Page 54 of Take Two

I am fully committed to this statement.

#IveSeenEnough #MaxwellAndReed #SeattleSummerOfLove #FullyCommitted

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@SeattleLocal: Genuinely just saw them together in person yesterday, completely by accident. I don’t have much to add. Except⁠—

The way Jamie Maxwell was looking at Cyaire Reed? Yeah. They’re absolutely not fooling a single person in this city.

Chapter 14

Jamie

“Jamie.”

Tazja’s voice cuts through my thoughts, sharp enough to pull me back, but it still takes me a full second to register that she’s actually talking to me.

“What?” I say, looking up from my phone. Another opinionated article about Cyaire and me. I will never say this out loud in front of my teammates, not in a million years, but I finally understand why they complain endlessly about Hattie and her particular brand of journalistic chaos. That woman needs a hobby. Several of them.

She doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she studies me from the center of the empty retail space with the kind of patience that is really just thinly veiled judgment, one hand resting on her hip, the other gesturing vaguely in my direction as though she’s presenting me as evidence in a court case.

“Brother. Hello, thank you for joining me.”

“I’ve been here the whole time,” I reply.

“Physically,” Taz says, delivering the word with enough attitude to fill the entire room. Yep. She is completely over me right now.

I glance around the unit as though taking a slow, deliberate look at the space might somehow redeem me in her eyes. It doesn’t.

The space sits on a busy corner in Queen Anne, afternoon sunlight spills generously through floor-to-ceiling front windows that would flood the salon with natural light for the better part of every day. The exposed brick along one wall already won Tazja over the moment we walked in. I could see it in the way she ran her fingertips along the surface and went quiet. The polished concrete floors, however, are a different matter entirely. She has spent the better part of the last twenty minutes locked in what appears to be a deeply personal debate about whether they should stay as they are or disappear beneath warm hardwood. I have chosen not to weigh in.

This is the third property we’ve looked at in as many weeks.

Unlike the first two, she hasn’t spent the entire viewing walking the agent through a comprehensive list of everything that needs to be torn out, replaced, relocated, or otherwise reconsidered. She’s been planning instead, quietly and deliberately, the way Taz does when she’s already decided and is just giving herself permission to admit it. I know this look. I grew up watching it.

Closing her salon in New York had never truly meant walking away from the business. She had debated whether to stay behind, weighed it seriously, turned it over for weeks. With our family being what we are and the understanding that we move together or we don’t move at all, that was never really a live option. Seattle had always come with one condition of her own making. She was opening another shop here. The only question that remained was where.

“I think this is it,” she says quietly, almost to herself, still turning slowly in the middle of the room.

I smile. “I know.”

She looks over at me, the faux attitude still holding. “You do?”

“You’ve stopped telling the estate agent everything that’s wrong with it.”

A laugh escapes her unbidden. “Okay. Okay, I suppose I have.”

I may have been half-buried in my phone, but I’ve been watching her the entire time. She’s been measuring walls with her eyes, deciding where the reception desk should sit, mapping out where the styling stations would work best, assessing whether the plumbing at the back would be usable for the wash basins. She already has suppliers lined up. Most of her equipment is sitting in a storage unit somewhere, waiting for an address to be attached to it. The only part of the business she hasn’t fully resolved yet is convincing her best friend and business partner, Monique, to leave New York behind and follow her west.

Personally, I think Monique is already halfway there and just hasn’t said so out loud yet.

Monique practically ran the administrative side of their salon back east. Tazja always used to joke that she could manage a client with impossible color expectations with her eyes closed but would rather throw herself into traffic than deal with payroll or a spreadsheet. If there is anyone who follows Taz to Seattle, it will be Monique. It is simply a matter of when.

“What?” Tazja asks, catching me watching her.

“You’ve got that look,” I say, because it is my brotherly duty to give her a hard time about this. I take the responsibility seriously.

“What look?”