“Stupid,” she said, sniffing a little. “It’s supposed to show that beautiful things don’t last.”
He glanced atherthen, which she didn’t want. Not while she felt like this. Not when every single facet of her life was a glaring reminder of why this wouldn’t work.
Even if she wanted it to.
As if he could read her thoughts, his expression softened. “It’s just a picture, blue jay.”
And we both know how much damage a picture can do.
She stared at the browning apple until her eyes hurt, aware of the steady pressure of his hand.It’s just Nick, she told herself but her pulse wouldn’t listen, and when he ran his thumb along the inside of her palm, it accelerated to a buzz in her ears.
In the next gallery, an older, European-looking couple were gazing at paintings. The man was wearing suspenders over his button-down shirt and the woman was wearing a loose linendress that looked casual and expensive at the same time.
Jay kept her eyes on the paintings but her cheeks heated with an all-too-familiar shame as the man and woman turned to look at them. Nicholas’s hand tightened further over hers, his fingers lacing with her own until she felt as if she had been neatly shackled.
“Quel charmant couple,” the woman murmured. “Il est si grand. Et elle est tellement belle.”
“Plus jolie que moi?” Nicholas spoke up, surprising all three of them. “Je le pense aussi. C'est pour ça que je l'ai épousée.”
The man and then, more self-consciously, the woman, laughed. “You’re just darling,” she told him, smiling with dimples. Then she turned to Jay, who felt like her face was on fire, and said, “What a charming husband you have.”
Husband?
Husband?
“Whatdid you say to her?” Jay demanded, the moment they were out of hearing.
Nicholas smirked. “She said you were pretty. I asked if she thought you were prettier than me.”
Jay suspected this was not the full truth but wasn’t sure how to call him on it, afraid it would trigger another conversation neither of them were ready for.
He gave her hand another playful squeeze. “Are you ready for dinner?”
“Yeah,” she said, feeling a flicker of regret that the afternoon was being cut short. Then she looked at her phone and realized that they’d been here for three hours. Despite his initial reluctance, Nicholas hadn’t complained at all.
He called a taxi as they walked out of the museum. Thecar met them out in front and took them to the Ferry Building, which was a ten-minute drive because of all the traffic, even though it was only a couple blocks away. They exchanged a glance when a sleek Mercedes cut them off and the driver began to swear.
“We should have taken BART,” said Jay.
“I don’t mind the wait. Did you have a good time?”
“I had a great time.”
This time, the smile he leveled at her—one of his real ones, the one with the dimples that he never showed anyone—made her stomach flip. “Good. I’m glad.”
They went to dinner at a Vietnamese fusion restaurant and under the dim lights, at a table beside a cold glass window that offered a view of the bay, they had cocktails and pho while the sun slowly sank below the rippling surface of the water and the fog rolled in on ghostly fingers.
This was a side of the city that Jay had rarely gotten to enjoy: the sparkling underlayer that catered to the exclusive elite. It was the lifestyle her mother had dreamed about when she took her clothes off for other men, letting the stars in her eyes blind her to the trash in the street.
Jay despised herself a little for wanting it, too.
“Is something wrong with your food?”
She looked down at her untouched bowl and smiled guiltily. “No, the view is just so amazing, I’m trying to take it all in.” Her shoulders dipped as she looked at him through the flickering candlelight, an accusatory thought sweeping through her head:you take your clothes off for this man, too. “This was such an amazing day.”
“We can have more. A lifetime of them.”
She laughed nervously, fingering the stem of her cocktail glass. “You didn’t even know if I wanted kids. We grew up together but we don’t know much about each other now.”
