Lost and Found (Growing Pains #1)(10)

“Are you calling me a slut?” Krista asked with a cackle.

“Not the time for hysterics,” Ben said, waving away her jest.

Hysterics? She thought sourly.

“Hmmmm.” Ben took on a look of inward contemplation. He turned back to the easel. Krista followed his gaze and still saw the same random brush strokes of red.

“Anyway,” Krista started to wander away. “Not much on the man front, I’m afraid. I do need to start dating again, though.”

“Uh huh. Hmm. I might have to use my imagination on that one.”

“Okay, then. Let me know if you ever figure me out. I’ll pass the code along.”

If Ben heard her, he didn’t show it.

As she was halfway to the kitchen she heard the front door open.

Oh shit! Abbey’s home!

Krista ran back to Ben. “Ben, Abbey’s home! You need to cart this off to your room!”

Ben shook his head, still staring at the canvas. “Not this time, Krista. I need space for this one. This is finals material.”

“But Ben—“

“I’ll handle her, Krista. It is a buyer’s market out there. Past school starting. There is no one to take my place. She won’t kick me out. Not this time of year. She is insane, but when it comes to roommates, she’s been in the city too long to be stupid about it.”

“What the f**k has happened to my living room!”

Krista turned around slowly. Sure enough, Abbey the Horrible had shown up on scene. She was a Goth girl back in her distant youth, but hadn’t quite given it up completely. She was thirty-eight, often wore black clothes, but stopped with the black lipstick and nail polish when she hit thirty. She always looked like she was sniffing poo, and that was a thing she probably wouldn’t grow out of.

Ben turned to Abbey, looked her straight in the face, and said, “Abbey, I appreciate your territorialism, and I wouldn’t dare upset your balance, but I need all the space and concentration I can get to work on this piece. It is extremely important to me. If I mess anything up, I will be happy to pay for it. Now please, go away.”

Ben, who usually bowed his head and found somewhere else to be, standing up to Abbey, who was definitely a bully growing up who stole lunch money from kids like Ben, was so foreign, so totally absurd, that both Krista and Abbey stood speechless.

Ben turned back to his painting. “Now, if you two will excuse me, I have a masterpiece to put together.”

Krista hightailed it to her room. If Abbey exploded, she wanted to be somewhere else. If Abbey didn’t, she’d probably perch at the dining room table and watch Ben, making sure he didn’t mess anything up. Krista didn’t want to be an ingredient in that mixing bowl.

The next day, Krista got to her desk at one minute to eight. The stupid Muni had broken down in the tunnel and she had to nearly run in. As she dropped her handbag in the usual spot she froze. Her lucky mug sat in the middle of the clean desk, somehow back in one piece!

Tentatively, not believing her eyes, she leaned closer. It was then that she saw the cracks, small pock marks and fissure lines where it’d broken.

Next to the mug was a note. A neat but lazy hand scrawled,

“It was the best I could do. Please use this  to buy a new one. –Sean.”

The arrow was pointing toward a Starbucks gift card.

“What the—“

She poked her head outside the cube, saw the usual nothing, and stepped back in.

“—hell?”

It was a really sweet gesture. He must have gone home and spent time gluing the mug back together. Not many men would put in the time or effort.

Damn. The guy was good, she’d say that much. He was on par with the best there was, Krista was sure of it. There probably wasn’t a woman alive he couldn’t get if he really tried.

Krista picked up the gift card. Too bad it was Starbucks. She was a Seattle girl, born and raised. Seattle’s Best Coffee was the coffee for her, and since Starbucks, the sell-out, had bought them out, Starbucks was the enemy. She would settle for a local San Francisco company, or free work coffee, but she would not set foot in a Starbucks. She had to draw the line somewhere, take some kind of stand in something. Everyone had their thing. Starbucks was hers.

She clutched the card. She couldn’t throw a gift away, and she couldn’t give it to someone else in the company because it’d look really bad if Sean found out. She could take it home to Ben, but he had an anti-Starbucks rule, also, even though his was for other reasons. He had tried to explain, once, but it had something to do with politics and rainforests and hippy stuff—she stopped listening when he got passionate. Everyone had their thing, but a person didn’t need to go spreading the insanity around. She had plenty of her own.

In the end, Sean did fix her mug. And she probably owed him an explanation why she couldn’t accept his peace-keeping offer—if that’s what a womanizer called bribery.

Well, crap. She had to return it. Sean could at least make use of it. No sense wasting twenty bucks.

With a sigh that made Mr. Montgomery look like an amateur, she jumped up, card in hand, and set out. She’d head straight into the lion’s den. She’d hold up her head, put all her logic defenses on red alert, and hope he didn’t smell good enough to lick.

On the way down her heart was in her throat and the base of her spine was tingling. If she was a prisoner, she’d hear the steady beat of drums as she walked toward a firing squad.