by M. J. Pullen
“No problem,” Charlotte said cheerfully, holding the door into the sunshine of the park. “So, we’re looking for an elegant proposal for a woman who loves trendy places and met her outdoorsy husband in the woods. With less than three days to plan and execute. I’m on it.”
“I know it’s a tall order,” he said. “But I guess it’s like love. Or the perfect campsite. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Absolutely,” Charlotte agreed. “Let’s do this. We’ll catch one of those open-top tourist busses at the end of the park and ride all around the city. When you see something that intrigues you, we’ll hop off and explore. In the meantime, I have a few calls I can make, for more options.”
According to Jared, Brianna loved animals, chocolate, fine food and wine, and art. Over the next several hours, they explored Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, Little Italy, Pier 39. They toured a private tasting room at Ghirardelli Chocolates, where they could mold a box for the engagement ring out of chocolate—dark or milk. Sweet and intimate.
They went to the zoo, where Charlotte could call in an enormous favor and set up a private nighttime tour, with a candlelit dinner in the carousel plaza and a proposal on the old-time carousel itself. Whimsical and outdoorsy.
They visited several art galleries, each of which would have been a prime choice for any art lover. Elegant and trendy.
But none felt exactly right to Jared.
After ten hours of searching, they ended with dinner at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Transamerica Pyramid and the Bay beyond. It wasn’t on Charlotte’s original list, but they had to eat. And there was nothing like watching as the water turned all the colors of the darkening sky and lights began to twinkle like the stars at the planetarium.
They plowed their way through a bucket of fresh mussels, pork tacos with pineapple slaw, and a bottle of pinot grigio. Charlotte felt happy and lightheaded after the well-earned meal.
As the waiter took their plates, she leaned back in her chair and gestured at the view with her wine glass. “See? Okay, I know a restaurant isn’t the most original proposal site. But what woman could ever turn you down when you offered her all of this?” She swung her arm around to encompass the city, bridges, water, and sunset. “Hell, another glass of wine and I’d marry you.”
There was a long beat of silence, during which she regretted her last statement deeply and strained to keep her eyes on the view.
“It’s not like I never offered.” Jared’s offhand smile was belied by the crack in his voice.
Charlotte’s heart lurched. Did he really want to talk about this now? Or was that just one in Jared’s endless stream of jokes designed to make her uncomfortable?
He had always delighted in throwing her off her game. But say the wrong thing now, and she could not only make the conversation awkward, but take the focus off his engagement and put it on their painful history. Exactly what she’d been avoiding all day.
She lowered her glass. “True. Unfortunately for me, I was an idiot and missed my chance with you.” Her tone was playful, dismissive, but the truth of the words pressed on her even as she said them.
“Charlotte. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Water under the bridge.” She waved away whatever was coming next. She couldn’t go there. Not now. “It’s your new love we need to worry about now, your lovely Brianna.” She signed the check and put the Perfect Proposals credit card back in her purse. “This woman of yours seems harder to pin down than any future bride I’ve ever worked for. An outdoorsy type who doesn’t like public parks, an elegant type who won’t want a fancy restaurant or exclusive wine cellar, a San Franciscan who doesn’t want too much San Francisco in her proposal.”
“Don’t think of her that way,” he said, a defensive note in his voice. “She’s really easygoing, actually. She probably would’ve loved every place you suggested today. It’s just me. None of these places feel right, somehow.”
“It’s not a bad thing, Jared. I love a challenge.” She put a hand on his arm, feeling a prickle of warmth in her fingers despite the cool evening air.
Her phone buzzed, a text from Lily. “Darren is the house DJ at Club YOLO Saturday. Let’s go dancing after the proposal!”
“Everything okay?” Jared nodded toward her phone.
“Sure…” Charlotte said absently. Club YOLO… She’d never been, but Darren and Lily loved the place. There was one idea…
On sudden impulse, she looked up at Jared. “I’m thinking of trying something completely different for you. It’s a little unorthodox, but it has potential.”
“Why do I feel like we’re in a horror movie and I’m the idiot who decides to take a shower in the cabin at midnight?” He made a stabbing motion with his fist to illustrate. “Things never end well for the guy in the shower.”
Charlotte stood and shouldered her purse. “I’m out of brilliant ideas. It’s either this, or Alcatraz at night, and somehow I don’t think even you are charming enough to get away with the prison metaphor for marriage.”
“Fair enough.” He laughed. “What do you have in mind?”
“Lily’s boyfriend is a DJ, and he just got a gig at this super-trendy dance club on Saturday night. I thought we could check it out tonight.”
“Come on.” Jared gave her a skeptical look. “You’re just looking for an excuse to see my super-hot dance moves.”
“If I remember correctly, your dance moves consist mostly of the white man’s overbite, and grinding up on any woman who doesn’t slap you.”
“And the problem is…?” He bit his lip and began thrusting his pelvis as they exited the restaurant, with more than a few staring eyes following their progress.
“Great. I can’t come back here again for six months. Thanks a lot.” She chucked him on the shoulder as they waited for the elevator. “Seriously, I know it’s not outdoorsy or elegant, but it would be very trendy and it’s definitely original.”
“A proposal at a nightclub?”
“Hear me out. I was thinking if you guys went dancing, and we had some lead time, Darren can help us. He could put the spotlight on you and Brianna, switch the music to your song—”
“We don’t have a song.”
“You have to have something.” She arched an eyebrow at him and he gestured for her to exit the elevator before him.
He shrugged.
“It’s not something embarrassing, is it? ‘Your Body is Wonderland’? Oh, please let that be it. I haven’t had anything decent to make fun of you about all day.”
“Nope. Brianna and I just… aren’t that sentimental about music, I guess.”
“Anyway, we’ll figure that part out. We’ll get the crowd to do something fun, like all the guys get down on one knee, and make a circle around you in the middle of the dance floor. We could rent one of the private rooms in the back for champagne…” Charlotte paused at the revolving door of the building to appraise her old friend. His expression was serious, inscrutable. “You hate the idea. I knew you would.”
“No, it’s…interesting.”
“Ugh. It’s a terrible idea.” She pushed through the door in frustration. “And it has no sentimental connection to either you or Brianna. It’s just been a long day, and I’ve never had so much trouble coming up with something for a client…”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You hate it so hard,” she said. “Look, it’s getting late and we’re both tired. Maybe we should call it a night and go back to the drawing board tomorrow.”
“Are you kidding me?” He flagged down a cab. “Since when do you go to bed at nine o’clock? Let’s go check out this club of yours.”
“You’re sure? I don’t want to waste your time.”
He gave her a serious look. “Hanging out with old friends is never a waste of time. Today has been the most fun I’ve had in years. Let’s go to this awesome, super-trendy cl
ub of yours. Maybe it will sweep me off my feet.”
“I really am so, so sorry!” Charlotte yelled, over the reverberating techno music, as Jared handed her a gin and tonic in a giant plastic cup. “It’s not…quite what I expected.”
They stood in the middle of a jam-packed dance floor, music thumping through them in teeth-jarring rhythm. “Don’t sweat it,” Jared yelled toward her ear, lifting his cup in a salute.
“The reviews are great on this place,” Charlotte went on, embarrassment made worse by the fact that she had to ramble apologies at the top of her lungs. “Darren loves it here.”
“It’s fine,” Jared said emphatically, taking a long gulp from his cocktail. “I’ve been really immersed in the Austin music scene, so it’s nice to try something different.” He moved closer as a woman in a bikini top the size of two tortilla chips pushed past him from behind. The woman wore glow-in-the-dark body paint and had her hair in braids; overhead, she held two drinks with pulsing neon spheres for ice cubes. Charlotte thought the woman pressed more firmly against Jared than was necessary to pass.
Charlotte took a long pull on her own cocktail. “Obviously,” her voice strained, “this wouldn’t work for a proposal. No way you could get all these people to do the same thing at the same time.”
Despite the elegantly framed local artwork on the black brick walls, and colorful LED lighting slicing through the dark in strategic places, Club YOLO still had the feel of a college dive bar. A DJ at one end of the room bounced and rocked over a turntable in front of a mirror; spears of light hit a disco ball overhead and shattered around them. The pressing crowd was not so much dancing as jittering, electrocution-style.
“It’s unlikely,” Jared agreed. “But hey, we paid twenty bucks to get in, right? Might as well soak it all in.”
“I always liked that about you,” Charlotte said, as the music got louder. When Jared signaled that he couldn’t hear, she leaned in, putting her hand on his shoulder for balance. His hand slipped around her waist reflexively for support. “I always liked that about you,” she repeated. “You were up for anything.”
“So were you.” His breath was warm against her cheek. “Be honest—I was just your excuse for doing what you wanted to do anyway.”
She pulled back to make a face at him, just as the skidding, thumping music changed tempo and the crowd surged in around them. A man who was dancing as though in the throes of a seizure bounced lightly against Charlotte and waved in apology. He then seemed to take her polite smile as invitation, and began dancing at her. There was no other way to describe it. The man vibrated, his wide eyes staring intently—almost aggressively—into hers. Jared tightened his grip on her waist and pulled her around to face him.
“We’re going to lose our drinks with all this bumping around,” he yelled, lifting his in a toast. “Bottoms up!”
She followed his lead and gulped down half the giant gin and tonic, something she hadn’t done in years. Being around Jared was like sliding back into her college self. Maybe a good thing, maybe not.
As Charlotte was working on the last third of her cocktail, Seizure Guy lost his balance trying to ensnare a blonde girl on the other side, and he human-dominoed straight into Charlotte. Jared steadied her enough that she didn’t plow into the person on the other side of them, but she did wind up with Bombay Sapphire and tonic running down the front of her white blouse.
Looking genuinely aghast, Seizure Guy made an effort to dry her off with his t-shirt. This gesture was nobler in theory than execution, considering it left him brushing her wet cleavage with his shirt.
Jared politely, firmly pushed the man away, and gestured at her wet, sticky blouse. “Should we…?”
“Please.”
He took her hand and they weaved through the crowd to the back of the room, where there was a stairway guarded by a bouncer and several weird little doors and hallways shooting off to other rooms. Jared led her to the first of these, which turned out to be a mirrored space with benches along the wall. A very drunk girl was dancing topless on a table in the middle.
“Um. No.” Jared dragged her immediately into the second room, which was a smaller version of the main dance floor, the music piped in through speakers. There was a couple pressed against the wall next to the doorframe, melting together, kissing in time to the music.
Charlotte glanced at Jared, who cleared his throat and averted his eyes, looking first down at her soaked blouse, then up at the painted ceiling tiles. “We need to get you dry,” he said. “Restroom?”
She laughed and took his hand, pulling him behind her. Charlotte had to admit, it was fun to see Jared discombobulated. In college, he had always been the one who knew where to go and how to get there. He knew which bouncers would let them in a side door and which female bartenders would give him free drinks just for that dimpled smile. Not that he necessarily tried to work the system; that wasn’t his style. He was just easygoing and personable; people just wanted to make Jared happy.
After a full day on her feet showing him every possible proposal site in the Bay Area, Charlotte could relate.
Still, it was fun seeing him a little off his game after all these years. It was clearly bugging him that he hadn’t already found Charlotte a stack of clean paper towels and seltzer water, and maybe an obliging waitress with a spare shirt she could borrow. Don’t worry about returning it, sweetie. Anything for Jared.
The line outside the women’s restroom was seven people deep. In the time it took Jared to run into the men’s room, pee, and confirm they were out of paper towels, the line for the women’s hadn’t moved. “We’ll go to the bar and get napkins,” he said, and Charlotte didn’t argue.
“Can I be honest?” Jared said on their way down the dark hallway.
“Of course.”
Instead of elaborating, he pulled her suddenly into a shallow nook in the hallway. Charlotte’s heart thudded in her chest as Jared pinned her to the wall. His fair, solid arms emerged from his t-shirt on either side of her. At some point he’d taken off the light flannel he’d worn all day; it was tied around his waist. Which was very, very close to Charlotte’s waist.
His head was turned to the side, toward the front of the club, watching something she couldn’t see. She leaned tentatively forward so her face was closer to his neck. She noticed it again: he smelled the same. The clean, Jared-specific scent she hadn’t realized she’d been missing for the last seven years, mingled with his detergent and sweat and gin. Charlotte wanted to inhale that scent, to put her lips against the divot in his throat, just above the line of his t-shirt, where she could see his heartbeat pulsing in time with the music.
She was mere centimeters from it—kissing that spot, feeling him groan against her lips—when he turned suddenly, and his nose bumped against her temple. “Sorry! I didn’t realize I was right up on you like that.”
When he released her, Charlotte could see what he’d been watching: two broad-shouldered bouncers hefting a very loud, very drunk college-age kid out the back door. The kid was kicking and flailing, followed from behind by six or seven of his buddies, two of whom were capturing the whole thing on their phones. That was why Jared had pulled her into the nook: to shield her from the ruckus coming down the hallway. He was being chivalrous, not amorous.
And she was a complete idiot, and entirely too close to him.
“Right there.” Jared nodded at the kid as they pushed him out the back door and his friends followed behind him, laughing. “That is why I don’t do social media. Ten bucks says that’s on YouTube or Facebook within an hour.”
“More like minutes,” Charlotte agreed. Her voice sounded like a baby goat’s, she was shaking so hard.
He gave her a perplexed look as he relaxed back, and his hands drifted down from the wall along the side of her arms. Was it a caress? Or just a friendly, “we’ve known each other forever and I’m comfortable enough not to t
ry too hard not to touch you,” incidental kind of touch? It sure as hell felt like a caress. God, why had she let herself go so long without sex? No woman who’d had a proper orgasm in the past year would be this panicked around Jared.
This was Jared, for Pete’s sake.
Friend Jared.
Soon-to-be-engaged Jared.
Kind, sexy, delicious-smelling Jared.
“You were about to say something?” Her voice was an octave higher than usual. “Being honest?”
It took a minute for the distracted, puzzled look to leave his face. “Oh, right.” Then he was sheepish. “I was just going to say, and I hope you won’t be offended by this.”
“I can handle it.” I can handle you. I’m crazy about you, too. You’re attracted to me? I had no idea!
“I really hate this club.”
“Oh, right. Me, too!” Charlotte shook off a fog of disappointment. “Should we go?”
“If you don’t mind?”
He took her hand again, adjusting his fingers so they were interlaced with hers, and craned over the crowd in front of them toward the club’s entrance. “That’s a mess. Want to go the way of the social media stars?”
She nodded, and Jared pulled her toward the back door. The kissing couple had now disappeared. The girl on the table was still dancing, though she was now wearing a man’s sport coat over her bare upper body. The girl looked happy, twirling and swiveling her hips with her arms across her belly, eyes closed as though in a dream.
The night air was cool and bracing in the alley behind the club. No sign of the guy who’d been thrown out, or his entourage. Charlotte became aware that her shirt had not entirely dried as the cold air focused itself sharply against her—making her nipples harden embarrassingly under the damp blouse. She wanted to cover herself, but that would’ve meant dropping Jared’s hand, and she wasn’t sure he’d noticed he was still holding hers. She settled for scrunching her shoulders together and trying to discreetly cover herself with one arm.
“You’re freezing,” Jared said as they approached the cross street.