Oh shit. At the shop and I can’t leave. Come here? I have bourbon in the back.
Nik put her shoes on and grabbed her keys out of her bag.
Be there in 15 min.
She’d known from the beginning that he was arrogant and thought he knew everything, but she’d let herself ignore that because he was so much fun. She never should have dated him in the first place.
It took more like thirty minutes to get to Cupcake Park, given the vicissitudes of L.A. traffic and parking. Thirty minutes of listening to her most angry music on repeat and fantasizing about hitting cars with baseball bats. So when she walked up to the shop and was faced with a line out the door, she almost pushed herself through the crowd of chattering, happy people like a battering ram.
Luckily, she came to her senses before she ruined her friend’s business. She turned around and went through the alley and in the back door. She couldn’t help but think about when Carlos had rescued them when Courtney had her cupcake crisis . . . and about everything that happened later that night. Damn him.
She went through the kitchen and into the shop.
“Hey,” she said to Courtney, as she popped up behind her. Courtney jumped and spun around.
“Holy shit, you scared me to death. I was wondering if you were stuck in this line.”
Nik shook her head.
“I saw it and came through the back door. But this is amazing, look at all of the people here, and it’s only nine a.m.”
Courtney nodded and loaded half a dozen confetti cupcakes into a box.
“I know, it was like this yesterday, too. The L.A. Times did a piece on the shop this week, and someone on the Food Network came by this week and Instagrammed all the cupcakes she bought, so people are going wild.”
How had she missed all of this? She’d known everything that had happened with Courtney’s shop for the past year, and she’d missed an article in the Times?
“This is so awesome, Courtney!” she said, and hugged her friend. “You’re a hit!”
Courtney hugged her back, but quickly turned back to her cupcakes.
“It’s great for business. I just hope we don’t screw it up. I made triple the cupcakes this morning, with more flavors than we usually have most days because I thought it would be like this today and I wanted to make sure to capitalize on this. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Nik held up her crossed fingers as they walked into the back room.
“Dana texted that she’s on her way,” Courtney said. “Tell her to come through the back. I’m going to take some more cupcakes out front, and I’ll shoot back in here as soon as I can take a break, okay? Don’t say anything until I get here.”
Nik sat down on one of the chairs at Courtney’s worktable. She glared at the tray of spicy chocolate cupcakes and took a lime coconut off of the tray next to it.
Suddenly all of her anger left her, and she just felt sad. Another depressing end to a relationship. And this one felt worse than any ending had since Justin. She had really liked Carlos. Damn it.
Dana walked in five minutes later, still wearing her running clothes.
“Hey, there you are. It’s a mob scene out there.”
“Hey!” Nik stood up to hug her, sweaty running clothes and all. “How are things with Natalie?”
Dana beamed.
“Great. I was just finishing a workout with her at the gym when I got your text.” Dana looked at her. “We can talk about that later, though. Are you okay?”
Nik shook her head.
“I’m not great.”
Dana pulled her in close.
“Oh, honey, what happened?”
Nik let herself be comforted by Dana’s tight hug for a few moments.
“I can’t tell you anything until Courtney gets back here, because she’ll—”
“Destroy both of you, yes.” Courtney walked back into the kitchen with three cups of coffee on a tray and set them on the table. She opened a cabinet, reached into the back, and pulled out a bottle of bourbon, and poured a tot into each of their cups.
“Okay. My staff can hold down the fort for a little while. What did he do, and how painful will it be when I kill him?”
Nik took a swig of coffee and winced. That was a lot more bourbon than she’d expected.
“He told me he loved me. And when I didn’t say it back, he was furious, said I used him up and discarded him like I do every man I date, and stormed out of his house. You know, garden-variety Nik breakup.” She sighed and reached for her drink again.
Courtney shook her head and poured more bourbon into Nik’s cup.
“Okay, obviously we hate him now, but I’m going to need you to back up here. He told you he loved you? Did you see this coming? Did you . . . were you glad that he said it? How did he make you feel like shit? What happened in between the ‘I love you’ and the storming out of the house part? I feel like we’re missing a lot here.”
Nik glanced down at herself and realized she was still wearing Carlos’s old UCLA T-shirt. She reached for another cupcake.
“No, I didn’t see it coming! It came out of nowhere first thing this morning. And no, of course I wasn’t glad he said it! You guys know how I feel about ‘I love you’s! I don’t get this. I was so happy with the way things were, and he had to fuck it all up.”
“Did you . . . tell him that?” Dana asked.
She shrugged. So fucking what if she had?
“More or less. We had a deal! We talked about this! He said he didn’t want anything serious. I relied on that! And then he springs this ‘I love you’ bullshit on me this morning.”
Dana narrowed her eyes.
“When you say ‘more or less,’ what exactly do you mean? What did you say to him?”
Oh God. Now Dana, the romantic, was going to get all upset on Carlos’s behalf, she just knew it.
“I told him that he was probably just feeling emotional because of last night. Oh!” She just realized she’d texted them about Jessie but had never given them the update. “The baby was born last night. She and Jessie are both okay.”
“Oh, that’s so great!” Dana said. “But wait. You told him that he was just being emotional? Didn’t you think that would upset him?”
Well, yes, now she did.
“I didn’t think about that before I said it! Look, I was kind of flustered when he sprang this on me, okay? It was first thing in the morning—everyone knows I’m not at my best first thing in the morning anyway. I was exhausted because we were at the hospital for hours last night, we got back to his house super late, and then—”
Courtney broke in.
“Wait a second. You were at the hospital with him? When did that happen? How?”
So much had happened in the past twenty-four hours.
“It’s a long story, but like I texted you guys, I’d been at his house helping him make enchiladas for his cousin, and . . .” She saw Dana and Courtney exchange a glance and stopped. “What? What does that look mean?”
“Nothing,” Courtney said. “Go on. You were helping him cook enchiladas for his pregnant cousin, and?”
She knew it didn’t mean “nothing,” but she went on anyway.
“And we had just put the first batch in the oven when he got the call from his cousin in the hospital. So he raced there, and I stayed back to finish baking them.”
Why were they making her go through this whole timeline? They knew this part already; she’d texted them last night. She’d also told them the important part, which was that Carlos had ruined everything.
“But how did you get from there to the hospital?” Courtney asked.
“I texted him to check in and see how he and his family were doing, and he said they were all stressed and hungry, so I packed up one of the pans of enchiladas with some paper plates and took them over there, which meant tha
t I was there when they found out that Jessie and the baby were both okay. We were all so relieved.”
She’d been so happy just last night, of course it all had to come crashing down this morning.
Courtney and Dana exchanged those annoying looks again. Why were they looking at her—and each other—like that?
“You brought them food to the hospital. Did he ask you to bring it, or . . .” Dana raised her eyebrows.
She shook her head.
“No, and that’s the other thing! When I walked into the waiting room, he didn’t seem happy that I was there at ALL. He barely looked at me, and his sister had to jump in to answer the ‘How do you two know each other?’ question from his mom.” She’d thought he’d gotten over that. She’d thought in the end he was happy to have her there. And she’d been so happy to be there, to share that experience with Carlos and his family. That’s why what he’d said this morning had felt like such a slap in the face. “I tried to leave after dropping off the food, because it didn’t seem like he wanted me there, but his mom insisted that I stay and eat. But obviously I shouldn’t have gone: this morning, one of his comebacks to me saying that I thought this was just a casual thing was ‘You met my family!’ like that automatically made us married or something.” She refused to let herself cry. “And he said he wished I hadn’t come.
“Anyway,” she said, before either of them could say anything comforting. That would just put her over the edge. “Why is it so weird that I brought them food to the hospital?”
Dana put her hand on her arm.
“It just . . . that doesn’t seem like you, that’s all.”
Nik shook Dana’s hand off and took a huge bite of her cupcake. She tried to calm down as she chewed. It didn’t work.
“That’s a pretty mean thing for one of my best friends to say about me. You don’t think I’d bring food for you in the hospital if you were sitting there waiting for a family member?”
Dana reached for her arm again.
“Of course you would. That’s my point. You would for me, you would for Courtney, you would for probably a handful of other people, but that’s it. I love you with my whole heart, Nik, but you don’t do favors for people you don’t care about. I can’t picture you doing something like that for any of the guys you’ve dated in the last five years. The rest, you’d absolutely contribute to flowers or food or whatever, if someone else organized it, but a hospital visit? No, come on.”
Nik sat and thought about that. Okay, she had a point there.
“Even if that’s true, what does it matter? I’m not saying I don’t care about him. I told him I cared about him! But when I told him that, he acted like I’d told him his food was just as good as the food from Taco Bell or something. I said I was happy to keep going the way we’d been going, and we could just pretend he’d never said ‘I love you.’”
“What did he say when you said that?” Courtney asked.
Nik put her head in her hands.
“He got really mad. Why do people think ‘I love you’ is the only meaningful thing you can say to a person? Why did he have to say he loved me?”
“Nik.” Courtney’s voice was gentle, which meant she was about to say something bad. “Why does it scare you so much for someone to say they love you?”
She shook her head.
“It doesn’t scare me! I just know from experience that that’s when everything gets bad, that’s all.”
Dana sighed.
“Justin really did a number on you, didn’t he? Just because he was an asshole doesn’t mean they’re all going to be like that.”
She leaned her head on Dana’s shoulder and thought about denying that this had anything to do with Justin, but what was the point? Courtney got up and fetched the bourbon bottle and poured more into all of their coffee cups. Nik took a sip and sighed.
“I don’t think about him that much anymore, except for that time I profiled the quarterback of his favorite team for GQ and pictured his face when he’d see my byline. Well, and those times when I have low moments and I hear his voice in my head. But Justin, in his terrible way, did me a favor. First, he made me feel like there was something wrong with my writing, then he made me feel like there was something wrong with me for loving writing and my career. But the end result of all of that was that he made me sure that I don’t ever want to let anyone make me feel that bad ever again.”
Courtney pushed her chair around the table so the three of them were all shoulder to shoulder.
“I know, honey,” Dana said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to close yourself off to everyone forever. You are great at being strong, and there’s no one else that either of us would have on our side in a fight. But it’s okay to be vulnerable with more people than just the two of us, you know? Letting yourself have feelings for people is scary, I know it is, but you can’t go through life with most people at arm’s length. Not everyone is going to be like Justin.”
Nik buried her head in Dana’s shoulder.
“I know,” she said. “But—counterpoint: what if I don’t want to be vulnerable with people other than you guys?”
Dana and Courtney didn’t even respond to that.
Nik sighed.
“I hate this. This is all Fisher’s fault. If he hadn’t done that stupid proposal in the first place, none of this would have ever happened, and I never would have even met Carlos.”
“Would you really want that?” Courtney asked.
“Yes! Okay, fine, no. I just wish Carlos had listened to me!” Nik said. “Okay, maybe telling him he was being emotional was a shitty thing to say, but I didn’t know how to react and I didn’t want this to ruin everything, but everything is ruined anyway.”
She put her head down on the table. Dana and Courtney immediately put their arms around her.
“I’m so mad at him for how mean he was to me this morning, but I hate that I hurt his feelings. See, this is another reason why I never should have dated him in the first place. I should have stuck to my streak of dating guys I couldn’t care less about. When I do that and we break up, I feel fine! Look at Fisher—did I care if I hurt his feelings? Not really! I need to find another Fisher.”
“No you don’t,” Dana and Courtney said in unison.
She shook her head.
“There must be something wrong with me. Here I have this great, smart, kind, hot man telling me he loves me, and I recoil. Everything was so great, and now it’s over, and he thinks I’m an unfeeling asshole. Maybe I am.”
Courtney got up and grabbed a box of tissues out of a cabinet and brought them over to her. She sat up and took a handful.
“Okay, first of all, if he thinks that, Carlos doesn’t know you at all. You are loving and kind and funny and the best damn cheerleader anyone has ever had.”
Damn it, now Courtney was going to make her cry even more.
“Second, there’s nothing wrong with you. I’m not saying that you’re perfect, but who is? It’s okay to not react perfectly all the time; it’s okay to say no to people; it’s okay even to not love someone back.”
Nik wiped her eyes and nodded.
“What if I want to be perfect though?”
Dana laughed.
“As my mother would say, it’s nice to want things.”
All three of them laughed.
“Your mom would say that,” Nik said. “Have you told her about Natalie yet?”
Dana shook her head. “It’s only been a little while. I just told you guys! But . . .” she smiled. “Hopefully soon.”
Nik reached for her now cold bourbon and coffee drink and drained the cup.
“I’ve got to try to make a bourbon and coffee cupcake,” Courtney said. “Oh fuck. Speaking of cupcakes, I have to get back out there.”
Nik stood up.
“Give me an apron, I’ll help. You don’t wan
t people complaining on Yelp about your long, slow line.”
Courtney tossed an apron to her from the closet.
“Good, you owe me for all the cupcakes you just ate.”
* * *
• • •
Carlos forced himself to turn off the shower. Usually when he took a shower it helped him figure out the answer to whatever he was stressed about, but this shower had just made everything worse. As soon as he stepped inside, he saw the empty space where Nik’s bottle of conditioner used to be. She really had made sure to take every reminder of her existence out of his house, hadn’t she? Not that he could forget her.
Nor could he forget how ashamed of himself he was. He was thirty-four, not fourteen; he was a little too old to storm out of his house full of righteous anger. Granted, he was still furious at Nik for the way she’d reacted this morning, but he was probably just as mad at himself for blowing up at her.
Maybe he’d been naive, but he hadn’t expected her reaction this morning at all. It wasn’t that he was so arrogant he thought any woman who was lucky enough for him to fall in love with her should be overjoyed . . . okay, fine, a little part of him may have thought that. He’d always just figured that when he got ready to seriously date someone, finding the someone would be the easy part.
Maybe she was right. Maybe he wasn’t in love with her after all. Maybe this was just a momentary feeling, because of all of the emotion from last night and then all of the sex they’d had afterward. Maybe he could just . . .
He put his jeans on and sighed. Bullshit. He knew he loved her; he knew it to his core. He loved her for her kindness, her ability to laugh both at him and at herself, and her intelligence. But most of all, he loved her for that feeling he had when he sat next to her on his couch in silence or woke up next to her in bed, that feeling of peace and happiness. That he was with someone who understood him and everything about him. That everything was right with the world.
He sat down on his bed to put his shoes on. He had to pick up Angela, go to the hospital with her to check in on Jessie and the baby, and potentially throw his weight around if anything wasn’t perfect. What he wanted to do was to go for a long run or play basketball all afternoon with people he didn’t like or drive his car really fast along winding roads for three hours. Anything to not have to think or talk to people.
The Proposal Page 24