She looked up, surprised to see me. “How do you know it’s Jonah?”
“You get heart eyes for exactly one person, babe. And it’s not me.”
She tried valiantly to suppress her smile, but alas, she could not. “He’s taking me on a trip in a couple of weeks. To Charleston.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Bougie.”
She wiggled and rapidly stomped her feet in a bursting-with-excitement kind of way. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “I think he’s going to propose.”
“No way.”
She set her phone down and placed one hand demurely over the other. “I don’t know for sure. But he booked a hotel that overlooks the water, and we’re doing a boat ride on Sunday afternoon that’s supposed to take us out to an island for a private picnic. I mean, it sounds propose-y, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds very propose-y. Have you thought about what you’re going to say?”
Her eyes bulged. “Yes, Ada. Obviously, yes.”
I snickered, happy to see her so adamant. “I’m kidding. Your yes is so easy he could probably just plan the wedding and surprise you at the church and you wouldn’t care.”
She dropped her chin into her hand. “That’s actually true. Do you think that’s what he’s doing? Have you been invited to a wedding?”
“Not yet. But I better get more than an invite when it does happen. Not saying I need to be maid of honor, but if you try to keep me out of the bridal party, I’ll pick out my own dress and show up anyway. Plus, Claire, Lola, and I will throw the most epic bachelorette party.”
“Speaking of, we need to plan Lola’s.”
“Mmm.”
“We can make it fun,” Eliza coaxed. “Just because she’s pregnant doesn’t mean we can’t do anything fun.”
“Mmmph.”
She threw a pen at me. “You’re a lush.”
“I work in a bar. My life’s passion is booze. I can’t help it.”
“Speaking of.” She waggled her eyebrows. “How was the whiskey tasting the other night?”
I felt my nose wrinkle in distaste without my permission. It had been an absolute disaster. I’d tried to introduce one of my dating app matches to whiskey, thinking a tasting with multiple options would be the perfect place for him to find something he liked. I knew he’d never really had a taste for it from our texting chats, but I assumed that was just because he hadn’t found the right one.
Two hours and a million minutes of him complaining about how badly whiskey burned his throat then finally confessing he doesn’t ever drink, I had to call him an Uber because he was too drunk to stand.
It had been an awkward goodbye. He’d clearly been trying to impress me. But nothing was sexy about being able to drink your date under the table after only a few samples. Not to mention I’d had to sort through the guilt of feeling like I’d taken advantage of the poor guy.
For legal purposes, I stood by the fact that I didn’t coerce him into anything. He got hammered all by himself. But inner Ada felt more than a little responsible.
“Uh,” I said to Eliza, “anticlimactic.”
She pouted. “Well, that’s too bad. I had high hopes for Tinder Teddy.”
Also, his name was Teddy. That should have been red flag number one. “All the good guys are obviously taken. Or a myth to begin with. Maybe something invented by the patriarchy in order to keep women willing to sleep with them in hopes of tracking one down.”
“We’re not a total myth,” Charlie’s low, sultry voice teased from the doorway.
I hadn’t noticed him walk in. Turning slowly to face him and ignoring the sudden quickening of my heart, I said, “You’re exactly the problem.”
His stupid eyes got all innocent and big. “Me? What did I do?”
Standing up slowly, I picked invisible lint off the front of my faux leather mini skirt and mentally mapped my escape. “You lure girls in with your sex appeal and we get all excited because we think we’ve found ‘the one.’ Only to get kicked out of bed in the morning when you can’t remember our name.”
