Beautiful Stranger

considered calling Max, but the answer to one man problem was never to create another. He might have wanted dinner the other night, but it wasn’t because he wanted depth. He wasn’t going to be that guy, either.
    Monday and Tuesday flew by. Wednesday was a wall of meetings with new clients, and it felt like every minute ticked by in the span of a year. Thursday was worse in a completely opposite way: Chloe and Bennett left to take a long weekend over the Fourth of July holiday, and George went home to Chicago. The offices grew silent, and although we were a booming business, my entire team had been strangely too efficient. I had nothing to do and all around me the halls echoed.
    Why am I here , I texted Chloe, not even expecting an answer.
    I asked you the same thing before I left yesterday.
    My footsteps echo in the hallway when I get more coffee. I’ve had enough coffee now to stay awake for a month.
    So text your beautiful stranger. Booty call. Use that energy for something useful.
    It doesn’t work that way.
    My phone buzzed immediately.
    What does that mean? How does it work??
    I slipped my phone back in my purse and sighed, staring out the window. I hadn’t told Chloe anything else about the arrangement with my stranger, but I could see her patience wearing thin. Thankfully she wasn’t in town; I could put my phone away and keep the secret all mine, at least for a few more days.

    New York weather in June was beautiful, but the moment July arrived it was unbearable. I began to feel like I never got away from the mazes of high-rises and more than a little like I was being baked in a brick oven. For the first time since I’d moved, I missed home. I missed the wind off the lake, tunnels of air so strong they would push you backward as you walked. I missed the green sky of summer storms and outlasting them at my parents’ house, hunkered down in the basement for hours playing pinball with my dad.
    The best part of being in Manhattan, however, was how I could just walk aimlessly for a while and randomly stumble upon something interesting. This city had everything: yakisoba delivered at three in the morning, men who found warehouses full of mirrors for sexual escapades, and pinball in a bar in walking distance from my corporate office. When I saw the hint of the machine’s lights through the window, I faltered, feeling like the city had given me precisely what I needed.
    Maybe more times than I really gave it credit for.
    I ducked into the dark building, inhaling the familiar smell of popcorn and old beer. In the middle of a sunny Thursday, the bar was dark enough to make me feel like it was midnight outside, that everyone else was sleeping or in here, drinking and playing pool. The machine up front that I’d seen was a newer one, with polished levers and emo punk music I had no interest in. But in the back corner stood an older model with KISS in all of their painted-faces glory, and Gene Simmons’s mouth open, tongue darted down.
    I made change for several dollars at the bar, ordered a beer, and made my way through the small crowd of people to the game in the back.
    My father had been a collector. When I was five and wanted a puppy, he got me a Dalmatian, and then another, and then somehow we ended up with a huge house full of deaf dogs barking at each other.
    Then there were classic Corvairs, mostly bent-up frames. Dad rented a garage for those.
    Next came old trumpets. Art from a local sculptor. And, finally, pinball machines.
    Dad had about seventy of the machines in storage and another seven or eight in the game room at home. In fact, it was during a tour of the game room that Dad and Andy had first bonded. Although Dad had no way of knowing that Andy had never played pinball in his life, Andy had acted like Dad’s collection was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen and managed to sound like he’d been playing since he could reach the levers. Dad had been smitten, and at the time I’d been thrilled. I was only twenty-one and wasn’t sure how my parents would feel about a boyfriend who was almost ten years older than me. But Dad immediately did everything he could—with his time and his checkbook—to support our relationship and Andy’s ambitions. My father was always easy to win over and, once won, his esteem was almost impossible to lose.
    Unless, of course, he ran into you while you were out at a romantic dinner with a woman who wasn’t his daughter. Despite what my father told me and