“You may not.” He lifts his hands, a palm-up gesture to indicate our surroundings. It’s a we-had-that-awkward-walk-so-you-might-as-well-try gesture.
I readjust in my seat, a slight shift from side to side that’s really nothing more than a poor attempt at loosening the fabric of my dress, which right now feels sweat-sealed to my ass and thighs. I think about what to say, how to casually communicate thefeelingI’d had that day, seeing him and Avery together. How I’d felt later, when I was designing their program.
“It isn’t that I’ve never seen an uninterested party before,” I begin. “I used to sit in meetings with couples where a groom has never once looked up from his phone to have an opinion.”
“I don’t believe I brought my phone to our meeting.”
“They probably don’t have phones where you come from.”
In theMasterpiece Theatremovie you live in, I’m thinking, but he says, “I’m from Maryland.”
I cannot tell if he is joking. But if he was, he’s certainly blanked the humor from his face before I can recognize it, and now all that’s clear to me is that he wants to get back to business, and I guess I owe him that. None of my usual chipper, customer-servicey distractions.
“I guess I thought you were . . . um. You were . . . you had a way of being absent, I guess, even though you’d finally come. You seemed very unhappy, and honestly . . . she did, too. She hadn’t seemed that way before, when it was only the two of us meeting.”
He sits back. It’s maybe the first time his spine has made contact with the chair.
“You didn’t like anything she’d picked; I could tell just by looking at you. But then you blinked once and wiped all opinions from your face.” It had looked so familiar to me, that blanking. I’d seen it between my own parents for years and years, a practiced disconnection after one of their fights. “She wanted you to have an opinion, too. She was disappointed.”
“Yes,” he says, completely matter-of-fact. “I did disappoint her. Often.”
On instinct, I want to backtrack, to soften all the hard edges of this conversation, to keep the peace.
“Listen, I don’t know you. And I don’t know her. Maybe you’d had an off day. Or, I don’t know, maybe you had some kind of arrangement together, how your relationship worked, and I misunderstood. It was completely wrong of me to—”
“You didn’t misunderstand,” he says quickly. Then he moves his hand, curls his thumb and fingers around his cup, turns it in a move that’s precise, like a quarter-turn to mark the time. I don’t imagine he’ll say anything else, and I stare down at my own cup. I’m surprised when he speaks again, his voice lower now, almost as though he’s not talking to me at all.
“I . . . went along. She led, and I followed, because it took less effort. It’s how it was with us.”
I blink across the table at him, a smooth, small, Spencerian script unfurling in the space between us, probably the first spark of creativity I’ve had in weeks.it spells, but I don’t say anything. In the silence, we both sip our drinks, and since mine is basically a defibrillator in a cup, I’m the first to get back in the game.
“I didn’t intend it,” I say plainly, my voice an eraser over that script connection between us. “Sometimes it just happens, and I realize it later.” I feel a strange, unfamiliar temptation to tell him the whole thing.The letters, they work on me sometimes. When I’m stressed, when I’m tired, when I’m lonely. When I’m blocked . . . I can’t draw at all, or when I try—I end up saying too much.
But telling him all that, what good would it do? It’s nothing to him, and it’s detrimental to me. I don’t need him leaving here and spreading the word, not after everything I’ve worked for and am still working for. I thought maybe I’d fixed the problem when I stopped with the wedding work; I thought all the effort I’d put into my own business would give me a sense of ownership, a sense of control. Sure, it’d be other people’s plans, but the idea for the planners, the execution—it had been my idea, my vision.
But I’ve started to slip again, at such a critical time, and Reid doesn’t need to know it.
“I loved doing the job,” I say, back in that cheery register. “I really did. The play, the tribute to your first date—”
Trench-brow, back again. “What first date?”
“Your first date with Avery.A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Shakespeare in the Park?”
“That wasn’t our first date. Our first date was coffee in the lobby of my office building.”
“Oh,” I say. Meanwhile, this coffee shop now feels like an inferno to me. I wish I had asked him to do whatever the opposite of going to a coffee shop is. An outdoor vending machine that dispenses sleeping pills? Literally anything but an echo of his first date with his ex-fiancée, whose life I have possibly ruined.
“Her father arranged it.”
“That’s . . . nice.”
It is not nice, not judging by the way trench-brow disappears, replaced with a single quirk of the left one.Do you really believe that?Left Quirk says.
“He is also my boss.”
“Oh,God,” I groan. “Did you getfired?”
“No, I am”—he blinks down toward his tea again—“valuable to him. And it was amicable.”
