Page 6 of Mutual Discord

I’d be interested. But I’d need to practice first.

Practice. What a great idea. I could definitely benefit from practice. Relief swirled like sunshine in my chest, instantly brightening my mood.

“¿Qué te hizo sonreír, nena?”

Stifling a gasp, I closed the app and pulled up our FaceTime window, doing my best to school my expression. But my mother’s narrowed eyes told me my acting skills weren’t exactly Oscar worthy.

“It’s just a friend.” I shrugged, although the movement felt stiff. I’m sure it looked stiff, too. “We’re just making plans to meet up.”

My mother continued to stare at me, and I fought not to fidget under the intensity of her gaze. I may have been thirty-one years old, and had lived on my own for at least nine of those years, but my mother still knew exactly how to intimidate the hell out of me.

“Is this friend a man?” she asked, feigned nonchalance in every word.

Mamí didn’t fool me. But now I had to consider whether I needed to lie, because God, I didn’t know what to say. I swear I could feel sweat pop up along my hairline.

“He’s only a friend, Mamí,” I said, aiming for casual.

One of my mother’s black brows arched. Of course she didn’t buy it. I’d never been casual in my whole life.

“What are you going to do?”

I tore my eyes away from my phone screen—and my mother’s probing stare—and glanced at my closed laptop. “We’re just meeting on a video chat to discuss a project.”

Her face fell. “Oh, so he’s from work?”

My head was nodding before my brain understood the question. I was thankful for my quick reaction because I’d yet to tell my parents I’d been let go from Desert Media 360. If they knew, they would be livid on my behalf. Without a doubt, they’d drive from their home in Tucson to storm the 360 offices in Tempe, where my mother would cuss out Josh in rapid-fire Spanish while my father let the air out of his tires. Papí wouldn’t care about a rap sheet if he thought I’d been hurt.

But despite my desire to save them from jail time, the main reason I hadn’t told them was because I was horribly embarrassed to have been laid off. Although I’d done nothing wrong, when I thought about how my career with Desert Media 360 had ended, my stomach churned and my face went hot because I felt like a failure. I couldn’t risk my parents believing I was a failure, too. Not my accomplished, celebrated parents.

My answer seemed to appease my mother, however, because she nodded her graying head and then returned to her recitation of my cousin Papo’s work woes.

It wasn’t until later that night that I was able to finally reply to User16892’s message, letting him know we could practice via Zoom. He sent me his email address, and the simple [email protected] address made me snort. It was like he had created the account specifically to communicate with me…but then I had done the very same thing. So with a smile, I sent him a Zoom invite to chat the following day.

As the time for our meeting approached, I grew more and more nervous. I may have been exchanging messages with User16892—shit, I still didn’t even know his name—but I didn’t really know him. We were both communicating anonymously…or as anonymously as possible, considering he knew what I looked like. And that got me wondering about what he looked like. I imagined a man in his fifties or sixties, perhaps. With a wife and maybe daughters who had taught him to value women and their contributions. Just thinking about his imaginary family possibly giving him his own pep talk helped curb the worst of my nerves.

When the time finally came for our meeting to start, I set up my laptop in a corner of the living room with my plain linen curtains as a backdrop. I didn’t want to give away any detail of my personal space if I could help it. After starting the meeting, connecting my audio, and opening my camera view, I grabbed the notes I had written for the meeting so I would know exactly what I wanted to touch upon when we discussed Rosalind Franklin. I was so focused on the agenda that I didn’t realize User16892 had joined the meeting…not until I heard a soft “Hi.”

Glancing up, my smile froze as my gaze focused on the person on the screen. Did I really think User16892 was an older gentleman? Because he wasn’t. Not at all. And worse, I realized as my mind assessed his features and damn near purred like a cat at what it found, User16892 was really, really hot.

Oh no.

Chapter Three

It took me a long moment to unhinge my jaw, but when I did, I gracelessly mumbled, “Uh, hi?”

Ay dios, I sounded like an absolute moron.

Thankfully—or perhaps graciously—the man on the screen smiled. “Hi, S. I’m A.”

My brows knitted together. “A?”

One dark brow winged up. “I’ll tell you what it stands for if you tell me what S stands for.”

I blinked, and then huffed a dry laugh. “Touché. I appreciate the anonymity; I was just caught off guard.”

That was an understatement. Everything about User16892—A—was surprising. He appeared to be in his early thirties, and although I could only see him from the waist up, the fit of his dark gray T-shirt across his chest hinted that he knew his way around a gym. Dark, manicured scruff stretched from his defined jaw to the cut of his cheekbones, and his dark eyes sparkled even from behind a pair of black-frame glasses. When the corner of his full lips quirked into a smirk, a dimple cut into his cheek and I suddenly understood why women in nineteenth-century novels swooned. It wasn’t the corsets—it was men as devastating as this.

Abruptly I realized that A had probably smirked because I was staring at him like an idiot. Heat rushed up my neck and crowded my face, and I tore my gaze away from his to drop my head and pretend I was looking at my notes. If God was still in the business of smiting people, I could really use a good smote right now.