Page 4 of Tempted By the Safety

Amanda would pick the second one, which is why she went home. Her parting shot, delivered through my passenger window: “Text me when you’ve adopted him. I’ll send a fruit basket.”

I wait out in my car, answering the emails I’ve been avoiding, and around four, the side door by the dumpsters swings open.

Milo steps out with his apron balled up in one fist, the door clapping shut behind him, and his smile is just… gone. Like a breaker flipped, and what’s left underneath is a kid with his shoulders down around his sternum, standing in a parking lot looking tired and about ten pounds too light for the wind that’s pushing his hair around. He tips his head back at the sky for a second, and just stands there, holding his apron.

Three hours of rehearsing how a reasonable businessman starts this conversation, and my hand’s on the door before I’ve settled on a word.

He clocks me getting out of the car, and the smile snaps back up so fast I’d have missed the gap if I hadn’t been staring at it.

“Oh no.” He points at me with the apron fist. “Table twelve, halibut and the pinot. If this is about the crème brûlée, I want it on record that I recommended the tart.”

“It’s not about the crème brûlée.”

“And yet here you are, lurking by a dumpster, so either you have a complaint or a compliment, and I should tell you I only accept compliments in cash.” He’s walking toward me while he says it, easy gait, no wasted motion. Up close, his eyes are doing a lot of work to look like this is a fun conversation.

“I want to offer you a job,” I say.

He goes still. “Come again?”

“Personal assistant. I play football, run a training program, and I’m launching a company. My calendar’s trying to kill me,” I add, using Amanda’s line. “You’d handle scheduling, keep my life stocked and running, run errands. Full time. I’ll pay double whatever this place did.”

He looks at me, then at the restaurant, then back at me.

“You don’t even know me,” he says, and the smile’s still up, but there’s a wariness under it now.

“I know you got fired today,” I say. “I heard it from the hallway.”

That catches him, dead center. His mouth opens, closes. Then the grin recovers, and he props a hand on his hip.

“Okay, first of all, that’s stalker behavior. But you’re huge and pretty, so I’m going to allow it.”

I don’t respond to that, because I’ve learned that waiting works better than talking, in negotiations and in coverage, and sure enough, the silence does its job. I watch his face run through the possibilities: joke, scam, prank show. Then it lands, reluctantly, on the last option standing.

“You’re serious,” he says.

“I don’t waste time.”

Here’s the part I’m not saying out loud, the part that stays between me and the dumpster: I’m not hiring a résumé, and I know it. I couldn’t tell you if this kid can manage a calendar. What I can tell you is that I watched him take a clean hit to the ribs today and pop back up smiling before he’d finished falling, and that’s good enough for me.

“Okay. Okay, hypothetically.” He’s pacing a small circle now. “Logistics. I’m in Queens. Where do you even… because if this is one of those Connecticut situations, I want to say up front that I don’t own a car, and the trains out there are theoretical—”

“I have a house,” I say. “There’s a guest suite. Position’s live-in.”

He stops pacing and looks at me, his eyes blue and sharp, recalculating everything at speed.

“You’re inviting a stranger to live in your house,” he says slowly.

“You start at seven. I’m not paying you to sit in traffic.”

He laughs, and this one sounds genuine. It comes up from his chest, and he has to put a hand over his mouth to manage it. It’snothing like the ones he’s been handing out all day. Those were currency, but this one’s a leak.

“You’re insane,” he says, wiping his eye. “You know that? This is insane. People don’t do this.”

“People waste time.” I open a blank contact on my phone and turn the screen toward him. “Number.”

He thumbs it in and hands the phone back, and I put my hand out. “Spencer.”

He looks at my hand. Then he takes it, his grip stronger than his wrists suggest: calluses, a burn scar near the thumb. He shakes it once.