by Julie Wright
He looked up, and his face brightened into a smile so wide the dagger that had been living inside my ribs twisted just a smidge more. “Lettie!” He crossed the kitchen from where he’d been standing at the stove and gave me a hug.
In spite of how much I didn’t want to, I breathed a sigh of relief at his touch. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that physical contact from him.
“What are you doing here?” The words came out far more crisply than I had intended.
“Kat knocked on my door in the middle of the night and told me I missed a celebration. Lettie! How could you not tell me?”
“I . . .” How could anything be explained without making me sound pathetic or mean or both? How could I tell him that since he’d decided not to be a part of my life for the last few weeks, I’d childishly decided not to let him be a part of mine either? “I don’t know,” I finally said, because we couldn’t just stand there staring at each other. “So what are you guys doing?” I pointed toward the oven and stove top, where things were both baking and sizzling.
“I missed the celebration dinner, so I decided to make a celebration breakfast. It probably won’t be as good as it would have been if you’d done the cooking, but we used your recipes, so there’s hope. We’ve got lemon blueberry muffins, hash browns, fried eggs, and a fruit bowl.”
When he mentioned the fruit bowl, he gestured toward my sister. Since I could not look at her without venom, I didn’t look. I would deal with Kat later. Later when I’d decided how to deal with myself and all of my emotions tumbling around in a confused mess like an overloaded washing machine.
Happy, relieved, embarrassed, sad, and a smidge ticked off, too. How all of that could exist inside me all at once was a mystery. So I stood there in my kitchen in my Sleeping Beauty pajamas—in blue, not pink, since I was Team Merryweather—and bare feet and worked very hard to feel nothing at all.
“Breakfast smells good.” My second lame attempt at conversation made me do an inward eye roll. And why wasn’t Kat helping with the conversation? She could invite the guy over but she wouldn’t help me talk to him? She and I were definitely going to have words when this was all over.
“It’s going to be great!” Kat interjected from where she was chopping up fruit, if the sounds of the knife against the cutting board were any indication. Her first words of the morning, a motivational message on how I should feel, didn’t actually make me feel any better and made me wish she’d go back to not talking.
I grunted some response that was probably less than friendly but also probably more of a response than Kat deserved at the moment.
It seemed I’d walked in at just the right time because breakfast was done and ready to be served. Kat already had the table set with three places, and Anders ushered me to one of the chairs. I sat. What else could be done?
Anders served up my plate. He put on all the things that he knew I loved, garnishing it in a way that I would have done if I had done it myself. He knew all of those little things about me. He knew what I liked and what I didn’t like: two shots of Tabasco sauce over my potatoes, my syrup on the side in a dish because I like to dip my food, not drown my food.
How had he come to know so much about me when we were just neighbors?
Once everyone was settled, the questions came in a torrent. What did the agent say? Did she offer anything yet? Why is she wanting to meet you? Is that typical for an agency to fly you in for a first meeting before there’s even a contract?
I wasn’t able to answer all of the questions or even most of the questions. I had no idea if going to meet her was typical or not. I kind of thought all that stuff was done over internet and phone, but maybe I was wrong.
Somewhere halfway through the meal, I must have forgiven my sister. How could I be mad at her for giving me this moment with Anders that was so calm and peaceful and comfortable? Anders in my space might only last for this one moment longer, but I would enjoy the gift for what it was for as long as it belonged to me.
Having him within reach and out of reach all at the same time wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t complain.
Until I could complain. At the end of breakfast when it became apparent we were all finished eating, Kat jumped up and said, “I’ll scrub everything up. You guys go for a walk. I know you have things to talk about.” She gave me a meaningful look that I returned, I hoped, with slicing daggers.
And I’d forgiven her? Well, that forgiveness was now revoked. She had been returned to the evil-stepsister list.
Anders was also on his feet. “Yes,” he said. “We do have things to talk about.” The look he gave me was meaningful as well. Immediately I went from hot anger to cold fear.
Had my sister already told him that I cared about him in a way that was not appropriate for a friend-neighbor? Had she gone over there and spilled my guts to him? Was he now furious with me for being so ridiculous with my own emotions? Was he going to give me a lecture about how the thing I felt for him wasn’t real, and he was taken, and he had somebody, and blah blah blah?
Why hadn’t anybody warned me that siblings could be dangerous?
Of course, the fairy tales all warn about stepsiblings. Yep, Kat was definitely on the evil-stepsister list. She was going to have to slave like Snow White did for those seven messy dwarfs in order to get off that list.
I made a growl low in my throat and stood as well. If Anders had a lecture for me, I might as well get it over with. After years of living with my mother, I had become a rip off the Band-Aid kind of person—even if that Band-Aid had princess decor.
“You’ll have to give me a moment to get ready,” I told him. “Obviously, I can’t go out in my pajamas.” Which wasn’t strictly true. I’d gone out in my pajamas lots of times, maybe not in that particular nightgown, since it was my most childish one, but definitely in others. Regardless, I’d be darned if I was going to be trapped in pajamas while Anders lectured me.
Changing into suitable clothing also meant brushing my teeth, jerking a comb through my hair, and pulling it up into a ponytail. There was no reason for me to look like a feral red fox.
I grabbed a coat to ward off the cold, and we exited the building. We turned in the direction of the Muddy River and the rose garden with the cherubs. Of course we would go that way. That was where Anders always went when he wanted to think, when he wanted to talk, when he had something he needed to work through.
He stayed silent for the first part of the walk. The silence killed me. My mind ran over and over all the things he might have to say to me about my feelings and how misplaced they were. Unable to take it any further, I broke the silence. “I’m really sorry about Kat. I had no idea she’d gone to your place. Believe me. If I’d known, I would’ve duct-taped her to a chair.”
He seemed startled by that. “Why? I thought we were friends. Why wouldn’t you want me to know the cool things happening in your life?”
That caught me off guard. Admonishment had been expected, but I hadn’t expected him to admonish me over not telling him about the agent. “I knew you were busy.”
“Busy? Too busy to be a good friend? You must not think much of me if you think that I’m too busy to care about what’s going on in your life.”
The conversation wasn’t going anything like I had expected. “Well, with your engagement and everything, of course you’d have a lot going on. And of course I was going to tell you. But I wasn’t going to waste a weekend evening when you probably would be with your fiancée. I would’ve told you on Monday after it’s all gone down because, honestly, I don’t even know what there is to tell right now. The agent seems excited. She wants to meet me. I don’t really know much else. Monday’s a better time to be telling anybody anything because then I’d have real information.” I hated how defensive I sounded but kept going because I didn’t want him to think we weren’t friends. I would always be Anders’s friend. “For all I know this is an
other dead-end situation. And wasting your time on a weekend when you would be with your fiancée, over something that might not be anything, seemed . . . absurd.”
“I’m not engaged.” He said it like a shrug, an afterthought, as if the words weren’t the most powerful things ever uttered in human history.
I stopped dead on the sidewalk and stared at him. “What?”
“I’m not engaged.”
The eyes that stared back at me were clouded with uncertainty. Was that uncertainty because he was sad about his engagement break-up?
“Why not? What happened? I have a shovel and a pretty decent knowledge of the surrounding woods. If she broke your heart, all you have to do is say the word.”
He laughed. “No. It’s nothing like that. I was technically never engaged. When she wanted to talk about it, I told her I needed some more time. In that time, I really paid attention to who she was and who we were when we were together.”
“Who are you when you’re together?”
“We’re friends. Really good friends but only friends.”
“I thought you loved her and that you were ready to take her home to meet your farfar.”
“I do love her. She’s an amazing woman. She’s just not the amazing woman for me. We’ve been officially unofficial for about a week.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s rough.” Part of me was deliriously happy to hear this news. But the other part of me worried about him. A breakup is hard regardless of how it goes down. “So, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I really am. Better than I’ve felt in a long time.”
We’d made it to the garden. Anders held the gate open for me.
Once we’d stepped inside, I stopped and shoved lightly at his chest with the heel of my hand. “Hey! Wait a minute! You’re out here lecturing me about not telling you about the important things happening in my life, and you waited a whole week to tell me news like this? Seriously?”
I moved to shove at him again, but he caught my hand and grinned like he found my irritation hilarious.
“I needed a breather for a bit, some time to think about what I really want.”
“Oh? What you want? And what’s that? A smack to the side of the head? Because that’s kind of where we’re going here.”
“You can’t be mad at me. You held back information, too.”
The cherubs looked smug today. It figured they were on his side.
“At least I had a good reason. Your reason is lame. You don’t need a breather from me. I’m your friend.”
“I know. And it was friendship that got me thinking. It was friendship that made me decide to not be engaged.”
“Circles, Anders.” He usually talked in circles. It was how he communicated. Most guys were choppy, incomplete sentences. Anders was a run-on sentence. He’d once asked me to use the code word circles if he got out of control. I swiped at a rosebush, since he’d just catch my hand again if I swiped at him. But the plant swiped back as a thorn dragged over my open palm. I cringed but didn’t cry out, because such an alert would sidetrack Anders, who turned to paramedic professionalism whenever blood was introduced to a situation. Even a tiny scratch would make him turn around so he could fetch antibacterial ointment and a bandage.
“Friendship is important to me. What I want is for the woman I marry to not just be any old friend. I want her to also be my best friend. Don’t you think everyone should have that? To be married to their best friend?”
We sat on a bench facing the cherubs. I closed my fingers over my palm to press away the sting of the rose thorn cut. The bench held the cold of the season, which seeped through my jeans. I did my best to ignore both the frigid bench and the stinging cut.
“Of course,” I said. “If someone’s going to actually go to the trouble of getting married, they should definitely marry the best person for them.”
“Right. And I want that for myself.”
“And she’s not that?”
“No. Not really. You know I’d like to move on in my life. I feel like I’m ready for that stage of settling down and putting down roots. And I know that makes me weird in comparison to our generation—in comparison to you, specifically. But just because I want to be settled doesn’t mean I want to be stupid about it. I don’t want to do it wrong. I want to be married to somebody who is my best friend.” He turned his whole body so he was facing me.
“You keep saying that, Anders. But we’re back to circles. Who’s your best friend?”
He paused at that, looking toward me and away from me and toward me again as if not sure how to proceed. I’d asked the question to help him get to the point, but the question rolled around in my own brain for a moment before it occurred to me what I’d asked and what his sudden nervousness might mean. Was he saying . . . ?
“I don’t know yet,” he finally said, making me exhale a disappointed breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “But I think . . . I hope . . . what I’m trying to say is: I would like to go on a date with you.”
Anders scrubbed a hand through his hair and rolled his eyes. “I have never asked anyone out in such a way that made me look so awkward and ridiculous before in my life.”
“You want to go on a date?” The words came out slowly, every syllable attended to because I needed to be absolutely clear on what he was asking.
“You are my best friend, Lettie.”
I was his best friend. And he was mine. His saying that he was ready to settle down should have terrified me. It should have. But it didn’t. Anders had declared himself ready for marriage at the same time that he declared he deserved to be married to his best friend while at the same time declaring I was his best friend. Why didn’t that terrify me? What kind of hypocrite did that make me? Since my fifteenth birthday, at the time members of the opposite sex had become interesting to me, I’d decided the whole trouble of them was more than I cared to deal with no matter how interesting they might be.
Yet, a man stood in front of me talking marriage and friendship and me, and the shiver down my spine didn’t come from fear, it came from anticipation of something great. Did that make me a hypocrite? Or did it make me a romantic? Or did it make me hopeless? Maybe a hypocritical, hopeless romantic? But I didn’t mind or care.
Because maybe I didn’t just write fairy tales. Maybe I believed in them as well. I would argue how I felt about actual marriage later when Anders wasn’t looking at me with that blue-eyed intensity and waiting for a response.
I gave him the most attractive smile a woman who’d been caught by surprise and had barely managed to run a toothbrush over her teeth could manage. “I think a date would be a fantastic idea.”
His vulnerable expression fled, replaced by relief and a bit of satisfaction as well.
I grinned. “Were you afraid I was going to say no?”
He made a psh noise. “Of course not. A woman would be crazy to turn me down.”
He was more right than he knew. He scooted forward and reached out for me—the friend who had reached out to me a million times but who had never reached for me. This wasn’t a grab for the chip bowl or a playful tug on my braid as he made jokes about Scottish tempers and redheads in general.
His hand slowly moved my direction, a slight tremor in his fingers as he trailed the back of them down my jawline.
My breath hitched in my throat, and my eyes briefly fluttered closed at this foreign contact between us. What was he doing? What were we doing?
He was so close, his breath washed warm over my lips. He smiled. “Does Wednesday work for you?”
“Wednesday?” What were we talking about? Why were we still talking at all?
“Yeah. For our date. We can celebrate the contract you’re getting with an agent when you meet her on Monday. And celebrate our friendship. All the new things.”
“Our friendship isn’t new.” I would have rolle
d my eyes at myself for sounding so breathless, but breathing suddenly felt like one of those impossible quests, like when the rebel leader asks the young princess to beat the evil mage with nothing more than her wit and a short sword.
“But it’s taking a new direction.” He smiled wider and gently took my hand, bringing it between us to his mouth, where he pressed a kiss to my knuckles.
His lips were soft as he smiled against my fingers and then leaned in close to my ear. He whispered softly, “Charlotte Kingsley, I think this is going to be the beginning of something incredibly good for both of us.” His lips brushed my earlobe briefly—so feather-light, I might have just wished it instead of feeling it. He pressed another kiss to the place just behind my ear.
Another shiver coursed down my spine.
He moved away then, getting up and keeping my hand in his so he could help me up.
I finally remembered to breathe. The beginning of something incredible, indeed. We hadn’t shared our first kiss, but if that little bit acted as a teaser of things to come, I had a lot to look forward to.
Anders and me. Who would have guessed? Well, my sister, obviously. How did I get here? How did I get to this place where the agent of my dreams was paying for a plane ticket for me to go meet her in New York and my best friend was looking at me with such intensity in his eyes?
Dear Fairy Godmother, I thought, I apologize and take back every mean thing I ever said about you. Clearly, I was wrong. I’m sorry I said you were lazy. I’m sorry I accused you of stealing, instead of actually replenishing, the ice cream in my freezer. I apologize for calling you an audacious flirt who probably was spending all of your time with my also-nonexistent tooth fairy. Clearly, you were watching out for me the whole time. I was wrong. I can admit that.
Fairy tales were coming true.
Chapter Seven
“Most of us imagine ourselves to be the Cinderella character as we stumble along waiting for a fairy with a wand (and probably an ulterior motive) to save us from the ugly stepsister holding us back in life, which is why it’s hard to discover that we might just be the ugly stepsister.”