I giggle. "None of the above," I say. "We're old friends, that's all." I gather my papers back into my file and busy myself with placing my fabric samples back into a little stack with OCD-straight edges. And then I back my chair up and stand without giving out any more details.
"Old friends, my ass," I hear Quinn mutter as I walk away. "Somebody'll be doing the walk of shame tomorrow morning, I guaran-damn-tee you."
I giggle again, and my heart speeds up as I think about the next few hours. I swear I can feel it beating in my toes.
CHAPTER NINE
Home Again
I walk into the restaurant with my head buried in my phone, both to hide my nervousness and to avoid appearing eager. Plus, Allison, my high school best friend, has been texting me nonstop for the last hour, ever since I told her about my "date."
I'm here. I'll call you tomorrow.
I imagine this won't make her happy, but when my phone chimes with another text I shove it in my purse without looking at the screen. I avoid looking left or right as I approach the hostess stand.
"I'm meeting someone here," I say. "Tall guy, dark hair?"
She gestures over my left shoulder, and I turn slightly to see Brandon rising from a bench inside the entry and walking toward me. I feel as if I'm in a fog as he greets me with a bear hug, a cheesy grin plastered to my face. This feels nothing but weird.
"Jenny Dawson," he says, giving me an up-down once-over. "You look great."
I'm tongue-tied, but I force myself to get over it. "So do you," I say, my voice wooden and feeling like an echo in my own ears. I'm so nervous my teeth are almost chattering, though in my defense, it is freezing in this restaurant.
As he steps back from me, I get a better look at him. He looks roughly the same as he did in high school, but in the ensuing years his shoulders have grown broader and his facial features sharper, more defined. His cheeks are burnished with a five o'clock shadow, and it works for him. Most of all, his eyes are the same—the rich, ruddy color of milk chocolate, and sparked with a kind of impish glow, like he's waiting for the party to start.
His eyes always were what drew me in, and they're doing it now…
Wait, wait, wait. Wasn't I recently going on about how certain relationships belong in the past? Facebook is bad enough, but seeing somebody I used to love in person is pure agony. Why am I here, ogling Brandon Royer's eyes? More than that, why did I ever think this was a good idea?
Luckily the hostess steps in and saves me from making a humiliating decision to dart back through the front doors. "You two can follow me," she says, and Brandon makes a sweeping gesture with his arm, indicating that I should go first.
I follow the hostess as she threads through the front part of the restaurant, acutely aware that Brandon's eyes are on my ass. I concentrate on making sure I don't trip in my wedge heels, at the same time adding a little extra strut to my walk. Since we're here, he might as well see what he's been missing all these years. Besides, he asked me here, not the other way around.
As I give myself this pep talk, my right hip bumps into the edge of a chair, and I wobble mid-step. Of course. Thankfully the hostess chooses this moment to stop in front of a table—a round, intimate two-top in a back corner of the dim dining room, and I balance myself by grabbing the back of a chair, which I manage to pull out and slide onto without falling and making a total idiot of myself.
Once we sit, I avoid looking at him, my nerves back in full force. I take a minute to settle myself, hanging my purse carefully from the back of the chair, picking up and opening my menu.
When I look up, I see that he's watching me, an amused look in his eyes.
"What?" I ask, laughing.
He shakes his head. "It's just been a long time, is all," he answers after a couple of seconds. "How've you been?"
He has the same slow, Southern drawl he had in high school, that too-cool-for-school, football player kind of verbal swagger. I feel like he's drinking me up with those delicious eyes and inadvertently flutter my lashes.
"I've been fine," I say. "Great." When he doesn't say anything right away, I add, "What have you been doing with yourself all these years?"
He laughs. "Like you don't know."
I tilt my head at him. "What do you mean?"
"Come on," he says. "I know you checked out my Facebook page after I sent you that message. You've seen everything I've done in the last five years, at least. Right?"
When he smiles a little dimple appears in his right cheek. Only the right. I can't believe I'd forgotten this little detail, this tiny essence of Brandon-ness. I also forgot how straightforward he can be. That made it even harder when he dumped me mercilessly in the height of our junior year, at the height of my adoration of him. Still, somehow, his words send a thrill of excitement down my spine.
My cheeks grow warm against my will.
"Like you didn't do the same thing," I accuse, feeling myself relax the tiniest bit. Sarcasm is a language I speak. Is Brandon sarcastic? I can't remember. I study the planes of his face, strange and new and adult, and yet familiar—even though I know he's a different person now, just as I am.
The dimple deepens. "Guilty," he says.
I duck my head into my menu, finding it impossible not to feel self-conscious and feeling very, very grateful that I didn't leave any traces of my Facebook screw up anywhere on my wall. Of course he's right—of course I stalked his profile, and I knew he was doing the same. But to have it confirmed this early in the evening is like dancing with the white elephant in the room.
Brandon Royer is full of surprises.
"Have you been here before?" he asks me, opening his own menu.
"Lots of times," I say. It's true, though the Midtown restaurant only opened six months ago. It's the newest restaurant in David's company's portfolio, so I was here with Carrie for its soft opening and again for its grand opening. And a few times since.
"Well, what's good then?" he asks, sounding surprised and a bit deflated, as if he'd hoped to impress me by picking the new hot spot. I feel a hint flattered and a hint offended. We discuss the menu for a minute or two. It's a tapas-style restaurant, which means we have to come to an agreement about what to order and then get past the awkwardness of having to share.
I'm surprised when he chooses seared scallops, candied pecan arugula salad, and prosciutto-wrapped dates. The Brandon I knew lived on a diet of burgers, pizza, and peanut butter, and his idea of vegetables didn't go much past French fries. Again I realize we're not the same people we were back then. I might as well be on a blind date with a stranger.
As soon as we've ordered—me the lamb meatballs and roasted asparagus—I clear my throat and decide to just come out with it.
"So why did you get in touch with me?" I ask. If he can be direct, I can too.
He looks a little taken aback, and immediately I wish I could retract the words. Why look a date horse in the mouth?
"Well, it's like I said. I saw you were still in town when I friended you on Facebook, and I wondered what you were up to." He shifts his tall frame and leans back a little in his chair, assessing me. "Plus you're pretty hot, Dawson. I thought I'd see why a girl like you is still single."
My jaw slackens a little bit. Are you freaking kidding me? Clearly he hasn't gotten over being a jerk.
"That didn't stop you from dumping me, Royer," I say, the pique clearly displayed on my face. I look him in the eye, only to see him grinning at me, the dimple out in full force.
"I'm kidding," he says in that easy drawl of his that's as charming as it is infuriating. "Relax."
I'm still staring at him with my lips slightly open when our server reaches our table with two glasses of wine. Mine is a pinot grigio—in our twenties my friends and I had a "no red wine on dates" rule, since purple teeth are decidedly unattractive—and Brandon's is a cabernet. I eye his glass, wishing I had the cab instead, but I'm happy for the distraction because it allows me to process this turn in the conversation.
; "Still got that fire, I see," he says, and I sip my wine for a moment and contemplate that. I did have fire in my teenage years—my mom would definitely agree—but somewhere in the ensuing decade I think I've let the flame burn out. Maybe all those years of suppressing my emotions around Jeremy have something to do with it. Jeremy couldn't stand any type of emotional outburst and would basically agree with anything I said to keep me from starting an argument.
Holy cow. My mother is totally right. Jeremy really wasn't right for me.
"So why are you still single?" I ask, pulling myself together and vowing right here and now to get my fire back. The first man who ever screwed me over seems like a good place to start.
He chuckles, making it impossible for me to stay annoyed with him, much as I might want to. "Touché," he says, taking a drink of wine and then wiping his mouth with his napkin before answering me. Then he looks me straight in the eyes. "I got stood up at the altar," he says.
I wait for the punch line, but it doesn't come.
"You got…stood up at the—" I pause for a long moment. "Seriously?"
"Seriously," he says in a quiet voice. There's no sign of the dimple now.
"Geez, Brandon. That's awful," I say. "When did it happen?"
"About two months ago," he says. "Three days before I found out my fiancée was pregnant with our boss's baby." He picks up his glass again, casually, and takes a long, deep drink, draining almost a third of the wine in one gulp.
I feel like I'm watching a TV screen, not my ex-boyfriend across the table at a swanky downtown restaurant. "Our boss?" I ask. "So you two worked together?"
He nods. "Yep. Both on the partner track at my old firm." I learned from stalking his Facebook profile that Brandon is an executive at a big, multinational financial services firm. I also saw photos of him with a woman in the not-so-distant past, so I know that his ex-fiancée is a striking blonde with a great figure and an expensive wardrobe. In most of the photos I saw, she was carrying a Prada bag I happen to know costs around two thousand dollars (because I might or might not have pinned it to a Pinterest board called, "I wish").
"Well, she is a partner now," he continues, bitterness drenching his words. "Guess that's what happens when you're sleeping with the managing director."
I just stare at him, speechless. And I thought my life had sucked for the past couple months.
"Anyway, I asked for a transfer to the Memphis office, and I moved back home. Figured I'd get back to my roots."
Neither of us says anything for a long moment. Finally, going for levity, I say, "So, what? You're contacting all your old girlfriends now, trying to figure out where things went wrong?"
Immediately I know it's the wrong thing to say. His face contorts in a painful way, as if I just pushed the knife a little deeper into his back and gave it a twist. I was thinking of that movie with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton where Jack Nicholson does exactly that after losing the love of his life—Something's Gotta Give. I start to tell Brandon that, but just then the server interrupts with our first two small plates.
We spend the next couple of minutes arranging our dishes and spearing items from the entrée platters onto our individual plates. I pop a bite of salad into my mouth, trying to chew up and swallow the awkwardness of the moment.
Brandon slices a scallop in half, scoops it onto his fork, and downs it almost without chewing. "This is great," he says, and I feel brave enough to look him in the eye. He grins at me, showing the dimple. "You called it. That's exactly what I'm doing," he says, surprising me once again.
I feel as if I've spent half of this date so far with my jaw hanging open. I close my mouth and then immediately open it again to take another bite of salad. I chew slowly and swallow before I answer him. "First of all, that was a joke," I say. "A bad one. I had no idea—"
"No worries," he says, looking as if he means it.
I study his face as he continues devouring the scallops. A fleeting worry crosses my mind that I should grab one before he eats them all. They look amazing and smell even better—buttery and nutty and delicious.
"So, am I the first ex-girlfriend you've talked to?" I ask. I know that before me, he'd never gone out with anybody longer than a few weeks—or gone past third base. I have no idea how many women he's been with since I lost track of him though.
He shakes his head, a sheepish look on his face. "No, I had lunch with Missy about a week ago," he says.
I try not to let that rattle me, or at least I try not to show it. "And what did you learn?" I ask.
"I learned I have commitment issues." He looks completely guileless as he says this.
"Well, we were babies back then," I say, not sure why I'm defending him, especially when we're discussing the girl he dumped me for.
"Nah, she's right," he says, and I feel amazed anew at the intensity of this conversation. I'm not sure what I expected from tonight, but this wasn't it.
"It's not like I was the saint in my relationship with Michelle," he says. "It took me three years to propose, even though I knew she was waiting for a ring for at least two of them. And I…" He clears his throat and squares his shoulders, as if he has to steel himself to continue. "And I cheated on her first."
So the ex-fiancée has a name, I think first. Michelle. And then, Wow. He really is a jerk. So why do I feel like placing my hand over his and telling him everything's going to be all right?
I'm nothing if not self-destructive.
We go on talking and eating through three more small plates, and Brandon orders one more plus two more glasses of wine. I learn that he moved to Boston for grad school before getting his job in Chicago and that Michelle is from a prominent Connecticut family—her mother is a news anchor for ABC.
As we're parting ways outside the restaurant, Brandon says, "I wasn't planning on doing this, since I'm kind of on a mission and want some time to myself." He studies me for a long moment on the sidewalk, just steps from my car, which is parked at an after-hours meter. As we're standing there staring at each other, a group of loud, drunk college students walks past jostling one another, forcing Brandon to move closer to me. Unexpectedly, he slides his arm behind my back and pulls me so I'm almost pressed up against him. My heart is pounding about a jillion beats per minute, though I don't know what to think about this situation. All I know is that old crushes die hard.
He leans down and brushes his lips against my cheek before releasing my waist and stepping back again. I resist the urge to reach up and touch my face where he kissed me.
"Do you want to go out again sometime?" he says.
I lick my lips involuntarily. "Um, sure. I guess," I say in a tentative voice. So much for reclaiming my fire. "Just…text me sometime."
"Will do," he says.
I turn away from him, round my car, and get in. When I pull away from the curb, he's still standing there, watching me leave.
I'm almost all the way home before I realize that even though we spent more than two hours talking, he didn't ask a single question about me.
* * *
When Monday rolls around, I'm almost convinced my night with Brandon didn't happen—that I dreamed the whole thing. He hasn't texted me as he promised, not that I expected him to. I'm sure when the buzz of the evening and the heat of the moment wore off, he gave himself a proverbial kick for even suggesting it.
Why should he turn backward, when he's clearly looking to move forward?
I could say the same thing to myself.
I'm sitting at my desk, midmorning, at a rare moment when every member of our office is present. I've just sent an email confirming this week's appointment with my new client when three things happen all at once.
One, I check my inbox and see that I have a new email from Marc Rasmutin, probably about my proposal for the bicycle-factory condo project. Two, my cell phone rings, and I see that it's Brewster's number on my phone's screen—I'm not sure he's ever called me direct before, and my head swirls with the possibilities of what he might want
. And three and most significantly, Candace steps into the doorway of her office and calls out, "Jennifer, darling, can you please come to my office for a minute?"
I must look like a character in a stop-motion animated film, my head bobbing from one frame, to the next, to the next. I prioritize things quickly in my head. The email can obviously wait. But who do I answer first, Brewster or Candace?
This feels a little unfair. It would help me in either situation to know what each one wants before I speak to the other. But since Candace is the one staring at me—and since she is not a patient woman—I let Brewster's call go to voicemail and give her a brisk nod before pushing back in my chair. She disappears into her office as quickly as she appeared.
As I stand and start to walk away from my desk, I give my phone a wistful glance. Brewster had better be leaving me a voicemail, and I wish I could check it before I stumble into Candace's presence. But the voicemail chime hasn't gone off, which means that either he isn't leaving me a message, or he's leaving me one hell of a long one.
Oh, how I want to know what he wants!
I've gone numb inside as I concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. The way I feel, I might as well be walking onto the guillotine stand or into the path of a firing range. I can sense every pair of eyes at Greenlee Designs on me as I take this walk of shame, though I truly don't know what I have left to be ashamed of at this point. Candace is the one who should be ashamed of her behavior, not me.
That thought makes me feel a bit stronger, though I still refuse to look right or left at my ogling coworkers, not even at Ellie Kate, who I know has my back and my best interests at heart.
I walk into Candace's office and close the door behind me, even though she doesn't ask me to. As uncertain as I feel as to what's about to happen, I don't want accidental spectators, though I do wonder if Quinn is brash enough to stand with her ear to the door.
Hell yeah, she's brash enough. The thought makes me almost smile in spite of myself.
"What's up, Candace?" I ask, wary. The last time we had a conversation of any length was the day she tried to make me an assistant on my own project. I still seethe at the thought of it, which is why I've been avoiding it so hard, I guess. My thoughts turn again to the call from Brewster.
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