Page 3 of Worth Loving
MAKING BETS
Five years later…
“You lost, Molly,”Tonya Miller, the administrative assistant to the research group, said. Tonya also happened to be her closest friend for the past year. Not that she and Tonya went out and did a lot. Just the opposite. Tonya was always trying to get Molly out, but she’d rather stay home than meet new people or socialize.
Too many years of being knocked down had worn on her, and though she moved out of her family home years ago hoping to recreate herself and break free of her father’s belittling ways, it never really happened. Not even after he passed could she escape always feeling as if she wasn’t worthy enough.
She just couldn’t quite pull the trigger and figured it’d never happen now.
“What did I lose?” she asked.
“The test subjects knew right away what the ingredient was you put in there and they all said it was horrible.”
Molly rolled her eyes. “I doubt they said it was horrible. I’m just trying to make it healthier.”
“Putting freeze-dried Brussels sprouts into pistachio cookies isn’t going to make them healthier, it’s only going to make people gag. It’s a cookie. A packaged cookie at that. If people want to be healthy they should just eat the damn vegetable.”
“I know. But we are paid by clients to make products healthier. Or at least we were for this. The cookies are green and I just figured it’d work.”
“It was a fail of epic proportions. It bombed like Hiroshima.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s not a very nice analogy.”
Tonya laughed. “It’s the only thing that I could think of. My bad. You’re just so smart and I figured if I said something silly or pop culture you wouldn’t get it.”
Just because she was smart didn’t mean she didn’t understand the world around her. She didn’t think she was one of those people who was book smart and society dumb. Maybe everyone thought that way about her because she didn’t get out much.
“Fine,” she said. “They didn’t like it. What did I lose?”
She hated making bets, but Tonya just loved to do it in the office and it did kind of give everyone something to cheer on in an otherwise boring job for many.
“You’re going on a date with Dwayne.”
“What? How? Huh? I would have remembered making a blind date bet. I don’t make bets like that. No way.” The panic was rising inside.
“The bet wasn’t specific. It was my choice and I believe you were so confident that you were going to win, you just let me go.”
She dropped her shoulders in defeat remembering that now. Or maybe agreeing to it was her easy way of getting Tonya and the sweet-smelling cherry bubble gum she was snapping away from her.
“Can’t you think of something else?” she asked. “Maybe I can bring lunch in for everyone this week. Or take you out for dinnerand drinks. You’ve been bugging me to get out. Why not go with me?” She made her voice as sweet as she could.
“Oh, you’re going out and you’re going out with Dwayne.”
She groaned. “Who is this guy?”
Tonya pulled out her phone and showed her a picture of the guy on Facebook. Even worse, the guy had slicked back hair and a button-down shirt with a few buttons open at the top revealing some pretty lengthy, curly chest hair. Her Brussels sprouts addition to the cookies didn’t make her gag, but nasty chest hair almost always did.
“He’s a friend of my brother’s. He’s really nice and you two would hit it off.”
“Why would you think we’d hit it off?” she asked. “He looks like he’s related to Tony Soprano.”
“You watchedThe Sopranos?” Tonya asked. “We were teens when that was playing. I remember having to sneak it at night when everyone was sleeping because it was on HBO.”
She felt her face flush. “I binge-watched it a few months ago. But it doesn’t matter.” She waved her hand away. “Dwayne looks like he belongs on the show.”
“He’s not Italian. He’s just a little heavy on the hair pomade.”
“Heavy?” she screeched. “I don’t think I’ve used that much product in one year, let alone one day.”
