Dance with Me, page 13
As they shake hands, Marisa squints at Adley, then repeats her name twice before saying, “Do you own Get the Scoop?”
“I do,” Adley says, and I notice she sits up a little straighter. Pride’ll do that to you.
“Well, my nephew loves, loves, loves your ice cream, and he loved that you had him in the back. He talks about it a lot. We’ll definitely be back again soon.”
“Jaden, right?” Adley asks, and both Marisa and I nod. “He was a sweetheart. He’s welcome anytime. I’ll take him in the back again, and he can help me make a new flavor.”
“Oh my God, don’t say that if you don’t mean it.” Marisa laughs and then the bartender is there, and she orders a rum and Diet Coke, a pitcher of light beer, and two glasses of white wine. First round is clearly on her.
“I definitely mean it. Bring him by anytime.” She lifts her G&T and touches it to Marisa’s glass.
The bartender helps her carry her drinks back to the table, and Marisa gives me a smile and says she’ll talk to me later and then I can breathe again.
“Man,” Adley says. “You’ve got it bad. Just ask her out already.”
I hope my face shows the What the hell are you talking about? that I feel because what the hell is she talking about?
“What?” Adley says. “She’s obviously into you. You are absolutely into her. Might as well, right?”
“That will not be happening.”
“Why not?” Adley asks, and as if Pen is sitting right there with us, participating in the conversation, my phone pings an incoming text and there she is.
I hold the phone up so Adley can see. “That’s why not.”
Just thinking about you, says the text, followed by a smiling emoji surrounded by hearts.
“What the hell is she doing?” Adley asks, and that is the question, isn’t it?
I shake my head and sigh. “I don’t know.” I finish my beer and signal to the awesome-haired bartender for another. “I really don’t.”
“Have you responded?”
“No,” I say, probably too vehemently, because Adley squints at me.
“But you want to.”
“No.” I sigh. “I mean, maybe?”
“Why?” Adley asks, and draws the word out so it’s about seven syllables. “Why would you want to? She ripped your heart out. She kicked you out of your own home. She told you she wasn’t the kind to get married, and now she’s engaged to somebody else. Why would you even give her the time of day?”
Adley Purcell, voice of reason, everybody.
“I don’t know.” But that’s not exactly true, is it? I lift the fresh beer the bartender slides me and take a big swig of it before I admit the real reason to Adley. “I feel like I have all the power right now. I’ve never had the power when it comes to Penelope. Not once in the entire time we were together. So I think I’m just…reveling in that for a bit.”
Adley tips her head from one side to the other and seems to take that in. “All right. Fine. I’ll let it slide for now.” She sips her drink and adds, “But I do wonder what’s going on with her.”
“Me, too,” I say.
Adley stays long enough to finish her drink, but then tells me she’s gotta get back to Get the Scoop and help with closing. I wave away her attempt to pay, hug her, and tell her I’ll see her again soon, and then she’s gone, and I’m sitting alone at the bar with an almost full beer. I’m glad my back is to Marisa and friends because if they were in my line of sight, I’m afraid I’d stare like a creeper. Instead, I pick up my phone and scroll back through all the messages Pen has sent in the last week or two. There aren’t a ton, but there are more than she ever sent in that span of time when we were together. And Adley’s words come back to me because I, too, wonder what’s going on with her. She’s engaged. She should be planning her wedding and canoodling with her fiancée, shouldn’t she? Not sending vague, random texts to her ex.
I’m seriously considering what kind of a response I could send when Marisa appears next to me, and I drop my phone, then quickly snap it up and make the screen go black.
“Looks like we’re the holdouts,” she says, and when I glance over my shoulder, her table has cleared out, and her friends are headed toward the door. “Jaden’s spending the night at my mom’s, and I’m just not ready to go home yet.”
“That was the fastest girls’ night out I’ve ever seen.”
She laughs and it’s pretty. Soft and musical. “It was. Everybody’s got people to get home to.”
“Not you?” I think we both realize that I’m asking if she has somebody besides Jaden at home, because it occurs to me that I have no idea. Maybe she does. I mean, look at her. Why wouldn’t she?
“Nope.” She takes the stool next to mine. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” I say. And I don’t. Spend time sitting next to this gorgeous woman who, according to my bestie, the powers that be are putting in my path for a reason? Yes, please.
“How was your day?” she asks, and I love the simplicity of the question.
“It wasn’t bad, as Fridays go. I worked, was pretty busy, then went to watch my little brother play baseball. Then I spent way too long convincing Adley to leave the ice cream shop for half an hour to meet me here for a drink. And here I am.”
“That sounds like a pretty good day,” Marisa says, signaling the bartender. Turns out the rum and Diet Coke was hers, and she orders herself another. “Does your brother play in college?”
I laugh because I tend to forget that when somebody doesn’t know my backstory, of course they would assume my younger siblings are merely a few years younger. “No, he plays in elementary school.”
Marisa’s eyes go wide. “What?”
“Yeah, my parents split when I was thirteen. Then they both got remarried a few years later and then both had kids a few years after that. So I have a sister who’s thirteen and three brothers who are ten, eight, and five.”
“Wow,” Marisa says.
“Right? I was in my twenties when everybody was born.”
“Was it hard for you?” And believe it or not, Marisa is the first person to ever ask me that right off the bat. I blink at her a couple times before answering.
“It was. Yeah. Still is sometimes.” I sip my beer. “I often have to remind myself that my parents are much different people—and much different parents—now than they were when I was a kid.”
“That’s really observant. I bet not a lot of people would get that. Are your siblings being raised differently than you were?”
I snort what’s supposed to be a laugh but ends up being more sarcastic than anything else. “In every way. Yes.”
“I bet that can suck.”
“In many, many ways.” I grin at her. “You’re really intuitive, you know that?”
She lifts one shoulder. “I come from a big family. Lots of ins and outs and family dynamics. Family can be complicated.”
“So complicated.” We’re quiet for a moment, and while I debate internally for that time, I decide maybe it’s okay to ask her about her situation, since she just learned a whole bunch about mine. “So, you took in Jaden after his parents died. That’s…incredible. Selfless, loving, and I bet hard.”
She inhales a deep breath and lets it out very slowly before she speaks. When she turns to me, her dark eyes are filled with so many things, emotions in quick succession. Grief, happiness, worry, joy. “It’s been…so much. So many different things. Jaden is a good kid. A really good kid. And my heart breaks for what he’s been through. He sees a therapist, and he’s pretty good about talking to me about things. But he also has nightmares. And sometimes, he just wants his mom, you know?”
“Ugh.” I can feel my heart aching in my chest for the poor kid. “I can’t even imagine.”
“I guess…this is going to sound awful, but I think part of me is glad that, if this was going to happen, if he was meant to lose his parents, he lost them at the age he did. He’s got memories, but not so many that the entire scope of his life is changed.” She grits her teeth and makes a face like she’s worried what she just said might be tactless. “I mean, that’s stupid, of course the scope of his life has changed. I just…” She seems to struggle for the right words, but I put my hand on her forearm, stopping her.
“I get it. I totally understand what you mean.” She tosses me a look of gratitude. “So, you said you have a big family. What made you decide to take him in?”
“Well, my mom wanted him. Was all set to move him in. But my dad uses a cane, and my mom is pretty sprightly for being almost seventy, but they babysat Jaden when he was two, before he went to preschool. And I watched them do it. It was only three days a week, and they loved it. But they were exhausted by the time Friday rolled around. They’d spend their weekends recovering only to do it again on Monday. And I just knew having him full-time would take a toll on them, healthwise. They’re only recently retired. They should be able to take vacations and travel and just relax, not raise another kid from three years old.”
I love listening to her talk. I realize that in the middle of her story as I just sit there with my chin in my hand and listen. The timbre of her voice. The way her glossy lips move. How she turns her glass in a slow circle with her fingers as she speaks. I am entranced. Thoroughly entranced by this woman. “So, he’s been with you for a year?”
“About that, yeah. I have a little house and had the extra space, and he’s my godchild. We were always close.”
“Sounds to me like he’s a very lucky little boy to have you.” I almost wince when I hear my own words because Jaden is obviously not lucky. He lost both his parents, for fuck’s sake. But Marisa smiles and thanks me, and I’m relieved.
“No kids for you, right?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No. Not yet.”
“You want them, though?”
“I do.” I give a nod to go with my words. “I wasn’t sure when I was first out. My childhood was such a mess, and I really struggled with the possibility of messing up another kid the way my parents messed me up. But…” I look into my near-empty glass, my past struggles and indecision around the subject flashing through my brain. “But yeah. I’d love to have kids.” I glance up and meet her eyes, and there’s something there that I can’t identify, that gives me a little flutter low in my body. I clear my throat and change the subject, if only to stop her looking at me like that because it’s just too…I don’t know. It’s too something, and it’s doing things to me. “Why financial planning?”
If Marisa is surprised by the shift in topic, she doesn’t show it. Again, she lifts one shoulder, and I’m kind of starting to like that little half shrug. “I have always wanted to be fully in control of my future, so when I was younger, I’d do lots of research on things like stocks and investments and Wall Street. I almost moved to New York City to work there.”
“Really? Wow. That’s impressive. What stopped you?”
“I didn’t really want to leave Northwood. I always thought I did. Couldn’t wait to get out of town and live somewhere big where nobody knew me. But when it came right down to it, I realized that I actually love this little town.” She sips her drink. “Plus, it would’ve killed my mother.” And then she laughs that musical laugh again, and it worms right into my stomach. And lower.
“It’s still so interesting to me that your two jobs are so opposite. One is logic and numbers. The other is creativity and emotion.”
“What can I say? I guess that makes me well-rounded.”
“I guess it does. Not a lot of people are.”
Our gazes hold, and something zips between us. I think we both feel it because we each look away quickly.
We finish our drinks, and while I’m tempted to have one more, Fridays aren’t actually Fridays for me, since I work Saturdays. “I should probably get home,” I say. “I’ve got a client at nine tomorrow morning.”
“I forget you work on Saturdays. You’re off on Mondays?”
I nod. “Hairstylists and some restaurant folks. We have our own weekends.” We both slide off our stools and prepare to settle up tabs. For a split second, I want to pay for Marisa’s, but then I realize that could be seen as kind of presumptuous, and I don’t want to be that. We sign our own slips and slide them back across the bar, gather our things, and head out together.
We get to Marisa’s SUV first, and we stop and sort of stand there. “Well. I’m glad I ran into you tonight.”
“Yeah?” Her words surprise me, but I’m not sure why because I feel the same. “Me, too.”
She swallows. I see it and hear it. When she looks back up, she seems to hesitate before saying, “Listen, I know you’re working tomorrow, but want to grab a drink later? Or some ice cream?”
When I tell you I am this close to squealing in delight and jumping up and down like a tween girl, I am not even kidding. I try really hard not to grin like a weirdo, but I’m pretty sure I do. “I’d love that.”
Her smile seems to be a combination of joy and relief. “Okay. Good. Perfect. I’ll text you. Or you can text me when you’re done. Or whatever. One of us should text.”
I laugh because she’s so stupidly cute right now. “Okay. Sounds good.”
She gives a quick little nod and opens her car door and gets in. I back away slowly, watching her face in her side mirror for a minute before I turn and walk to my own rattletrap. And the weirdo grin breaks through. I see it in the rearview mirror, and I shake my head at myself, but I also keep right on grinning. I make eye contact with myself and point at my reflection.
“You, my friend, have a date tomorrow night. I think.”
Chapter Twelve
Saturday’s weather is gorgeous. Stunning. Sunny all day long. About seventy-five degrees. Just absolutely perfect early summer weather.
People might complain about being inside on a weekend day when it’s so nice out, but honestly, I’ve worked in a salon for many years now, and I don’t even consider Saturday part of the weekend anymore. My weekend is Sunday and Monday, so I’m not upset to be cooped up on a gorgeous day.
That being said, it’s also my date day, and that makes me not want to be here. While I’m very aware that chatting along with my clients often makes the day go by faster—the one exception being if I have somebody in my chair who insists on talking politics and their politics are the opposite of mine—I’m being kind of quiet today, doing more nodding than participating.
“What’s going on with you?” Bash asks me after my fourth client heads out the door.
“What?”
He waves a finger up and down in front of me. “You’re being weird. What’s going on?”
I haven’t told him about Marisa, and I’m still not sure I should, but I also know he’ll bug me all day until I can’t take it anymore and I crack, so it’s probably better to just come clean.
“Okay. Fine. It’s possible I…have a date tonight.”
“What?” he says. Loudly.
I look around quickly, then make a face at him. “Shh. Seriously. I don’t need the whole place to know.”
“I can’t believe you’re just telling me this now. I’m hurt.” He pouts. I laugh.
“Stop that. You are not.”
“Tell me,” he orders, and since we both have empty chairs for the next few moments, I figure I might as well.
I spill the details. All about the dance lesson last week and the competition and running into Marisa at the bar last night and how we ended up talking, just the two of us for a bit, and how she asked me to drinks or ice cream tonight.
He stares at me as I talk, clearly rapt with attention, and the more I say, the farther open his mouth falls until he’s completely slack-jawed by the time I finish. “Holy shit,” he says quietly. Then he repeats himself. “Holy shit.”
“I know, right?”
“Going for ice cream is just the cutest date thing. It’s like…rom-commy. What are you going to wear?” The question takes me by surprise, and I glance down at my jeans and simple top. When I bring my gaze back up, Bash is shaking his head. “No. Just no.”
“I agree with Bash,” Demi says from her chair, and now I know that she’s been listening as well. “Plus, you’re gonna have little hairs all over you. Come on.”
Well. So much for not getting all nervous about tonight.
“Jeans are fine,” Demi says, and Bash nods his agreement. “But maybe cropped ones. And wear that cute light blue plaid sleeveless button-down you have.”
“Yes,” Bash says, agreement clear in his voice. “That’s perfect. But put a white tank on under it and then leave it unbuttoned.”
“Oh, good call,” Demi says. “Ice cream is casual, so you don’t want to overdo it. What about those cute white sneakers you have? Wear those with no-show socks.”
“And pull your hair partially back.” Bash reaches for my hair, gathers some of it, and holds it behind my head while he plays with what’s left still hanging, arranging hanks of it here and there. He turns to look at Demi, who nods enthusiastically.
“Perfect.”
So, yeah, that’s how I decide what I’m going to wear tonight.
* * *
While I don’t love waiting in line forever, I’m always thrilled when Get the Scoop is busy. I pull in, and the lot is almost full, so it takes me some time to find a spot. Kids are running everywhere, some with cones, some with no cones but ice cream on their faces. I get out of my car and glance around. No Marisa yet, which is a bit of a relief because now I have extra time to really let my nerves build. I roll my eyes at myself and lean against my back bumper, just watching the kids. I’m sure Adley is inside, in the back, brewing up some new flavor combination, and I know I could go in the back, grab some ice cream that way, but I don’t like to take advantage. No, I will wait in line like every other customer. Maybe I’ll scoot back there and say hi later, though. Depending on how things go.
