Love at First Like

by Hannah Orenstein

  “But you liked him anyway!” Michelle says triumphantly, raising her glass in my direction.

  “Of course!” I say, chuckling. “He’s easy to like.”

  Blake’s family smiles at me.

  “Tell me some stories about Blake as a kid?” I ask. “I’d love to hear them.”

  They jump at the opportunity. Even though I see Blake as a pretty smooth guy, it’s clear that his family sees him in a totally different light. Here, at home, he’s the kid brother, the butt of every joke. Reid tells a story about how Blake would study for his fourth-grade science test with stacks and stacks of color-coded flash cards (“Always was a little nerd,” he says fondly) and Lauren recalls how sweet and welcoming Blake was the first time they met four years ago. Michelle excuses herself from the table to grab a family photo album. There are maybe ten or fifteen pounds of Kodak photos slid into laminated sheets clipped into a three-ring binder.

  “This is Blake from birth to age two,” she says, flipping by memory to her favorite snapshots. “He refused to wear clothes until he was in preschool. Buck naked in every photo.”

  “Sorry I’m not as cute as I was back then,” he deadpans to me.

  “Eh, you’re cute enough—in a different way,” I joke back.

  Seeing his family gently rag on him makes it easy to join in. I start to relax around them.

  My phone begins to vibrate in my pocket. I know it’s rude to check it, but I so rarely get phone calls—I figure I should at least see who it is. I pull out my phone to check the screen. It’s Mom. I send her call to voicemail and put my phone away. But fifteen seconds later, my phone buzzes again with a text.

  “Are you around to talk? Dad and I want to hear more about the shop’s finances,” Mom wrote.

  They know we’re in a precarious position. They’d bail us out if they could—but that’s not an option right now.

  “Will call tomorrow,” I type back.

  Michelle draws my attention back by tapping a manicured finger against a photo of toddler Blake in a lumpy pumpkin costume complete with an orange felt hat dripping in green vines.

  “Halloween. Wasn’t he the cutest? Look at those chubby cheeks.”

  Saturday with Blake is delightfully low-key. Sunlight streams in through the window in his childhood bedroom to wake us up. He looks overgrown against the sky blue walls and neat rows of Harry Potter books lined up on the bookshelf. He drives us into the town’s center for bagels at Cafe Fresh, his favorite spot since he was a kid. (“New York bagels don’t even come close to these, I swear,” he says, sinking his teeth into the doughy mass.) He shows me around his hometown: his high school; the parking lot where everyone went to make out in cars; the mossy, abandoned railroad tracks stretched across a river where he used to smoke pot during summers home from college.

  We’re perched there now, lying across the creaky wooden slats. My head is in his lap and he absentmindedly winds his fingers through my hair. There’s a sense of calm and peace out here that’s hard to find in the city. It’s just us surrounded by sky-high pine trees and a lazy river below. I don’t always know what to say to fill the silent lulls, but he does. He tells me more about growing up here and asks if we can visit Portland soon, so he can see my hometown through my eyes. He muses about how lucky he is to have met me, and how rare it is to find someone he can feel so comfortable around.

  Eventually, it’s time to head back to the house. Michelle had asked us to come home and change into nicer clothes before dinner at one of her favorite restaurants in a neighboring town. Blake stretches his arms overhead with a sweet grin on his face.

  “You look so beautiful today,” he says.

  Then he drops down on one knee and my heart stops. His head lowers, and I can’t see his expression anymore. Does he plan to propose and then celebrate with his family at the restaurant? He’s fumbling with something by his foot—wait. He’s tying his shoe. He’s not proposing; he’s making sure he doesn’t trip over his loose laces.

  I take a deep, jagged breath. The air feels sharp within my lungs. He rises again.

  “Ready for dinner?” he asks.

  • Chapter 17 •

  I schedule wedding planning now, the same way I plan meetings and marked off time in my calendar to go to barre classes when I cared about having a toned butt. It’s half past noon, so it’s time to squeeze in a half hour’s worth of work in the time I typically reserve for my lunch break. With the wedding just five weeks away, I have no other choice. I head into the back room to sit in Helen’s old leather chair and finish following up with a travel company offering me a luxe honeymoon for free—as long as I promote the shit out of it on Instagram, of course. I picked the Mediterranean package. I like the idea of traipsing around the Greek islands, the beaches of Croatia, the coast of Italy, maybe Morocco, too. When that email is done, I research florists who can do bridal bouquets. I’m going low budget on the flowers. I don’t need floral centerpieces on every table, since I don’t even know how many tables I’ll have. I just need a bouquet for me to hold as I walk down the aisle and a boutonniere for my groom. I think the flowers should be in assorted red tones—they’ll pop the most in photos.

  It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how I feel about Blake. The more time I spend with him, the more I can imagine myself falling in love with him for real. I don’t doubt that I have feelings for him, but I do doubt that they match the strength of his feelings for me. And it’s hard to swallow the undeniable fact that if the circumstances were different, I wouldn’t be fishing for such a quick engagement. But because of my predicament, I’m desperate for the proposal to happen soon.

  I know Sophie gave him the ring as a gift on the house (because if he pays the full $45,000 for it, and the engagement goes south, New York state law says I could be legally required to return it to him—and that’s a risk I don’t want to take). At times, I even catch myself in a sheer panic because my ring finger is bare. Then, of course, I remember that I didn’t lose the ring, but rather, I took it off on purpose. I really thought he would pop the question in Massachusetts, but the long weekend has come and gone.

  I’ve only been waiting for six days, but the time is starting to gnaw at me. It’s given me enough time to reconsider if all this—an engagement, a wedding, Blake—is what I really want. If I go through with it, I’m making a choice to irrevocably intertwine my personal life with my business and my livelihood. I can’t take that back. Blake and I will be linked, romantically, financially, publicly, and that means opening up our relationship to scrutiny. My ruse could be exposed. But I can so easily envision the highlight reel of our lives together: first, a gorgeous wedding, then a generous spike in Brooklyn Jewels’s sales that leads to a healthy bank account balance, and ultimately, the kind of soul-affirming love that can sustain the shared life of a marriage. If I truly let my imagination run, I can see us spending weekend mornings in bed with our laptops, each happily working on our businesses; I can see us sunbathing on his rooftop on summer afternoons; I can see the two of us eating stir-fry with Sophie and Liv and maybe their baby someday. But once I let people in to see all that, I can’t take it back. I can’t guarantee a happy ending. If we go public and then fizzle, it would be ruinous. Personally, it’d be mortifying. But professionally, it could be disastrous, too. All my new customers and followers who gush over our relationship could leave me cold.

  I don’t have to go through with it. I could say no to Blake’s proposal. I could push away the wedding planning, cancel the splashy party at the Wythe Hotel, return the glitzy dress. Maybe that’s the logical decision. The safe choice. But the prospect of shutting all that down makes me feel lost and lonely. After building up the idea in my head all spring and summer, I don’t know how to pivot away from it. I would be so sad to lose Blake. And now that I’m hinging on an influx of business to keep the shop afloat, I’m too far gone. I have to go through with my plan or else.

  So that’s why I close my laptop at 1 p.m. and head over to the
hotel’s in-house restaurant, Reynard, for the cake tasting. Raj is meeting me there. He had texted over the weekend to ask about hanging out again, and I suggested he join me today. The plan isn’t to pass him off as my fiancé necessarily, but I can say that my fiancé isn’t able to make it, and I wanted a second opinion, so I brought a friend. It’s not the most outrageous lie. I’ve certainly told worse.

  Reynard’s dining room is outfitted with the kind of industrial chic design that makes everyone in it look at least 10 percent hotter by association. The walls are rosy brick, the banquettes are made of sumptuous chocolate leather, the floor is rough wood, and the lighting fixtures are softly glowing exposed bulbs. Raj waits for me by the hostess stand, and we’re seated at a round table in the back. A ponytailed waiter comes by to greet us.

  “This is the happy couple?” he asks, clapping his hands together.

  “Well, I’m Eliza, the bride,” I say, jumping in to smooth over the potentially awkward situation. “And this is my good friend Raj, who’s joining me for the tasting today since my fiancé can’t make it.”

  Raj reaches his hand across the table to shake the waiter’s hand. “Not the groom, but a groomsman,” he says, hamming it up.

  I choke on my sparkling water. The plan was to avoid bridesmaids and groomsmen entirely—it’s too complicated to arrange with such a shaky, last-minute wedding. Maybe Sophie could serve as my matron of honor, and maybe Reid would be Blake’s best man, but that’s as far as I had gotten.

  “He’s a . . . special, important friend,” I tell the waiter, who seems entirely unfazed by all of this. “Can’t wait to have him stand by my side at the altar!”

  The waiter launches into his spiel about the six varieties of cake we’ll be tasting today. He gives us notecards and tiny golf pencils so we can jot down our reactions to each flavor. The moment he leaves to retrieve the first sample, I jab Raj with my elbow.

  “So you’re a groomsman now?” I hiss.

  “You know I wouldn’t miss your wedding for the world,” he says, smiling like he’s full of shit. “I am invited, right?”

  I laugh hollowly. “Ha. Yeah. Sure. Invited to a wedding that will probably happen, if I can get my boyfriend to propose and marry me in five weeks flat.”

  His eyes bug out. “Jeez. What’s going on with that?”

  I fill him in on my weekend with Blake’s family and the ring I know must be burning a hole in his pocket.

  “You’re kinda nuts. You know that, right?”

  “I prefer the term ‘ambitious.’ ”

  A German chocolate cake arrives first, followed by a pumpkin spice pound cake and a vanilla cake with raspberry filling. We disagree on every cake.

  “Good thing it’s not you two getting married,” the waiter jokes.

  My favorite is the chocolate. I can’t resist digging my fork into the molten, gooey center and returning to the plate until every morsel is gone. Overall, planning a wedding has been more stressful and less dreamy than I had anticipated, but this dessert is exactly as perfect as I had hoped it would be—a true highlight.

  “So has Carmen told you what we’re up to lately?” Raj asks, once the waiter retreats with our empty plates.

  “Only a little! What’s going on?”

  He stretches to run his hands through his hair. “You’re a genius for connecting us. The timing was amazing.”

  “Don’t even worry about it.”

  He explains that Carmen had originally wanted someone to build out the entire Skindemand app right away. But Raj pointed out that that would take a ridiculously long time for a team to build, forget just one person—and she didn’t really have the money to pay him properly for that anyway.

  “So instead, I’m building her an MVP—minimum viable product—which is like the skin-and-bones version of the app that she can present to investors,” he says. “It’ll have everything she needs at this stage of the company, but it keeps the workload doable for a part-time engineer.”

  “Which is all she can afford at the moment,” I fill in.

  “But not for long,” he says smugly.

  From what Carmen has told me, her presentation to Cecelia Sundquist went flawlessly, and she seemed to be leaning toward making an investment. Nothing is set in stone, of course, and Carmen is still scoping out plenty of other VC firms in case this doesn’t pan out. But she’s by far her first choice, and I have a hunch this could work.

  “And honestly, building the MVP means I get to dive into the design more than the coding, which is the piece I love the most,” Raj continues.

  He pulls out his phone to show me mock-ups of what he’s creating for Carmen. Each slide borrows Carmen’s sleek white, black, and yellow color scheme, but amplifies it to a level of polish that she wasn’t quite able to capture on her own in the presentation. The app looks real.

  “I love that you two are working together,” I say.

  “Worlds colliding, huh?” he says.

  “In the best way possible.”

  The next servings of cake arrive: a strawberry shortcake, a lemon, and a red velvet with buttercream frosting. Raj and I try bites of them all, which gets increasingly more difficult as we feel more and more stuffed.

  Later, the waiter returns for feedback. “Do you have any sense of what the groom’s preference would be?” he asks.

  It strikes me that I don’t. The first time Blake and I went out for a nice dinner, the dessert menu arrived and he waved it away. He explained that he’s not much of a sweets person. I was suddenly struck by how terrible it would be to live a life with a guy who only watches me scarf down cakes and pies and sundaes on my own.

  “He’s open to anything,” I bluff. “He says he trusts me to pick whichever one I like the most.”

  “Which is . . . ?” the waiter prompts.

  I look to Raj to back me up on this, but he simply shrugs.

  “Whatever you want,” he says.

  This is the first time I’ve made a wedding decision with a guy by my side. True, he’s just a guy friend, not my fiancé, but still. The significance of the moment strikes me in a bittersweet way. Not for the first time, I feel a pang of sadness. If my life had played out differently, I’d have a real partner to plan this with. Maybe he would groan over the difference between the cardstock weights on invitations, or maybe he would insist on an old-fashioned church wedding that’s totally not my style, or maybe his mother would intervene and throw a fit if we didn’t invite all twenty members of her book club, plus their husbands. But regardless of how the process went, it’d be a joint undertaking. Making these decisions entirely on my own feels wrong.

  “The chocolate, I guess,” I tell the waiter. “It was really good.”

  It only occurs to me hours later, after Raj and I have left Reynard’s, that Blake specifically told me during that first dinner date that he doesn’t even like chocolate.

  • Chapter 18 •

  I realize that something is off on Saturday morning. Usually, on weekends when neither of us has anything pressing to do, we laze around in bed. If there’s one thing I have to give Blake credit for, it’s this: he is an excellent cuddler. His skin is warm, his arms wrap firmly around me in all the right places, and he nuzzles kisses onto the top of my head that make my entire body feel like it’s glowing with comfort. But this Saturday, when I drift awake, he’s tensely hunched over his phone. There’s a gulf of space between us. On instinct, I roll toward him.

  “Morning,” I mumble, pressing my cheek against his thigh.

  That’s when I realize he’s wearing chinos. I feel so naked. He absentmindedly rubs my back.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Up already?” I ask, confused.

  “Yeah, couldn’t sleep,” he says.

  He turns fully toward me on the bed and smiles. “Hey, there’s something I’d like to do today.”

  “What is it?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.

  He gives me a coy grin. “It’s a surprise. I wanna take you somewhere
.”

  I summon every acting tip I gleaned from my brief dalliance with the Lincoln Middle School drama department, in which I played a tree in the seventh-grade winter production.

  “You want to take me somewhere?” I repeat, lifting an eyebrow.

  He dives in for a kiss. “Yeah. Get dressed.”

  I shift to sit up in bed. “Should I . . . dress for anything in particular?”

  I’m not a religious person, but in this moment, I actively consider praying he doesn’t propose somewhere cheesy in public, like on the jumbotron at a sporting event or the crowded observatory on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building.

  “Just get dressed,” he says, giving me that infuriatingly coy grin again. “You always look beautiful, no matter what.”

  I fish yesterday’s jeans and T-shirt off his bedroom floor. Knowing that a proposal could happen at any time, I should’ve planned better for this moment. My hands are neatly manicured, yes, but that’s nothing special. They always are. The T-shirt is old and beginning to form unsightly pit stains. I’d shower first, but I don’t have any of the post-shower essentials I’d need here—no fresh clothes, no brush to detangle my wet hair, no real makeup aside from the tubes of lipstick and mascara I keep in the bottom of my purse. All I have is a toothbrush. Begrudgingly, I dress and check my reflection in his mirror. I’ve certainly had better-looking days.

  Blake’s kitchen table looks like something Martha Stewart herself personally arranged: two plates are stacked high with eggs, pancakes, and home fries, surrounded by sunny cups of orange juice and steaming mugs of coffee. I realize that Blake has piped in soft jazz from a speaker somewhere.

  “You did all of this?” I ask.

  “Eat,” he says simply, leaning in for a kiss.

  We sit, but it’s hard to eat or talk or relax when I know something is up. I want to pepper Blake with questions, but I know that it will be useless. I want to graciously enjoy this beautiful breakfast like a good bride-to-be should, but my mind is racing. Instead, I fork eggs into my mouth at a steady clip. Blake doesn’t seem to notice; he seems preoccupied, too.