Honey on Your Mind Read Free

slowly toward the lobby. I could see the taxi waiting outside.
    After standing by the front door for a few moments, I finally decided it was time to let it go.
    As the cab slipped away in the early morning sunlight, I waved silently at the building I’d called home for so long. Then I turned to face forward, trying to shift my focus to the adventure ahead.
    • • •
    “It’s beautiful, Waverly, I’m really impressed.” Jake ran his hand along the crown moldings in the living room and looked up at the high ceilings.
    “Isn’t it great?” I walked around and began to point. “I thought I could put the couch here, the TV here, my bookcase here, and my desk here. What do you think?” I’d downsized toa one-bedroom apartment, so my living room was now going to double as an office, as well as a temporary warehouse for all my Honey products. To date, I’d been fulfilling the few orders I got with sporadic trips to the post office, but I hoped all that would change once I met with Andie’s cousin, Paige.
    He nodded and put his hand on the wall. “That’ll work. By the way, I really like the colors you chose.”
    “I know, aren’t they great? Isn’t it all great? I’ve always wanted to live in an apartment with walls in various shades of green and blue. I can’t believe I—”
    I stopped talking and put my hands over my mouth.
    “Oh my God, wait, that reminds me. I have a joke to tell you.”
    He laughed. “Do you really have to?”
    I pointed at him. “You be nice. Wanna hear it?”
    “Is that a rhetorical question?”
    “Maybe.”
    He walked toward his suitcase. “I’ll let you tell your joke if you let me give you something first, OK?”
    My eyes brightened. “Give me something?”
    “It’s nothing big, just a little housewarming gift.” Next to his suitcase was a medium-sized shopping bag. He picked it up and handed it to me.
    “For me?”
    “For you.”
    I opened the bag and looked inside.
    It was a plant.
    A plastic one.
    I laughed and pulled it out. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
    He put a hand on my shoulder. “Just trying to stop the carnage. I’ve seen what you can do.”
    I squeezed his hand and set the plant down. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. So are you ready for my new joke?”
    “Do I have a choice?”
    “Of course not. So there are these two green olives just hanging out on an olive tree, chatting about their day, when all of a sudden one of them plummets to the ground.” I pretended to be an olive plummeting downward.
    Jake nodded.
    “So the one on the ground is just lying there on its back, stunned, and the one still safely attached to the tree yells down to it, ‘Are you OK?’”
    Jake nodded again.
    “And the one on the ground yells up at him, ‘OLIVE, OLIVE!’”
    Jake didn’t say anything.
    I held my palms up. “You get it? O-live, I’ll live ?”
    He smiled. “Oh, I got it. I’m tempted to jump out the window and plummet to the ground myself, but I got it.”
    “Hey now, you know that was funny.” I pushed his shoulder.
    “Don’t quit your day job, Miss Bryson. So what were you saying about your walls?”
    I was about to reply, but when I looked into his eyes, I momentarily forgot what I was going to say. Jake’s eyes, an intense blue that put my walls to shame for even trying to associate themselves with the same color family, had a way of doing that to me. I needed to come up with a new color to describe them. Plain old blue just didn’t seem sufficient. Hot-guy blue? Babe-ilicious blue? Nothing seemed appropriate.
    “Waverly, you there?”
    I blinked. “Sorry, spaced out for a second. Um, so anyhow, I was about to say that I can’t believe I found a neighborhood and an apartment I love as much as what I had back home. I swear I’m never moving again though. Moving sucks .”
    Jake looked at me as if he were going to speak, but instead he turned to check out the walls again. The landlord had done right by me, and the colors gave