Chapter 15
“You need to wear something blue.”
“What?” Xavier says, turning from where he’s digging through his suitcase from its new home on her bedroom floor.
Julie has reclaimed her bedroom for her stay in LA and that means his stuff is stacked in precarious piles in the corners of Bianca’s bedroom.
It’s a wonder Chloe didn’t notice it when she spent the night in his room, but then she was pretty distracted.
“Blue,” she repeats. “The guys have to wear blue and the girls have to wear pink.”
“You’re serious?” he asks, standing with his hands on his hips.
Bianca shrugs with a huffing breath. “It’s on the invitation and Isobel’s a little . . .”
“Insane?”
“Excited,” she corrects him, her eyes rolling indulgently.
“You know pink used to be associated with boys, right?”
“Yep, and blue was for girls, until the forties.” He loves that she knows that. Of course she does. She’s on a roll now though. “Which just makes this extra stupid. You’re talking barely two generations there.”
“So we’re gonna wear blue and pink to this thing?”
“We are.”
“You know the couple who first did one of these regrets it,” he says.
“I know, NPR did an article about it.”
“So we’re doing this because . . .”
“Because I’ve known Isobel for years and sometimes you do shit you don’t agree with because it’s important to your friends.”
“I gotta say, I don’t quite get you two.”
Bianca shrugs. “Izzy’s . . . she’s changed a lot over the years.”
“People do that sometimes.”
“They do. I thought . . . I guess I thought we were more alike than we are, but . . . anyway, she’s been through four rounds of IVF and wants a baby more than anything, so we’re gonna go and have appetizers and wait around to see which color the balloons are.”
“Four rounds? Fuck.”
“Yeah, it’s been incredibly hard.”
“So you want to support her.”
“I do. But seriously, if you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I get it. None of my other friends are going to be there and I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
He doesn’t want to go, but he’s going to go and not because of the bullshit living up to his end of the bargain excuse he gave her the night before.
He’s going because of the pure and simple fact that she’s going to be there and he’s happy enough to just exist in her general orbit for the time he has left here.
Even if that means he has to dig out his blue collared shirt that he wore to her surprise engagement celebration the other night and try desperately to iron the wrinkles out of it before they have to go.
“Here, let me,” she says, after his third attempt with his crappy iron. She’s holding a small steamer in her hand and she takes the shirt with her other before hanging it from a hook on the back of her door.
It’s so . . . natural, as he sits on the end of her bed, shirtless, in jeans, watching her in her pretty pink dress that ties up around her neck, exposing the long line of her back down to where two dimples sit just above the top of her skirt, light against her darker skin tone.
He’s never seen those before and he’s fascinated.
He wants to press his mouth to them, trace them with his tongue and see how her body reacts.
He blinks away the fantasy as her hair swings into view, straightened again today, a long shiny curtain down her back, artfully curled at the ends, neat and tidy and not the wild mess he really loves, especially if it’s his hands that have done the dirty work.
As usual, his eyes can’t help but trace the curves of her body, new ones now, too, along with those that have become familiar since they decided on this crazy plan, the smooth planes of her shoulder blades, her slightly knobby knees, the flex of muscle in her calves when she pushes up on her tiptoes to smooth out the shoulders of his shirt because the hook is a little too high for her reach.
That’s the real problem though. He’s always been turned on as all hell by her mind – her brilliance was the very first thing he loved about her – but it didn’t hurt that she was absolutely beautiful.
He was in enough trouble before, when he was captivated by the flare of her hips into her ass and the sweet rise of her breasts, and fuck .
. . now, it’s her back dimples and knees that do it for him too?
How the hell did he get in this deep?
“There,” she says, stepping back to admire her handiwork. “Wrinkle-free.”
He takes it from her, making a concerted effort to keep some space between them.
He camped out on the couch the night before, Julie’s knowledge of their fengagement not giving them any excuse to share, and it’s just .
. . better that way. He’s pretty sure another night in the same bed would have been too much for him.
He would have had to call the whole thing off and figure out another way to help her because .
. . shit, now she’s looking up at him as he buttons up his shirt and her eyes are wide and blown nearly black.
Is she . . . turned on by him putting clothes on?
Shit.
Clearing his throat roughly seems to jolt her out of whatever trance she’d just been in and she blinks dazedly at him.
“Ready to go?”
“Yeah,” he says, suddenly super excited about getting the fuck out of this room even if what awaits them is perhaps the stupidest tradition the twenty-first century has managed to create.
They’re about halfway to Santa Monica when she drops a bomb.
“I think I’m going to buy a house.”
“What?”
“With the money my parents gave me and then with the job offer, it’s a decent down payment on something small, or maybe a condo.”
“That’s . . . that’s . . .” Permanent, putting down roots, she’s staying in LA and there’s nothing he can do to change that. She’s got a life here, obviously, her friends and family and now a career, and she’s going to stay and he’s going to go. “That’s great, boss.”
“Yeah, it feels like the right thing to do, you know? And I should probably apologize to them for walking out like that, I just . . .”
“You were angry. You had a right to be angry, but I think . . . maybe after I’m gone, if you just talked to them about it, they’d understand.”
“Maybe. It’s just so surreal. I figured I’d just be stuck for a minute, you know? But now, it feels like, I don’t know, like there are a million possibilities.”
The exact opposite of how he feels about it. It’s like a death knell for whatever semblance of a future he might have fantasized for them. She’s staying, he’s going and that’s always been true, even before she got that job.
“Any idea where?”
“Maybe Silver Lake, sort of nearish to Lexi. Or that neighborhood near Runyon. Miranda and Sarah lived up there until they bought their place in Pasadena.”
“That’d be cool. You could hike every morning.”
“I could. Or I could make everyone mad and move to Culver City or Mar Vista.”
“Guaranteed privacy, though. No one is gonna want to make that drive ever. Or you could embrace your inner surfer girl and buy in Santa Monica or Venice.”
“Ocean Park is kind of cool, actually, and I might be able to afford it,” she muses.
“How much time did you spend scrolling Zillow last night?”
Groaning, she grins at him from the passenger seat. “Too long. It’s disgusting how much money one-bedroom condos cost in this city.”
He hums his agreement. “Just one bedroom?”
“Well, it’s just me and Amelia, you know? I don’t need that much space.”
“Right,” he says, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “What were you going to do if they hadn’t given you the money?”
“Just keep renting, I guess. Julie’s killing it obviously and I’m sure she wouldn’t want to renew the lease, so maybe I’d find a new roommate or something and it’d be fine.”
“So, the job is in LA?”
“It’s based here, yeah, but it’s mostly remote. Since technically I work for the entire system, I need to be able to communicate with any university library on any given day.”
“And you’ll be designing their information literacy curriculum?”
“Part of the team that’s doing it, yeah. But my job is specifically developing a program for incoming freshmen that’ll hopefully build on the skills they learned in high school.”
“From what I can tell from teaching undergrads, they basically learned how to take nudes and unintentionally distribute them as far and wide as possible in high school.”
“Yep. So I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
“Where do you even start?”
“At the beginning. Where information comes from, why it’s presented the way it is and what makes good information versus suspect. Figuring out if you’re only consuming news that reaffirms your opinion or exposing yourself to multiple points of view, full context, and expert analysis.”
“You’re gonna be good at it.”
“I know.”
He loves how confident she is. It makes him want to pull the car over and pull her over the gear shift and kiss the living breath out of her on the side of the road.
“Are they gonna let you teach?”
“That’s part of it, at least at the start of every academic year.
The freshmen will be in with us during their first week or two on campus.
Their university librarians will take it from there, but we’ll be getting feedback from them all year and then reevaluate at the end of the first semester.
Eventually, I want to have a required course for all first-semester freshman on it, you know, a basics of research that really digs into it and guides them for the rest of their undergrad and beyond. ”
“And all that, while you write during breaks, get that dissertation ready to publish.”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“And you could write anywhere, right? Theoretically.”
“Sure.”
“You could fly out to Greece then, if you wanted? Maybe do a little writing there.”
“Xavier?” she asks, her voice soft and . . . shit, is that . . . pity in there too?
He chances a glance away from the road over to her, but she’s not looking at him, she’s looking straight ahead, her eyes wide and unblinking. Oh, so maybe not pity, maybe . . . panic?
Shit.