“There had better be a really good reason why you haven’t thanked me yet, if your story is what I think your story is,” she said as she walked in the door and through the house to the kitchen.
Margot poured them both glasses of wine while Sydney took down plates from the cabinet.
“Oh, there is, don’t worry,” Margot said. She closed her eyes and breathed in. “Whatever you’ve brought me smells amazing.”
“Of course it’s amazing, this is me we’re talking about,” Sydney said. She took a stack of boxes out of the bag she’d carried inside. “I could tell from the sound of your voice that you needed carbs.”
She slid a mound of pasta onto a plate, and handed it to Margot.
“Carbonara, like the doctor ordered,” Sydney said.
Margot looked down at her plate and smiled genuinely for the first time since Elliot and Luke had walked into her office that morning.
“Carbonara. Yes. This is just what I needed. How did you know?”
Sydney handed her a fork and waved at her to start eating.
“I always know.”
Margot sat down on one of the high-backed barstools at her counter and dug her fork into the plate of pasta. She took one very large bite, and sighed.
“I love you so much,” she said to her friend as soon as she finished chewing.
Sydney slid her own plate of pasta onto the counter next to Margot and sat down.
“I know you do,” she said. “There’s also bread and cheese and charcuterie, obviously. But we can’t let the pasta get cold. Eat.”
Margot ate. The pasta was perfectly cooked, the pancetta was crispy, every single noodle was coated in just the right amount of sauce . . . this was bliss.
She put her fork down after she had inhaled half the plate, and took a sip of wine.
“Thank you,” she said to Sydney. “For the pasta, and for letting me eat before I started talking.”
Normally, she would have been delighted to tell Sydney about her unexpected hookup with a twenty-eight-year-old. She’d even thought on her drive to work this morning about how fun it would be to spill the details of this escapade to Sydney, to have her cackle and take credit for it and say she told her so. They would have laughed about his I thought I dreamed you line, debated whether she should text him or not, Sydney would have toasted her for this, and the whole thing would have felt even more fun.
Of course, it wouldn’t have happened exactly like that, since the only reason Margot knew Luke was twenty-eight was because she’d seen his birth date on his employment forms today.
She sighed.
“Okay. So. Yes, I went home with that guy last night. Luke. He kissed me outside of the Barrel.” Sydney grinned, and Margot couldn’t stop herself from grinning back. “And then I told him that we couldn’t do that there, that too many people know me around here.” Thank God she’d said that so quickly, at least. “And his place was closer, so we went there.”
Sydney shook her head, her smile huge.
“I didn’t think you had it in you.”
She wished she hadn’t.
“Yeah, well, just wait. The sex was . . . great. Unfortunately.” Or would it have been more awkward if the sex had been bad and he’d shown up at work today? Yes and no—at least then she wouldn’t have felt like her body was on fire whenever he looked at her. “He drove me home this morning—a very gentlemanly move, since he lives only six blocks away, which he knew.”
She took another sip of wine. And then another. She needed fortification for this next part of the story.
“And?” Sydney prompted her.
She took a deep breath.
“And. Two hours after he dropped me off here, he walked into Noble Family Vineyards to start his new job as a tasting room associate. The job my brother hired him for on Friday, when I wasn’t there.”
Sydney’s mouth dropped open.
“Yes, that was also my response when he walked into my office with Elliot this morning,” Margot said. “Elliot told me he hired a ‘William something,’ not Luke Williams! Granted, I didn’t know his last name until this morning, but still!”
Sydney got up and walked back into the kitchen and picked up the cheese and charcuterie.
“I’m glad I got all of this cheese, we’re going to need it after this story.” She sat back down and reached for a cracker. “How did he react when he saw you?”
Margot considered that.
“He seemed as shocked as I was.” She took another sip of wine. “This afternoon, he walked into my office and offered to quit.”
Sydney spread some gooey cheese on a cracker and handed it to her.
“What did you say?”
Margot sighed.
“I said no. What else could I say? I can’t tell someone who works for me to quit his job because we had sex—that seems like an employment-law nightmare. And plus, as much as I want him to go away and never come back, Elliot actually liked him, and despite how annoyed I was about Elliot hiring someone without me—which, as we see now, I was correct to think was a disaster waiting to happen—the whole reason we’re hiring more staff is because I pushed to expand our tasting room. Though Luke told me last night that he was only in town for a few months; I never would have hired him if I’d known that. But I’m sure if he quit, Elliot would figure out a way to blame this on me.” She made a face. “To be fair, he would be right to do so.”
Sydney looked at her hard.
“Do you really want Luke to go away and never come back? I saw that way you smiled when you talked about last night.”
Margot let out a long breath.
“Of course I do! Do you think it’s going to be fun for me to have him around? At the winery? With my brother there? Because I can tell you right now, today was the opposite of fun.” She stared down at her plate of pasta. “He gave me his number this morning. Right before I got out of the car. Told me to text him, said he wanted to see me again.”
Sydney set her glass down.
“Were you going to text him?”
Of course she was going to ask that question.
“I had decided not to,” she said. “I think.”
But . . . if Luke hadn’t walked into her office today, and she’d gotten into bed alone tonight, and thought about the night before, what would she have done? Would she have pulled that number out of her wallet? She didn’t know.
“He asked me that, too. After he offered to quit.” She saw the question in Sydney’s eyes. “I told him it was best if I didn’t answer.”
Sydney laughed.
“I can just hear the way you would have said that, too. With your firm, CEO, taking-no-shit voice.” The smile dropped from her face and she pushed the garlic bread toward Margot. “I’m sorry. This sucks. And it was my fault.”
Margot shook her head.
“It wasn’t your fault. How could you know the guy you dared me to talk to was my new employee? Plus, I’m the one who demanded to go home with him.” She dropped her head into her hands. “But wow, I can’t even describe how I felt when Luke and Elliot walked into my office this morning.” She sat back up. “Calling it a nightmare doesn’t even do it justice. It felt like one of the worst kinds of anxiety dreams. You know the ones, where you’re back in high school and you have one more class to take before you can graduate and you’re trying to figure out how you messed up your life so much that you’re back in that terrible place? Except this was me, in my office this morning, in a great mood after last night and a good work call this morning and with this little secret smile on my face and hum in my body, and then the reason for the smile and the hum walks into my office with my brother and he’s my new employee.” She grabbed the garlic bread and tore it in half. “Business school did not prepare me for this.”
Sydney grinned. “Okay, but you say that every week about your job.”
Margot took a bite of garlic bread that was at least seventy percent just roasted garlic.
“I know, but when I said it those other times, I meant they need to do a better job prepping people to work in small businesses and on shoestring budgets and to figure out how to deal with natural disasters. Now I mean it on a more . . . global scale.”
Sydney was silent for a while. She ate cheese while Margot demolished the garlic bread. What if she asked her favorite business school professor, whom she’d reached out to a number of times with questions, about this?
Hi, Professor Karlan,
Hope you’re well! Just a quick question today. What would you advise if—unbeknownst to me—I slept with my newest employee the night before he started work at the winery?
Thanks so much for any assistance! Can’t wait to host you in the tasting room soon!
Margot Noble
She tried to picture the look on her professor’s face upon receipt of that email, and failed completely.
Margot let out a sigh and turned to Sydney.
“How did I get myself into this? No, wait, that’s the wrong question, I always get myself into things like this. Better question: What am I going to do?”
“What you always do,” Sydney immediately replied. “Put your game face on, get up and go to work tomorrow, and make the world bend to your will.”