“I’m so sorry to wake you up,” I told Gabe’s brother Caleb at the door. He’d come armed with a baseball bat, which said something about Queens (mostly that they didn’t have doormen to hold the bats for them).
“What makes you think you woke me?” he groused, rubbing his eyes. Black hair stuck out every which way, including in tufts from the collar of his faded white NYPD shirt.
“Anyway,” I said, clearing my throat. “I need to talk to Gabe. It’s very important.”
“You could’ve just called him,” Caleb grumbled. I had called him. He hadn’t picked up. Probably because he was sleeping. Hopefully not because he was so mad at me that he couldn’t handle the thought of hearing my voice.
Thankfully, Caleb turned his back toward the hall inside, gesturing for me to come into their small row house. Which meant that Gabe presumably wasn’tthatmad at me that he’d told Caleb not to let me through the doors, no matter what. “Upstairs, second door on the right.”
The first step was creaky, so I stuck to the outside edges of the others as I crept my way upstairs (old habit from when I used to sneak out of the Hamptons house as a teenager to meet my twenty-five-year-old boyfriend, which, come on, teenage Pom, did you not pick up on the creeper vibes from the fact that he always had a bubble-gum vape hanging out of his mouth?) and counted the doors carefully, hoping as I eased the second one on the right open that I wasn’t actually intruding on one of Caleb’s two young children. I stood there as my eyes adjusted, aware that I probably looked like a monster silhouetted in the dim light of the hallway.
Fortunately, I knew immediately the shape of Gabe’s lumpunder the blanket on the twin bed; Gabe must have displaced one of his nephews to his brother’s room. I stepped inside, closing the door behind me and plunging us back into darkness. “Gabe?” I whispered.
He let out a little snore in response. My heart twisted. At first those little snores had woken me up. Now it was hard to sleep without them. “Gabe?” I said, slightly louder. I didn’t want to touch him—it felt like crossing some kind of boundary. Well, more of a boundary than creeping into his room in the middle of the night.
He grunted and stirred, flopping over and putting his pillow over his head. I took a step closer. “Hey. Gabe. Wake up.”
That got him. He pulled the pillow off, pushing himself up to an awkward sit that turned into a real sit on the edge of the bed as he saw me. “Pom? Are you real?” he said, blinking hard, rubbing at his eyes like he wasn’t seeing the room right. “What are you doing here?”
“I am real. Realer than I’ve ever been,” I said dramatically, plopping down on the edge of the bed. He hadn’t invited me to sit down, but my feet were killing me after all the pacing I’d done in the back of the bakery while thinking things through. “I had an epiphany. I’ve been trying so hard to be this perfect person who Vienna’s cool friends and the public all approve of. I’ve been trying so hard to be perfectly charitable and grown-up and mature and in that process I’ve made myself maybe not miserable, but a little sad. Because it turns out that I do still love some things from my life before. Like going out clubbing. I can do good for the world and enjoy art and go clubbing and go to fashion shows all at once.”
I paused to consider what that would actually look like. “Well, not literally. Unless?” A hybrid art show–fashion show held at a club for charity? It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever had (that was the line of designer puke bags for private jets I’d tried to start). “Okay, I’ll table that for later. The point is, even thoughI’ve changed a lot since last year, it turns out I haven’t changed into an entirely different person. There are still parts of the old me I want to hang on to.”
Gabe was still blinking hard. Maybe I should’ve given him more time to wake up before really diving in. Oh well. Too late now. I forged onward. “When I was talking to Persimmon about proposals on Kevin’s island, I was exaggerating a bit for effect. Because she was showing off and I wanted to show off in return. But it wasn’t totally a lie. An intimate proposal all alone sounds beautiful. For someone else.” He was blinking less now, sitting up straighter. “Not that your idea was bad. But I… I love the idea of being asked in a big way that makes me feel important and special and where there are a lot of eyes on me. I just do. I’m sorry that it came out the way it did and not in a conversation between the two of us, the way it should have.”
I swallowed hard. He was still just staring at me, mouth a little open. “Also, I’m sorry you overheard me on the phone with my parents,” I said. “I know people say this all the time and it turns out to be a lie, but it really,reallywasn’t what it sounded like. They were saying I should break up with you and I was telling them no, that I loved you, to stop saying those things about you, that I had nothing in common with this rich jerk they wanted me to date instead. It all just came out in the worst possible way. I promise. They know I love you, which is why they were working so hard to convince me that we shouldn’t be together.” Now he was frowning; why did I bring up how much my mom hated him? “Don’t forget they also work really hard all the time to convince me that I shouldn’t be myself. They suck. We should see them less.
“But,” I continued. “Ultimately it’s not the engagement that matters. It’s the marriage, right? So if a small, private engagement is what you want, then that’s what I want, because I want more than anything to be married to you. So.” I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, tried to look as regal as I could sitting in a bedroom in Queens. “You can ask me right now, and I’ll say yes.”
Gabe just blinked hard at me for a few seconds that felt like minutes. Eventually he sighed, running a hand down his stubbled face. “Pom.” My name came out in an exhale. “I’m not going to ask you to marry me.”
It felt like I was a sheet of paper and my teacher had crumpled me up before my calligraphy lesson was even done. “Oh. Okay.” My voice was tiny. “Okay. I’ll go. I’m sorry. I just thought—”
“Because I want more than anything to be married to you, too, and a private engagement in a bedroom in Queens where you don’t even have your nails painted the right color for the photos afterward is definitely not what you want,” he continued. I stopped halfway through a stand, my thighs quivering with the strain. “We’re going to wait until I can give you what you want. And what you deserve.”
This was why I’d done so many rounds of Pilates: so I could hover here in place, half crouched, afraid to either sit or to stand, like doing either might break the spell. He went on, “Pom, I hate clubbing. I don’t really understand fine art, the kind that’s in the galleries we tour. But they’re both things you care about, and I care about the wonderful swirling whole of you, so they’re important to me too.” I wasn’t sure describing clubbing as something I cared about was the best way to do it, but I certainly wasn’t going to interrupt someone who was saying nice things about me. “You don’t stop being the brave, brilliant, hilarious, beautiful, fascinating woman I love just because you like to go dance for a night and blow off steam. Are you worried it makes you silly or superficial? Because I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but it doesn’t.”
He took a deep breath, raking his hand through his hair, which somehow stood up even more on end. “Do I ever want to go clubbingwithyou? No, unless for some reason I really have to. But you don’t want to ever go to hockey games with me, do you? Or camping?”
“No.” I shuddered, which released enough of the tensionwhere I plopped back down on the bed. It seemed safe to say at this point I wouldn’t have to run off. “God, no.”
“Exactly.” He shifted closer to me so that he could take my hand, thread my fingers through his, rest it in my lap. “I can do those things with Caleb, or a friend. Not every person has to be there for everything. Hell, I don’t think one single personcanbe there for everything. That goes for friendships too. You can have Vienna and Persimmon and the rest of them for your galas and art gallery tours and fancy bars and, I don’t know, operas or whatever, and you can be friends with Millicent and Coriander for clubbing, and whoever else for whatever else.” He leaned in, resting his forehead against mine. It was incredible how the mere act of touching his skin, breathing in that faint coffee and soap smell, was enough to instantly soothe any nerves that might have been bristling. “And I want to be there for everything. Except clubbing.”
I closed my eyes, reveling in the warmth of him against me. “You never have to come clubbing with me.”
“I love you so much right now.” His lips found mine in a soft, gentle kiss, one with promises of what we’d do later, when we weren’t in his brother’s small, creaky house.
“I love you so much too.” Was this what being a mature adult was like? Arguing with someone and miscommunicating and then just… making up without spreading nasty rumors about each other or lighting anybody’s left-behind clothing on fire? Because if so, it was so much less stressful than what I was used to. I’d nearly burned down multiple apartment buildings disposing of friends’ exes’ treasured vintage polo shirts or cashmere lounge pants. Arson wasn’t my thing these days. Unless it was solving a crime that included—oh! Right! My eyes popped open.
“Also,” I said, pulling back a bit, but not too far. “By the way, I think I know who the killer is. I still have to confirm one more thing, but, yeah.”
“You could’ve led with that,” he said, and it touched my heartthat he didn’t look surprised, as if he’d expected me to figure it out. It felt great to have someone think I was smart. Something I was still getting used to.
“No. I wanted to get us squared away first,” I said. “But now that we’ve figured out our relationship, we can figure out how to get a confession.”
Gabe inclined his head toward the door. “How about we just go to my brother, tell him our theory, and let the police take it from there?”
I snorted. “Yeah, because they’ve done such a great job at investigating so far thatPomona Aftonfigured it out before them.” I shook my head. “No way. If I have to do all the work, I want all the glory.”
