AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I hold up my hands in surrender.
“You were right. I won’t doubt you again—at least where food is concerned, anyway.”
“Check this out.”
Wesley turns his phone toward us and hits Play.
I don’t know what I was expecting her to look like, but it definitely wasn’t that.
Aside from the fact that they’re both blonde, she doesn’t physically resemble Julia, but something about her posture or the cadence of her voice or the way she moves her hands when she talks reminds me of her.
What surprises me the most is that it doesn’t ache to see something that reminds me of her in someone else.
All I feel is fascination.
When she cuts off her “fingers”, both Phillip and I scream.
“I reacted the same way when I first saw it.” Wesley laughs.
Well, she’s definitely got Julia’s twisted sense of humor. If they would have gotten the chance to meet, there’s no doubt they’d have got on like a house on fire. Between Avery’s decorating skills and Julia’s penchant for mischief, I would have lived in terror for the rest of my life.
The thought makes me smile.
I should be analyzing the video to see what I can learn about how she presents herself (and her business) to the world, but I’m too captivated by her to focus.
She moves like a dancer, has a smile that puts Marilyn Monroe’s to shame, and eyes like sapphires.
This woman is living art, and based on my friends’ expressions, they feel the exact same way.
If we make it through this session without crossing any lines, it’ll be a damn miracle.
5
PHILLIP
Even though I know it’s completely unnecessary, I inspect my suit jacket for lint for the fourth time in as many minutes.
Once again, there was no lint to be found or any stray threads that needed to be snipped.
There is absolutely no reason for me to be this fidgety. I have met with people one on one since I received my PhD eighteen years ago. This should be old news to me by now.
I had been so on edge about our initial meeting that I even watched some of the videos from her blog to get a better sense of who she was.
Some of them? You watched all of them.
It was purely for research purposes, of course. I needed to know what her strengths and weaknesses were in terms of establishing her brand. I had to watch them to see what she was already doing marketing wise or if she was even doing anything at all on that front. How else was I going to find out what her practical experience with it was?
You’re lying to yourself and you know it. You could have found out all that by talking to her just like you did with every other student you met with today. You didn’t go looking for anyone else’s social media platform.
That thought resonates in my head so intensely, it makes my brain itch.
I know better than most how rationalizing questionable behavior can damage someone’s life, and yet here I am, still doing it.
From the moment Wesley showed us the video, Avery had been an ever present guest in my mind.
Yes, she was beautiful—almost unearthly so—but it was the gleam in her eye when she talked about her plans for the future that captivated me.
The knock at the door of my office startles me. I nervously brush off my jacket a fifth time just in case some lint had spontaneously manifested there.
