I unlock the door and fling it open.
“Crap,” I say when I see who’s standing on my stoop.
Gav eyes me up and down, taking in my very casual ensemble of two-sizes-too-big Stanford tee and old, frayed-at-the-hem denim cut-offs. “You forgot about my make-up birthday dinner,” he deduces.
Stupid iPhone! Why didn’t it remind me? Oh, right, I turned it off when I left the office early to come home and pout. Dammit. I’ve flaked out on celebrating Gav’s birthday twice now, which officially makes me the worst friend ever. I tried this time. I really did. I made a reservation at The Net, which is this hot, new seafood place in Ghirardelli Square, and I asked for a window table so that we’d have a view of the water while we ate. I even talked with my co-worker, Doug, who’s ATM’s resident foodie, at length about the menu. He gave high marks to the Dungeness crab with quince snow, so I was going to recommend that to Gav.
“I’m so sorry.” Lifting the wine bottle to my lips, I take a guilt-induced slug from it. “And you got all dressed up, too.” He really does look sharp, wearing a slim-cut, European-style suit in pale gray, with a cobalt blue shirt and a cool, geometric-patterned pocket square in varying shades of blue. “I suck. This day sucks. My life sucks.”
“Wow, how much of that have you had?” Gav walks into the house, shuts the door behind him, and relieves me of the bottle of Cab. “You know that wine makes you morose.”
“It also dulls the disappointment.” I make a grab for the bottle, but Gav holds it above my head. “Fine. Keep it. I still have eleven bottles left in the case,” I say petulantly, walking past him toward the kitchen.
“Stop.” He catches my arm, his warm fingertips pressing into my bare flesh. “Tell me what’s going on. Something happen at work?”
I grimace. “Sort of. My personal and professional lives collided.”
“I didn’t know you had a personal life,” Gav teases.
“Maybe not a conventional one, but it was working for me up until this afternoon. Congrats, by the way. You were right about Josh. Total douchebag.”
Gav drops his hand; a look of concern replacing his playful smile. “What did he do?”
“For starters, he made a fool out of me, which really pisses me off.” Right on cue, the muscle under my right eye begins to twitch, like it always does when I’m under duress. With an irritated grunt, I rip off my glasses and toss them on the antique writing desk that serves as my foyer table, then squeeze my eye shut tightly because I recently read an article on how to stop eye twitches and this was one of the tips. The tip that seemed the easiest to implement anyway. I’m sure as hell not limiting my caffeine intake.
“I find it hard to believe that anyone could put one over on you. Seeing through people’s bullshit is like your superpower.”
“I know!” My eye pops open with righteous indignation. “That’s what’s so upsetting about this. I keep asking myself, ‘How could you be so obtuse? You were in the same room with Josh and Monica for hours at the Stanfield party last weekend. Surely they did something to give themselves away that night. Why didn’t you notice? Why wasn’t your Spidey sense tingling?’”
He smirks. “First of all, I love that you just referenced a comic book character. Secondly, who the heck is Monica, and what did she and the douchebag do? Embezzle money from your firm?”
“Monica’s the self-entitled, waste of space daughter of one of the partners at ATM. I told you about her.”
Gav frowns as he searches his memory bank, finally coming up with, “The girl who looks like a Cheez-It?”
“That’s the one. Turns out she and Josh-u-a have been secretly dating for months. I walked in on a big office party celebrating their engagement this afternoon.”
“And you had no idea?”
I shake my head.
“Brutal.” A sympathetic Gav shoves the bottle of wine back into my hand.
“It gets worse.” I guzzle some more Cab, then swipe the back of my hand across my wet mouth. “When I confronted Josh about keeping me in the dark, he acted like it was no big deal. He didn’t even pretend to be sorry. Oh no, he was too busy patting himself on the back for having pulled off his Machiavellian scheme to marry his way to the top of ATM. In case you were wondering, I wasn’t forgotten in this plan of Josh’s. He very generously offered me the position of . . . are you ready for this? His mistress! And he strongly implied– No, hold on. He didn’t imply; he flat out said that if I kept sleeping with him, the two of us could rise up the corporate ladder together.” UGH I feel queasy just thinking about that conversation again. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been drinking all this rich wine on an empty stomach. I decide to test this theory by taking another swallow from the bottle of Cab.
“Where does this son of a bitch live?” Gav asks, clenching his jaw as he pulls his car keys out of the front pocket of his jacket. “I’m going to go beat the crap out of him.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.” I touch Gav’s cheek. “You haven’t threatened to do bodily harm to a guy on my behalf since Frank Ferguson ditched me at Homecoming so that he could bang that skank Andrea Perry in the janitor’s closet. P.S. . . .” I lean forward and say in a stage whisper, “Andrea’s got five kids and is on marriage number three now, and Frank is managing a Jack in the Box out in Antioch. So,” I poke him in the chest with my index finger, “the moral of the story is – Violence isn’t necessary, because jerky people always get what they deserve in the end. Besides, you can’t afford to hurt this . . .” I pick up his fisted hand, where he’s still got his keys clutched, “punching Josh in his big, fat, stupid head. Your hands are your fortune, remember?”
“Did you love him?” Gav wonders.
“Not even a little,” I answer without having to think about it. “It’s my pride that’s hurt, not my heart. The jury’s still out on whether or not I have one of those.” I return to my bottle of Cab for another drink. I know I’m overdoing it and will probably suffer the consequences tomorrow, but I like how the wine is smoothing out the rough edges, making me not care so much about what happened or what the future holds.
“We need to get you some food.” Gav takes the wine away from me again. “I bet you haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“Couple bites of food truck taco that were really good. Mmmmm, Mexican food. Let’s order some of that!” Excited by the prospect, I grab my glasses and dart off to the kitchen to see what takeout menus I have for places specializing in south-of-the-border cuisine. The first one I find when I open the junk drawer has a dancing, sombrero-wearing burrito on the front, which is a turn-off because I hate it when advertising animates food (Don’t even get me started on those creepy M&Ms commercials!), but if I ignore that, the list of food inside looks promising.
“Señor Pepito’s!” I wave the menu in Gav’s face.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” He bats my hand away. “Too much wine, plus spicy food, will result in projectile vomiting, and my idea of birthday fun is not holding back your hair while you pray to the porcelain goddess all night.”
“How dare you imply I can’t hold my liquor!” I say, with faux outrage. “I may make bad decisions when I’m smashed . . .” Like getting the Pythagorean Theorem tattooed on my shoulder after doing one too many Jell-o shots in celebration of acing all my finals senior year at Stanford. It was a bitch to get that lasered off a few months later. “But I never upchuck. Willa’s the vomiter in our family. Remember that time she went crazy drinking pink champagne and eating glitter-covered cake pops at your girlfriend Sonya’s New Year’s Eve party?”
Gav winces. “Yeah, we kept telling her to slow down, but she didn’t listen to us.”
“Then, when everybody was doing the countdown to midnight, she started spewing pink, glittery barf everywhere, all over her date, all over the carpet, all over Sonya’s Sue Wong dress. Sonya was so mad; she kept shrieking, ‘There’s puke on my ostrich feathers!’ while you and I were trying to drag Willa out. Ohmigod, that was so funny!” I snort laugh at
the memory.
“And that was the end of my relationship with Sonya.”
“Willa’s fault, not mine.”
“Okay, so that’s Willa – one; Sloane – four as far as driving women away from me goes. Why am I friends with the two of you again?”
“You blame me for four of your breakups? No way!”
“Marley.” He holds up a finger.
“Eh, okay.” I’ll give him that one. I did tell her he had VD, but that was only because he gave my sixth row ticket to The Smashing Pumpkins concert to her in hopes that she’d be so grateful she’d give him an all-access pass to her pleather pants. Payback’s a bitch, and I was really upset about not getting to see Billy Corgan, who was my teenage obsession.
“Shannon.” He ticks off another name on his middle finger.
“That woman was a klepto! If I hadn’t insisted on a purse search before she left here, I would have lost my Gucci sunglasses, the monogrammed soaps in the guest bathroom, and my favorite coffee grinder!”
“Jennifer.” A third finger springs up.
My brow furrows with confusion. “Which Jennifer are we talking about – Slutty Jen, the pretentious film student who liked to re-enact scenes from 9 ½ Weeks with your roommate, or Pathological Liar Jenny, who claimed to have lost her sense of smell while protecting the president from a toxic gas during her time as a Secret Service agent?”
“I’d forgotten about Slutty Jen. I was thinking about how you tricked Jenny into opening up a bag of dog poop to prove that she did still have her sense of smell. Okay, your number just shot up to five.”
“Man, this is going to take all night, and I won’t be able to properly mock all your questionable dating choices without sustenance. Let’s order a pizza.”
“Carnivore’s Delight!” we shout in unison.
I give Gav a high five and go back to my collection of takeout menus to try and find a number for Spinelli’s.
Chapter 26
(Willa)
“You have to try one of these tomato hand pies,” I say after polishing off my second of the yummy mini-pastries. “They are so good! I love this pâte brisée.”
“Which is what, for those of us who didn’t marry a French mime when we were teenagers?” Brody queries, with an amused quirk of his lips.
“Pâte brisée is the pastry dough the French use for their pies and tarts. It’s made with lots of butter and has this wonderful, crumbly texture. Here, take this one.” I lift up my plate and offer him my last hand pie.
“Only if you’ll try this smoked salmon and wasabi sandwich.” He passes his plate over to me. “It’s even better than the pear and Stilton,” which I deemed my favorite of the various finger foods we’ve been noshing on, but that was before I tried the tomato hand pies.
“Deal.” I take the heart-shaped tea sandwich off his plate, and he claims the little pie with its folded corners on mine. “Mmmmm, I like the chives,” I determine after sampling the sandwich. “And that wasabi cream cheese has quite a kick.” I quickly take a bite of some cucumber salad to cool off my taste buds.
“Too much?”
“Just enough. I like a little spice,” I say, with a wink, suddenly feeling flirty. Must be the surroundings. We’re sitting on a curved stone bench that’s tucked into a corner of the garden, which gives us a bit of privacy. Stars are twinkling above our heads, there are fragrant rose petals scattered on the footpath beneath us, and the melodious sounds of flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon are floating through the air, making me feel like Brody and I are starring in our own big-screen romance and the quartet’s tune is our theme music.
“Good to know.” Brody smiles at me; his eyes glinting in the moonlight. “So . . .” He sets his almost empty plate down and reaches for my hand. “What do you think? Ready for some dessert?”
If any guy but Brody were asking me this question, I’d assume it was a come-on and be turned off, but Brody has never acted like anything but a gentleman with me. So, I feel confident that when he says “dessert,” he’s talking about highly caloric sweets, not sneaking off somewhere dark so that he can stick his hand up my dress.
“I saw you casting some longing looks at those artisanal strawberry meringues earlier.”
“Actually, it was the purple ice cream that caught my eye,” I correct him. “I’ve never seen ice cream that color before. I wonder what flavor it is?”
“Black raspberry probably. Those berries do grow on plants, so they work with tonight’s garden theme.”
“Have you ever thought about growing fruits and vegetables in your garden? That would be so much fun!”
“I have toyed with the idea. Would be a lot of work, though. I might need a gardening assistant,” he hints.
“Fortunately for you . . .,” I slide over on the bench, closing the small space between us, “. . . I know somebody, and she comes with her own set of tools, plus a very stylish hat.” I’m already imagining the two of us spending every weekend this summer, working side-by-side in his garden, for hours on end, talking, laughing, enjoying the sunshine and each other’s company. And once our vegetables are ripe, we can use them to make tasty dishes together in that darling, blue-and-white kitchen of his. I’ve never dated a man I could cook with before!
“She’s hired!” Brody enthuses. “Not that I’ll be paying her to help me, of course. Hopefully, there are other ways I can show her my gratitude.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are.” I touch the side of his face, and he leans in toward me, with a purposeful look in his eye. This is it! Our first kiss! Finally! I don’t just have butterflies in my hair now; they’ve migrated down to my stomach, where they’re fluttering like mad, making me feel nervous, excited, and impatient all at once. My eyelids close in anticipation of Brody’s lips meeting mine . . .
“Can I take those plates for you?”
I open one eye and look up to find an overeager server hovering above us. SIGH I know he’s just doing his job, probably working this gig while going to school, which is very enterprising, so I can’t be mad at him, even if he does have the worst timing ever. “Yes, I’m done. Thank you.” I hand him my plate, with a forced smile.
Brody surrenders his without saying anything. He’s frowning, so I think he’s also bummed about smoochus interruptus.
The server examines what’s left on our plates and says, “You really should try some of the desserts. The cheesecake cupcakes are fantastic!”
“How about the ice cream?” I ask, just to be conversational. Doesn’t look like this server is leaving us any time soon, so I might as well be polite.
“Super good, probably the most popular of the desserts here tonight. Nothing beats ice cream on a summer night, right? If you want some, you’d better hurry, because we were close to running out last time I checked.”
Brody and I exchange a look. Clearly, neither of us wants to leave this lovely, romantic spot, but missing out on that ice cream would be a shame. We can always come back to our bench, can’t we? I nod at Brody, and we both stand.
“Appreciate it,” Brody tells our helpful server before we head off to the pergola.
We enter from the opposite end this time, and I notice that the tables on this side, which are draped with green sequined cloths that create the illusion of iridescent moss, don’t have food on them, but clipboards and little, numbered plaques set out in front of the tables’ rose-adorned birdcage centerpieces. Some of the tables have groups of people gathered around them, perusing literature that’s been laid out.
“What’s going on here?” I ask Brody, pointing to the table that seems to have attracted the largest crowd.
“Silent auction,” he explains. “Different companies have donated goods or services that people can bid on. You should have a look around. If something strikes your fancy, I can place a bid on it.”
I smile at him. “That’s really sweet, but I don’t want you spending a lot of money on me.”
“All the money collected here tonight goes to Project
Open Hand, which I’m always happy to contribute to.” Brody tugs me over to the nearest table, where he picks up a clipboard and reads aloud, “Be a guest conductor for the San Francisco Symphony for one performance.”
“Mmmmmm . . .” I consider the possibility for a minute. It would be fun to hold a baton and make those sweeping, dramatic motions with my arms in front of a big orchestra, but I don’t know anything about music, and even less about what those conductor gestures mean. Sooooooo . . . probably not. I shake my head “no,” and we move on.
“Fencing lessons?” Brody proposes after seeing what’s on offer at the next table. “En garde!” Holding the clipboard out in front of him like it’s a sword, he lunges forward as if to attack.
I laugh, pushing his pretend weapon away. “No, thank you, D’Artagnan. I subscribe to a strict policy of nonviolence in my leisure activities.”
While Brody puts the clipboard back, I wander over to table four and get in line behind a woman who’s writing down the amount she’s willing to pay for whatever the item is. When she’s finished, I take a step forward and bend over to read the bid sheet, which is illuminated by the flickering light coming from several votive candles – ‘Have a home garden designed and planted by local, award-winning rosarian Brody Wyatt.’
“This is you!” I exclaim excitedly, looking at Brody, who’s just joined me, and pointing to the clipboard.
“Uh, yeah.” He smiles sheepishly and fiddles with the collar of his dress shirt. “I donated my botanical services to the cause. How am I doing?” Placing a hand on my shoulder, he leans down to take a peek at the paper, his cheek brushing up against mine.
“Really well!” I murmur softly. “The bidding’s already up to four hundred and fifty dollars – see.” I direct his attention to the most recent amount entered.
“Wow, that’s more than I expected.”
“And the night’s still young! We should get out of the way in case anyone else wants to place a bid,” I suggest, taking him by the hand and drawing him over to table six where some fancy downtown spa is offering a couple’s hot stone massage and exotic body scrub that’s supposed to be a “blissful, sensual bonding experience.” Um, no. If Brody and I are going to be bonding while naked under sheets, I don’t want there to be other people in the room. “Moving on,” I say, dragging him over to a table on the opposite side of the pergola.
Twin Piques Page 26