“Worst. Date. Ever,” Amy said.

I sank farther into her couch. She was shaking her head and smiling a little in disbelief at the play-by-play account I had just given her of my dinner with Jake. The view from her Gold Coast apartment looked out over the vast Chicago cityscape, making me feel totally open.

I felt especially vulnerable right now, because seeing Grant had reopened a wound that had never totally healed.

“I mean, up until the moment I left, it was a great time. Jake was a good date and—wait—I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Because it was a non-date, not a date. Right. Whatever you say. I wasn’t talking about Jake anyway. I was talking about you,” she said, getting up to pour us more wine. “You just marched out of the restaurant in the middle of the meal!”

She filled my glass and then hers with the California pinot noir, her voice expressing incredulity as much as surprise. I chuckled at the fact that I hadn’t even had the time to finish the two-hundred-dollar bottle that Jake and I had started, and here I was, drinking a fifteen-dollar bottle from Trader Joes.

“Well, to be exact, I didn’t march. I did a sort of shuffle-run, the best I could manage in these things.” I pointed at my heels, which I had already taken off my feet. “Seeing Grant so suddenly after I hadn’t seen him in over a year had me spiraling out of control, and then Jake was coming on so strong, he was just so...”

“Manly? Protective? I don’t understand what you’re complaining about! I would love to have that man wrap his long baseball arms around me. What happened to enjoying the journey?”

Yeah. That little mantra had gone right out the window. The truth was, I did want Jake. I mean, what girl with a pulse could sit across from him and not be attracted to him? But it all seemed too good to be true. His charm was hard to resist, sure, but behind the façade? Who knew what was under there? I shuddered, thinking about Grant and how well-masked he was before I got to know him.

“I guess seeing Grant at the restaurant reminded me that if something is too good to be true, it usually is.”

“I don’t understand why you had to run away, though,” she countered. “It wasn’t a date, right? It was just a professional meeting. Technically speaking.”

I couldn’t help but crack a soft smile. “If I’m being honest, we were starting to cross a line, and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to stop myself. He did this thing with his fingers. He was showing me how he throws a special kind of pitch, which apparently only works if you have giant hands. He grabbed my hands and did this.” I tried to imitate the way he ran his fingers over my wrist and hand. “It felt...intimate. Like I was finally getting a piece of the real Jake. But then I felt other things too. All these memories of Grant, of how it had ended, of how it almost ruined me—”

I stopped mid-sentence. Amy was sitting on a beanbag chair facing me. She was in shorts and a tank top, her brown hair up in a messy bun and a bucket of popcorn in her lap like she was watching a movie. Watching me have a meltdown.

“Why’d you stop?” she asked, a hint of aggravation in her voice.

I rubbed my eyes, mentally wiped and physically exhausted. I wanted to go home, take my contacts out, get into comfy clothes, and cry some more. At the same time, I didn’t want to go home precisely so I wouldn’t spend all night wallowing in self-pity. “I, uh, don’t know what the point of my story is anymore,” I told her, feeling confused. Though probably not as confused as Jake.

“Well, I know,” she stated with a handful of popcorn poised in the air. “Jake Napleton has huge, long fingers, and you are curious how they would feel wrapped around your...wrist…or something.”

“Uh, no, what I was really wondering is how they would feel sliding between my—” I realized what I was saying and brought a swift hand to my mouth to stop myself.

“You really know how to leave a girl with a cliffhanger!” she remarked and took another sip of her wine. “Are you embarrassed? He’s super hot. I don’t get it. Any normal girl would be thinking exactly what you’ve been thinking. Why are you holding back? You think it’s part of the whole conservative upbringing thing you were talking about the other day?”

I sighed and reached for my glass of wine on the coffee table.

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe it is. I do know I feel scared. I just feel like if I let myself cross the line, I’ll ruin everything I’ve worked for. What if I hook up with him, and then we break up? What if people found out? How would I be able to get a job in sports PR again? I’d just be another notch on his belt. And what if he doesn’t even like me in the first place? What if it ends up being exactly like Grant? I can’t go through something like that again.”

Amy ran her finger around the rim of her wine glass, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Grant really did a number on you, didn’t he?”

I felt like my stomach was about to collapse inward. “Yeah, pretty much,” I said quietly. “We’ve been over for nearly a year, and I just stopped thinking about him three months ago.” My last year at Tennessee State, Grant’s face had been everywhere since he was the touted number one pick for the draft. He was still the golden boy, but after graduation back in May and getting this internship, it’d felt like a fresh start.

“You can’t live in fear,” Amy said sternly. “He’ll win. You deserve to have fun and be happy.”

I nodded, agreeing but still glum. “Finally, I was moving on, and then—poof. Now he’s back on my mind.”

“I mean, he plays for the Bulldogs. You’re in sports PR. It’s hard for you to totally avoid him, especially since their series with the Jags lasts the rest of this week.”

“I know. Ugh. It’s just all so stressful.” I sank farther into the couch. “Why can’t I just be a normal girl who finds a normal boring accountant guy who just plays a little softball on the weekends? It’s all so difficult.”

Amy narrowed her eyes at me and tilted her head. “What did Grant do to you that was so bad?”

My heartbeat sped up again. “Sorry, I just…really don’t want to talk about it. I don’t mean to wall you off, but it’s been a really stressful night, and I don’t want to get into it.”

Amy nodded and went silent for a moment, her eyes darting around the room. Eventually, her gaze found her way back to me. She grabbed the wine bottle on the coffee table, smiled, and shrugged.

“Sounds like you need some more wine.”

I smiled and stuck out my glass.

“Yes please. Did I mention how glad I am that I met you?”

She took my glass in her hand and filled it up. “Hey, there is nothing quite like a wine night with a non-judgmental friend to get you out of a funk, am I right?”

“I don’t care what you have to do,” Steve was saying. Wednesday morning I was back in his office, getting reamed. I was seated this time, because this had gone on for over twenty minutes now. “I need you to find an angle. Something. Anything that portrays Jake Napleton in a way besides as a dumb fucking asshole who drinks and parties too much. Have you seen the latest viral meme?”

Of course I had seen it. Everybody had. A picture of Jake with his eyes half open and a beer in his hand had made the rounds on Twitter and was up to over a million shares. It was taken last night. Apparently, after I’d ditched him, he’d called up some buddies and painted the town red.

“That picture was so ridiculous anyway. He wasn’t even drunk in it. The shutter just happened to flash when his eyes were just partway open. And it was posted by a third party. We should be suing for them to take down the photo. It’s bunch of bullstuff.”

“Did you just say bullstuff?” He arched an eyebrow at me.

I shrugged. “Why is it such a big deal that I don’t like swearing?”

He smiled. “It’s just cute, that’s all. Anyways, you got me off topic with your clean language. You know what we have to do, right? I need you to stalk him.”

I cleared my throat. “Stalk...Jake?”

“Yes. Where does he mysteriously go after games? Why isn’t he accounted for? His teammates sure aren’t telling, and the coaches have no clue. Neither does his agent. Obviously, it’s bad if he’s being this secretive. Is he doping? Maybe we shouldn’t even be taking him on as a client. If he’s a sinking ship, it’s in our best interest to cut him loose.”

I got defensive, and I wasn’t exactly sure why. Even though Jake had neglected to go into detail about his background, I felt protective of him. Something told me his frat boy drinking image was the tip of the iceberg, and there was a lot more beneath the surface. “No way is Jake doping. And he’s not a sinking ship. Although yes, he can be a little reckless sometimes.”

“Well, if you can’t find an angle, we’re going to have to drop this account.”

“I’ll find an angle. Trust me.” I stood up.

“Just do it. Do whatever you have to do. We clear, Andrea?” he said, dismissing me as his eyes went to his laptop.

Numbly, I nodded and left without another word.