by Julie Wright
He accepted the plate I prepared for him with a thanks and a grin. While I’d prepped his food, he’d prepped mine. I grinned back as I thanked him for my plate. Pad Thai for him, yellow coconut curry for me.
“We’re like one of those old married couples,” he said with a laugh at the way we knew each other well enough to prepare plates with the right amounts of rice and sauces.
It wasn’t that he was wrong. He drew an accurate picture of us. But the way he called us a married couple made me hesitate, my fork hovering over my food.
I gave myself a shake. His statement didn’t qualify as a proposal, meaning I had nothing to freak out over. I focused on enjoying his company knowing that no one would interfere with that for at least long enough for me to figure out how I felt about us on this new level.
We ate, talked, laughed, and watched the planes descend over the Boston harbor. No topic was too small or too large. His blatant and unashamed theft of my streaming accounts, how wild rice was harvested, politics, the state of the world, and our goals and dreams: all subjects served to entertain us. We discussed at length Anders’s work as well as an award he’d received for a photo of a child with a blanket watching intently as a paramedic gave the child a shot. The scene was tender, and the little boy had the biggest eyes I’d ever seen on a kid.
And Anders, with his artist’s soul, had caught the image. He gave a face to a job not many people ever thought about.
We talked about my writing, my agent, my publisher, how much it meant to me to have met one of my hero authors. And with every word, I hated that we were kept separated by the table. The lower timber of his voice buzzed in my head. My focus moved more and more from the words he said to the mouth he used to say them. The planes slid by silently, cutting the darkened sky with intermittent flashes of light. The moon crept up among the stars.
The setting was just so perfect. And the table stayed solidly between us.
As I was formulating a plan for getting Anders up and away from the table, it occurred to me that my dilemma had been handled before. In so many of those movies, one part of the couple asked the other to dance. It got them both up, removed the obstacle of the table, and allowed them to get closer. Anders interrupted my thoughts. “Just don’t ever write any of those lame books, okay?”
His comment made my wandering thoughts hit the brakes. “What do you mean by lame books?” Anders had read my last few books. Had he not meant it when he’d said he liked them?
“You know the kind: the kind that keep me always buying print instead of digital just in case they need to be chucked across the room and into the wall.”
“You buy paperbacks so you can chuck books against the wall?” I made sure my expression carried the appropriate amount of horror.
“Well sure. I can’t do that with my tablet or my phone. You’re the one who throws phones at walls, not me.” He leaned on his elbows over the remnants of his meal. Then he grinned.
I rolled my eyes and got up. “I cannot listen to such blasphemy for another second.”
Anders, actually looking slammed at my abrupt change in the conversation as well as by my declaration of leaving, also stood. “It’s blasphemy to mention you throwing your phone?”
“No. It’s blasphemy that you throw books.”
“You’re not really mad at that . . . are you?” His eyes were wide, his expression worried.
For all the months of teasing and pranking, his fear that I might actually storm off really amused and baffled me. He knew me well enough to dish up my food for me but was insecure about what he could joke about? We really were in a new place for us. Not that I gave up the teasing immediately.
“You actually throw books? Perfectly benign, and even innocent, books at walls? I don’t know if we can be friends now that I know such horrible things about you. I speak softly to them, whispering words of love as I tuck them back into their shelves at night. Throwing them at walls makes you a monster.”
I’d moved closer to him with every word, pulled by the promise of something that created a fire in my belly. A good chance existed that sharing any kind of physical contact with Anders would ruin the friendship—the near perfect synchrony we had when we were together. But I could no longer deny the shiver in me when he was close. To not move toward him would be betraying every nerve in my body.
How we were close yet not touching—not connected in any way—baffled me. The energy between us crackled and sparked like it was being pulled too tight, stretched to its limits.
Even without him reaching for me, the warmth of him flooded my senses.
“You think I’m a book-throwing monster, huh?” He finally caught that I’d been teasing before, that the only emotion between us was that of a need to be closer.
“After the statements you just made, I’ll need some evidence to the contrary if you want me to believe otherwise.”
He leaned in and whispered, “What kind of evidence?”
My eyes fluttered closed at the feel of his breath against my cheek. And I knew what kind of evidence was needed. I turned my face toward his, where our eyes locked, and the energy between us turned to the sort that stars are made from.
This was it—the point of no return where Anders would go from neighbor and friend to something more. Did I want to cross that point? Did I want to change what we were? What if it ruined everything?
His lip quirked up to the side on the right, as if he saw the conflict in my eyes. He made no move to close the distance between us. He simply stood there.
I leaned in closer. His eyes dropped to my lips, but he didn’t move so much as a flinch in my direction.
It seemed Anders was all tease and no kissing. Or, more likely . . . he was leaving this decision to me. He wanted me to be sure about this, about him.
He knew my dating track record. It wasn’t like I was a novice at the first kiss. One could even go so far as to call me an expert. But I also never went beyond that by very much because relationships expected things from me that I never felt prepared to give. Anders waiting for me to make this move was also Anders asking me a question. He wanted to know if this was what I really wanted. We both knew this relationship was different for me. It wasn’t a movie or dinner with a casual acquaintance or an almost stranger. This was a step forward with something more. Anders was asking if I wanted the more.
I tipped my head back, pushed up on my tiptoes, closed my eyes, and closed the distance.
Warmth—no, fire, flooded me.
He cradled my face with one hand, and the other went to the back of my head, where his fingers threaded through my hair. My fingers curled into his shirt, pulling him closer. Heat and heart tangled together into something tangible. For a moment, I felt more real than I’d ever felt before.
People talk about puzzle pieces and being completed by someone else. I had never imagined something like that for me. Those fairy tales belonged to . . . well, the fairy tales.
Or at least to other people. They’d never even belonged to people I knew.
And yet, here I was, feeling completed.
Anders pulled away slightly and rested his head on my forehead. “I can’t believe we’re here,” he said.
“Me either,” I agreed.
He stared at me with the same wonder I felt. Neither of us had expected our friendship to bring us to this place. And the fact that kissing Anders elicited a visceral reaction in me meant something even more.
He kissed me again. With the urgency gone, his lips moved slowly over mine and then strayed over to my cheek, along my jaw and back to my lips in a trail of kisses that were light as breath and intense as lightning.
We stood a long time in each other’s embrace with the moon rising on this new chapter in our lives. Contentment wrapped around me. Whatever the future held, it promised to be fantastic.
Chapter Ten
“Getting th
e last word in during an argument isn’t everything you hope it’s going to be. Take a page from Cinderella and try getting the nice word in instead. It’ll likely go further in your aim to irritate the opposition in your argument and will leave you with nothing to regret.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Be a Good Person” Chapter)
The couple of days that I’d been to work since coming home from New York, Nicole had made my life sheer misery, even going so far as to say that the company wasted perfectly good money paying my wages. Thursday morning, when my alarm went off, I wondered why I continued putting up with her perpetual abuse.
I called the office to let them know I wouldn’t be coming in. Ever again. When I hung up from the rather tense conversation with Nicole Hall, where she informed me how I was leaving all my coworkers in a lurch and being unprofessional by not giving two weeks’ notice and by being unwilling to train my replacement, and where I informed her that I just didn’t want to waste the company’s money on my wages any longer, I let out a gleeful laugh that probably sounded like a cackle as I dropped the phone to my bed in mic-drop fashion.
“What are you doing?” Kat had come into my room quietly enough to take me off guard and make me jump like I’d been caught doing something illegal.
“I . . . was just calling in sick to work.” She’d interrupted me just before I’d gone into what would definitely have been a victory dance of embarrassing proportions.
“It sounded to me like you were quitting.” She smelled of apple-scented shampoo from her shower.
“Yes, well, I’m calling in sick permanently.”
She stared from me to the phone on my bed and back to me again. “Lettie, how long will it be before you get the first check for your book? What if it takes months? You can’t just quit your job. You’ll have to move back in with Dad and your mom if you jump the gun on something like this. Trust me. You don’t want that.”
“Have some faith, Kat-astrophe. I’m a responsible adult with enough savings to float me for a while.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Have you met my boss? I’ve been socking it away, knowing that, at some point, the crazy woman would push me over the edge. Why do you think I live what my mom calls paycheck-to-paycheck?”
She flopped down on my bed. Water droplets from her hair speckled my arms and hands as she went. She propped her head up on her hands. “You better be sure. The life of a homeless woman is only marginally better than a life with your mom.”
I swatted her with a pillow. “I’m not going to be homeless.”
The pillow connecting with her head flicked more water in my direction and pretty much everywhere else as well. The pillow didn’t bother her.
“So explain to me your book. I don’t think I get it. You say it’s not a fairy-tale story, but the title sounds like one.”
“It’s really more of a self-esteem book.”
She scrunched her nose and curled her lip. “Ugh. Seriously? Lettie, why? Isn’t there enough of that in the world? I’m so tired of uninformed people telling me how to feel about myself. I can’t be the only one to be sick of it.”
She rolled over to her back and stared at my ceiling.
“Who are the uninformed people telling you how to feel about yourself?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. People at school and stuff.”
I had the feeling that it was more of the “stuff” than school. She was tired of her dad and my mom telling her how to feel. She had to go home in a day or two. Her dad had already called and said she’d outlived her welcome at my house, even though I had assured him the exact opposite was true. He wanted her to come home. She wanted to stay forever. He’d later called me privately to plead for my assistance in talking to her. And I’d agreed.
I sighed.
It was time to make good on that promise. “School huh? What? With the no-bullying campaign, or is it some other program they’ve established to make them feel better about the jobs they’re doing?”
“You know I’m in the Hope Squad. Mocking anti-bullying campaigns is a hit to me.”
I settled next to her and stared up at my ceiling with her. “So you’re one of those people telling other people how to feel?”
She gently knocked her head into mine. “Hopeful is a good thing to feel.”
“Right. So who’s telling you to feel otherwise?”
“No one.”
“Not the school?”
I felt her head give a shake next to mine.
“Certainly not me, since you haven’t read any of my riveting thoughts on self-esteem.”
She blew out a breath that managed to sound exhausted, furious, and resigned all at the same time. “My dad thinks I’m wasting my time on fashion design. They say it’s not practical.”
Though she’d started out saying it was her dad, she’d ended it with they.
That meant my mom was involved.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She said that matching outfits is an accomplishment worthy of mastering when you’re six years old. She said no one takes a grown woman seriously if all she can do is pair a jacket to a handbag, and it’s certainly not a career choice with any weight to it. I don’t even know what that means. What is weight, and why am I supposed to care who takes me seriously?”
I briefly closed my eyes. What a disappointment both Kat and I must have been to my mom. Her natural-born daughter chose a literary arts career instead of being a scientist or the first woman to walk on the moon or something equally as history-book-worthy. And then when she had a second chance to raise up a girl to be a realist and a historically relevant woman, she ended up with a fashion designer.
I opened my eyes again and blinked away the image of my mother standing in my bedroom doorway and scolding me for reading “silly books” instead of the serious ones she bought me. Her short hair, which was meant to look businesslike and be easy to care for but in reality took a good forty-five minutes to be forced into looking like she’d spent no time on it, would stay rigid even while she was shaking her head at me.
“Kat, design is what you love. It’s what you’re brilliant at. You would be miserable doing anything else. So, although I don’t doubt they have your best interests at heart, and they just want you to be secure financially as an adult, what they don’t understand is that you can be secure financially and do what you love at the same time. Just because they both have jobs that pay well doesn’t mean they know everything about the job market. I do what I love and what I’m good at, and I am financially secure—secure enough that you caught me quitting just now. If I can do it, you can do it.”
“Right? Dad really hates his job, you know? If he could do what you just did, he totally would.”
I nodded. He was an accountant. He made good money working on corporate taxes, but he sighed on his way out the door and scowled for at least an hour when coming in again.
“They’ll probably give me a big lecture about it when I go home. A lecture that will never end until I move out for good.”
“And they might. But you and I know those lectures don’t matter. You are free to choose your own path in life. This isn’t the fourteenth century; your parents can’t sell you off to apprentice for a boot maker. You’re going to be good whether they lecture you or not.”
“I could live with you.”
And there it was. Edward had worried about this very question coming up and had asked me to say no. The reality was that I wanted to say yes. Kat had such a hard time with my mom. Her life would be easier, better, with me. But the fear that I was wrong, that I’d make things worse for her, tied me in knots. Maybe my mom’s methods weren’t so terrible. After all, she’d raised me, and I liked me. And she’d had a hand in raising Kat, and I liked Kat.
Would I screw everything up?
I
didn’t know, and the not knowing paralyzed me. “Try going back home with your dad for a while. Just see how it goes. If things are still bad in a couple of months, then yes, you can absolutely come and live with me.”
“A couple of months?” The whine in her voice hit puppy-dog proportions. “Lettie, they might have murdered me by then.”
I smiled at her dramatics and turned my head on the pillow so I could see her directly. “I’ll make you a deal; if they start investing in cutlery or firearms, pack your bags, and take the next train into town. But really, I think everything’s going to be fine. You are a talented young woman with a brilliant career ahead of you. My mom and your dad are not enough to quash the brilliance that is inside of you.”
She turned her head so she was looking directly at me as well. “Do you really think so?”
“I absolutely, one hundred percent know so.” I tugged lightly on a strand of cold, wet hair.
She grinned, half of her mouth disappearing into the folds of the pillow. “You know, Lettie, I think you just might be great at writing a self-esteem book.”
Warmth flooded me. “I hope so,” I said. Because here I go, I finished in my head.
Kat helped me buy the clothing indicated on my list, though we both cringed at the price tags, and she kept saying, “Are you sure you can afford this?”
I wasn’t sure, but geronimo!
Anders had told me not to buy any of the camera equipment or the camera because he’d let me use his. What he meant by use his was that he would take the pictures, because he didn’t like people touching his camera.
I’d almost forgotten about the social media expectations except that Lillian Christie tagged my new account with the picture of us. She’d captioned it with a, “Hey guys! Check out the new, up-and-coming awesome to the literary world!” My new account gained over a thousand new followers. Lillian sent me a direct message with a smiley face and a “You’re welcome!”