He shook his head. “I can’t tap-dance.”
She elbowed him again. “Yeah, but you canwrite.”
“That’s not writing. It’s barely even thinking.”
“Hey...” She made a face. “I love those ads. I love the talking fork who crosses his tines because he really hopes it’s pizza day.”
“It’s always pizza day,” Tom said. “The Western Alliance dining area has an organically supplied pizza station.”
“A fact that the ad effectively communicates.”
His lips quirked up. He looked a little embarrassed. “You’re easily impressed.”
Cherry’s voice was faint: “I’m really not.”
Tom didn’t leave Cherry’s side all night long. (Except to get her another drink and more canapés.) He hardly looked away from her. His head was tilted down for three hours, and Cherry’s was tilted up. She laughed at everything he said, and he smiled at everything she said.
Tom was drinking beer, but he switched to Coke.
Tom was from Omaha. He was a year younger than Cherry. He’d gone to art school because he loved Donald Duck comics. He read a lot of books that Cherry had never heard of and was very into “sequential art.”
Tom didn’t care about music. He didn’t recognize any of the pop songs playing over the speakers. (Meg Jones’s house had a built-in sound system.) He’d never even heard an Adele song—he’d never heard ofAdele—but he kept making Cherry sing them all the way through. “Just a little bit more. I think I might know this one... No, I guess not. Hit me with another one.”
Tom wasfunny.
Funny in a way Cherry wasn’t used to. He dropped his voice every time he made a joke, like he was telling them to himself. (The boys she knew made sure you caught every punchline—sometimes they repeated them.) Cherry kept leaning in to hear him. Cherry just kept leaningin.
Everyone thought that the two of them must have come to the party together.
“Who’s your friend, Tom?”
“Tom didn’t tell us he was bringing a date.”
“What the fuck, Tom—why didn’t you tell this poor girl what to wear?”
“It’s okay,” Tom kept repeating in his soft voice. “Nobody really cares what you’re wearing.”
“I hope I don’t get fired,” Cherry said.
“Do you really think you’d get fired for wearing jeans?”
She gritted her teeth and made a consternated noise in the back of her throat. “No. But it’s a pattern of behavior—I’m never wearing the right thing. My boss wants me to look more corporate. He says I dress like Theresa the Channel 42 Kids Club lady.”
Tom winced. He laughed. His eyes sparkled. “Doyou?”
Cherry looked offended. “No!”
“Hmm... I might need to judge this for myself.”
Cherry grinned, and Tom looked away. He was smiling. Blushing visibly. Closing one eye and peeking back at her. Scratching the back of his neck.
Tom had wide, ruddy hands. He had a wide face and a square jaw. He moved like someone who didn’t want to bump into anyone or knock anything over. Up close, under about a thousand white Christmas lights, his hair was ashy blond, not brown, and you could tell that he hadn’t shaved. Cherry kept finding new things to like about him.
Fortunately Cherry’s boss didn’t spot her until he was two and a half sheets to the wind. Doug came to talk to the agency people and saw her hiding in the corner. “For Christ’s sake, Cherry, what are you wearing? Are thosejeans?”
“This is your fault!” she shouted over the music. “You didn’t tell me it was formal—you told me to wear black!”
Doug started laughing—hard. “Wallace has gotta see this...” He went to find him.
