“Nothing!”
Olive stares at me silently, her eyebrows raised in disbelief. I cross my arms over my chest and stare back, but I already know I’m losing this one. “Fine, I picketed her house.”
“Chelsea!” Olive exclaims. “You can’t picket a person’s home!”
“I think the fact that I did proves itcanbe done,” I argue. “The sidewalks in front of her house are public property. I checked.”
“And while I appreciate your thorough research on that, her response proves that it was probably a bad idea,” Olive counters.
“Okay, maybe you have a point, but she fired our librarian for letting kids look at the list of banned books. Just looking at the list! She didn’t give them the books or anything!
“I was supposed to chaperone the spelling bee club to a baseball game next week, and the board pulled all the funding and transportation. So now I need to find a way to take the hateful woman down in the next five days or raise enough money for the team to still go. I amnotletting her ruin this for them.”
Olive holds out a hand. “Jesus, you’re fired up about this. I love the intensity, but let’s just calm those tits. We just need to find a sponsor for your team. That’ll cover tickets and you can use my delivery van.”
“I love you, you know that?” I ask my best friend.
“Hey, what’s the point of having a delivery van if I can’t use it to send a bunch of adorable nerds to a sporting event?”
We sip our drinks and watch the tv in silence for a moment. The camera pans around the stadium, showing flashes of people dancing and singing along to Sweet Caroline. But then a thought occurs to me. “No, wait. We can’t use the van. It doesn’t have seatbelts in the ba—”
“Oh shit,” Olive cuts me off, pointing at the ball game on the tv. The camera is focused on an area just below the skyboxes, but up at the top right corner of the screen, in all of his heart-stopping hi-def glory, is Matthew Acevedo.
He’s clapping at the last play, impossible to miss with that blindingly handsome smile and dark hair. Just the sight of him is enough to make my stomach do a backflip. And then I remember the way his hand felt on my lower back and my stomach tells the rest of my body to hold its beer while it does a round-off into a back handspring, finishes with a back tuck and sticks the freaking landing.
“Oh! Chelsea!” Olive looks at me with wide eyes. “I know how you can get those kids to the game…” I can see the plan forming, and I try to head her off.
“No, Olive. I’m not asking him for more money. Nope. The man basically funded our entire computer lab—”
“So don’t ask him for money. Ask him to take you to a game. And then show up with your sticky little champions in tow! Who’s going to say no to a bunch of kids?! No one, that’s who!” Olive smacks her hand on the bar excitedly. She’s getting herself worked up, but maybe she has a point. There isn’t a cock block on this planet that is as effective as six rowdy school kids.
“Isn’t that kind of… cheating?” I ask.
“Hell no! Well, maybe. But he cheated first! He broke the auction rulesandforced you to say yes to a date you didn’t even want to go on. This would just be… payback.” She grins and raises her beer. “Besides, I bet you ten bucks the man has the box for the season and barely uses it.”
“Can we bet with an ‘I-told-you-so’ instead?” I ask.
“God yes,” Olive laughs. “You know I live to give those out.”
I clink my glass against hers and chew my lip, wondering if I really have the ovaries to go through with this.
5
MATT
My phone buzzes across the glass surface of my desk, "Chelsea Crawford" lighting up the screen. I snag it as James lets out an exaggerated sigh.
"So, I'm guessing I should bring the budget projections back later," he grumps.
"You made me to go to that bachelor auction," I remind my assistant, pointing a finger at him. "Technically, this is on you."
"I didn’t make you strip to a country song from the 90s and pay out the ass just so you could schmooze a schoolteacher."
"Well, it's a good thing I'm the boss then, isn't it?"
James rolls his eyes and sits back in his seat as I read the text from Chelsea.
Chelsea:I saw you on TV last night.