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She couldn’t believe he’d rearranged part of his week just to plan all this. “Why not just ask me?”
“Because I felt like we veered off on the wrong foot somewhere and I wanted to make it up to you. I realized that a lot of proposals were getting lost in the shuffle. Yours included.”
“The shuffle?” Lydia said. “That’s what you’re calling it?”
He sighed, coming to sit on the edge of the table next to her, and she could tell that this was him attempting to apologize for the breakdown in communication from the leadership team to the rest of the firm. “It’s not a perfect system. I know that. But I really think we have a shot here. If we team up, we could really make this happen. For Poletti’s. For the kids. They deserve something like the center we’re trying to build for them. I say we go back to the drawing board together, lean into the best parts of our ideas and make something magical.” He reached for her hand and squeezed. “Sometimes you just need to get your foot in the door. It doesn’t matter how you get there. So, what do you say? Are the running buddies officially becoming proposal partners?”
“All right,” Lydia said, pulling her laptop from her bag. “But you’re in charge of supplyingallthe coffee.”
Jack grinned. “Deal.”
If Lydia were ever this late for a client meeting they would have dropped her. And honestly, she wouldn’t even have blamed them. But when things had run late with Jack, she’d texted Luke to let him know she was still tied up at work, and he’d told her not to worry. Then he’d shifted his schedule around to accommodate her, which was how she found herself walking into an empty gym at nine at night.
“Where is everyone?” she asked as Luke let her into the building.
“We close at eight on Tuesdays.”
“Eight?” Lydia said. “Why did I think it was midnight?”
“That’s Friday and Saturday.”
“Clearly I don’t spend enough time here,” she remarked, following him down the hall. “I can’t believe you waited. You should have told me to kindly fuck off.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I wanted to show you your updated mile times.”
“You could have texted.”
“It’s not the same. I can’t see the look on your face.”
Lydia walked past him as he opened his office door for her. The fact that she was sort of excited to see her new mile times almost made her laugh. Maybe Luke had turned her into a gym girl for life. Maybe when this was all over, they’d spend weekends on the treadmills with her complaining about Poletti’s and him telling her all about the progress he was making on his revamped business plan. “Are youevergoing to clean this space up?”
“It’s tidy,” Luke protested, sitting down in front of his computer.
Lydia picked up a framed certificate that Luke had left leaning against the wall. “What are you talking about? You still haven’t hung this. And everything from your bookshelf is sitting in that box over there. You know they finished the repairs in here months ago, right?”
He turned slowly in his chair to face her. He had a pensive look on his face. “I guess some part of me kept thinking there wasn’t much point in putting everything away because I was going to get the business loan and be packing up my office soon. When it fell through, I was too disappointed to start putting things away.”
“Oh,” Lydia said softly, wiping dust from the glass covering Luke’s certificate.
“It’s silly,” he said, moving a bunch of papers out of his way and pulling out the hard copy of her training plan. “You’re right. I should tidy up already.”
Lydia put the certificate on the sofa and walked to the desk. She didn’t know what she meant to do. Hug him? Tell him everything would be okay, or that the second time’s the charm? Before she could decide, she got distracted by the papers he’d moved.
“What’s all this?” she asked, picking up a rough sketch.
Luke tried to nab it from her. “I was just working on some mock-up drawings for the warehouse space to add to my new business plan. They’re...not very good. I know. I was hoping drawing it out would inspire a new business model.”
“What are you talking about?” Lydia said, her voice pitched too high. “These are great.”
“Says theactualarchitect who’s clearly lying through her teeth. These are kindergarten quality.”
She did her best not to laugh. “Want some advice?”
“From a professional? Sure.”
“Invest in a ruler.”
Luke scoffed. “I could have figured that one out.”
