Falling for the Fire

Chapter 11

I arrived to the potential location the next morning, looking around to see if I was the first one there. I had left a little earlier this morning with the hopes of avoiding Brooklyn's attempt at taking over again.

Thankfully, I didn't see anyone else in the area.

It was a large park with a lot of space to set all of the booths and stages up, and they also had a number of pavilions of their own.

I walked a little ways down the path, and was startled when I heard a voice behind me.

"Trying to beat me here, are you?"

I abruptly turned around and was face to face with Brooklyn.

"Jesus you scared me," I said breathlessly.

"Sorry," she shrugged.

"And no," I said firmly, "I wasn't."

That was a lie, but I wasn't about to admit it to her.

"If you say so," she responded, "what are your initial thoughts on this place?"

"I think it's pretty goo -"

"I'm not so sure about it," she cut me off before I could even finish my sentence.

I sighed to myself and felt my jaw clench.

"And why is that?" I asked.

"It's too spread out," she said as she slowly spun in a circle and looked around us, "people would have to walk too far."

"But you need room," I retorted, "we're going to have hundreds of vendors and all sorts of entertainment set up."

"Sure you need room," she said, "but not so much room that people are walking around forever to get to where they want to go."

"It wouldn't be that far, it would just -"

I was cut off by the arrival of Eliana, along with a few other of my coworkers.

"Morning," she said, "this place, huh?"

She looked around at the park and my gaze shifted down to the ground. How were these two so infuriating this early in the day?

I cleared my throat as I looked back up at her.

"It's just one of the places that we're looking at," I said, "nothing is set in stone."

"I would hope not," Eliana said with a sarcastic laugh.

My fingers clenched tightly to the folder in my hand as my irritation grew.

I'd worked with her before, and she was always a bitch but she was never this bad. She'd already taken my boyfriend from me, did she really need to do this shit every day on top of it?

I knew she was doing it on purpose, she wouldn't have been making so many bitchy comments if she wasn't.

Once everyone arrived at the park, I found the person that we were meeting and they took us around to look at everything. I still thought that it was a good option, but apparently not everyone shared that opinion.

Both Eliana and Brooklyn looked less than impressed the whole time we were there, and I was over it. I had to tune them out, but that was much easier said than done.

I had no idea how Brooklyn was so good at planning events when she seemed to hate everything that wasn't her idea.

Once we were done looking at everything, we all went back to the office and into the conference room.

"Don't we also have that big dinner party we're supposed to plan?" Eliana asked as we sat down.

Each year, there was a big event where a number of the vendors prepared food and drinks for the planning committees to try out.

"Yes," I responded curtly, "well, kind of, we don't really plan that one, we just attend."

"Do we get a plus one for that?" She asked me with a polite but obviously fake grin.

This was miserable.

"Um, yeah I'm pretty sure that we do," I responded, keeping my voice as even-keeled as I could, "I'll have to double check."

I obviously knew why she was asking, and I just couldn't wait to see her and Owen together.

"Yes, please do," she said.

I gave her a small nod and went back to discussing the venue options, which is what we were supposed to be focused on. Eliana just couldn't help herself, she was taking every opportunity that she possibly could to take a dig at me or bring up her and Owen.

We all eventually divided up into smaller groups to work on different things, and I purposely put myself with Brooklyn. I wasn't going to let her pull anything with me again.

"Well I would say you were stuck with me," she said, "but you did this to yourself."

"Yeah," I shrugged, "and?"

"Nothing," she shook her head, "just making an observation."

Any time I was near her, I could still feel tension between us. I was unsure if it was just the awkwardness still leftover from our first encounter, or if it was something else.

I wasn't sure that I wanted to know, but I needed to get over it.

We were going to start looking at other location options, and trying to narrow down which ones we wanted to look at. We clearly hadn't agreed on the one from this morning, so I had a bad feeling about how this was going to go.

"Okay here's the list we have so far," I said, setting a pile of papers down in front of us.

Brooklyn began to sift through them, quietly saying "no" to herself as she set a number of them aside.

"Okay," I sighed, "what's wrong with those?"

"This one is too spaced out, this one doesn't have enough space, this one doesn't have many spots to set up the live music, this one has too many buildings around, it would be a logistical nightmare," she said, "do you need me to keep going?"

"No," I mumbled as I shook my head, "but I don't agree with you about most of those reasons."

"Alright," she said, "tell me why then, I'm open to a discussion."

"Well I would hope so," I said sarcastically, "you already know how I feel about the one that you said was too spaced out, but if you think that then how can you say that this one doesn't have enough space?"

I pushed one of the sheets of paper out of her pile and back over in front of us, waiting for her response.

"Because it doesn't," she said plainly, "and if you think it does, you're wrong."

"Excuse you?" I questioned.

"I've done events like this before," she responded, "so I know what we need."

"Just because it's not your idea doesn't mean it can't work," I quietly snapped back.

She looked down at the table, smirking slightly to herself before looking back up at me to respond.

"I didn't say it can't, but it won't."

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