Page 39 of You'll Love it Here

I swallow hard and pull back. “This is amazing. I think you just healed all my ailments.”

He can’t hide his delight. “Really?”

I nod vigorously. “I want to eat this every day. No, that’s not enough, I want to immerse myself in it. I want tobecomeit.”

His lips twitch into a smirk. “Now I know you’re full of shit.”

“Seriously!” I press. “You should add this to the menu. You’d have a line around the block.”

“I doubt that,” Sami says, suddenly a little softer.

“You could call it Sami’s Sammie! I bet the folks at marketing would have a field day.”

He rolls his eyes. “I bet the folks at marketing would never stoop that low.”

The music on the jukebox suddenly cuts out with a fuzzy sound. The giant black clock on the wall indicates that the mixer started ten minutes ago, yet it’s still just me and Sami. Even that soup-breakdown guy has disappeared, leaving a stack of coins on his table.

A nervous energy trickles in. What if nobody shows up to this mixer?

Have I really sunk so low that I’m going to get stood up by these fuckers?

I slowly sip my wine while Sami’s eyes linger on the door. Only a few seconds later, the bell of the door chimes. I pop higher in my seat.

It’s just Jane. One of the few people I don’t actuallyneedto speak with now that she’s given Jamie and me permission to enter her suite. She perks up when she sees me at the counter, and I try not to let my disappointment show as I give her a friendly wave.

She’s in a bright-pink fur coat, a black slip dress, and a pair of pink tights with holes that reveal orange tights underneath. Her hair is a new color, a frizzy yellow almost like straw. Somehow she makes it work with the high bun.

“Oh good, you’re alone!” she mutters as she sidles in and grabs one of Sami’s sandwiches off the platter. She turns to Sami. “Hey! I’ll have what Mona’s having.”

“Excellent.” He pours her a glass of white and passes it to her before making his way across the diner to clear off soup kid’s dirty table.

“These aregood,” she says through her first big bite. Then she places her napkin on the counter and opens the sandwich, takes aknife to the pattie and starts mincing it into smaller pieces, mixing the yogurt sauce in. Once she’s done whateverthatis, she closes the sandwich and looks at me again. “So, I wanted to talk to you about the... Well, you know, it’s pretty obvious.”

I nod like I know exactly what she’s talking about. But it’s her nervous energy that throws me. I’m weirdly drawn in by the way her hands clench the fabric of her dress and turn white at the knuckles.

“That’s what we’re here for,” I mutter.

Smile lines fill around her eyes before quickly fading. “Has your underwear gone missing from the laundry room too?”

I almost cough into my wineglass, glancing at Sami over my shoulder, but his back is to us. “Oh, right. I’m not sure.”

She nods steadily, like she expected this. “At first I wasn’t sure if I was just mistaken, but I had this one pair with cherries on it that was lucky.” She leans in closer and the scent of something synthetically fruity comes with her. “I washed them in preparation for this interview I had lined up, and when I went to get them, they were nowhere to be seen.” She blinks slowly, accentuating her clumped mascara. “I checked everywhere. There’s only one explanation left.”

I nod, not knowing what to say.

She notices the skepticism on my face. “You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, no, of course I do,” I say. Ishouldbelieve her. Although if I’m truly honest, she does seem scattered enough to misplace her undies without the help of a thief, and it’s possible that she’s let her true-crime obsession create this.

“Well, I started counting before I do laundry, andtwicenow I’ve had a pair go missing. Isn’t that creepy?”

“And you think it’s Carmen?” I ask as quietly as possible, remembering their spat in the lobby.

She taps her chipped yellow nails on the bar. “To be honest,there’s a lot of suspects.” She pats my arm conspiringly. “Like that guy across the hall from us has a sort of nineties molester uncle in loafers feeling to him, you know what I mean?”

At least I can wholeheartedly agree with this. “Yes, I actually do see it.” I can’t help my grin at her apt description of Divorced Dad.

“And his wi-fi is called something like ‘wi-fi daddy,’ like what even is that? Is that supposed to be funny?”