CHAPTER FIVE

Easily, there are three dozen of those suckers. All the size of Martian heads, in every shade of pastel known to HGTV.

A centerpiece balloon rises in the middle, higher and prouder than the rest. That one is the lone bright shade. It’s blood red, and I think it’s supposed to be shaped like a heart, but it looks like a big butt to me.

I hand the cabbie a twenty, telling him to keep the change, and shut the door behind me as he screeches off in search of the next fare.

I can’t even see her face. Or her chest. Or her waist. The top half of her is entirely obscured by balloons, but I’d recognize those legs anywhere. Charlotte ran track in high school, and has strong, toned legs with muscular calves that look like sin come to life when she wears high heels. Come to think of it, they’re fuck-hot right now in white socks and sneakers. She must have been out for her morning run earlier today.

Peering down the street at her, I watch the scene unfold as I eat up the sidewalk with long strides. She tries to hand the bouquet to a mother pushing a stroller. The mom gives her a shake of the head and a sneer. As I cut the distance to ten feet, she offers the balloons to a girl who looks to be about ten.

“No way!” the girl shouts, and runs the other direction.

From behind the balloons, Charlotte heaves a frustrated sigh.

“Let me guess,” I say as I reach her. “You’ve either ditched The Lucky Spot to attempt a new career as a balloon peddler, or Bradley Dipstick has struck again?”

“Third time this week. He can’t seem to understand the meaning of the words ‘we are never getting back together.’” She yanks the balloons away from her face, but they bat her hair. She tries again to slam them away, but static cling is working against her. The pastel fuckers are relentless, and a slight breeze keeps jamming them closer to Charlotte’s hair. “These are the world’s most obnoxious balloons, and I swear the other residents are whispering about his plan to get me back, since they all know about what he did in the first place.”

“He just sent them, I take it?”

“Yes,” she says through gritted teeth, as she clutches the bouquet. “About two minutes after I called you, I was heading out to get a quick coffee, and the doorman rang to tell me they had these balloons for me. But they were too big to fit in the elevator, so could I please come take them? Even if I wanted to keep them I wouldn’t be able to get them to my apartment.”

“And you’re trying to give them away?” I ask as I extend a hand, gesturing for her to give them to me.

“I thought perhaps a child might enjoy them more than an adult woman. Shockingly, I’ve outgrown my balloon fetish.”

A bus groans to a stop outside her building, and a plume of exhaust sends a balloon straight for Charlotte’s face.

“Oomph,” she utters, as a vile cotton candy pink balloon attacks her.

I grab the tangled mess of string and jerk it away from her, then hold them high above my head. “We can’t just let them fly away into the sky? Float over Manhattan in shades of garish Easter egg?”

She shakes her head. “No. Balloons eventually lose their helium and then they float down. They get stuck on trees or fall to the ground, and animals eat them, and get sick, and that is not okay.”

Charlotte is a softie. She loves animals.

“Gotcha,” I say with a nod. “Just so I’m clear. Are you okay witnessing the massacre of three dozen obnoxious balloons right about now?”

She nods resolutely. “It might scar me a little bit, but I’m confident I can get through it.”

“Cover your ears,” I say, then grab my keys with my free hand and proceed to stab each balloon with a loud pop, including the ass-shaped one, until I’m holding a limp bouquet of broken rubber.

Sort of like Bradley.

Here’s everything you need to know about how Bradley earned his stripes as a total asshole. He and Charlotte met two years ago since they both lived in the same building. They started dating, hitting it off and going strong for a while. They talked about moving in together. They decided to buy a bigger place on the tenth floor and get engaged. Everything was going swimmingly until the day they were all set to sign the papers on the two-bedroom, and Bradley headed down early to—get this—“check out the pipes.” Yeah, that was his real excuse.

When Charlotte arrived, pen in hand, Bradley was banging the realtor against the kitchen counter.

“I never did care for those steel counters,” Charlotte had said, and I’d been so proud of her for coming up with that zinger in the heat of the moment.

Of course, in reality, she’d been devastated. She’d loved the guy. She’d cried on my shoulder as she told me the story, zinger and all. That had been ten months ago, and when Bradley finally ditched the realtor, he embarked on a campaign to win Charlotte back.

With gifts.

Abhorrent gifts.

I stuff the flaccid balloons into the garbage can on the corner. “The animals are safe now from his reign of terror.”

“Thank you,” she says with relief, as she grabs a tie from her wrist and yanks her hair off her face and into a quick ponytail. “That was like a pastel explosion of pathetic. Once you killed them, they were pretty droopy, too.”

“Like Bradley?” I ask with an arch of the eyebrow.

Her lips quirk into a tiny grin. She’s trying not to laugh. She covers her mouth. Charlotte has never been one to kiss and tell. She never shared details of their sex life—not that I wanted to know any. But she was a vault.

So the fact that she’s holding up a thumb and forefinger, and mouthing a little bit is a huge deal for her.

For me too, it turns out.

I’m a guy, and therefore I’m in competition with all men, all the time, so I can’t help but feel a surge of triumph.

That is so not an issue for me whatsoever.

“Let’s get you that coffee and I’ll tell you why I was acting like a lovesick weirdo.”