“Stop crying over him.”
“Good for you!”
“And I mean it,” Suz emphasized. “Life is too short for this BS. If he doesn’t see how great I am, except tonight maybe, then I don’t want anything to do with him.” She paused. “He didn’t see how bad I was tonight, right? He isn’t here or anything?”
“Nope.”
Suz slumped. “Oh, thank God.”
“Ready to go?”
“Yes, but you’re not coming.” She was still slurring slightly, but she wasn’t crying anymore and she was far more coherent than she’d been half an hour ago. “You’re staying here. I have a good feeling about tonight for you. I want you to have some fun for once. I blew that for you tonight so far.”
“No, you didn’t,” Noelle objected, but it was kind of hard to deny. It’s never super fun to babysit a hammered friend.
Suz squinted at her phone and punched some buttons on the screen. Then she put it aside triumphantly and said, “There. The cab is on the way.” She looked at the phone again. “Five minutes.”
“Let me at least walk you down to the street.”
“That”—Suz hiccupped—“I will let you do.”
The apartment was a third-floor walkup, and the walk down was long with a wobbly Suz. All the way, Noelle struggled with the feeling that she should be driving her, but what was the point? She lived about ten minutes’ drive away, on the first floor, and on top of everything else she was insisting that Noelle stay at the party. She wasn’t even welcome to take the opportunity to leave.
So when the cab arrived, Noelle checked out the driver—a woman, which put her mind at ease—and said good-bye to Suz.
Then she made her way back up to the apartment where the party was—whoever’s it was—thinking about the guy in the kitchen all the way.
Honestly, she’d expected to run into him the moment she went in, but she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t see him at all, and her casual glancing around quickly turned almost frantic. She was headed back toward the kitchen when the gypsy fortune-teller called out to her. “You there, do you want your fortune told?”
Noelle hesitated. This was the kind of thing she’d normally refuse, but for heaven’s sake, it was a party, it was just for fun. Why on earth not do it?
“I guess so.” She sat down in front of the fortune-teller, a little uneasy. This was just a joke, right? What if she said something personal and other people heard it?
“Give me your hand.” The woman held hers out and took Noelle’s in a tight grasp. “Aaahhh, good, good. You have a long lifeline. Great happiness. And love. Mmmmm, love. I see a tall man with very dark hair. Light eyes. He’s closer than you think.”
Self-consciously, Noelle glanced around.
“Do you know this man?” the woman asked.
“I … don’t think so.”
“His name begins with a J—I am not sure. Jacob. Jake. That’s it. Jacob or Jake. He’s very close. Very close.” She released Noelle’s hand and winked at her. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Noelle said, but it was more of a question than an expression of gratitude. Of course, it was just a party trick. She’d been hired to distract people, create some fun, but why be so specific.
“You’re still here,” a man said at her elbow, and she looked up to see him. The guy from the kitchen.
“Yeah. My friend went home. She … wasn’t feeling too well.”
“She wasn’t looking too well. Holiday breakup?”
“You got it.”
He shrugged. “It happens to the best of us.”
“I guess so.” She remembered tenth grade. She got a gold necklace from the guy anyway. Not a total bust.
“So the coffee, it was for her? Or are you a nervous wreck now?”
“Both.” Noelle laughed, then lowered her voice. “To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure whose party this is.”
“It’s mine.”
She gasped, horrified. “I’m so sorry!”
He laughed heartily. “Don’t worry about it. It’s actually my roommate’s. I wanted to have an early night and go to sleep, but…” He gestured. “This.”
“The perils of having a roommate.”
“Indeed.” He studied her for a moment. “You seem like a quiet type yourself.”
“You’re spot-on. I never go to parties.”
He raised an eyebrow and looked at her with interest. “Then why did you stay?”
“Because I never go to parties. It’s time for me to start doing things I never do.”
“Do you ever kiss strangers?” he asked, taking a step toward her.
“Never,” she said firmly, but something inside of her wavered and flip-flopped.
“Good policy.”
“I know it.”
“But there are times when it’s absolutely appropriate.”
“Oh yeah?”
He pointed up, and she followed his fingertip to a decorative little ball of mistletoe hanging over them.
“I see.” But she wasn’t sure about this. This was so far outside her realm.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Noelle,” she breathed.
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s what everyone says this time of year.”
He eyed her. “You look kind of familiar.”
“Everyone says that, too,” she said, but it wasn’t true. He looked a little familiar, too, though she couldn’t place him. It made her wonder if his familiarity was some sort of premonition.
“Well, Noelle, have you ever been kissed under mistletoe?”
“No.”
He took her hand, pulled her ever so slightly closer, then, looking so deeply into her eyes that she was sure he could see her heart inside of her, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Now you have.”
“Oh.” Everything in her relaxed. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d been at the prospect until he let her off the hook. “That was very nice, thank you. Very unexpected.”
He gave a laugh. “What can I say? I’m a gentleman.”
“Thank you,” she said sincerely. Then, “You didn’t tell me your name!”
“Jacob. Jake. Jake Marsden.”
She opened her mouth to exclaim in surprise, then frowned. “Wait a minute, do you know the fortune-teller?”
“No,” he said.
“But—”
“But I paid her five bucks to tell you that.”
“You did?”
They both laughed. “I did,” he said. “So if things don’t work out, don’t worry, you don’t have to spend the rest of your life looking for another Jake because some gypsy told you about him.”
“What a relief.”
“Tell me, Noelle. Could I persuade you to go for a walk with me? All this noise and smoke is going to drive me nuts if I’m here much longer.”
“I would love to,” she said. “Jake.”
Chapter 8
It was the sound of the snowplow scraping by outside that jarred us both out of the moment.
“Zooterkins! What was that?”
I took the Manolos off, then got up and looked out the window to confirm. “They’re starting to clear the streets. The snow has stopped coming down.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed.
“It would be an utter nightmare if it just kept going and going and going and never stopped. Can you imagine? We might have been stuck here forever!”
“Oh, I don’t think there was much danger of that. Where I come from, you can have snow whenever you want it. Or sun. Ocean or mountain. It’s really quite lovely.”
“It sounds like it.” And in that moment I really and truly wanted to believe her.
In fact, in that moment, I really did believe her.
I can’t say why. Certainly she wasn’t all that persuasive herself, but she hadn’t done a ton of talking. What made me question where she’d come from and why was the magical clarity of the memories she’d brought to me. Well, m
emories and … what would you call them? Memories that never happened? There should be a word for that, but if there is I don’t know it.
“So do you remember anything about your life?” I asked her, deciding, for a moment, to go with her story.
She was keen enough to be onto me immediately. “You don’t believe my ‘story,’” she said. “Do you?” She raised an eyebrow.
I smiled and shrugged. “I might. A little bit. I have to say, I never heard anyone say ‘Zooterkins’ before, so you’re certainly not from around these parts.”
“I do apologize for cussing.”
“Is that a cuss?”
Her face turned pink. “I mean it as one.”
I laughed outright. “If that’s not the definition of a cussword, I don’t know what is!”
“He laughs when I say it, too.” She jerked her head and eyes heavenward.
I laughed even harder. I didn’t know who he was, whether it was God or some underling angel, but the idea of anyone up there in charge chuckling at this crazy old broad really tickled me.
“I believe you,” I told her.
“You do?”
“I do.” Maybe I was just giddy with the weird situation, but in that moment I genuinely did. “So what exactly are you supposed to do in order to declare mission accomplished on this night?”
“Oh, that’s easy. You’re supposed to spread your wings a little bit finally. It’s time for you to stop chickening out of everything. Especially during the holidays. Do you realize that for the past eighteen years you have had one crummy holiday after the next?”
“Do I realize it?” I gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, I realize it.” It wasn’t as if they’d all been miserable, but there had never been a stellar one. And having been through the potential scenarios tonight, I could see that there could have been some really great ones, but I hadn’t allowed for them. I’d been too scared of what could happen, when I should have been excited about what could happen.
“Then there is one more thing you need to consider,” she said, and handed me a pair of Shoe Addicts Anonymous pumps. They were a gorgeous buttery soft black leather, cut low on the sides to give the illusion of a longer leg without going so far as to show the arch, and they were finished with a solid gold band around the heel. That was an SAA trademark. “Put these on.”
“But we’re almost finished—”
“Put them on!” she said, sounding what you might call cross, as I wasn’t sure the woman had an angry bone in her body.
Assuming she had any bones at all, that is. Or any body. I guess if she was an angel, she wouldn’t, right?
I put the shoes on.
* * *
Noelle was working late, as usual—the week leading up to Christmas was madness—when her phone rang. She glanced down and picked it up.
“Hey, Lorna.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Almost always.”
“Are you sitting down now?”
She laughed. “Yes, I’m sitting down. If you don’t tell me what’s up, though, I’m going to get up and start pacing.”
“You’re going to Rome!”
“What?”
“For Christmas! Well, on Christmas. Which kind of knocks out Christmas night, but who cares? You can’t stand it anyway, so now you have a great excuse for being a grinch!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have to go to Rome for the business, to pick out new designs, if you can even stand the idea, and Helene just bagged on me because her daughter has a Christmas pageant, so I’m going alone, except I’m not going alone, because you are coming with me!”
“I can’t!”
“What do you mean you can’t? You can. You will. I won’t let you say no to such an awesome opportunity. We’re going to stay in the Visconti Palace and walk the ancient streets every day, and drink strong Italian coffee with cannoli for breakfast—I don’t care if it’s dessert—and eat pizza and spaghetti and gnocchi and just loads and loads of things and we’re going to get so fat.” She gasped. “Oh my God, the prosecco! Imagine how much prosecco we can have! We can rent a Vespa like Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and—”
“It sounds like you need to take your boyfriend, not me.”
“Oh, shut up, you know guys don’t ever want to do those girlie romantic things.” She paused. “Wait a minute, why are you being so negative? I thought you’d be thrilled. This is like the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s free,” she added with a question in her voice.
“That’s not the problem…”
“What’s the problem, then? How could there possibly be a problem at all?”
Oh, it was so typical of Lorna. Everything was so easy for her. She got an idea and she followed it. She was the original Fantasy Island proprietor; everything was possible with her.
But it wasn’t possible. Christmas was a week away, and there was no way Noelle could get herself together and ready to go abroad in that short time. Why, she’d have to tell Lex she was taking off work and … and … and get someone to collect her mail.
And a million other things. Just too many things to count.
“I can’t do it,” she said to Lorna. “I’m really sorry. I really do appreciate you inviting me. That is so sweet of you.”
“Noelle,” Lorna said in a stern voice. “This will be fun. And admittedly, I really would love to have you there. But honestly, I don’t want you to come for me so much as I think you need to do it for you. When was the last time you were out of the country?”
Noelle thought about it. “Mexico.”
“Mexico nine years ago Mexico? With me?”
God, had it really been that long? “That’s the one.”
“But there was a hurricane. And, wait, didn’t you leave early, even?”
Yes. They’d been there two days when the weather report had come predicting bad weather, and while everyone else was content to hunker down in the hotel suite and live it up, Noelle had panicked at the idea of them all getting stranded there for weeks and had taken the last plane out.
To be fair, she had tried to persuade everyone to come with her. She didn’t think it was safe there. But everyone else stayed, and to hear the stories, they’d had a marvelous time, even though Lorna herself had ended up having to pay an extra fifty bucks to get a second suitcase—full of new shoes—home on the plane.
“Noelle,” Lorna said, her voice grave. “Please think about this. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. You can see the designs with me, help pick out next fall’s line. It would be so much fun. For both of us. Please, Noelle. Get out of your cocoon for once.”
The truth was, Noelle wanted to. Part of her could envision it: taking her passport out of the little lockbox she had behind her Jane Austen collection on her bookshelf; packing a suitcase full of great shoes, black palazzo pants, sweaters, hats, sunglasses, everything she could think of to look stylish in Rome.
But she’d been through this kind of thing before; she had been disappointed before. She’d counted on things being one way only to find they went a completely different way over and over again. She’d begun to believe that gut feeling she got when she knew something wouldn’t be a good time and she ended up being right.
Like that Christmas party she’d gone to a few years ago with Suz. She would much rather have stayed home, but instead she ended up having to escort her poor, drunk, heartbroken friend home and had ended up in bed, watching terrible TV by 11:00 P.M.
Two weeks later, Suz met the guy she ended up marrying—not the guy she’d been heartbroken over, by the way—but Noelle’s life had remained the same, ever the same. Never changing.
It was just one example, and a small one at that, but she could come up with a hundred times she’d known something was going to suck and it did, from her high school boyfriend making New Year’s Eve miserable to …
* * *
… to getting snowed in here tonight on Christmas Eve because I was too busy working to r
ealize that, for other people, life had taken a turn.
For me, life never took a turn.
That’s what Charlie’s examples had taught me. That it could have but it never did. Because if there was such a thing as fate, could a person really screw it up that badly? That consistently? If there was fate and I was meant to experience it, wouldn’t it have happened no matter what I said or did?
“No,” Charlie’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry to eavesdrop, I really am, we’re only supposed to do it in extreme circumstances, but this is one of those. Your fate has come to you over and over again, and you have pushed it away.”
“I haven’t.” Eavesdrop? She could hear my thoughts?
Charlie considered me. “Do you know the story about the drowning man and the boat?”
I frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” This was crazy. Why were we suddenly talking about a drowning man and a boat? If she began to talk about Titanic, I was going to lose it.
“There was a man who was drowning,” Charlie said. “And he prayed to God with all the faith in the world and asked him to save him. Well, then a boat came along and offered to help, but the man said, ‘No, thank you, I’m waiting for God to save me.’ This happened three times—three boats came before the man finally died.”
“Great story.”
Charlie laughed. “And when that man got to heaven, do you know what he said to God?”
“Nice robe?”
“He said, ‘Why did you fail me? I thought you would save me, I had faith you would save me, but you let me drown!’”
I nodded, though I didn’t quite get it. “I mean, I know this is a parable, but I don’t know the point.”
“The point, my dear, is that God said, ‘I sent you three boats, and you refused them all!’” Charlie exploded into peals of laughter.
And I couldn’t help it, I joined in. That kind of laugh is absolutely contagious. “Okay, okay, I get it. That’s a good one.”
“So God has been sending you boats all your life, child, but you never get out of your house long enough to get on one.”
I got it. “You think I should go with Lorna on the trip to Rome in a few hours?”
“Why on earth not? You don’t have so much as a goldfish to take care of, and I happened to see that pile of clothes you set aside in your little shopping expedition—”
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