—
THE NEXT DAY, Jack acted like that conversation had never happened. Charli couldn’t get it out of her mind though.
Something changed inside of her after that night. She knew it had probably just been Jack’s alcohol talking, and that he’d most likely meant nothing by what he said, but it was as if the very mention of her meaning more to him than just a friend triggered feelings of her own for him.
Whenever his name flashed across the screen on her phone, her heart raced and her palms clammed up. When they met up for lunch at Carol’s Pizza Parlor that Wednesday, Charli found herself picking at her food like she might on a first date, her stomach already full—from butterflies.
“Are you all right?” Jack asked as she boxed up most of her pepperoni slice. “You’ve been sort of quiet the last couple of days. And you barely touched your food.”
“I’m just feeling a little off,” Charli replied, thinking it wasn’t really a lie. She wasn’t sick, but she sure didn’t feel like herself.
“Do you have a fever?” Jack rested the back of his hand against her forehead.
His touch stirred something inside of her. She moved his hand, wondering why this was happening and hoping that it would stop.
“I’ve been up late the last couple of nights cramming for a chemistry exam. Maybe I just need some rest.”
She figured that rest and a week or so away from Jack would help her feelings for him return to normal, but Jack didn’t really give her a chance to put this experiment to a test. Halfway through the week, she was woken up by a rap on her dorm room window, and when she pulled open the blinds, Jack’s face was on the other side.
Her heart stopped, and right away her mind started to race. What was he doing here? Her first thought was that something must have happened. A fight with Mandy, an injury, or worse, a family emergency. She was thinking like Jack’s best friend, not the girl who had been crushing on him, as she pulled open the blinds and lifted the glass.
“Jack?” She whispered his name into the cool night quietly so she wouldn’t wake her roommate, who had an eight a.m. test in the morning. He was staring out at the empty road, so she reached out and touched his shoulder. “Is everything okay?” His silence scared her. She said his name again and still there was no response. It felt like minutes had passed before he finally turned toward her. To her relief there were no signs of tears in his eyes or anger on his face, and she let out the deep breath she was holding.
He was fidgety, folding his arms over his chest and then unfolding them. Looking her in the eyes, then staring at the ground, then glancing up at the clear night sky. She tensed up again. This had to be about their moment at the party. He was acting weird like he had that night. He rubbed his hands over his face, and her chest knotted with anticipation.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he said.
Charli crouched down and rested her hands on the ledge of the window. Part of her wanted to jump right in and tell him what she’d been thinking about the last few days. To talk through it all with him. But the other part wanted to wait and make sure that’s where this conversation was headed. What if she blurted out what was on her mind, and she’d totally misread all his signs?
Jack set his hands down right in front of hers so that the tips of their fingers touched. Her heart thudded in her chest. If this was how it felt to have him just barely touch her, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he . . . if he actually . . . She was mid-thought, picturing Jack’s lips meeting hers when his eyes drifted shut, when he leaned toward her. And then, before she fully realized what was happening, her childhood best friend, the boy who used to ride his bike around their neighborhood with her and whose house she used to sneak over to in the middle of the night to keep him company before big games when he couldn’t sleep, was kissing her.
She was in shock when he pulled away.
“What was that for?” she uttered. She felt like she was floating above herself.
“I don’t know.” Jack dropped his head. “I wanted to. I have wanted to . . . for a while.”
Charli nodded.
Jack seemed to interpret her silence as something else.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “I’m sorry. I should have asked before I did that. I shouldn’t have assumed you were feeling the same way I was. It was stupid of me to come over like this.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, clearly embarrassed, and turned around.
Charli watched him walk a few steps out toward the road before she came to her senses.
“Wait!” she called, climbing out of her window in her pajamas and hopping down onto the cold and dewy grass. Jack kept walking with his head down, looking like he did after he lost a game or gave up a home run. “I do feel the same way,” she said, realizing that she did. Any thought she’d had to the contrary was just denial. Her words reached him before she could. “I feel exactly the same way, Jack.”
She crossed her arms over her chest as Jack stopped in his tracks, and then she stood there in the cold, waiting. Waiting for him to say something. Anything.
“You do?” When he turned around, he wore a look of disbelief on his face.
Charli had never seen him this unsure of himself before. Where was the confident, composed guy she always caught in the halls in high school, leaning up against a locker, making small talk and teasing girls he thought were cute?
“Yeah,” she said, her heart threatening to miss its next beat.
He let out a relieved laugh. “God, you have no idea how hard this has been to keep to myself, Charli.”
She swallowed hard as he approached her. “Really?”
“Yeah. Seeing you with Nick all these weeks has been awful for me. I think it took you falling for another guy for me to realize what my true feelings were.” Her pulse ticked up a notch and sped up even faster when Jack reached out and lifted her hand, putting his fingers through hers.
“I know this will change things between us,” he said. “But I want things to change. You’re not like any girl I’ve ever met, Charli. You’re smart, you challenge me, you’re pretty, without even really trying to be and . . . I don’t know . . . you’re the one person I can be myself around.”
It was the best thing anyone had ever said to her. She couldn’t believe it. She stared into Jack’s green eyes, memorizing the way he was looking at her and the feelings she had for him in that moment, thinking how she had never been so happy and how even though she had never been in love, she was pretty sure that this was what it felt like to be utterly and completely falling.
Click here to watch Charli and Jack’s love story unfold and to Shop the Book™ or visit sincerelyriley.com/scene-2.
five
NOW
GIANNA PACED BACK and forth on Mary Pat’s covered front porch.
It was nearly four o’clock. Her neighbor—who could almost always be found on her front porch, rain or shine, day or night—hadn’t been there when she arrived that morning.
I’m at a hair appointment, darling, she’d texted Gianna after Gianna sent her a string of flustered messages.
Where are you??
Need you!!
Having a crisis!
How a hair appointment had taken all afternoon for a woman with cropped brown hair was beyond Gianna. Mary Pat’s hairdresser must have been going through a major personal crisis of her own and given her a free four-hour scalp massage in exchange for her neighbor’s famous pearls of wisdom.
There. Finally! Her yellow Volkswagen was turning onto their tree-lined street, its windshield wipers batting away the rain that had been falling on and off all day.
Gianna took a long sip of her gin and tonic. She’d brought over ice and made herself a cocktail from the ingredients in the wooden bar cart by Mary Pat’s front door with handles of Tanqueray, bottles of Schweppes, and limes.
“Want to come over for a G&T?” Mary Pat had called out to Gianna on Gianna’s first night in her new home, three years ago. Gianna had be
en hurrying to get inside with her groceries because it was thirty-five degrees out and raining. Mary Pat was in shorts and a t-shirt, sipping a cold drink. Space heaters, Gianna later learned. Her whole porch was filled with space heaters so it was actually always very cozy.
I’ve moved next door to a crazy person, Gianna remembered thinking. Then again, maybe she thinks I’m crazy—a single woman moving into this big, impractical, five-bedroom house.
It was Betty Grace’s fault. “If you want something, act as if you already have it, and it will come!” The famous self-help guru had dispensed her prescriptions for positive living to Gianna and fifty other ambitious women who had sat in a stuffy conference room that smelled like soup from the soup kitchen across the street for four hours a day, five days straight.
Her mother had dragged her to this convention on manifesting one’s dream life at her New Age church. Gianna had gone, just to appease her. She wasn’t sure she bought into the whole philosophy—though she didn’t not buy into it. She was open to any and all possibilities when it came to explanations for how life worked and what the whole point of it was.
“I would like a husband, a family, and a white and gray Cape Cod house with a great big kitchen, a wraparound front porch, and a swimming pool.” Gianna’s voice had sounded so loud, so scratchy, so ridiculous over the microphone when she shared her desires the first day of the conference with the ladies.
“So, go house hunting, dear!” Betty Grace had said. “And then feel the feeling of having the rest in your belly.” That part was “very important,” she had kept stressing.
This is silly. So silly! Gianna had thought, as she called up a real estate agent the following week to show her property. “I just want to check out what’s on the market,” she’d told her. “I’m not looking to buy yet.”
But she had the money. And Valerie had just moved in with Richard, so she no longer had a roommate. The timing was right. It would be a good investment, if nothing else. And what if it did open up space in her life for a great guy and her dream family? She hadn’t gotten where she was career-wise by sitting around doing nothing. Buying her dream house at least felt like a productive step on the path to falling in love and having babies. It was hard to find productive steps to take when it came to those desires, considering they depended so much on good luck and timing.
“Is Peter proposing to me?” She blurted the words out as soon as Mary Pat was out of her car.
Her neighbor’s new ‘do, which looked exactly like her old ‘do, was being styled by the wind, so by the time she made it to her front porch, it was sticking out in a million different directions, as if she’d been electrocuted.
“Proposals are supposed to be a surprise, honey,” she said.
“I hate surprises. You know I hate surprises.”
Mary Pat poured herself a drink and did a silent toast to her husband, Dale, who she used to have happy hour with every single day before he lost his battle with colon cancer the year before Gianna moved in next door. She had a drink daily, to preserve the ritual, always on her front porch, just like she and Dale used to do back in Wilmington, North Carolina, where they’d lived.
She’d moved to Portland after his death to be near her daughter, Jane, who Gianna had met on various occasions when she popped over to visit with her husband and their two kids. They were such cute kids. Both girls. Six and eight. Each had Mary Pat’s high cheekbones and her daughter’s button nose and blond hair. Gianna sometimes just stared at them from her window, probably looking like a creepy neighbor. She was just ready to have kids. So ready, it sometimes hurt. Which was not a good thing, according to Betty Grace. Apparently, it meant she wasn’t “in sync” with her desire.
“I hate to betray a man’s trust, but you’re driving me crazy,” Mary Pat said.
“So, it’s a yes?” said Gianna.
Mary Pat took a sip of her drink, then sat in one of the two rocking chairs, where Gianna sat with her a lot of evenings and played Gin Rummy, another former tradition of her and Dale’s.
“He thought with The Reservation tonight it would be romantic.”
Just as Gianna had suspected! She knew him well. At least she didn’t have to worry about whether or not she knew him well enough to marry him. She just had to decide if she loved what she knew. Which should have been easy. Why wasn’t it easy?
“I thought this was what you wanted,” Mary Pat said, when Gianna went back to pacing. “That this would come as welcome news.”
To be fair, Gianna understood this. She’d only been telling Mary Pat how ready she was to get married since they first met. And she’d said nothing bad about Peter, ever. Not to Mary Pat or any of her friends. The only person she’d told her anxieties to was Linda. She hadn’t wanted to taint the relationship in case she ended up marrying him.
She’d had friends who confessed some of the most horrid things to her about men they eventually settled down with.
“Sometimes I see Jake and don’t really want to kiss him. Is that bad?” asked Lucy Lawson, Gianna’s best friend from college. Yes, Gianna had thought. Terrible. Definitely not how one should feel about a prospective husband.
“I might be in love with my co-worker, Steve!” Marcy Sanders, Gianna’s gym partner, had told her as Gianna was helping her address envelopes for her four-hundred-person wedding to Brad.
Then, months later, Gianna had stood beside each of her friends and watched them exchange teary-eyed vows with those men, like they’d forgotten everything.
Gianna hadn’t forgotten though. Every time she saw Lucy with Jake, she wondered: Do you still not like kissing him? And when she saw Marcy and Brad, she thought: Do you still sometimes think you might have married the wrong guy?
She didn’t want her friends wondering if a spark had finally materialized for her with Peter every time they saw the two of them for the rest of her life.
But now, Linda was on vacation and couldn’t be reached. And the proposal was coming this evening. She had to talk to somebody.
“You don’t know your answer?” Mary Pat said.
“No, I don’t know my answer!” Gianna said, continuing to pace. “I should know the answer, shouldn’t I?”
“Normally you are a very decisive person,” Mary Pat said.
True. Ten years ago, she’d seen the building for lease on Northwest 23rd Street where Hayden’s was now and thought: Yes. That’s it! That was the space where she wanted to open her restaurant. That corner building with floor-to-ceiling windows on that cute street filled with boutiques and white twinkle lights strung on every tree. She knew that about herself. She was capable of knowing something.
So why not this?
Maybe because marrying Peter was a forever commitment. Sure, starting a restaurant was a big commitment, too, but there was a way out if she hated it or it didn’t do well. Of course, divorce was always a way out of a marriage. But she didn’t want to go there. She really didn’t want to go there. At least not mentally before she settled down.
Her phone rang then, startling both her and Mary Pat.
“Please don’t be Peter,” she mumbled as she rummaged through her purse. She pulled out the phone and checked the caller ID. It was Hayden’s. Relieved, she turned in her chair and answered it. “I’ll be there soon, I’m just—”
“Charli called.” It was Rosie, her hostess.
“What?” Gianna jumped up, checking her silver watch, which had been a gift from Peter for Valentine’s Day. It was something she had pointed out in the window of a small antique jewelry store months before and Peter had remembered. He’s a gem! I’m being too picky!
“What did she say?” she asked Rosie.
“She asked to speak with you. I told her you’d be in shortly and would call her then. I’m sorry. I should have just given her your cell phone number. But I wasn’t thinking. I just couldn’t believe I had Charli on the line!” Gianna could picture Rosie all frazzled at the hostess stand, pulling at the low bun she always wore, messing it
up.
“Okay, listen, I’m leaving right this second.” Gianna hung up and ran over to her place to change into her black VDV wrap dress and check her makeup. Mary Pat followed. “It’s Charli,” Gianna said, while applying her lipstick.
“Ah, the five-year-out reservation girl. She’s arrived?”
“No, but she called and asked to speak with me.”
“Any word from Mr. Five Years?”
“Rosie didn’t say. I mean, she would have said if Jack called, too, right? Oh my God, Mary Pat, what if only one of them shows and the other one doesn’t?” She pictured Charli sitting at the fireside table they’d reserved all alone, waiting for Jack. Then Jack sitting all alone waiting for Charli. Suddenly, Gianna imagined Peter at Hayden’s, waiting for her. Waiting to ask Gianna the question that she didn’t want to hear because she wasn’t sure of the answer and, frankly, not being sure of the answer was pretty much an answer in itself, wasn’t it? Or was it? She sighed.
“You’ll figure it out, hon,” Mary Pat said.
“Right. I’m sure they both will show.” Gianna stared at her reflection in the mirror as she pulled her long dark hair back into a ponytail. Yes, Peter, I would love to marry you, she mentally rehearsed. No, Peter, I don’t want to marry you. She watched her face, seeing if one response lit it up more than another. Ugh. Wasn’t working. Flipping off the bathroom light, she walked out.
“I wasn’t talking about whether or not both Charli and Jack will show up for The Reservation,” Mary Pat said.
“You think I’ll figure out what to say to Peter?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I really do.”
“I hope so.” She pulled open her front door, and a gust of wind blew into the apartment.
“You want a ride?” asked Mary Pat.
Gianna took a deep breath in, smelling the rain, the wind, and the pine trees that were swaying in the breeze at the bottom of her stairs. “I think I’ll walk. Clear my head.”
“All right,” Mary Pat said, handing her an umbrella. She took Gianna’s other hand and gave it a good squeeze as if trying to pass along her confidence. “Call me if you need anything. I can’t wait to hear the end of the story.”
Waiting at Hayden's Page 4