bathroom counter, the ceramic cold beneath her fingers.

“We should meet to iron out the details.”