47 What Are You Doing?!

"What on earth are you doing?" Justin hissed once Emily left for the bathroom.

Alexa hadn't been acting like herself since they entered the restaurant. She had been polite enough but was definitely putting on some sort of show. This must be part of the plan she mentioned before but she refused to tell him what all it entailed, saying that if he knew his reactions wouldn't be right.

"Being brilliant," she replied. "Didn't you see your little girlfriend? She left because she was about to start steaming from the ears!"

Justin was taken aback. "What do you mean?"

Alexa sighed and shook her head at him. "You really are hopeless. Justin, I'm pretending to be a brat to gauge her feelings for you. She wouldn't be so mad right now if she didn't care about you at least a little."

"You ordered all that food just to piss her off?!"

She smirked. "Actually, I mostly ordered all that food to piss  you off. I'm doing you a huge favor here and you're still doubting my methods. I study people's motivations, remember?

"No offense, but yours are so naïve and innocent that you keep shooting yourself in the foot by doing dumb things you don't think through. Everything I've done since coming here is to figure out hers. The best way to see what her intentions are with you is for her to see you be upset."

Justin thought it through. "Has anyone ever told you that you're an evil genius?"

"Only once before this but it was one of my favorite compliments ever," she said with a laugh, leaning back leisurely in her chair. "I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart, you know. I meant to ask you earlier but forgot. Our last deal was just for me showing up here today. If you want the full extent of my matchmaking services you have to do something else for me."

"What?"

"You told me before about how I should invest. I looked into the startups you told me you helped out before and they're doing really well. I'm not so good with finances. I want you to help me with my investments so I can be set for life. Once I'm done with school I want to be able to do whatever I want with my career without having to worry about bills," Alexa explained. "I believe that friendship should mutually benefit both parties. So what do you say?"

He didn't agree with her views on friendship at all. Friends weren't supposed to be like business transactions. He had more than enough of those in his life already.

Half his mouth lifted into a wry smile. "You know, I would have helped you with that anyway. All you had to do was ask."

She looked at him funny before smiling at him. "For someone as smart as you are, you're awfully altruistic."

"Emily taught me that," he admitted.

He hadn't been remotely interested in how other people felt before she came along. She still held all of his affection but he never would have given so much money to other people to help them out if he hadn't realized how happy people could be from the smallest things after he started leaving her those secret admirer gifts in high school.

"I think she's good for you. Without her you would probably be a walking computer without a heart."

"If I'm a walking computer without a heart, what does that make you?" he asked. She had clearly expressed her opinion on his emotional intelligence so he was curious where she ranked herself on that scale.

"Me?" Alexa thought about it a moment. "I channel my heart into my craft. I like people and have fun spending time with them but I don't depend on them to be happy."

That reminded Justin of how he was before meeting Emily. He was largely indifferent to people—even his own family—until she came along and he realized how happy she made him.

"That's a sad way to live."

Alexa shrugged, unbothered, before shoveling more mac and cheese into her mouth. "Talk about something else. She's coming back," she said with her mouth full.

As Emily approached their table, looking much calmer than before, he blurted, "Did you know that octopuses have three hearts?"

"Really?" Alexa asked. "Where did you pull that fact from?"

"Before my little cousin was obsessed with horses she was into octopuses," Justin mumbled with a red face. He really couldn't have chosen anything more random to say but she was the one who told him to change the topic and it was the first thing that popped into his head.

"I imagine octopuses are easier to find in San Francisco than horses," Emily said conversationally as she sat back down.

He looked at her gratefully for going along with his randomness. "Yeah, we went to the aquarium a few summers ago and Sam had to drag her away."

"How is Sam?" Alexa asked coyly. "I haven't seen her forever."

Justin was confused. He had only mentioned Sam to her once when they were discussing his hopelessness when it came to girls.

"She's doing well. She recently started looking into schools to apply for because she'll be a senior next year."

"Sam's his cousin," she said helpfully to Emily. "We hit it off when she was here this summer. Justin said we're just alike, didn't you?"

She turned to him with a devious smile. He actually did say something like that but in a completely different context so he nodded.

"I know who Sam is," Emily said crisply.

The more upset Emily looked, the smugger Alexa got until Justin was at his wit's end. Looking between those two was like watching a chess match that Emily was clearly losing.

He knew this was part of Alexa's plan but what exactly was her end goal here? She already said that getting Emily mad on his behalf would help her figure out what she thought of him but Alexa had already done that so he wasn't sure why she insisted on making the girl he liked even madder.