After steeping two hot teas, I handed her one. “So, I finished The Law of Attraction. Are you ready to talk about our books?”

She looked down into the steaming hot water and cringed. “Don’t kill me, but I haven’t finished The Alchemist.”

“Slacking on our arrangement?” I teased.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ve had a hard time concentrating lately. I’ve been a bit too preoccupied to read. I know I said I’d have it finished.”

Whatever could be preoccupying you, Amber?

“I’m just kidding,” I said. “It’s a book. It will always be there when you’re ready to open it again. But I’m ready to talk about The Law of Attraction.”

She wiped her mouth and eagerly gave me her full attention. “What did you think of it?”

“Well, the biggest takeaway is that if you want something in life, you can’t focus on the problem. You have to focus on the solution, or rather, focus on what you truly want. When we stress, we dwell on the things that bother us, and the more attention we give to those things, the more we attract that negativity into our lives. Whether someone believes in the attraction component or not, at the very least, the book teaches the obvious, which is that dwelling on negative shit gets you nowhere.”

“Do you believe that you can actually attract something by focusing on it?”

I rubbed my chin and thought about it for a moment. “No way to know for sure. That’s a mystery of life. But now that I’m more consciously aware of that possibility, I’ll let you know if I experience it happening to me.”

She sighed. “I love the concept of the book, but honestly, I’ve found it hard to implement. Even trying hard to block something out of your mind is still inadvertently focusing on it. It’s scary to me to think that if I’m lamenting over Rory, or telling myself that I’ll never find anyone else…that I could be attracting that exact situation.”

“Okay, so, just in case that’s true…try to think about something you really want and practice focusing on that instead.”

She looked at me in silence then asked, “What if what you want is something you can never have?”

“Well, that’s what you’re telling yourself. That may not be true. Maybe you should try to think more positively.”

Was she referring to me, or was that just my ego?

Either way, my advice would have been the same, but now I was left feeling rattled and wondering what was really going on in her pretty, little head.

Today was probably one of the most confusing days of my life. There was no doubt I still had feelings for Emily. It was so good to see her, and I was immediately reminded of all of the reasons I fell for her in the first place. She seemed genuinely sorry about the way things had ended between us and made it clear that she wanted a second chance.

When she’d asked me to go back to her place, I almost budged. But I knew what going there would have meant. It seemed like forever since I’d been inside of a woman. I hadn’t slept with anyone since before moving to Boston. This was the longest I’d gone without sex since I was a teenager, and truthfully I was nearing my breaking point. But I somehow resisted, deciding instead not to take advantage of the offer.

While a part of me suspected that it wasn’t exactly the end of the story for Emily and me, I couldn’t ignore the fact that Amber had been on my mind the entire day. When she appeared at the Common, something shifted. Things were awkward in a way that was different from just running into your friend.

Emily sensed it, too. She asked me if there was anything going on between Amber and me. I told her the truth: Amber and I were just friends.

So, why did it not seem as simple as that answer?***Emily and I decided to have dinner in Chinatown.

Looking around at the bamboo-style wooden décor and waterfalls at the restaurant, I dragged my fork over the Singapore noodles.

As I gazed out at a window across the street that was dressed with ducks laying upside down in a row, Emily interrupted my thoughts.

“You seem like something’s on your mind.”

“Just thinking about work.”

“Has it been busy?”

“Yeah. I have limited time here to get what I need to get done, so there’s a lot of pressure.”

Of course, work wasn’t really the subject of my obsessive thoughts tonight. I still didn’t know what I was going to do about Saturday. The truth was, I was seriously considering just letting the Gentleman Nine thing blow away. Maybe I’d send Amber a message from the G9 email account cancelling tomorrow night, or maybe I could just not show up at all. I honestly had no idea how to handle it. And now with Emily in the picture, things were even more complicated.