Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER TWELVE
Here’s the secret to making other people happy: you accept that what makes them happy is what makes them happy, and you don’t question it.
You don’t question it as you’re led into a red-hued, darkly lit club that smells like sweat and incense. You don’t question it when dinner is served on breakable plates even though halfway through the meal someone’s bare feet are going to be on the table. You don’t question why some people keep eating after that kind of abhorrent foot proximity.
You don’t question the music. You don’t question the volume of the music. You don’t even question why the guys serving your table keep glancing at the massive clock on the wall, waiting for their cue to begin clapping in tandem with the beat dropping.
You take a couple bites of dinner until hygiene compels you to stop, and then you stack the plates in one corner. You tell the bridesmaids to stand up in their seats, make sure anyone wearing precarious heels removes them. You take pictures and dance and sing at the top of your lungs even though no one can hear themselves think in here—genuinely, you might have to type out the next round of drink orders on your Notes app and hand it over—and you just let the person you’re doing all this for be happy.
I stumble to the bathroom a while later, vodka soda clutched in one hand. Past the roped-off areas and massive tables in the main club room is a narrow hallway that does a decent job of blocking sound. My ears enjoy the relative quiet as I rattle the women’s room doorknob.
A bouncer covered in tattoos comes up to me and gives me a nod, then tries the door. “You’ve got a boyfriend,” he says. Not a question.
The sureness of it throws me off long enough to study him. He’s maybe seven years older than me but has warm eyes I can tell he leads with when he flirts. He’s employing them right now, offering me unsevered eye contact.
A rumpled man and woman leave the bathroom a few seconds later. Avoiding our eyes, avoiding each other’s eyes. The bouncer and I watch them head down the hallway and depart in opposite directions.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I say. Not because I care one way or the other if the bouncer is interested. I just don’t like lying.
His lips pinch, though I can’t tell if it’s because he’s pleased or confused. “Then who was that guy who came by this afternoon and waited around for three hours to get you a reservation?”
My stomach floods with cold shock.
“He came here in person,” I repeat, “and waited for hours?”
The bouncer nods. “I mean, yeah, he kept going back and forth between here and Valhalla, the sports bar next door, but when a cancellation came through this afternoon, we gave the reservation to him. And he said it was for you. Josephine Davis. That’s the name you gave at the door when your group came in.”
Warmth gathers in my heart like a whirling dervish, growing stronger, more powerful every moment. Then my heart beats with emphasis—once, twice, three times—and the white-hot feeling floods my veins in tiny sparks.
“Excuse me,” I mutter.
I quickly use the bathroom and wash my hands, my mind careening. Instinct carries me across the main room. I swerve past clubbers on the dance floor and make a beeline for the front door. Outside in the alley, the air is smoky and damp. In the direction of Valhalla, a large sign glows bright, and shiny windows display the bar’s bread-and-butter sports fanatics inside.
What are the odds he’s still in there?
I push open the door as a cheer erupts in the direction of the TV screens. It’s crowded in here, the music still loud and in direct competition with the sports announcers. The bar is strung in fairy lights that give the place a foggy glow.
I scan faces. My body feels as heavy as a bowling ball as I plow through groups, searching for him. If I don’t find Will on a first pass, I tell myself, I’ll go back to Andalo and let it go. Text him instead, thank him, ask him what on earth possessed him to—
“What are you doing here?” His deep, smooth voice stills me right in my tracks.
My eyes jerk up to his. The blue flecks wink silver at me.
“That’s my line!” I push a finger into his chest, my gaze catching on the Predators T-shirt he’s wearing.
Will’s holding a frosty draft beer in one hand, but his other arm scoops around my waist. In an effortless movement, he pulls me against his chest just as I feel the brush of someone trying to sneak past me from behind.
“Thanks, man,” the passerby says to Will, who nods, his chin catching on the crown of my head. I feel the rough stubble of his five-o’clock shadow before he releases me.
“Is something wrong with the reservation?” Will asks.
“Oh, you mean the reservation you apparently waited around all day for? That one?”
“What are you wearing?” A grin tugs at his lips as his gaze catches on my crop top, the word PARTY printed in all caps, bright pink across the front.
I glance down at myself. “We were supposed to go home and change before dinner, but you said to be there at eight and time got away from us.”
“That,” he says, his grin widening, a lock of hair creeping down across one temple, “is not even a remotely sufficient answer.”
“Camila’s shirt says Wife of the Party, ” I explain. “Party, Wife of the Party. It’s a pun.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much do you hate that shirt?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much it’s about what I think is a zero.”
A dimple pops out. The left one. “Something tells me the list of people you’d let tell you what to wear is short.”
“Short? It’s microscopic. It was painful agreeing to the bridesmaid dress. Orange is not my color.”
Will laughs out loud, the sound like a cool breeze.
“It’s weird I can amuse you now.”
“You always amused me,” he says. “I’m just comfortable enough to show it now.”
I brush past the honesty of this and ask, tongue in cheek, “Come here often?”
Another person is trying to sneak behind me; we’re stopped right in the aisle of traffic leading to the bar. This time I close the distance to Will on my own, stepping into his personal space while that same arm curls around my waist again.
“I know it’s a weird coincidence,” he allows, raising his glass to take a sip of his beer. I track the movement as he swallows, my eyesight in line with his throat. “But this is the Preds bar, and my mom is married to one of the old coaches.”
He says it like it’s nothing, which to him it must be, even though Will just confirmed what I first suspected when he mentioned visiting only his mother: Will’s parents aren’t together anymore. My chest pinches for him and Zoe, for their whole family, and I can’t help but wonder what happened. Back then, I’d never have guessed they’d end up divorced.
My palms land on Will’s chest, unsure where else to go while more people pass behind me. “Were you planning to tell me you were next door?”
“No.” His eyes break from mine, traveling down to my PARTY shirt. “I knew you had a full itinerary.”
Something about that admission shoots affection up my spine. The notion that he was near, and I didn’t need to know because I was busy. That Will would simply take care of things for me in the background, no thanks necessary.
“Want to say hi?” Will asks.
I flinch. “To your mom?”
He nods.
“Does she hate me?”
“Viciously. I’m just offering you up as a meal for my own entertainment, to be honest.” I cast him a look. His grin settles but doesn’t drop. “No, of course she doesn’t hate you, Josie. Come on.” He turns and leads me, his hand still loose on my lower back, toward a table in a corner of the bar. Mrs. Grant and a white-haired man sit at a high-top watching the hockey game. When she spots me, her eyes brighten, and she springs up from her seat.
“Josie Davis! Oh my !” Will’s mother wraps me up in a hug, making motherly noises in the back of her throat. “Will mentioned you were nearby. It’s so lovely to see you!”
“You, too!” I say. “You look amazing!”
It’s true. Mrs. Grant was always stunning, but now she has a glow. A professional-hockey-coach glow?
We do the usual catch-up and introductions, dancing around several elephants in the room, and then she says, “I’m so happy you’re back in Will’s and Zoe’s lives.”
I don’t correct her about Zoe. All I say is “Me, too.”
She looks back and forth between Will and me, curiosity at our situation plain as day on her face. I nip it in the bud by saying I need to get back to the bridal party.
“I’ll walk you out,” Will says.
Mrs. Grant grabs my hand, eyes warm and content. “I hope I see you again soon.”
I return her sentiment, but my chest eases with every exhale as we leave the bar. Outside, the temperature has dropped in only twenty minutes. The night feels nearly cool. Will falls into step beside me as we head toward the Andalo entrance.
“Your mother remarried,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Your mother got divorced,” I say.
He clears his throat. “Yes.”
When I look over and up, Will’s expression is relaxed, his eyes soft on mine. “It’s a long story. Longer than you have time for right now. But I’ll tell you another day if you want. TL;DR: Dad cheated, Mom left him.”
I sigh, impossibly disappointed.
Will nods and looks away. “You never think it’s going to happen to your family,” he says quietly. “Secret girlfriends, double lives—that’s the kind of thing that glamorous, absent fathers in television shows would do, not salesmen from Texas. But then it does happen to your family, and you learn clichés exist for a reason.”
“I’m so sorry, Will.”
“Thank you,” he says, voice gruff but kind. His mouth shapes into a wan smile. “And I’m sorry to bring you down on a trip celebrating the start of your best friend’s marriage.”
“I’d argue we’re partway mourning the end of her singledom, but anyway.”
Will’s smile turns genuine, bolstered by an easy, knowing fondness. A dimple on his left cheek, half a dimple on his right. Suddenly there are one million questions I want to ask him. More pieces of his life I’m dying to know. Plenty about the past, but I want to know about Will’s present. Where he eats out for dinner, how often he rides his bike in the city, the order he’d rank the five boroughs in, what his apartment looks like.
I push it all down, tell myself those facts aren’t mine to know.
“How’d the bull riding go?” Will asks.
“Oh, tragic. The longest any of us lasted was six seconds, but at least we all wore pants.”
“Perverts everywhere are wiping their eyes.”
I burst into a laugh, and Will’s eyes flash triumphant. I settle against the brick wall ten feet from the dark club door.
Will moves in front of me. “Well,” he says.
“Well. I’d better head in.”
His eyes jump around my face. “You’d better.”
I do not move a muscle.
“Your mom was really nice to me,” I say.
He bites the inside of his cheek. “That’s because you were always really nice to her. She simply treated you the way you deserve to be treated.”
After a moment I whisper, “I’m not positive that’s true.”
His head tilts. “Why do you think that?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
He studies me with a frown, something clicking behind his eyes. “I owe you so many apologies, Josephine.”
I laugh brittlely to push past the ache of his words. “What now?”
Will looks sideways. His jaw rolls. “It would be okay if you resented me.”
My stomach lurches. “For what?”
“Exactly. For what?” he parrots, a challenge in his eyes.
With his permission, I say what we’re both thinking. “For calling me a surface-level girl that one time?”
He nods. “You’d be justified in resenting me for that. I resent myself for saying it. I hated myself when I realized you’d heard it.”
I pause and consider my next course of action. “It would be okay if you resented me, too. You tried to clear the air after we kissed, but I told you it wasn’t a good idea for us to speak.”
“I understood why you felt that way,” Will says. “I was just trying to help. I could have tried harder, but I was…” He closes his eyes, gulping. “Wanting you. And that confused my priorities. I didn’t know how to help you repair your friendship with Zoe without acknowledging how much I…” Again, he drifts off.
Every pore across my skin tightens. My breath locks inside my lungs. “Why?” I ask. “Why on earth did you want me?”
His voice slips out of him, the words seamless. “Because you are not and never have been a surface-level girl, Josephine. You’re just a girl who loves things you have every right to love. And if I’m the boy who once convinced you that can’t be true, then I will become the man who convinces you it absolutely is.”
My heart seems to skitter instead of beating.
“You deserve to be treated with kindness,” Will goes on, “because you are kind to everyone. You made yourself late to give me a ride when you could have left me on the side of that road and been totally grounded in doing so. You worked yourself into a fit when Andalo double-booked you because you wanted to make Camila happy.” He laughs lowly. “You complimented my mom’s necklace even though you would never wear it yourself.”
“How did you know that?” I cry.
“You’ve got a tell,” he says.
I noticed his tell; he noticed mine.
One of Will’s hands comes to my temple, his thumb brushing my skin, just barely. My body overreacts, my muscles locking still.
“A tell?” I whisper.
He nods, looking entranced, and murmurs, “You blink three times in a row when you don’t like an outfit. I noticed it earlier tonight when you were explaining the PARTY shirt to me. And I used to notice it with Zoe, all the time.”
I glance away, feeling deeply ashamed he used to notice that. “Zoe had a unique fashion taste,” I say neutrally, with the full understanding that fashion choices are ultimately a personal preference. Not to mention limited by finances, time, culture, geography.
“She came into her taste more once she met you,” Will replies.
“I’ll have to trust you on that.”
“You don’t trust anyone’s taste but yours,” Will muses, smiling gently. “And for the record, that doesn’t make you self-absorbed or surface-level. It makes you iconic, but only to the people who don’t know you well enough. The people who do know you…” He smirks. “Well, they’re the ones who get to see you in the PARTY shirt.”
“So, what you’re saying is, the internet can’t see me in this PARTY shirt, or they’ll take away my It Girl status.”
“I don’t claim to know what the internet wants.” His voice is like a quiet forest before everything wakes up. “And what I’m saying is, you deserve to be treated respectfully by everyone all the time, full stop. Including my mother. Including me. Including strangers on the internet who will never see you in the PARTY shirt.”
His praise is like helium, slipping out of his mouth on a breath and under my limbs. I feel buoyed. I feel more intoxicated now than I’ve felt all night. Being understood by this man—even partly—is enough to send me to the moon and back. It’s miraculous to be understood, and then to be wanted anyway.
It occurs to me Will’s fingers are still resting against my temple.
I see the thought occur to him in the same instant.
Which is notable, mainly because it’s the first time in a long time that something physical regarding a man has occurred to me at all.
I exhale, breathing softly.
The pad of his thumb grazes my temple again, then the rest of his knuckles skate across the plane of my cheek. It’s a light touch, gentle and unsure, but I don’t make a sound.
My body is awake. His touch has aroused some long-dormant part of me.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I haven’t been attracted to anyone in years. And if I’m really honest with myself, I stopped feeling attracted to my ex-boyfriend (a hockey player, for fuck’s sake!) months before we ended things four years ago. Which has been great for my productivity, don’t get me wrong.
I am the blueprint for productivity.
What other twenty-seven-year-old CEO do you know who also cycled fifty miles in a local charity race last month and never misses a grooming appointment (of which there are many)? All while taking CEO classes online that are frankly more intriguing to me than a vibrator.
Productivity at its finest!
I guess I’ve spent the past four years assuming I was just… growing out of it? Attraction, that is. Or—yes, okay— maybe part of me was expecting a queer awakening any year now. But no, not the case, and believe me when I say I’ve wondered about it enough. How my sexual drive could actively exist in high school and college and then simply vanish like that.
Back when Camila and I lived together, I spent many a midnight hour unwillingly listening to her and David make love to a Janis Joplin soundtrack while I quietly contemplated all the places my sex drive could have gone. While I wondered if I’d ever rediscover it.
But my sexual drive didn’t disappear, not at all. It was stolen. And now Will Grant is wearing it around his neck.
I was wanting you, he’d said.
His hand settles against my collarbone while his eyes watch mine for a single sign of hesitation. I offer him none, my breath growing ragged, my pulse jumping beneath his palm.
I gulp, and his thumb traces the path of my throat as I swallow. My hands rest against his stomach, and I feel his abs clench underneath his shirt. I grip the fabric.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He shakes his head, focus narrowed on my neck. “You smell like orange slices. And cinnamon sugar.”
Oddly specific, but at least I know he means it.
“It’s Jo Malone,” I explain.
“No,” he mumbles. “It’s you.”
My whole body hums. Will leans closer, nearly tipping into me. But he doesn’t make a move to kiss me. Instead, he swallows thickly and closes his eyes, gathering himself. I stare at his eyelashes, at the scrunch of his nose, the wet on his lips.
He pushes off the brick wall and steps away.
It’s not relief I feel—even though it should be. Relief is the only thing I should be feeling. I want him and he wants me, but at least this time both of us had the wherewithal to see past the alcohol thinning our blood and make the smarter choice.
Don’t give in to it.
We resist the urge ten years too late.
Still, part of me thrills I can make him come this close to an impulsive decision.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Will says, voice weak. There’s a conflict in his eyes.
“Want to what?” I ask innocently.
He shakes his head at me, huffing out a laugh. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Right. Nothing. Because I couldn’t possibly be a good person if I never learned from my past mistakes,” I say.
His eyebrows launch upward. “That so?”
“And you couldn’t possibly be a good brother if you willingly engaged with a person your sister excommunicated without talking to her about it first.”
He stares. “Who says I never talked to her about it first?”
My head tilts. He’s got me there. “You spoke to Zoe about me?”
Will doesn’t answer and takes another step back. “Good night, Josie.”
“Wait.”
“Not now.” He nods toward the club door. “Your best friend needs you.”
He’s right. I’ve lapsed in my maid of honor duties for more than thirty minutes now. I head for the door, but I toss one last look at Will over my shoulder.
“I meant to say thank you,” I call out. “That’s the whole reason I came over to Valhalla. So I could thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He stands there, his smile small but starbright, and waits for me to disappear.