"Oh, no, absolutely not," she said abruptly.
He felt the sting of her rejection.
"My roommate won't like it," she explained.
"Maybe your roommate will be gone sometime?"
"It's not going to happen," she told him sharply.
He was taken aback. He thought they were developing… maybe not a real relationship, but a rapport, at least. Apparently, he was mistaken.
His eyes narrowed as he watched her dress in a hurry.
As he rode alone in the town car that evening, he stewed about Allie. He had thought maybe he and Allie were becoming a real thing, but it was just his imagination. He wished he had someone to talk to about it, but none of his family approved of her.
Kate was still pushing him to ask out Liz, and now his parents were in on it too.
"You need to stop partying and buckle down," his father snapped at him when he, Harris, and Nancy met Carter for dinner that night.
"Ihavestopped," Carter complained.
His father pulled up a tabloid article on his phone and showed it to Carter.
"That was from two weeks ago," Carter said, batting the phone away.
"We just want you to be happy," Nancy said.
I'd be happy with Allie,he thought. But would he? Or rather, would Allie be happy with him? They didn't do normal date stuff. He'd never been seen in public with her romantically except over Thanksgiving, and that really didn't count.
"Liz is a nice girl," Jack said.
Carter ignored him.
"You need to land someone before all the nice girls are snapped up." Harris sampled the wine the waiter presented for his approval. "Very nice." He swirled the dark liquid around in his glass. "Wine and dine her, be your best self with her, buy her expensive presents, take her to beautiful places, show her off at parties. Women like to be appreciated," his grandfather said. "Don't treat her like a piece of meat—treat her like something fragile and precious."
Carter felt slightly nauseous. He hadn't done any of those things with Allie.
"I’m not taking dating advice from you," he said nastily. "You just find random girls in their twenties and lure them in with promises of a wealthy, easy life."
"They're just for fun. Your grandmother was a real blue blood. Impeccable family—she could trace her lineage back to England in the thirteen hundreds. My wife was the perfect hostess, beautiful, charismatic..." He trailed off, looking sadly into his wine glass.
Carter knew his grandmother had died when his father was in high school. It had hit their family hard. Harris had never recovered, though he had remarried again and again.
"I work with Liz," Carter stated. "It wouldn't be right."
"It's fine since you aren't her boss," Jack countered. "You're growing older—"
"I'm not that old," Carter said, trying to relax his grip on the stemware.
"We're not asking you to propose marriage. Just try to look for women who have the same values as you and want to work toward the same goals. Find a woman that isn't like the waifs that you've been spending time with."
Harris tapped his phone and showed the screen to the table.
It was the Instagram account of one of the club girls that Carter had drunk with during one of his nights out on the town. He looked drunk, and the girl had a shot glass in the cleavage in her low-cut dress.
"At least you sowed your wild oats for a bit." His grandfather chuckled while Carter sank down in his seat. "She's pretty hot!"
Nancy was appalled. "There will be no wild-oat sowing," she said. "You saw how much trouble your uncle Walter got himself into with that."
