I Pursued the Wrong Guy and He Became Obsessed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Opening Bid
I take the mic at the hotel's anniversary gala and confess to Thatcher Kincaid in front of two hundred phones, and he turns me down in public, but a text from him ends the night: do not come back tomorrow.
Two hundred guests were holding champagne when I walked onto the stage and took the microphone out of the host's hand.
"Sorry," I told him. "Two minutes. It's a love thing."
He let go. People usually do when I'm smiling.
The banner over the ballroom said Kincaid Grand, Forty Years.
Below it, at the foot of the steps, stood Thatcher Kincaid in a black tuxedo.
I had never spoken to him. I had never been closer to him than the far end of the lobby.
Ten minutes earlier, at the coat check, a voice in my head had said, "Target located. Affection: zero percent. Probability of success: ninety-seven percent. Relax."
The voice had pulled me into this city in March, handed me a night job at the front desk of this hotel, and given me sixty days to win Thatcher's love.
If I failed, it would erase me.
I'd said it sounded like a piece of cake.
I spent four years in a call center selling renewals to people who had already said no.
Nine out of ten said no first. I closed four of those by the third ask.
A no is just an opening bid. I have never believed anything else.
"Good evening," I said into the microphone. "I'm June Abernathy, third-shift front desk. Mr. Kincaid, I'm going to marry you, and I'd like to start with dinner."
The ballroom laughed. That was fine. Laughing is how people say they're listening.
Thatcher did not laugh.
"I know you didn't plan for this," I said. "That's okay. I did enough for both of us."
I pointed at the quartet in the corner.
"Could we get something slow?"
The quartet leader looked at the cellist, and the cellist looked at the floor. They played two bars of a birthday song and stopped.
"Close enough," I said. "Thank you."
Phones were rising all over the room.
I pulled my laminated close sheet out of my clutch and held it up.
"This is my record. Sixty-one percent of the time, when someone says no, they just aren't done talking. So if you're going to say it, Mr. Kincaid, I'll wait."
Thatcher walked up the three steps.
He crossed the stage and put his hand on the microphone beside mine. He didn't take it. He lowered it, so only I and the first four tables could hear.
His face was stone.
"No," he said.
"Okay," I said. "That's one."
"I'm not worth this. I'm not good enough for you." His voice was low and even. "Please go ruin some other man's night."
Somebody at table two said, "Oh my God."
I looked at him and saw what I was meant to see, which was a man putting up a front.
Nobody says please to a person they actually want gone.
"That's an opening bid," I said.
The chime sounded in my head.
"Public rejection logged," the voice said. "Affection: three percent. Penalty for public failure: one shock."
The shock went through me from my teeth to my heels. My knees folded and I caught the edge of the podium.
Thatcher's eyes went straight to my left temple.
He took half a step toward me. His hand came up.
Then he stopped, put the hand in his pocket, and looked at the carpet.
Nobody else had moved. Nobody else had heard anything.
I noticed it, and then I was too busy trying to stand up to think about it.
A hand slid under my elbow.
"Come on, dear," a woman said quietly. "Before somebody puts your face on the internet."
She was in her fifties, with a silver bob and pearl earrings and a gray wrap over one arm.
She put the wrap around my shoulders and walked me down the steps. She steered me through the people, past the phones, through a door I hadn't known was there.
She had a staff key card in her hand before we reached it.
"I'm Constance Kincaid," she said in the service corridor. "I own this building, and I'm fairly sure you work in it."
"Third floor," I said. "Front desk. I'm so sorry, Mrs. Kincaid."
"Don't be. Drink some water. And, dear?"
"Yes?"
"My son does say no first. He always has." She patted my arm and handed me a cab voucher. "Go home."
I went out the back into the alley.
It was cold. The wrap smelled like expensive soap, and my knees were still shaking.
My phone buzzed with a number I didn't know.
"Do not come back tomorrow."
The voice chimed again.
"Affection: eleven percent. Plus eight. Reason: unknown."
I stood there under the alley light, reading the text a second time.
Day one of sixty was over, and Thatcher Kincaid had just written to me first.
So I texted back, "See you at nine."
Then I took the cab voucher and went home.
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