“Thanks for your help with the mess upstairs,” I said. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”
Sebastian stopped to let Bruno sniff a tree trunk. “You mean . . . clean?”
“Don’t you have a housekeeper?”
“Fuck no,” he said with enough vehemence that I wondered if I’d hit a sore spot. “And I never will.”
“I just can’t picture you on your hands and knees scrubbing down your Fifth Avenue bachelor pad. Or is it simply that you researched a How-To on caring for a date who boozes too hard?”
“If you must know,” he said, “I wasn’t raised the smooth-talking, bespoke-suit-wearing gentleman you’re acquainted with.”
Surely, he was messing with me, because that didn’t add up. Sebastian held himself with the poise of someone who’d grown up with Emily Post spines in the study, cotillion during the week, and an assurance that he’d never spend a night without a roof over his head. “But you went to Harvard and ‘summered’ on Nantucket as a kid.”
“You know where I went to school, how I spent my summers, and the location of my apartment?” He rolled his wrist to wrap the leash around it. “What are you, some kind of stalker?”
“No,” I said defensively, except that one night after a bottle of wine, a futile hour on Tinder, and a particularly combative workday with Sebastian, I had maybe succumbed to some stalker-like activities that went beyond what I’d needed to know for the job. “I did some research. Know thy enemy and all that.”
“Enemy, huh?” Bruno tugged on his leash to get to a discarded takeout carton, but Sebastian pulled him forward. “What happened to getting to know your team so you could therapize us?”
Damn. That would’ve been a much more rational explanation. “You say therapize like I’m trying to lure you into a dark alley and rob you blind.” I checked my hair in the reflection of a store window. “That could be what I’m doing for all you know, seeing as you have yet to schedule one-on-one time with me.”
“Aha,” he said. “I see what you’re up to now. You planned this to get me into a Georgina Keller therapy session.”
“You think I made my own dog throw up?”
“I don’t know what you’re capable of.”
Bruno stopped to poop, and Sebastian cleaned it up before I could even offer. “You’re derailing the topic,” I said.
He tied the plastic bag. “Which is?”
“Me trying to reconcile your past with your present.”
“I’ll tell you one thing as long as you keep it between us.” We turned a corner. “I never ‘summered’ anywhere, and my extensive cleaning knowledge is thanks to generations of Mexican matriarchs.”
So he was Latino as Luciano had suggested. I’d tried digging into his heritage, but there was scant information out there about his past. The few clues I’d uncovered hadn’t pointed to anything other than a charmed life. It made me wonder exactly how much information Sebastian put out there, and how many blanks had been filled in by the public.
“Why do I need to keep this between us?” I asked.
“It would be greatly appreciated.”
“By who?”
“By whom,” was all he said.
I waited for him to give me a reason. When he didn’t continue, I said, “I thought you were Irish.”
He snorted. “I have the opposite complexion.”
“Not everyone in Ireland has red hair and pale skin,” I pointed out.
“I’m half Mexican, half Caucasian.”
“Oh. Considering Boston’s strong Irish population, and that your last name is Quinn, I assumed . . .”
“Ah,” he said and got quiet.
“So then is your dad—”
“Look.” He nodded ahead of us. “We’re here.”
Maybe I should’ve known this would be a touchy subject, but I wasn’t an actual therapist. I was only pretending to be one, and an occupational one at that. I kept my eyes on him a moment longer, then looked forward. We’d reached Bryant Park in record time—or maybe talking to Sebastian had just made the walk feel short.
“This is your Zen?”
“I come here to unwind when work gets to me,” he said.
“Unwind?” I asked, feigning shock. “Whatever you do at the office all day, it looks an awful lot like unwinding to me.”
He snorted. “I’m not exactly what you think, Keller.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
“Well, you just accused me of goofing off on the job.”
“Okay, so you do know what I think.”
He gave me a look as he squatted to remove Bruno’s leash. “Go on, boy. Have at it.”
“Wait,” I said, seizing Sebastian’s bicep. Either he responded by flexing, or he was made of stone. “You can’t let him off leash.”
“Why not?”
“For one, it’s illegal outside of the dog run.”
“Do you see the K-9 unit around?”
“Like the bomb sniffers?” I asked. “You know they aren’t the actual dog police.”
“It was a joke. Never mind. Will he run away?”
“I couldn’t lose him if I tried.”
“Is he dangerous?” he asked. “Would he eat a small child?”
“No . . .”
“So, what’s the problem?”
I took a deep breath and looked around. The park had a lot of green grass Bruno would love, but it wasn’t fenced. And he really needed to be monitored during exercise. “Too much excitement is bad for his heart. I never let him off leash outside.”
“Well, shit,” Sebastian said. “How does he play?”
“We take long walks every day and do mental exercises like—”
“Georgina, do you see the size of this guy? He needs to get his zoomies out.”
“Zoomies—?”
Sebastian unclipped the leash, and Bruno bolted across the lawn. “When pets get a burst of energy and act all crazy. There’s a whole Reddit thread dedicated to them.”
I let Bruno get about fifty yards before I called him. Maybe he had the zoomies, but Mom had the panics. It was fun to see him go wild, but I preferred he did it closer. He skidded to a halt and sprinted back to us.
Sebastian slid out his wallet. “You hungry?”
“Not yet. I have lunch at the office.”
“I’ll be right back.”
As he walked away, I watched Bruno zigzag between benches, wrought iron park tables, and other dogs. If only I’d brought his pills, I might’ve been desperate enough to steal someone’s sandwich and turn it into a cocktail of heart meds. Once I’d gotten enough dirty looks, I squatted and whistled for him. He came bounding back and plopped down in front of me.
“Hey, you’re not really going to a Yankees game with that guy Francis, are you?” Sebastian asked from somewhere behind me. “If you want to drink beer, eat hotdogs, and root for a bunch of losers, we can do that at the office any day.”
I looked up once I’d latched Bruno’s leash back on. Sebastian waved a bunless hotdog in a paper tray at me. “It’s François,” I said. “And why wouldn’t I go out with him?”
“He’s clearly some overworked finance bro who got lucky. Right place, right time.”
“Who said anything about finance? Or getting lucky for that matter?”
“He’s a bro, trust me. I’ve got radar for these things. The point is, you made your case, but there’s no reason you have to go through with the date.”
“There is a reason,” I said, standing. “You guys have all these fancy ways of trying to get laid when the answer is very simple.”
“Oh, yeah?” He was freakishly close to me for some reason, and I had to tilt my head back to see his face. “Enlighten me, Georgina.”
“I already did. He and I share a common interest—baseball.” I tugged Bruno and started walking. “Catching a game sounds like the perfect date to me, and on top of that, he was a nice guy.”
“He just assumed you were single, despite the fact tha
t you were at a bar with six guys?” Sebastian asked, catching up to me in a few long strides.
“No. He asked if you were my boyfriend.”
“He did?” Sebastian tore the hotdog in half. “Me specifically?”
“Yep. That reminds me—you guys published an article about introducing a new girlfriend to your friends.”
“Hmm.” Sebastian closed one eye. “Yes. February 2015.”
“What about trying that from the girlfriend’s point-of-view? Get a guest writer with a crisp comedic voice. Meeting a guy’s friends is ripe for humor. Plus, it brings the female presence Modern Man desperately needs.”
Instead of pointing out the flaws in my idea, he seemed to consider it, which was progress. But then he said as he tore the hotdog into little pieces, “I wonder what made him think of all the guys, I was your boyfriend.”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant that as an insult, but he had a point. Sebastian and I were least likely to partner up. Then I realized with a start that I’d forgotten to fear this time away from the office with Sebastian. And that we were almost behaving like friends.
“What are you doing to that hotdog?” I asked when I noticed he hadn’t eaten a bite, just torn it up in the paper tray.
He reached in his trousers pocket and pulled out Bruno’s meds. I hadn’t even seen him pick them up. “For the brute.”
“You brought his pills?” I asked.
He stuffed them into the hotdog chunks and fed them to Bruno, who swallowed them right down without a fight. We’d done the hotdog thing plenty of times before, but always at home where I boiled them myself.
“Wow,” I said, not even trying to hide my awe. “Good boy.”
Sebastian smiled, clearly pleased with himself. “Thank you.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this new side of Sebastian. In the span of one morning, he’d cleaned vomit, taken care of my dog, and gotten us outdoors for some vitamin D. My mood had improved considerably seeing Bruno run free for the first time in a while. “No, thank you,” I said as I stepped outside the park. “Did you have pets—”
“Watch out,” Sebastian said, grabbing my arm to pull me backward.
“To your left,” a bike tour guide said into a small, handheld megaphone as he dinged his bell at me, “you’ll see a busy New York power couple grabbing some rare alone time on their lunch breaks.”
Bruno barked at the fleet, and Sebastian’s hand remained firmly on my bicep, even as the last cyclist pedaled by. A tornado of leaves followed, swirling around our feet. Bruno fell silent. A breeze blew my hair into my lipstick and Sebastian glanced at my mouth, then back up. New York City had many personalities. With the fall sun and a moment of quiet, it became serene. Maybe even a little romantic. I could see now that Sebastian’s eyes weren’t as green as I’d thought. They shaded into blue like the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Stillness in the city, and also in his eyes, was so rare and unexpected, that it almost felt wrong. Was this the calm before a storm, or were we standing in the eye of it?
As if Sebastian’s thoughts had followed the exact same course, his face smoothed, and he shook his head. “You have all these little fucking freckles,” he said. “It’s like someone sprinkled you with cinnamon to serve you up as breakfast.”
I gaped at him, but was his statement really that surprising? Like ninety-nine percent of redheaded children, I’d grown up being teased about my freckles. And as an adult, Neal would often compliment my skill for covering them up with concealer.
“Excuse me,” I said, pulling my arm back to cross it over my chest. Instantly, the warmth of his hand receded. I repeated my mom’s words of reassurance to me. “They give me character.”
“You already have enough characters for a George R.R. Martin novel.”
If Sebastian was implying I had multiple personalities, well, that might’ve been true, but what gave him the right? He wasn’t my therapist or my mother or even my friend. “Whatever.” I scoffed. “We should get back to the office.”
“Tell me the truth. Did you ask François to ask you out?”
I turned on my heel to head back. “Do you want me to tell everyone you’re acting like a sore loser?”
“I’m not asking because of the bet. I just don’t want you to feel obligated to go through with this ‘date.’” He made exaggerated and highly insulting air quotes. “What do you think, Bruno? Should she just cancel?”
“I’m not canceling a date I actually want to go on,” I said. “Geez. You’d give anything to see me suffer, wouldn’t you? You probably keep a notebook of things that annoy me.”
“Like your freckles and cinnamon.”
“Cinnamon doesn’t annoy me. Being likened to a cinnamon bun does.”
“And then there’s me,” he said. “I obviously top the list.”
“So, you do have a notebook.”
“Of course not. I keep the list on my phone for easy access.”
I trained my eyes forward but heard the smile in his voice.
We paused for a cab rounding the corner, then crossed the street. “I’m going to need proof of this alleged date, you know,” he added.
“Fine,” I said. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
His smirk gave him away. He didn’t believe there was a date.
Well, if proof was what he wanted, I’d find a way to give it to him. That gave me even more reasons to not only go on the date, but to spite Sebastian by enjoying it.
12
GEORGINA
It was entirely possible my “common interest” revelation was a dud. I would’ve thought two baseball fans at a Yankees game would have lots to talk about, but with several innings left, François and I were struggling to keep the conversation going. Or I was struggling. He was just watching the game.
“Do you like beer?” I asked him.
In a Yankees cap and Louisiana State polo shirt, an odd combination I still hadn’t gotten used to, François leaned his elbows on his knees as the opposing team’s first baseman moved to the batter’s box. “I was drinking one when we met, remember?”
“Right.” I waited for him to catch on to my line of thinking, but he just eyed the mound as if he was up to bat. “I can go get us one,” I volunteered.
“I don’t typically drink before the sun sets,” he said, glancing back at me. “Do you?”
“Well, no,” I said. Did brunch cocktails count? “But it is baseball. The rules are different on the diamond, François.”
“Call me Frank.” He rubbed his nose. “I don’t want to be fuzzy for the rest of the game, but go ahead if you want.”
I hated that Neal popped into my mind on my first date since our breakup, but he’d said that same thing a lot—if you want—and in a way that made it clear he disapproved. We could hire a cleaner if I wanted, even though we wouldn’t have an issue if I just picked up after myself more. Skipping the gym was fine if you don’t mind those extra pounds, but he’d be cycling the length of Brooklyn. If that’s how you want to spend the little money we have he’d say in the same tone when I’d look up Cliffs of Moher cruises.
I doubted Frank had meant it that way—it was my own issues that made it feel combative—but how had I gotten mixed up with a guy who was too tightly wound to day drink? Baseball was not the kind of sport that required a lot of concentration, even for the most devoted fan. And it was usually better with beer because the innings could drag sometimes. But maybe I wasn’t being fair. Getting buzzed alone didn’t sound all that appealing anyway.
“I’m good,” I said, “I’ll just grab something later.”
“How about these seats?” he asked, clapping through a play. “Pretty great, right?”
“Better than I’m used to.”
“How’d you get into baseball?” he asked.
“My dad.” I’d already mentioned that partway through the first inning, but Frank had been distracted. “I grew up in Buffalo, so it was a big deal to drive in for a game.”
“You alre
ady told me that, didn’t you? Sorry. My attention’s a little divided.”
“It’s okay, totally fine,” I said, even though I was starting to question why he’d asked me to the game. It seemed as if he might enjoy it more alone. “We never had seats this close. We were usually in the bleachers. It’s cool to actually see the players’ expressions.”
“This is the only way I’ll come to a game. I can’t sit farther back than this.”
“There’s actually a weird sense of camaraderie in the nosebleed section . . .”
François groaned at a bad call and turned forward. I should’ve considered how long a baseball game could go on. It was my first date in a while, and this wasn’t making a case for doing it again anytime soon. Silence made me just as uncomfortable as stilted conversation. Was he not interested enough to learn more about me? What if we ran out of things to talk about at some point?
I wiped sweat from my upper lip. I was starting to regret my long-sleeved shirt. It’d been cold when I’d left my apartment, but the sun was right on top of us now. Apparently, the weather was still making up its mind. “So, did you stay in the city this summer?” I asked.
“I spent some time at my parents’ beach house in Florida,” he said. “You ever been?”
I perked up with a fresh topic. “Just Miami. Is that where their house is?”
“Boca Raton. Did you go for work?”
“No, a bachelorette party with some girlfriends for a weekend.”
François looked back at me and winked. “Sounds like a fiesta I’d like to attend.”
He hadn’t shown much physical interest in me since we’d met outside the four train before the game, so I wasn’t sure how to take his comment. Friendly? Suggestive? Creepy? I didn’t think I’d make it through the rest of the game without a drink, but as he’d pointed out, we’d met in a bar. I didn’t want him to think I needed alcohol to have a good time.
I tried to think of something else worth mentioning. Frank had gone monosyllabic when I’d brought up Bruno, and my dog was probably my favorite subject. “On my way here,” I said, wrinkling my nose, “a guy on the subway offered me half an avocado. Isn’t that strange?”
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