Chapter 51 The Day You Owe Me Dinner
Briar's POV
The apartment was quiet when I helped Rowan from the shower to the couch, tucking a blanket around her. She was half-asleep before I turned off the bathroom light, breathing slow and even.
I heard the lock turn before the door opened.
Leah stepped inside, shopping bag on her wrist, keys in hand. Her gaze swept the living room—the blanket, the water glass, Rowan curled on the couch—then looked away, expression blank.
"Hey," I said from the kitchen doorway. "Sorry, I should've texted. She had too much to drink. I was so busy taking care of her I forgot to let you know. She'll be gone first thing tomorrow."
Leah bent to change her shoes, methodical and unhurried. Two seconds passed. "It's fine," she said, voice flat and polite, then walked straight to her bedroom and shut the door.
The click of the latch wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
I stood staring at the closed door. She was upset. I'd apologize properly in the morning. I turned toward my own room.
I changed into my pajamas and slipped under the covers, my mind still replaying the evening. The apartment had gone quiet. I was just starting to drift off when I heard soft footsteps.
"Briar?" Rowan's voice came from the doorway.
I turned my head on the pillow. "Yeah?"
She slipped into the room and climbed onto the other side of my bed, blanket still wrapped around her shoulders. The mattress dipped as she settled in beside me.
"Did you see me handle Garrett?" she asked, propping herself up on one elbow.
I shifted onto my side to face her. "I heard some of it."
She raised both eyebrows. "Some of it."
Rowan's expression shifted into something deeply satisfied. "So? How'd I do? Was I terrifying?"
I considered lying, then decided there was no point. "You sounded like a female outlaw who'd just held up a stagecoach," I said. "He didn't stand a chance."
She laughed, a short bright sound, and looked pleased. Then, without pausing for breath, she narrowed her eyes at me. "Okay. Your turn. How far did you and Lucian get tonight?"
The question landed squarely in the middle of the room. I looked at the ceiling. "We held hands."
Silence.
"Sorry," Rowan said. "Say that again."
"We held hands."
She stared at me. "The two of you spent the whole night together, there was a power outage, and all you did was hold hands."
"There wasn't a power outage —"
"That is not the point and you know it." She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, watching me with the focused attention of someone presented with a genuinely baffling puzzle. "Is it you, or is it him? Because one of you has to be the problem."
The image surfaced before I could stop it — the dim light in the storage room, the warmth of his hand, the way he'd looked at me when he asked his question. The way I'd been sitting on his lap in the hotel lounge, my pulse loud in my ears. My face went warm before I could school it into anything neutral, and I was grateful for the low light.
"I don't think it's him," I said, keeping my voice carefully even.
Rowan caught it immediately. Her eyes narrowed. "There's something you're not telling me."
"There's nothing I'm not telling you."
"Your ears are red."
"It's warm in here."
She let the subject drop, but only barely, settling back against the foot of the bed with the expression of someone filing information away for later use. "Fine," she said, stretching her arms above her head. "For what it's worth, tonight went exactly how I planned. I'm very satisfied with the outcome."
"Rowan."
"I'm just saying." She settled back against the pillow beside me, pulling the blanket up to her chin. "You should work on being a little less patient, Briar. Some things don't wait forever."
She turned onto her side, facing away from me, and her breathing gradually slowed into the even rhythm of sleep. I lay there staring up at the ceiling in the darkness, her words circling in my mind. She wasn't wrong, and that was the part I couldn't quite shake.
---
Garrett arrived at eight-fifteen the next morning. Rowan was already up, her borrowed clothes swapped back for her own, her hair pulled into a knot at the back of her neck.
She pulled me into a hug at the door, both arms tight around my shoulders. "Call me if anything explodes," she said into my hair.
"I always do."
I watched them go from the doorway, Rowan saying something as they reached the elevator that made Garrett's jaw tighten, and then the doors slid shut and the hallway was quiet again. I turned back inside, intending to find Leah before I left for the office.
Her room was empty. Her shoes were gone. A coffee mug sat drying on the rack beside the sink — washed and put away with the particular precision of someone who did not want to leave a trace.
I stood in the kitchen for a moment, the apology already assembled in my head and nowhere to go. Then I picked up my bag and went to work.
---
By afternoon, the office had settled into a rhythm that I was beginning to recognize as its own kind of momentum. The new hires had found their footing faster than I'd expected, and the team moved through the day with a steadiness that felt less like performance and more like routine taking hold.
The livestream was already running when I passed the broadcast room. Ash, Damon and Liam had the setup fully operational — ring light adjusted, products arranged, comment feed scrolling fast enough that I could barely read it. Liam was mid-sentence explaining the cold-press extraction process for the herbal protein line, his delivery clean and unhurried. Ash was reading the comment section, one elbow propped on the desk.
I slowed.
"I want to sing something," Ash said, directly into the camera.
I stopped walking.
I was already reaching for the door handle when the opening notes came out of his mouth, and I genuinely could not tell, in that first half-second, what key he thought he was in. The comment feed detonated. Liam's hand shot out and wrapped around the microphone with the calm speed of someone who had trained for exactly this emergency.
The comment count kept climbing. The donation alerts wouldn't stop firing.
I pushed the door open and leaned against the frame, watching Ash read the responses with the unbothered expression of someone who had not just done what he'd clearly just done.
The room smelled like the product samples they'd been demonstrating — something green and faintly herbal — and the monitors showed the viewer count ticking upward in real time.
"Fine," Ash said, reading a comment off the screen. "First ten links sell out, I'll sing and dance." He looked entirely at peace with this.
Liam's expression did not change. I suspected that was because he'd stopped expecting reasonable behavior some time ago.
I stepped back into the hallway and found Lily already beside me, her tablet angled so I could see the live sales dashboard. The numbers were moving fast — not gradually, not in the measured climb you planned for, but in the lurching, accelerating way that meant something had caught and was spreading on its own. Five minutes later, she showed me again. Two hundred thousand dollars.
"Pull every comment that mentions the product specifically," I told her, keeping my voice even. "Not the reactions, not the jokes — the ones where people talk about what they actually want. I want to see what's landing before we go into the next cycle."
She nodded and went back to her desk.
I looked at the sales figure for another moment, then put my phone in my pocket. We needed our own anchors, our own voices, our own pipeline. This wasn't a fluke. It was a proof of concept, and I intended to treat it like one.
The evening air was cooler than I'd expected when I finally stepped outside. I was still running numbers in my head, mentally mapping out what a proper content team would look like, when my phone buzzed.
Julian.
I answered on the second ring. "Hello?"
His voice came through low and flat, stripped of everything except the chill underneath. "What day is it today?"
I pulled up my calendar, then checked my browser, completely lost. "What day? It's not your birthday or anything."
Silence stretched for over a minute before his icy reply: "It's the day you owe me dinner."