Page 24 of Reaching Gavin

Chapter Nine

I will not Facebook stalk Gavin North. Or Wikipedia stalk. Or Google stalk. I will be an adult.

No matter how often I repeated the words, my willpower didn’t get any stronger. That was pretty much the opposite of how a mantra was supposed to work. Already today I had opened a web browser and started to type his name three times. I’d immediately closed it before I could hit enter, but that was the closest thing to restraint I’d shown. Searching his name would be reading too much into Friday night. So we’d shared a couple glasses of wine and talked. Nothing had happened. Only, nothing had happened and that fact was driving me crazy.

Besides, I’d learned a lot about him from our conversation over the weekend, including fun facts like he was only four years older than me.

Translation: there was a reasonable age gap.

Imogen Sound was his kid sister.

Translation: I didn’t need to be jealous of her and, more importantly, Gavin was single!

None of what I’d learned made him any less my boss. Sure, NorthWest Investments was cool with inter-office dating, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the boss dating an intern was going to be frowned upon. It might also wreck my chances of landing a permanent position with the company when I graduated. Maybe we could date in secret like in the movies, because that always worked out. And what about the inevitable break-up? I didn’t have the best track record with my ex-boyfriends. Despite the plethora of new information I’d learned from Gavin, my options were looking bleaker. It was easier to tell myself I shouldn’t date him when another woman stood in the way. I was never going to be a cheater like my exes. But if the boundary line was purely propriety, I was completely screwed.

He hadn’t come in for the day yet, so I was left to split my time making notes about the project and overanalyzing every moment we’d spent together. It was impossible not to think about him in the office, but I stubbornly redirected myself until my focus was mostly on the project. I’d finally begun to have an actual idea about how to approach the preservation committee. For some reason knowing that Imogen was the one behind it made things easier. I’d allowed myself to Google her. That was research—necessary research—not crazy-girl research. Still, I jumped every time someone walked by my cubicle. It didn’t garner much info. Imogen was an It-Girl, which meant that I’d have better luck piecing together info about her life from Instagram posts.

I’d spent my weekend binging The Bachelor while thinking of any ideas I could about the Majestic Theater project. To avoid access to Google and the temptation to use it, I’d written 100 tiny notes on Post-its instead of opening my computer. Considering the first thing I’d done when I got access to a web browser was do a search on Gavin’s sister that had been a wise move. This morning I needed to sort through all those notes. By the time I’d finished plastering them across my desktop and the walls of my cubicle, my entire workspace looked like a crime scene investigation. It was actually amazing what a weekend without access to computers or cell phones did for my creativity. Now, I didn’t have one good idea, I had at least twenty good ones and probably about eighty insane ones.

By the time, I’d filtered through them, I was feeling pretty good. Good enough to pop down to Sound Coffee to pick up a latte and a drink for George. Danny was working the bar and he lit up when he saw me, prompting my usual waves of guilt. Thank God, caffeine usually assuaged it.

“Hi Cassie, how was your weekend?” he asked with a bright smile as he began to pull my shot.

I didn’t know how to answer that. My weekend started with the bad date that had ended with… I wasn’t sure what had happened between Gavin and I. Just thinking about it left me feeling warm and tingly inside, probably an inappropriate thing to share. I opted for the cop-out answer. “I mostly vegged and watched TV. You?”

“I was working. We get pretty busy on the weekends.” He put a lid on my cup and passed it to me and then began working on the drink I’d ordered for George. “I put an extra shot in there for you.”

The trouble with Danny was that he was so nice that he was boring. I hadn’t given him exactly scandalous events to work with, but that was what our relationship boiled down to: small talk about work. He finished up George’s Americano and handed it to me. I grabbed two sleeves from the tray next to the espresso machine. I couldn’t help but stare at the Sound Coffee logo as I slipped them on.

Gavin, like it or not, was the heir to a giant coffee fortune, and yet, he’d chosen to work his way up from the bottom. It was really something special.

He was really something special.

The person behind me in line bumped my arm and I startled back to reality—the place where I had a job and shit to do. I waved goodbye to Danny and headed back to the office, eager to get to work on one of the one hundred ideas I’d thought up over the last few days. Pausing at the reception desk, I held the Americano just out of George’s reach as was becoming our custom.

“You didn’t tell me that Imogen Sound was Gavin’s sister?” I accused him.

He wiggled his eyebrows and pursed his lips like I had been giving him sass. “Honey, you didn’t ask. Why does it matter if she’s his girlfriend or his sister?”

“It doesn’t.” I shrugged in a not-at-all convincing way.

“Umm-hmm.” He took a sip of his drink with one raised eyebrow. He wasn’t buying it, but he didn’t push.

“Enjoy your coffee!” I called before he decided to ask more questions.

It had been a dangerous move bringing up Gavin at all. If I wasn’t careful I would find myself distracted at my desk. I sat down at my computer, determined to get to work, and dug in. When Trevor popped his head into my cubicle, I looked up surprised to see an hour had already passed. So far I had outlined three separate proposals. They were skeletons—ideas really—but any one of them would work. I just had to choose the one that would impress NorthWest Investments most. I did my best to shield my screen from Trevor’s prying eyes, but he craned his neck trying to see anyway.

“Are you working on the Majestic Theatre proposal?” he asked

I snorted. Even if he couldn’t decipher the dozens of random thoughts scrawled on notes all over the makeshift walls, some things should be obvious. “No, I’m solving world peace.”

“Come on, Cassie. I was thinking about it all weekend and it doesn’t make sense for us to work separately.” He leaned against my makeshift doorway and shoved his hands into his trouser pockets casually as he began to whistle his new tune.

If I knew Trevor, he hadn’t spent his weekend working at all. Undoubtedly, he’d been out to the bars or taking some new girl out. He had a firm commitment to a work-life balance that usually tipped the scales firmly toward life.

“I’m actually pretty far along in my proposal already.” I hit the sleep button so that he would stop trying to peek.

“Maybe you could show me what you have, and I can give you some tips.”