I’m in the office early the next morning, before Kyla has even arrived. In the early hours, before things get going at U-Coin downstairs, the office isn’t quite so sweltering. I tuck myself in at my desk and pull up the day’s to-do list, then dive quickly into my work.

I start with some website updates I’d promised I’d make for Bulldog Rescue NYC. Kyla normally handles our web stuff, but I know she’s swamped with a couple of other big web design projects so I’d offered to do them.

I search through my email for the zip file the rescue group sent me, then unpackage all the photos. I almost squeal out loud at the cuteness. It’s their new batch of adoptables — about a dozen squishy-faced bulldogs, all looking for new homes. I wish for the thousandth time that our apartment allowed dogs. Although maybe it’s a good thing it doesn’t, otherwise I might end up taking them all home with me. Not sure what Emma The Perfect would think about living in a dog hotel. I bite back a laugh at the thought of her grimacing as she de-furs every piece of clothing she owns …

No, Rori. No torturing your sister. Even if she does border on obnoxious sometimes.

I upload the new photos and the adorable little descriptions the rescue provided — “Hi NYC, my name is Roxy and I’m a shy eight-year-old girl who loves nothing more than going for walks and snuggling with my foster family!” I’m deep in the rhythm of it when my cell phone rings.

I pause as I’m uploading a photo of a snaggle-toothed pup named Henry — “My foster parents say I’m almost completely housebroken!” — and fish my phone out of my bag.

“Rori Holloway,” I say, still cooing at Henry’s lopsided doggy grin.

“Hello, Rori Holloway.”

My own grin falls away. I sit up straight in my chair, pressing the phone against my ear.

“Hello, Wes.” My voice sounds strangely formal.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

A slight pause. “Great. I’m fine, too, thanks for asking.” Even through the phone I can hear his teasing grin.

“What can I do for you, Wes?” Part of me almost wants to call him Mr. Lake, to emphasize how strictly-business our relationship is, except I get the distinct impression he’d enjoy that a little too much.

“I have your signed contract,” he says. “I thought I could take you out to dinner so that I can give it to you and we can discuss next steps.”

Mmhmm. Next steps. I fell for that one last time.

“I’m not sure dinner is such a good idea, Wes.” I think about suggesting I come by his office, but clearly that isn’t a good idea either. “How about a quick lunch?”

Lunch should be safe — there’s nothing romantic or sexy about lunch, right?

“We can do lunch,” he says amicably, without missing a beat. “Where would you like to go?”

“Fran’s,” I say quickly, naming a bustling diner close to our office. Fran’s is known for their amazing home-cooked meals, but most of all, it’s the least romantic place I can think of off the top of my head. It mostly attracts the senior set and a few regular homeless people who know they can get a hot cup of coffee and a place to get in out of the rain or the scorching heat without being hassled.

“Fran’s?” I hear the surprise in Wes’s voice, but he recovers. “Sure. That sounds great. Meet you there at noon?”

I swallow. “Oh. So you meant today?”

“No time like the present, right? Unless you have something else planned?”

My mind won’t work fast enough to come up with a plausible excuse, so instead I nod. “Sure. Today’s fine.”

I get off the phone with Wes and look down at my outfit. Yoga pants again, and a tangerine-colored t-shirt that says “I woke up like this.” Which is almost, in fact, true. I pretty much did wake up like this. Why oh why can’t I be one of those women who wears cute polished suits to work all the time? Or at least a smear of lipstick?

Well, if there’s any advantage in going out with Wes today, it’s that I don’t have to spend a lifetime agonizing over what to wear. I’m just going to have to go as is.

I go back to my website updates, but now even the cute doggies can’t distract me from my upcoming lunch meeting.

* * *

I arrive at the diner before Wes. It’s bustling but I snag a booth near the front. Unlike our seating arrangement at Jasmine Thai the other day, this booth offers absolutely no privacy whatsoever, which is exactly what I want. It also gives me a perfect view of the door, so Wes won’t even be able to take me by surprise. I order a coffee while I wait for him, but I don’t have to wait long.

At twelve o’clock sharp, I see him. I take a long slurp of my coffee and try to ignore the way my throat tightens when I swallow. He pulls the door open, steps inside, and scans the restaurant. My throat tightens further when I see the way his face lights up when he spots me.

He cuts easily through the crowd to the booth where I’m sitting. People seem to give him a wide berth, as if they can somehow sense his wealth, his power. Hell, maybe they can. That suit he’s wearing has to have cost a fortune. It’s a deep charcoal color, and he’s wearing a sky blue tie that sets off his eyes perfectly.

His attractiveness is completely out of line. Someone should have a talk with him about that.

He slides into the booth across from me and grins.

“Interesting choice,” he says. His eyes travel over my chest, across the stupid t-shirt I’m wearing.

I raise my eyebrows, daring him to say something about it, but Wes just gestures around him.

“In restaurants, I mean.”

“What can I say, I had a craving for mac and cheese.”

“That sounds good, actually.”

Our waitress arrives then, dropping two tall menus in front of us. I don’t bother picking mine up, and neither does Wes.

“Two orders of your finest macaroni and cheese,” he says. “And another coffee, please.” The waitress nods and slips her pad back into her apron pocket without writing anything down.

Once she’s gone, Wes turns his gaze back to me. I try to meet it as well as I can, forcing myself to sit up straight and be professional. You know, despite the yoga pants and the stupid t-shirt.

“So you said you were bringing the contract?”

Wes hesitates. The grin never leaves his face, but something in his eyes flickers. Then it’s gone.

“Yes. Right here.” He reaches down to his briefcase and pulls out the same blue folio I’d dropped off earlier this week. He slides it across the table, and I flip it open and glance quickly through the documents inside. Everything seems in order. I close the folder and slide it to the far side of the table as the waitress drops off Wes’s steaming mug of coffee.

“You also said you wanted to discuss next steps?”

Wes raises his eyebrows again. “All business today, I see.” He chuckles, dumping a small thing of milk into his mug. “Hey, I’m not complaining, not now that I’m paying for your time. By the way, I hope you’re recording this as part of your billable hours.”

“Of course,” I say, even though I hadn’t even thought of that.

He nods. “Good. And as far as next steps go ... we’d like to see a campaign proposal by the end of next week. Does that seem reasonable? We want to get moving as soon as possible.”

“Certainly.” I swallow a lump in my throat. A week? Jesus. I guess I should have known that GoldLake would want to move on GoldLake-style timelines. But no way am I going to let Wes see me sweat. I distract myself for a minute, taking a long slow sip of my coffee. “Will this be for the entire campaign or just for the recruitment stage?”

“Well, we’ll focus on the recruitment stage for now, of course, since that’s the most important piece to get rolling. But I’d like at least an overview of the rest of the campaign, along with a cost projection and a rough spending allocation.”

“Sure.” My stomach is rolling nervously.

“By the way, we’re starting to move on the hiring process already. We’ll still want to focus on a recruitment piece for the campaign, of course, but we’re hoping to have the first hires in place by the end of the month.”

“Right. Oh!” I perk up, remembering Maria and feeling like I can finally add something to this conversation. “I met someone yesterday who might be a good candidate for the program. She was a project manager in Brazil and has been having a hard time finding work in her field here. Can I send you her resume?”

“Absolutely. That sounds great. See, I knew I made the right move hiring you. You’re even helping us recruit for the program.”

A little flutter passes over my heart, but we’re thankfully interrupted by the waitress, who drops heaping plates of gooey mac & cheese in front of us.

“This looks great,” Wes says, digging in. I sip my coffee and pick at the noodles in front of me. Around us, the diner is hopping, and I can smell greasy burgers frying up and the sweet scent of maple syrup and somewhere, beneath that, a layer of bacon grease that may be permanently baked into the walls at this point.

Wes notices me looking around and follows my gaze. He shakes his head softly.

“Been a long time since I’ve been in a diner like this,” he says. There’s something almost ... rueful in his voice.

“Not enough Michelin stars for you?” I tease.

He shakes his head. “It’s not that. It’s ...”

He pauses and takes a sip of his coffee, and I get the strange sense that he’s actually trying to buy himself time. But for what?

“I have a lot of memories of coming to a diner a lot like this one,” he says finally. He clears his throat. “With my mom, I mean.”

“You do?” This is twice now that he’s mentioned something about his mother. Why can’t I ever remember him talking about her before? I try to picture the woman we’d run into at the mall that day — heavyset, with a pinched face and red cheeks. She looked nothing like Wes, or at least the memory of her that I’m able to call up looks nothing like him.

Wes nods. “Remember Al’s Dine & Shine?”

I laugh. “I haven’t been there in years.” It was an old diner in our hometown of Highfield, Connecticut — well, half diner and half car wash. Mostly the only people who went to the diner were the over-sixty crowd, who came for the early bird specials and stayed for the bottomless coffee.

“Well, my mom worked in a diner just like that one for a while. Before I moved to Highfield. When my grandmother started getting sick and couldn’t watch me as much, Mom would bring me in with her and I’d sit behind the counter while she worked. This was when I was quite young, of course. Four, maybe five. She’d give me lemon meringue pie to keep me quiet while she worked. Sometimes she’d put me to bed in the staff break room, if she was stuck working the night shift.”

Wes looks around the restaurant now, and I can tell by his expression that he’s lost in the memory. I don’t say anything because I don’t want to disrupt his train of thought. Whatever he’s thinking, it seems to tug at him. Finally, he shakes his head. His eyes are clear again.

“Anyway, that was a lifetime ago. Or at least it feels like it.”

“I know what you mean. Sometimes it seems like I can barely remember the person I was back then.”

I’m trying to empathize, but Wes raises his eyebrows. “I remember everything about you,” he says. His voice is low and gravelly, and even amidst the din of clanging glasses and ambient chatter, they lance through me. I force myself to take a bite of macaroni, but it sticks like glue in my throat.

The moment stretches out between us, until Wes cocks his head.

“Rori, I’ve been thinking.”

I hold my breath, waiting for him to continue.

He fingers his fork for a minute, then looks up at me. “If we’re going to work together, we need to do something about this.”

“This?”

“This,” he repeats, gesturing at the space between us. “This tension. We have chemistry, Rori. I thought after so many years, it would be gone, but ...”

I let my shoulders slump, finally feeling like I can relax a little. “I know. It’s pretty bad. But it’s not a good idea, right? We’re working together now. We should try to keep it professional. Right?”

Wes doesn’t answer for a minute. His cobalt eyes are as piercing as ever, and now they latch right on to mine.

“Right,” he says slowly, although he looks as if he was thinking exactly the opposite.

I force my gaze away from his face. It’s too hard to look into those deep blue eyes of is. I feel like I’m going to fall in and never be able to find my way out again.

Instead, my eyes light on the blue file folder on the table next to me. Our contract. A professional agreement. Rules and expectations, clearly outlined and agreed to by both parties.

I tap my lip thoughtfully, then turn to face Wes again.

“What if we had a contract?”

His brow furrows. “We have a contract.” His eyes go to the folder in gesture.

“Not that kind of contract. A personal one.”

“Are you talking about … a sex contract?” He gets a devilish grin on his face, one I ignore.

“No. I’m talking about a no sex contract.”

“That sounds distinctly less fun.”

“But a thousand times more professional, don’t you think?” I sip my coffee and stare at him over the rim of my cup. Wes does the same.

“Theoretically, what would this contract entail?” he asks finally.

“Well, it would just stipulate that we would have no physical relationship. Which includes kissing,” I add pointedly.

“Hey, you were the one who kissed me last time.”

My cheeks redden. “I know. But that was a regrettable lapse in judgment. One that wouldn’t be committed again, especially if we have a contract.”

“A regrettable lapse in judgment, huh?” Wes frowns, then sighs, grabs the napkin from beside his plate and spreads it out on the table between us. He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket for a pen.

“CONTRACT,” he scrawls across the top of the napkin. His handwriting clearly hasn’t changed a bit since high school — it’s still the same messy scrawl that every teenage boy seems to use.

“So, what do you think?” he asks. “Number one is obviously … no sex. Since this is a no sex contract and all?”

I nod. This whole thing is absurd, yet I find myself swept away by it. Wes writes a number one and then writes no sex next to it. I get a rush of euphoria. This is going to work. It’s in writing now.

“What else?” he says, looking up at me.

“No physical contact of any kind. No kissing. No touching. No hugging.”

“What about high fives?”

I roll my eyes. “No high fives. That would be a kind of physical contact.”

“Got it.” He writes the words no physical contact underneath the first clause.

“Oh, and no dates.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Dates?”

“Well, nothing that could be construed as a date. You know — no having so-called business meetings in places like Jasmine Thai. We meet at your office or on otherwise neutral territory, like this place.”

“Fine.” He adds the words no dates to our napkin contract and stares down at it. “How about this one — no talking about the past?”

“Fine with me.” I don’t need to be reminded of anything that came before this. What happened between Wes and I back then is ancient history, and I’m happy to leave the past in the past.

“Is that it, then?” He stares down at the napkin.

“No getting attached,” I say quietly. I don’t know if I’m making this rule for him or for me. “When our work contract is over, we go our separate ways.”

He glances up at me, his expression grim. The look in his eyes makes my stomach somersault, and I wonder if I’ve gone too far. After all, at one point, Wes was my best friend and, at least I thought, the love of my life. Is it unreasonable to think we might be able to stay friends this time around? But he nods and scribbles the words down on the napkin.

“Anything else? Or do we have a deal?”

I look down at the five rules he’s written out. This whole thing seems ridiculous and yet it makes me feel better to have it in writing. To know that we’re on the same page — that anything happening between us would be a bad idea of epic proportions.

“We have a deal.”

Wes tilts the napkin towards himself and scrawls his name at the bottom, under our list of rules. Then he hands me the pen. I scratch my own name into the rough napkin. The fact that I feel I need this contract in the first place should be a major red flag, yet here I am, signing it and feeling like it’s going to magically fix everything I’m feeling.

I slide the napkin back towards Wes, but he waves it off.

“You keep it,” he says. “I trust you.”

I take it and slide it into the blue folio with our other contract, the real one, for safe-keeping. For the first time since Wes walked back into my life, I feel like I actually have a chance of getting out of this unscathed.