Lauro is scrambling out his phone, sees no notifications, and frowns. “What did she say?” he asks Shan.
“She’s taking a cab home from the venue. We live in the same building.” She says that last bit to me, by way of explanation. “I’m not gonna miss a ride home!”
Shan leaves some cash for her drink and sweeps out of the bar.
Leaving me and Lauro.
Alone.
I turn, expecting him to be grinning like a tiger. But instead, he’s frowning down at his phone, sliding it away, catching my eye, andthengrinning like a tiger. “Guess we’ll have to finish Shan’s drink too,” he says on a sigh, as the bartender delivers three gorgeous tumblers, all in various shades of glowing amber.
What am I supposed to do? Run out the door? I lift my drink. “To life.” (The one that Vin wants me to live.)
Lauro lifts his drink and clinks mine. “To tonight,” he says. “With you.”
Shit.
Two hours later, I literally fall into my own home. My purse is caught on the doorknob and the floor has risen to greet my hands and knees.
“Whoa. Jesus.” That’s Vin.
Oh, good. He’s here to see this.
I’m up and trying to hop out of my ridiculous boots but I accidentally upend the umbrella stand.
“I hate the umbrella stand! Why are we constantly preparing for rain! It should be a sunscreen stand! Of course we were always gonna fall apart!”
Suddenly he’s next to me, one hand on my elbow. I jolt at the strength of it. He stands there like a pillar of cement, his eyes on my face, his hand steadying me.
I’m seized with the need to knock him off-kilter. I take two hands and plant them on his chest. Give my best attempt to push him over. The only thing that happens is all my breath comes out at once. Unfortunately in a gasp.
“Hey.” He’s very concerned.
He removes my hands from his chest and it topples me forward, my forehead planting itself against his sternum. I roll my head to one side and the world tips. I feel his palm press between my shoulder blades but I’m still spinning, still floating away.
“Roz. What happened?”
I’m dizzy and wretched. It hurts not to hold on to him.
So I do.
I tip up and grab him around the ribs like he’s a dock in a roiling ocean.
“I—” I gasp. “I—accidentally—went—on—a date.”
And then everything just releases. My nerves and dismay. Even the excitement I felt about going to the opening and spending time with my new art friends. It’s all in a slushy pile of disappointment and embarrassment, dripping off the boots I still haven’t managed to get off. I cry unseemly tears. There are bad noises and fingers twisted in his shirt and I can physically feel my makeup hotly displacing, melting across my face.
My lungs squeeze for breath and I try to calm myself a little, letting it out in a choppy stream. That’s when I register the rumble underneath my cheek. He’s shaking. Both hands around me and shaking. With laughter.
“Hey!” I tip my head up and sniffle. “Why are you laughing!”
There’s hair in my face and then it gets slid behind my ears. “I don’t know. I’m happy to see you.”
“I just told you I went on a date and you’relaughing? What the fuck is that! And I can’t get these fucking boots off! Don’t the people who make boots understand that eventually they must come off?”
He unclamps my hands from around his ribs and reclamps them against his shoulders, kneeling in front of me. The night we decided to get married, I stepped on a nail in the yard at his mother’s house, and he knelt in front of me just like this, studied the puncture wound, rose with me in his arms, carried me to the car.
A loudzip!jolts me from the memory. He easily slides one boot down my calf and off my foot. “Oh. Right. The zipper,” I grumble.
