I can’t help but smile and shake my head at her. She smiles back and squeezes my hand, and I’m a little proud that I knew exactly what she was up to.
“Really?”Tate looks down at the floor briefly. “How’s she been?”
“Great,” I say. “She’s our new social media maven, and she’s fantastic. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you again.”
“Yeah, it’d be good to see her, too.” He purses his lips and then nods. “Awesome, I’m in.Thanks, Cuz, you’re the best.”
Su-Lin bounces up and down again.Shecertainly thinks she is, and to be fair, so do I.
“Always happy to help family,” she says, grinning widely.
ThenTate turns and, blessedly, walks away toward the ballroom.
Finally.
I pull her against me. “You really think Emily will appreciate how happy you are to help family?”
She gives me her I’m-so-innocent face, which she is most definitely not. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she says in her haughtySockton Abbeyaccent.
“Uh-huh,” I say, wrapping an arm around her waist. “So you’re going to pretend you’re not helpingTate’s career just so you can play matchmaker with him and Emily.”
Her mouth falls open in mock offense. “You wound me.”
I laugh. “I know you. Also, for all your many amazing talents, subtlety is not one of them.”
She bites her lip, then breaks into a grin. “Okay, fine. You win. But look—I made all this happen.” She gestures back to the ballroom. “I have agift. Who am I to deny my friends love?”
My pulse races. I want to read all kinds of things into that statement—and turn it around on her and tell her I’m hoping she won’t deny it to me. But I bite my tongue.Telling her how in love with her I am is the opposite of casual, and I can’t give her more right now without sending myself into a full-blown coma.
“That logic seems iron-clad,” I say, though her eyes flash, and I’m sure she noticed the direction my thoughts were going. “Except, didn’t Emily andTate already date once? And break up?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think they gave it a real chance. I have a strong feeling about this plan, too. I think they’d be really good together. Did you see the look on his face when he asked about Emily?”
“I saw. And I should know better than to doubt your strong feelings.”
“Mmmm,” Su-Lin says, pulling closer. “I’m having a few of those right now.”
I eye the ballroom doors, out of which Su-Lin’s dad—who was definitely plotting to kill me when he saw me cozying up to his daughter on the dance floor—might burst at any moment. He’s not a scary man, but he has definite opinions about his daughters dating white boys, and I have serious father issues at the best of times. I think part of it comes from not growing up with a dad at home. I don’t really know how to act around them. “Is this where you had in mind?”
She breaks into a grin and pulls me by the hand. “Nope. Come with me.”
My heart pounds as she pulls me down the hall, past gilded mirrors and landscape paintings in shiny gold frames, to a door.
Marked “Women’s Bathroom.”
“No,” I say. “I will pay for a room before we have our first kiss in abathroom.”
Su-Lin wags her finger at me. “At least see it first.” She pulls me inside—
Damn. I have never seen a bathroom like this one. It’s carpeted, for one, and the door opens into a sitting area with plush couches and a fuzzy rug. Along one wall runs a marble counter top covered in cosmetics and hair dryers and curling irons and other accoutrements I assume Mei-Ling was using to freshen up before the reception. Her post-reception outfit is hanging from a hook next to the mirror, which doesn’t have a single spot. In fact, the whole place is pristine, from the shining counter to the gleaming doorknobs on the opposite door that I assume must lead to a room with an actual toilet.
“Does this meet your requirements, good sir?” Su-Lin asks.
“Um, yeah,” I say. “Yeah, this’ll do.”
Su-Lin locks the door. I turn toward her and she toward me, and suddenly she’s in my arms, even closer than when we were dancing. And I’m flashing back to yesterday in the studio in Su-Lin’s attic, where I played slow music on my laptop and taught her how to dance—more how to follow my lead, since I had to learn to dance for my wedding five years ago—and she laid her head on my shoulder and my whole body hummed with this perfect happiness.
That’s when I’d realized I was getting there. Closer to being able to make a move—though I don’t hate that she beat me to it. I’d been working toward this since we met, just praying that she’d still be single and still want me when I finally worked myself up to being able to think about dating without passing out. Even though I knew I had no right to expect her to wait for me.
