“No, Whitney. It wasn’t.”
“Then—”
“Shh.” I kissed her temple. Another word out of her and I was going to throw myself on the floor, naked and half dazed from that orgasm, and beg her to marry me. “Someday.”
Twenty-Four
Whitney
Rule Number Seventeen:
Be kind to everyone. You’ll get away with more.
“This is a nice place,don’t you think?” Brie bounced her knee under the table. The ice in my drink clattered against the glass from the force. “It’s nice but still casual. I wanted something casual. There are too many uptight, stuffy places in this city.”
I glanced around the hotel bar. It was newer; everything in the Seaport District was newer. And I couldn’t comment on whether it was any better than other hotel bars. I’d stayed in one hotel in Boston, which was an old jail of all things and that was when I flew in to interview for my job.
I forced a smile. “It’s great.” I desired as little information on the subject as possible, but I still asked, “Is he staying here?”
She never stopped scanning the room, her fingers twisting and tangling together. “I don’t know. He didn’t mention it.”
I leaned back and crossed my legs. We were a few minutes early, and though I knew next to nothing about this man, I fullyexpected him to show up late. What was ten minutes when he was already thirty-five years late?
I plowed through emails while we waited. There was a year-end staff survey coming up and it had a couple of questions about the professional standards. I was bracing for the worst. I knew the board of directors wouldn’t walk back this initiative, but it wouldn’t help anything if it was widely panned.
When I closed out of my email app, I realized our sperm donor was almost fifteen minutes late. Brie was still simmering in her seat. I opened my texts rather than commenting on either situation. Everyone was trying to coordinate holiday gatherings and I was at least thirty messages behind in the group chats.
When I set my phone down again, Brie hadn’t touched her drink and he was now fifty-three minutes late. She’d gnawed off her lip color and started twisting her necklace hard enough to leave red welts around her throat.
I knew it wasn’t a smart idea to rattle this cage, but I said, “Do you think we should?—”
“Where’s Henry tonight?” she asked.
As predicted, general surgery was kicking his ass. It was fun to watch. “He’s finishing up a procedure and then he’ll be in post-op for a bit.”
I was thankful his schedule had worked out this way. I loved that I could lean on him for crazy, messy things like this, but I also wanted to be able to process it on my own first. I needed a minute to figure it all out and put the pieces away in an order that I could manage before I could even consider reaching out for him.
“Do you think you guys will move in together? You basically live together already. Or you have for the past month. No, it’s been longer, hasn’t it? Maybe six weeks? Seven? I can’t keep track of your life but it’s been a while. Are you thinking about getting a new place or staying where you are? It’s a cute spotbut it’s small and he’s a big guy. Hmmm. Are you going to get married? I feel like you’d be into more of a nontraditional wedding. Would you even wear white? No veil, obviously. Have you thought about any of it?”
Brie rambled on, her words flying out so fast that I couldn’t possibly keep up—and that was the point. The more she spoke, the less room there was for us to acknowledge that our father was more than fashionably late.
I nodded while she explained all the reasons why an oatmeal-colored wedding dress would be “divine” with my coloring. I’d never thought about going to my own wedding. Even with all of my summer trips with Meri, I never let myself wonder how I’d plan my day. And I wasn’t wondering about it now, not beyond a passing curiosity about oatmeal dresses, but I did wonder what I was supposed to do now that I knew I was falling for Henry.
Or was it fallen?
I didn’t know. I was unfamiliar with the levels and stages of all this. I was still talking myself into believing that it was real and not a product of feel-good hormones, familiarity, and believing in fairy tales.
I didn’t want the fairy tale. That kind of perfection, where everything ended up tied in a pretty little bow, didn’t interest me. No one lived that way, not even the people who were honest-to-god happy like Acevedo and his wife or Emmerling and her husband.
If I was being honest, happy endings and pretty little bows scared me. They were always too good to be true and they didn’t last.
So, no, I wasn’t planning a wedding or thinking about finding a new house or doing anything other than taking each day as it came because I didn’t know when I’d be able to explain to Henry that the feelings I had for him had grown into something big andoverwhelming yet strangely permanent, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
There was a weak, rusty spot inside me that wanted more than anything to hear that I wasn’t alone in this, that Henry was falling for me too, and maybe we could be overwhelmed about it together. I didn’t need to hear those words from him though as the days slipped past and he came to occupy every corner of my life, I had to admit that I wanted them.
“Though you should grow this out,” Brie said, a shaky hand brushing at my hair. “You can’t do much with it being that length. A couple more inches will do the trick.”
Again, I couldn’t help it. “The trick for what?”
