Party Favors

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Aw, you’re home,” Vella said with as much disappointment as I was currently feeling.

“Hello to you, too. I do still live here.” I dropped my bag on the floor and kicked off my shoes, not even attempting to clean up after myself. I was too depressed.

“I was kind of hoping you’d be having such a good time with Max that you wouldn’t come home at all.”

A disbelieving sound escaped me, and I reached behind my back for my zipper. I wanted to take this dress off and get rid of it. Maybe I’d burn it. While I was struggling, she gasped.

“You kissed Max!”

I froze. “How can you possibly know that?”

“It was from that time I was training to be a psychic.”

“You can’t train ...” I trailed off, not willing to argue. I was too defeated. “Can you please help me with my zipper?”

“Sure,” she said, coming up behind me to tug it down. “Too bad Max isn’t the one doing it.”

“I don’t think he would want to,” I said with a huge amount of self-pity. With a whoosh, my dress slipped off me, puddling onto the floor. I put on a shirt and yoga pants. Vella was staring holes into my back, obviously wanting me to explain myself.

Now that I wasn’t in his arms, it was easy to question everything. It was hard to believe that we’d even kissed, like it had been some kind of waking dream or fevered hallucination. How could he kiss me like that and just put me in a taxi?

Maybe he’d enjoyed himself but hadn’t wanted me to get the wrong idea.

And if I was just one of many, as I suspected, it wouldn’t have meant anything to him. It would have been no big deal. Just another make-out at another New York City tourist attraction. He probably did it all the time and it hadn’t fazed him.

While I felt like my entire world had just completely shifted and been irrevocably altered.

I’d been in the midst of a hormonal Chernobyl, and he’d sent me away without a second thought.

What if he regretted it? Thought it had been a mistake to kiss me?

So many unanswered questions.

“You did kiss him, right?” she asked.

I collapsed onto the couch. My poor spinal column had had too much excitement for one night and could no longer keep me upright. “Yes. We definitely kissed. Like, a lot.”

Vella went over to the windows and looked outside.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making sure that there isn’t a plague of locusts or a hail firestorm signaling the end of the world. Because I thought that was where we’d have to be before you finally kissed him.”

I didn’t even smile, and this seemed to alarm her. “Do I need to take my superglue over to Max’s place?”

“No.”

She sat next to me. “So, are you two like, together now?”

“We just kissed. People can kiss and it doesn’t mean anything.”

“ Other people can kiss and have it not mean anything. Not you.”

“Okay, you’re right,” I conceded. “But I don’t know what’s going on. He kissed me and then he didn’t say anything else. He just put me in a cab, mentioned he had an early-morning flight, and sent me home.”

“What was he supposed to say? I know it’s been a while for you, but guys don’t usually give a relationship speech after they kiss you.”

I reached for the blanket folded up on the arm of the couch and put it over me. “I’m just confused. Does he like me? Or is he only attracted to me? Does he want something more? Or to casually kiss from time to time while still being just friends?”

“Did you ask him?”

“No, my brain was a little scrambled.”

“I’ll bet his was, too. And I’ll bet that he is interested in more.”

I hadn’t expected her to defend him or to choose the optimistic route. “Just because we made out doesn’t mean he wants to be with me. You know that better than anyone.”

“I do.” She nodded. “But given that I can’t read minds yet, I can’t tell you what Max does or doesn’t want beyond this. Maybe he’s only looking for somebody to hook up with, but he doesn’t seem the type. Although he is really good-looking, so we can’t rule that possibility out completely.”

I was absorbing what she’d said when she added, “But if that was all he was after, he would probably choose someone who is less of a challenge.”

“Hey!”

She shrugged. “I’m just saying you’re not a casual-hookup kind of person, and he has to know that.”

He did know that, in excruciating detail. I’d shared so much of my not-at-all-sordid past with him. I put my hands over my face and let out a groan. “Him and I kissing is basically all your fault.”

“How am I to blame? I mean, I accept the actual possibility that I might be, but how?”

I moved my hands and gestured at my head. “You made me look like Queen Katerina and that’s the only reason he kissed me.”

Vella was looking at me like I was stupid. “Are you serious?”

He had reassured me that it wasn’t the reason earlier, but I wasn’t feeling particularly rational at the moment. “Yes!”

“Max liked you long before I slapped some mascara and blush on you.”

I just grumbled in reply, burrowing myself deeper under the blanket.

“Did you ever see that movie Dumbo ?” she asked.

It was such a random question, so far from what we’d been talking about, that it kind of snapped me out of my funk. “I have.”

“Dumbo didn’t need a feather to fly. It was just a prop. You don’t have to do your hair and makeup like that queen, or wear clothes like her, to be your best self or to have Max be interested in you. You’ve always had the ability to fly.”

It was one of the nicest things that Vella had ever said to me. “Aww,” I said, and she gave me a disgusted look.

“This is the last nice conversation I’m going to have for the rest of the week, so listen up. Don’t read too much into tonight. Ask him about it. I mean, maybe there is a possibility that his flight really does leave early in the morning.” She immediately stopped herself with a grimace. “Yeah, I heard it. It was an excuse.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready to have that talk with him.”

“If nothing else, you have to take back your edict.”

“My what?” I asked.

“You’re the one who told him that you wanted to be friends. You need to tell him you changed your mind.”

That was entirely possible. She’d pointed it out previously—that maybe he was just being a gentleman and taking me at my word. It scared me to undo it, though. This way was safer, but it was also making me sadder.

“You need to think about what that Kitty person would do.”

It took me a second. “Kitty? Do you mean Kat?”

“Same difference,” she said. “First you have to figure out what you want. Do you want to be in a relationship with him? I think you do. Decide, and then go talk to him like an actual grownup and have a real conversation about your feelings. If you want to be in a relationship with him, tell him and deal with the fallout.”

“I don’t know if that’s what Kat would do,” I said, because she didn’t know that it wasn’t an apt comparison. “She ran away from Nico when she thought he had rejected her.”

And I understood her fear all too well. Because if Max told me no thanks, not interested , I was going to crawl into a deep, dark hole and try to disappear completely.

“Why do you like Kat so much? I mean, seriously. Is it that she’s a queen? Or is it something else?” Vella asked.

“I admire her. I like that she has her fairy-tale love story.”

“There it is,” she said, jabbing her finger toward me. “What you like about her is that she’s living happily ever after and you want that. Which is not a bad thing to want. It’s not for me, but I can understand the appeal. What you want is a successful relationship. Not a castle and ball gowns.”

Huh. I’d never examined it that deeply, but I suspected that Vella was right. “Maybe you should reconsider that psychology career.”

“Oh no, it would involve way too much of me having to listen to other people talk about their stupid problems and boring lives and I am not interested in that.”

“Except for me.”

“Except for you and only you. And don’t tell anybody.”

I made an X across my heart. “It just seems a shame because you’re so intuitive and smart.”

“That’s because I’ve had more higher education than actual professors,” she said, and I finally smiled. “You just give me the word and his hair is literal toast.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

She nodded with satisfaction and got up. “I’m going to bed. If you hear a drill early in the morning, don’t worry about it—I’m just making a hole into the neighbors’ apartment so that I can drop some stink bombs through the wall.”

Now I finally did laugh as she walked away. She always managed to make me feel better.

Until tonight, I would have said the same thing about Max, that he always made me feel better. I had always loved being around him—if he were a song, I would have put him on a loop and happily listened to him all day.

But now I was confused and distraught. Dating really was like a foreign country where I didn’t understand the language or the customs. And Vella, who lived there permanently, didn’t seem to understand my situation any better.

Which did not bode well.

I would take her advice. I needed to figure out what I wanted and then communicate that to Max.

If it meant that I lost his friendship, that would truly suck.

But what would suck worse was never knowing if we could have had more.

I spent the rest of the weekend working and got to the office a little bit early on Monday morning. Vella had yelled through her door that she’d see me there later, and I hoped that by later she meant at a point that might still be considered relatively on time .

Claudia usually arrived right at nine o’clock, and I wanted to be at my desk, just in case. She wasn’t in yet, though.

My desk phone rang a few minutes after I sat down. “This is Everly Aprile.”

“It’s Mom.”

I frowned. She didn’t usually call me at work. “Is everything okay? Is Meemaw doing all right?”

“She’s fine. You haven’t been answering your phone.”

That was because I had turned it off. I had been working the last couple of days, but I’d also been thinking about what I wanted to do as far as Max was concerned and I didn’t want any outside distractions.

Plus, it had been my cowardly way of avoiding having to speak or interact with him before I was ready.

My decision-making might have all been for nothing—he could have just ghosted me entirely, and then the decision would have been taken out of my hands.

That thought made me feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t want him to ditch me.

So I’d avoided giving him a choice by making myself inaccessible. He couldn’t ghost me if I was unaware of it.

Not exactly mature, but it had helped me to get a lot of work done.

I turned my cell phone back on and waited a few seconds until it was on. There were a bunch of texts from my mom, a couple of missed phone calls, but nothing at all from Max. Complete and total silence.

My heart fell. I had thought I mattered to him, had hoped that the kisses meant something, but they obviously hadn’t. He couldn’t have made it any clearer that he wasn’t interested in me. That the kisses had been some kind of mistake that would never happen again.

I wanted to start crying.

“Sorry about that,” I said to my mother. “What’s up?”

“I was calling to see if you got the promotion.”

“Mom, it’s first thing Monday morning. Nobody else is even here yet. And it’ll be a long process.” There would be a lot of people who’d have to sign off on it.

“Well, when that Claudia woman arrives, you should go into her office and insist that you talk about it right away.”

I tried to not feel completely exasperated with her. That was not how things worked here.

This was the first time my mom and I had chatted since Princess Chiara got married. We’d had an hour-long conversation about the wedding where we’d discussed what everyone had been wearing, how Princess Violetta seemed to be glowing and had briefly touched her stomach, making us wonder if she might be pregnant, and how Princess Serafina had been on her phone the entire time but tried to hide it from the cameras.

It had been such a fun talk—I wished we could always be like that. I wished that I could talk to her about Max and have her listen, really listen, just so that I could vent. Maybe she’d even have some insight to share and a guess as to why he’d been so weird.

I didn’t tell her, though, because I knew how things would go.

“Good morning, doll. Can I see you in my office?”

My mouth dropped open.

Adrian Stone was here and heading toward his desk like he hadn’t disappeared for the last two weeks.

“Mom, I have to go. I’ll call you later.” I hung up the receiver in its cradle, not even bothering to let her respond.

Adrian. It was so weird seeing him. I realized with a start that I hadn’t thought about him at all for a long time.

Like I had shoved him completely out of my mind.

He sat down at his desk and turned his computer on. When I entered the room, he said, “Please shut the door.”

In all the time I’d worked here, he’d never asked me to do that. I closed the door until it latched into place. I sat down across from him, suddenly a bit nervous. Did he know how Claudia was changing things? Was he going to blame me for it? Be upset that I didn’t keep him updated on what was happening at Elevated?

I was glad to see him again, but it was different. I still thought he was handsome, but that fluttery feeling I used to get every time I saw him?

It was gone.

That feeling now belonged to someone else.

But maybe it had been an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation. What if those feelings came back now that he had returned?

“I wanted to ask you to have dinner with me tonight,” he said.

A lance of shock pierced me. “What?”

“Dinner. Tonight. Me.” He was being playful and flirtatious. He’d never treated me that way before and I didn’t know how to take it.

I wondered if it was even appropriate, given that he was my boss.

As if he could read my mind, he said, “I’ve already disclosed to HR that I intended to ask you out, if you’re worried about that.”

I felt like somebody had punched me hard, knocking the wind out of me. I didn’t understand what was happening.

Adrian had just strolled back into my life as if he’d never left, and then asked me to have dinner with him?

Maybe I was misunderstanding his intent. “Dinner? Did you want to talk about work?”

“I am asking you on a date,” he said. “So that we’re clear.”

Adrian Stone wanted to take me on a date?