Finding Jack, page 26
The one time when it had really mattered to get the words perfect, I’d failed. But I’d offered him the truth.
And if that wasn’t enough, I didn’t know what was left to say.
Chapter 42
The next morning, I was cooking breakfast when Sean walked in from taking Shep out.
“I’m taking omelet requests,” I said. He didn’t answer, and I looked up to find him frowning at his phone. “Sean? Something wrong?”
“Denver,” he said. I blinked at him. “My omelet.”
I turned to get some ham from the fridge. “You okay?”
“I think my roommate situation just worked out. I’ll be out of your hair soon.”
“You’re not in my hair, but that’s great news. When are you moving?’
“Uhh…”
Something about the way he said it made me look up from the eggs I was cracking. “Are you about to tell me it’s going to be like a year or something? Because then maybe you’ll be getting in my hair.” A text sounded on my phone, but I ignored it while I waited for his answer.
“You should probably get that,” he said.
“Can’t.” I wiggled my fingers covered in egg.
He unhooked Shep’s leash, walked over to me, and gently steered me to the sink. “You really need to answer your phone,” he said and ran water over my fingers.
I washed and dried them while he headed down the hall, calling Ranée’s name.
“You’re being weird!” I called after him.
“Answer your phone,” he called back.
I picked it up as another text came in.
It was from Jack.
Even though I’d dried my hands, my fingers became impossibly slippery as I fumbled the phone trying to unlock it.
It was a selfie, showing only Jack’s flannel-clad torso—which I’d know anywhere by now—and his hand holding a cup of coffee and a small bag of Cheetos. But it was the background that dominated everything, because it was the front of my apartment building.
Before I could fully process what that meant, my phone vibrated with another text and a picture of Transcendent Seagull appeared. It said only, “You should buzz Jack up.”
I ran to the door and did exactly that, then turned and yelled Sean’s name down the hall, with a big, fat question mark behind it.
“Sorry, trying to keep Ranée barricaded in here,” he yelled back, muffled by her door. There were some thumps and a few Ranée curses.
A knock sounded at the door, and I flung it open to find Jack standing there. But it was Jack like I’d never seen him. The shirt and jeans were familiar, and so was the smile. Devastatingly so. But…
My hand flew to my mouth. “Your hair.”
He reached up to touch it, but there wasn’t much left. He’d cut it much shorter, trimmed around his ears and collar. “Linda did it for me. She wanted to leave some length in front, but I figured it would get in the way of the microscope.”
“You look…” Incredible. He looked even better than in my constant daydreams by a factor of infinity. “It looks really good. Linda must have loved it when you walked in.”
“She did. There was enough to send it to Wigs for Kids.” He shifted and cleared his throat. “Can I come in?”
“Of course. Let me just…” I took the Cheetos and coffee and set them on the table. “Um, should we sit?”
“Sure, great.”
It was such a stilted conversation, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what it meant that he was here. We settled onto the sofa facing each other.
“So I—”
“Why are you—”
We said at the same time.
“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “You go ahead.”
I curled my hands into fists to keep them from fidgeting. “Why are you here, Jack?”
“When you called me last night, I was already in the city. I’d been hoping you’d see me today, but then you called...”
“And you told me I had bad timing.” The realization was dawning on me. “But not because you think we’re over?”
He smiled. “No. Because you ruined my surprise.”
I gave him a smaller smile in return. “Sorry about that. But I’m glad you’re here. There are things I need to say to you in person. More apologies I should have made a while ago.”
His expression grew serious, and he shook his head. “When you left Featherton, I was pretty upset. I thought I was mad at you, which is why I didn’t text you or call you. I figured you didn’t understand anything about me, that I’d read you all wrong, that I was better off without you.”
“Jack, I—”
“No, it’s okay. Because then you sent that text about how you started volunteering. And it turned everything upside down for me. You’ve tied me in so many knots since we met that I don’t know what’s up with anything anymore, even things I thought I knew for absolute truth.”
My hands relaxed. “I know how that feels.”
“The fact that you were willing to do something that hard, it shook me. Out of complacency. Out of self-righteousness.” He reached up to brush back hair that wasn’t there anymore, and his hand drifted to his lap as if he was uncertain what to do with it. “Most importantly, it shook me out of self-pity. I realized that I wasn’t mad at you when you left. I was mad at myself.”
I looked down at my lap. “I still shouldn’t have said what I said.”
He sighed. “Maybe you should have. You were wrong about me needing to go back to practicing, but you were right about me hiding. I didn’t realize how much I’d isolated myself until you came along. You shook me up in ways I needed.”
I rested my hand on his knee. “If it’s any consolation, you did the same thing to me.”
He covered my hand with his, toying with my fingers. “Yeah?”
I swallowed as little currents ran up my arm from every place he touched me. “I had a perfect life figured out for myself. A plan for my career. For a relationship. Five years, ten years, I saw it all laid out in front of me, clear and simple. You were nowhere in there. And yet…”
“And yet there’s no version of the future where I don’t see you. How did that happen, Em?”
“I don’t know. But it happened to me too.”
“That’s what I came here to tell you. And then you ruined it with that call last night.” Another smile twitched at the corner of his lips.
A warm tendril of hope had unfurled inside me when he’d walked through my door, and now it grew and stretched. “I have faith in you to fix this, doctor.”
“Good, because it’s my turn to do the fixing,” he said. “You took a risk and came up to see me. As happy as that made me, I didn’t understand what a huge gamble that was until I packed my life into my car to drive down here to you.”
“Your life into your car?” The tendril of hope grew to a flame fueled by wonder. He had done that for me?
He threaded his fingers through mine and met my eyes. “When you told me last night that you were willing to work on this long-distance, and to do whatever it took…” His voice trailed off. He shook his head with an air of disbelief. “I promise you, I planned this grand entrance into your life before you even called. Ask Sean. I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon.”
“A grand entrance into my life,” I repeated. “Is that also why you cut your hair?” I touched the close-cropped strands near his temple. Then I remembered something he’d said when he first walked in. “Wait. You said you packed your life into your car. And when you came in you said something about cutting your hair for a microscope?”
“Yeah.” He brushed his lips across my knuckles and this time heat shot straight up my arm. “Sean mentioned he needed a roommate, so I figured I’d help him out and move to San Francisco. It kind of worked out since the UC San Francisco School of Medicine offered me a teaching and research position.” He watched my face closely, but he didn’t need to. He could have seen my jaw drop from the top of Coit Tower, and he smiled at my reaction. “I can’t go back to treating patients, but I can work on the problem from a different direction. Have to keep this out of the way of the microscope.” He brushed a hand over his hair, clearly still not used to it. “It was time.”
Suddenly I was every romance novel cliché at once: pounding heart, sweaty palms, and there was no way my knees would support me if I had to stand. But luckily—so luckily, as Jack reached over to slide his hand around the back of my neck—I didn’t have to go anywhere.
“I’m here. I can’t go back to the work I did, but I’m not quitting anymore. Not medicine, and not you.” He leaned forward, gently touching his forehead to mine. “I love you, Emily.”
I slid my arms around his neck, thrilling at the brush of the soft, short bristles of his hair against my fingers. “Jack?” I whispered, a hairsbreadth from his lips.
“Yeah?”
“I love you too. Now shut up and kiss me.”
And neither of us paid any attention at all as Ranée and Sean spilled into the hall cheering.
Epilogue
I smoothed down the bodice of my dress as Ranée fastened the last hook in back.
“How do I look?”
Ranée peered over my shoulder at our reflections in the full-length mirror. She spread the veil out and let it float back down with a happy sigh. “This dress is amazing. You’re amazing.”
We grinned at our reflection again. I hadn’t dreamed much about my future wedding before Jack, but if I’d thought about it at all, I’d imagined a simple, chic wedding gown. The dress I chose was exactly opposite, a ball gown with a strapless sweetheart bodice, the billowing skirt made of layers of airy chiffon. The dress itself had no embellishment. With the intricate draping of the bodice and the floaty layers of the skirt, it didn’t need any, but lace appliques edged the long veil behind me.
Suddenly, Ranée picked up one edge of the veil and peered more closely at the pattern woven into it. “Wait. Are these…is this veil covered in seagulls?”
I grinned at her, and she burst out laughing. “That’s so perfect.”
It felt that way. This dress said everything about how marrying Jack made me feel. It was full and exuberant and gorgeous and unrestrained.
“Are you nervous?” Ranée asked, scooping up her maid-of-honor bouquet.
“Not even a little bit. I’ve never done anything that felt so right.”
She stepped back to study me, tapping a finger against her chin. “You look almost perfect.”
“Almost?” I reached up to make sure the veil was fastened correctly, but Ranée caught my hand.
“It’s not that. I think the shoes aren’t quite right.”
I lifted the hem to examine the silk heels my mom had helped me pick out. “I thought you liked these.”
“I do, but—” She broke off and rushed to her overnight bag full of hot rollers and makeup. She rustled around in it for a moment before she turned, bearing a familiar shoebox. “These would make it perfect,” she said, lifting the lid on a pair of gorgeous red high heels. “They deserve a dress like that, and you deserve to wear a pair like these when you marry the man of your dreams.”
And as I slipped them on and the full skirt settled down around them, I smiled.
Ranée was right. There was no better pair of shoes to take me down the aisle to Jack.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, thank you to my Facebook readers for the encouragement to write and keep this story going every week. If you’d like to join me there, you can find my author page here:
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Thank you to Leah Gariott and Tiffany Odekirk for helping me plot out this ridiculous idea on a Starbucks napkin. Thank you to the best critique group in the world for picking through the key scenes and helping me to make the right parts less creepy and the best bits more swoony: Teri Christopherson, Aubrey Hartman, Brittany Larsen, Tiiffany Odekirk, and Jen White. Thank you to Jenilyn Tolley, Leah Garriott, Jeigh Meredith, Tiffany Odekirk, Rosalyn Eves, and Cindy Baldwin for reading through this to make it stronger. Thank you to Camille Maynard, Kathy Spencer, Cindy Ray, and Amy Bennett for proofreading and helping me make it shipshape. Thank you to Jenny Proctor for her patience in formatting this knotty manuscript for me! And thank you to the friends who answered doctor questions for me. And, as always, thank you to Kenny for his unwavering cheerleading. Maybe I’ll lift the household ban on the real thing after all.
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WEDDING BELLES
WEDDING BELLES
Chapter One
Harper stared at the sample menu in front of her and dug deep into her etiquette training to find a way to say, “Absolutely not,” in a way that would make the caterer in front of her feel complimented, not rejected.
“You certainly have fresh ideas, Mr. Choi.” There. That was a diplomatic start. She hoped it didn’t sound sarcastic since he looked to be her age, in his late twenties at most.
“Call me Zak.” He smiled at her. It was a good smile, toothpaste-ad quality, and with the laugh lines crinkling around his dark brown eyes, it could have been irresistible if Harper was looking for a man. But she wasn’t.
“But my clientele is very traditional,” she continued. And really, her office should have tipped him off. She’d designed it to look like an elegant Charleston sitting room. “I used a caterer last month for a garden party who put Dijon mustard in the potato salad and it created such a ruckus that it upstaged Beth Martin’s hundred-year-old hydrangeas. And that was a tragedy I’m not sure Miss Beth will ever recover from. So this…” she waved her hand to encompass the menu, “would push my clients too far. But I wish you good luck finding your client base.”
There was no way he was going to find a client base in Charleston with the edgy offerings he’d listed on his menu. At least not with the old money families Harper was targeting on her quest to become Charleston’s premiere event planner.
His smile dimmed, and he sat forward and cleared his throat. “I realize that most of this town still considers Julia Child revolutionary for introducing French cooking techniques, but that makes them ripe for the next food revolution. There’s a whole world waiting for them if they can evolve past coq au vin.”
Harper frowned. She happened to like chicken in wine sauce. The first time she’d had it at a sorority banquet, she’d felt a flush of luxury that was new to her, the little girl from scruffy Goose Creek who got Hamburger Helper on special occasions.
“Sorry.” She pushed the menu back across her desk, not sorry at all. “But your information isn’t correct. Charleston is full of innovative restaurants who have connected to a customer base that loves what they serve. But I serve a coq au vin crowd and I use caterers who serve coq au vin.” Even the name sounded fancy and French, and she liked the way it unfurled on her tongue, unlike . . . what was is it? She flicked her eyes over to his menu again. Ah, yes. Bulgogi. Her clients wanted a prime rib, reliably sliced and served with mashed potatoes. If they were feeling adventurous, maybe they’d walk on the wild side and make them garlic mashed.
His smile had disappeared, and his sharp cheekbones suddenly stood out without his smile to soften them. She wondered idly what his ancestry was. Based on the Korean influences in the menu he gave her plus his last name, she’d guess a Korean father, but he didn’t look full Korean. Maybe a white mother? They’d each done him a favor and passed on their best bits because even his scowl didn’t diminish his good looks. She wondered which one of them was to blame for his short temper.
“Thank you for coming in.” She pushed back from her desk to indicate that their meeting was at an end, but when he made no move to leave, she hesitated in an awkward half-crouch above her chair before sitting again. “Was there something else?”
“Do you know what foodways are?” he asked.
She blinked at him. “Is that . . . a grocery chain?”
His lips stretched in a quick smile, a mean cousin to the one he’d offered her only a few minutes before. “Foodways is the history of regional dishes. Port cities—like New York, where I’m from—are prime areas for cultural shifts in cuisines.” He made a short sound that was maybe supposed to be a laugh, but it wasn’t happy. “Usually. Looks like the oldest port in the country has the oldest taste to go with it.”
He ignored the menu she’d pushed back toward him and headed for the exit. “Good news,” he said as he reached for the handle. “Your branding is on point. No one is going to accuse you of being hip or fresh.”
He was halfway out the door before Harper pulled herself together enough to call in her Bridezilla-wrangling voice, “Pleasure not doing business with you!”
His answer was the jangle of the bell hanging over the entrance. Strange. It usually had a cheerful tinkle.
Whatever. Hip and fresh were code words for trendy. She was all about timeless classics. Who cared what he thought about that? She had enough to handle with her high maintenance clients. The last thing she needed on top of that was a high maintenance caterer.
Speaking of which . . . she glanced down at her watch. Fifteen minutes until the highest maintenance bride of all time appeared.
Harper sighed and pulled out the binder that grew thicker by orders of magnitude after each meeting with the lovely Dahlia Ravenel. It was possible she’d already put in more time planning this wedding than every other event she’d organized since she went solo three years ago. Combined. But Dahlia was a prize, the daughter of one of Charleston’s most prominent families, engaged to the son and scion of one of Charleston’s other prestigious families. This was the break she’d been working and praying for, the kind of society wedding that the The Post and Courier would splash on the cover of the local section with her name attached as the wedding planner.
