Her jaw dropped, and Vinicio snarled, but I didn’t give a fuck. I swerved around them without another word and rejoined Iko at our table.
“Sorry, that took longer than I planned.”
“No worries, my friend. Did something happen?”
“Nah, nothing important. Nothing important at all.”
TWENTY
NAOMI
Devil’s in the Details
It was the day of the mixer, and I wanted to throw up.
“It’s going to go great,” Carolina reassured me as I helped her out of the car. I was beginning to think that my being a nervous wreck was actually helping my friend. Although this wasn’t her first time out of her apartment since that fateful outage, it was by far the biggest event she’d been to since puberty, and I really wanted it to go well.
Not just for me, of course, but for everyone who might be attending. We’d had a few RSVPs, so I had hope that it wouldn’t be a complete bomb, but one never knew.
“I hope so,” I answered as I closed my car door behind her, still gripping her hand. Physical touch helped ground my friend, so I tried to make sure to do it whenever we were out and about. That was still a rare occurrence, and only happened maybe once a month, but it was incredible, considering where my best friend had started. “I really do.”
We’d all put so much work into it. Between online forums, flyers, and word of mouth, I felt like we’d really crammed as much as we could into the time we had. And speaking of the time that we had, I couldn’t believe that Rowan and I were approaching six months of being a couple.
Absolutely wild.
It was insane to me that it had been eight months since we first started chatting on the app, eight months since I thought I would be single forever. It hadn’t even been a full year yet, but we’d already passed so many milestones. We’d spent our first Halloween together. And although Rowan didn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas, we’d shared that as well.
We’d welcomed in the new year. Spent countless nights counting the stars, and visited more restaurants than I could count. And through all of that, I’d fallen far deeper in love than I’d ever expected. It was perfect. Well,nearlyperfect, because there was one thing that was driving me absolutely batty.
And it was that Rowan was so fuckingSLOW!
Not his intellect. No, that was as sharp as ever. It was just that after about three months of dating, I realized that the timeline for things was just straight up different when dating someone who was over a hundred years old.
It was easy to forget my boyfriend’s years when he looked younger than me, but whenever I got worried that we hadn’t dropped the L-word, or even mentioned a possibility of moving in together, I reminded myself that not only was he from a different time, but he also genuinely experienced said time differently than I did.
Besides, we were also insanely busy between being Tweety’s main support and preparing for the mixer. So, it wasn’t like we weren’t doing really important things together. And I supposed thatIcould be the one to drop the L-bomb first, but it was the first time in my life that a relationship had lasted so long, and Ididn’t want to ruin everything by pushing Rowan into something he wasn’t ready for.
Even if I really, really would like to tell him how I felt about him.
“You ready to head in?” I asked Carolina, bringing myself back to the task at hand. “I made sure we would be the first ones here, and we have a quiet room set aside only for me, you, and Rowan.”
“I’m fine, for the moment,” Carolina said with a lot of confidence. I could tell that some of it was put on, but not all of it, and that was a victory already. “Let’s head inside. Rowan should be here soon, right?”
He was usually my passenger princess, as it was hard to get a license when one immigrated to the USA about eighty years ago. Rowan had insisted he arrive with Iko. The cyclops could have Ubered to the event himself, but my boyfriend wanted them to get ready and arrive together, and me with Carolina. Almost like a bit of a prom. Was it silly? Potentially to some. But I thought it was sweet.
“Yeah, he should.” And I couldn’t wait to see him. Although we’d only been apart since he’d kissed me before he went to sleep at dawn, I already missed him intensely.
“That’ll be good.”
“Very.” I was quite tickled that my best friend liked my boyfriend so much. I didn’t knowwhatI would have done if the two were at odds, because they were the most important people in my life. “Let’s head inside.”
We were the first to arrive, just like I’d planned. Inside, I could see the decorations Rowan and I had been putting up every night for the past week in the light of day. Well, the light of dusk. The sun was setting, the rush of the day bowing out to the slower pace of twilight, and soon it would be dark enough that Rowan would rise and head to Iko’s.
“How many hours do we have until people are here?”
“I think an hour until the DJ. Food should be delivered in… two hours? That’s around when Rowan will get here, and then people who are on time will arrive about an hour after and the lates will arrive anywhere from one to two hours afterthat.” I looked to my friend uncertainly. “You’re sure that’s not too long for you? If you want to go back to your apartment and wait until later, I understand.”
But she shook her head. “I want to be here for my friend. Besides, we’ve been training for this. Time to see if all the hard work has paid off.”
