Chapter 5
REESE
TRACK: Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now”
“Remind me again what I was thinking?”
Nora stands behind me in the mirror in the tiny bedroom of my tiny apartment, pulling the elastic out of my hair. She’s at my place helping me get ready for this double date I’m panicking over. Rufus has settled in my lap, sensing my nerves as always.
“You were being kind.”
Normally I find Nora’s soft, quiet voice calming, an antidote to the shouts and clatter of my work. But right now I want her to shout at me what a terrible idea this is. To stop me from not only going out with the man who broke my heart, but pretends he never did.
I lean back in my chair, stroking Rufus’s ear before giving up and gripping the armrest. “No, I think I lost my mind!”
Nora smiles, but there’s something suspicious about it. “It’s not like you’re getting back together with him.” She tucks her long, straight red hair behind her ears and pushes her glasses up her nose. “You seem all there to me.”
“You like that I’m doing this!” I exclaim. “Also, we weren’t ever really…together. Not officially.”
Nora tucks a few bobby pins in her lips and pulls my hair back from my face, still with that little smile on her lips.
“It was a fling,” I say.
A rebound, for both of us. Pain spasms in my stomach as I run my thumb over my wrist. Eli wasn’t the one who hurt me. Not the way the one before did.
“Listen,” I say, pointing my finger at my friend in the mirror. “This doesn’t mean anything beyond what I told Eli. I felt sorry for him.”
“Mm-hmm,” Nora says, her eyes dancing now as she begins pinning my dirty blonde strands on top of my head.
But for some reason her assumption that this is a good thing makes my stomach skitter with nerves. It’s not a good thing. “Nora, you know how I feel about him.” I’m nearly despondent now.
“I do,” she says over the pins, not unkindly.
In fact, she gives me a smile that’s almost sad.
She takes the pins out of her mouth. “Reese, I just want you to be happy. I know that when you told me about what happened today, you sounded more alive than I’ve heard from you in a long time.
” She meets my eyes. “Maybe in as long as I’ve known you. ”
I open my mouth, but don’t have anything to say to that.
“You’re stepping out of your comfort zone, Reese. Being brave.”
It’s true, I haven’t exactly been myself since I moved to Quince Valley. I always blamed it on the fact that I was working in my ex’s hotel, in an industry I’d been trying to step away from for years. But now, I wonder if she’s onto something.
“You talk all the time about how your life is missing something,” she continues, slipping a pin into my hair.
“I didn’t mean Eli!”
Rufus perks up, as if he knows who I’m talking about. He probably does. The one time I ran into Eli with Rufus, Eli showered him with affection, like he was the best dog in the world. Which he is, of course. I run my hand over Rufus’s back. “You’re a softie,” I whisper.
“I was thinking more about this move to California,” I say.
Nora meets my eyes. “So you’re really doing it, huh?”
I pull out my vanity drawer, lifting up the brochure for the Sebastopol Children’s Academy of Music. “I think so. It sounds good, doesn’t it?”
I open the brochure for the hundredth time. It was my brother Pietro who sent it to me. A colleague of his talked about how sad they were to be leaving it behind when they relocated to the UK, where he lives now.
Maybe the change you’ve been looking for? he wrote on the note stuck to the top.
I’d been irritated at first that Michelle had told him I still thought about music. But how could I stay mad at her for never giving up on me, even when I did years ago?
“It sounds nice,” Nora says, lifting up another section of hair. There’s something non-committal in her tone.
“It’ll be good for me, Nor. I can teach guitar or voice to kids and pretend I’m not a total sell-out.”
“You’re not a sell-out, Reese. You’re good at what you do.”
“What, managing a restaurant in my ex’s hotel?” Eli’s half the reason I’m moving. Hell, maybe the whole reason.
Nora pinches her lips in the mirror, and I narrow my eyes. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘why, if you’re running away from Eli, you’ve agreed to go masquerade as his girlfriend?’ And honestly, I can’t blame you! See? I’ve lost my damn mind.”
Nora grins. “I’m not thinking that. I’m thinking I’m proud of you for doing this, because as messed up as it is, part of you thinks this could be fun.”
“I don’t—”
“Admit it! You said you miss fun.”
Rufus pants, almost looking like he’s smiling.
I groan as I hug him tight. “I do miss fun.” I miss a lot of things I used to have in my life. A life, mostly, outside of work. Dating, which I swore off after Eli. My sister and nieces.
And music. God, always music. Speaking of which, I reach for my phone, select a random playlist, then switch playback to shuffle.
“Okay,” I say, hovering with my thumb over the play button. “Whatever song that plays is going to tell me who’s right: you thinking this is a great idea, or me thinking this is nuts.”
Nora plants her hands on her hips. “You’re not using a song to get out of this.”
Rufus barks.
“Shh!” I say, then hit play.
The first notes of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” stream from my Bluetooth speaker on my bookshelf.
Nora snorts with laughter. “Perfect.”
I groan. “Great. Ambiguity.”
“Or equality? Both could be true.”
Rufus stands up on my lap and jumps off, shaking his butt before disappearing into the kitchen.
I toss the phone behind me on my bed, and Nora catches me by the shoulders to inspect her work. She pulls a strand of hair out from my temple. “Yes. This is good,” she says in her soft voice.
A wave of gratitude passes over me, and I smile, feeling suddenly close to tears. It’s been like this all day, ever since Eli and the crew left the restaurant. I spent the rest of the day in a panicky blur, then I ran right over to the library to grab Nora when she got off work.
“You got this,” she’d told me reassuringly when I blathered out the story of what happened.
“We’ve got this.” Then she’d insisted on cancelling her evening plans to come over to my place to help me get ready.
My closest confidante has always been my sister Michelle, but ever since she remarried and has a house full of four girls—and I moved to a different state—we don’t talk nearly as much as we used to, and Nora’s filled in.
She’s been everything to me, even though she already has a best friend—Eli’s brother, Jude.
But he’s a dude. I like to think I take first woman’s spot.
“Thanks, Nor.”
“I couldn’t let you get ready for this on your own. You’d either sabotage things by wearing a paper bag, or not show in the first place.”
“A paper bag!” For a quiet person, Nora really knows how to make me laugh. “You know that’s not what I mean. I mean thanks for being here. For not telling me I’m a total idiot for doing this.”
“I would never think you’re a total idiot. In fact, this is the smartest thing you’ve done in years. Fun, right?”
“Fun,” I say, my vision going blurry again as I squeeze my friend tight.
What’s funny is that in a convoluted way, if it weren’t for Eli, I wouldn’t know Nora at all.
I wouldn’t be here in Quince Valley.
Eli and I met back in Jewel Lakes, New York, where we both used to live. We only dated for three weeks—while he was in the middle of his messy divorce with Kelly, the love of his life, apparently, and I was newly free from a toxic relationship that took over my whole life for over a decade.
I never meant to fall for him. It was only supposed to be casual.
But I did, and Eli dumped me right after.
After things ended, Eli gave me a pity gift of a stay at his family’s hotel, which Michelle insisted I take.
One thing led to another, and I met his sister Cassandra in the restaurant.
She offered me a job. I probably shouldn’t have taken it.
I’d promised myself I was going to get out of the restaurant industry, maybe somehow try to at least step sideways into music again.
Not being a singer the way I’d wanted to be years ago of course, but something.
But this job was managing a high-end restaurant in a resort Cassandra was trying to turn around and make into something spectacular.
I’d only ever been a server. Plus, I loved Cassandra.
She’s tough and strong and takes no shit from anyone.
Cassandra and Eli’s other brother, Jude, is an ex-tennis pro, and works as the recreation director at the hotel.
I first met his best friend when Jude got swarmed by reporters in the restaurant one time when I’d just started—it happened from time to time—and I’d helped hide her in the kitchen.
If there was one thing I was good at besides taking a fifteen-person-table’s order with no notes, it was how to hide.
We’d been close ever since.
I look at Nora now as she rummages through my closet, holding out outfits for me to yay or nay.
I realize this whole night has been all about me. And that I can’t remember the last time Nora went on a date. She was seeing this nerdy computer guy for a while, someone she insisted she liked. But she didn’t look at him the way she looked at her best friend.
“Would you ever do something like this for Jude?” I ask suddenly.
“What?” Nora says a bit too sharply. Her cheeks flame.
She’s never admitted to me how she feels about her best friend—I suspect she’s never admitted it to herself.
But I know he’s her favorite person. She gets this little smile on her face when she talks about him.
And in any of the videos I’ve seen that she makes with her video camera—the super high end video camera he special ordered after he found out she was into documentaries—her shots always linger longest on him.
“Would you fake date Jude if he asked you to?”
“That would never happen.”
“Because you’d say no?”
“No, because Jude wouldn’t be able to keep his trap shut. He’d blow our cover immediately.”
I laugh. She’s right. But there’s that little smile again.
“Anyway, you’re the one going on a fake date,” she reminds me, glancing at her watch. “In ten minutes.”
My stomach plunges with nerves.
“Well, I’m not going to go over the top with this,” I say as I slip into the dress we picked out together a few minutes later.
“I don’t see much of Eli as it is at work, and just because we’re pretending to be together”—I swallow down the nerves that threaten to come up at that—“doesn’t mean that’ll change. ”
“No. Nothing will change at all,” Nora says.
But her lips are pinched again, and she won’t look me in the eye.
Twenty minutes later I hardly recognize myself. I haven’t gotten dressed up in a long time—at work I normally wear a black button-down and black pants, my hair pulled back and makeup demure. Classy and in the background, the way restaurant staff are meant to be.
“You look incredible,” Nora says, her hands clasped under her chin as I look in the full-length mirror in the hallway.
She chose my outfit: an emerald green sweater dress with a scoop neck and a hem that falls to just above my knees, along with dark tights and black ankle boots.
I chose the dangling brass earrings and subtle makeup.
With the black leather motorcycle jacket, I feel like I used to back in New York, back when I imagined a different future for myself.
“Reese, is that a smile I see?”
I frown. “Nope. Not at all.”
But of course that only makes my lips turn up again.
I don’t know why I’m smiling. I’m still dreading this date. But dammit, I look good—I feel good, for the first time in a long time.
It doesn’t last.
My phone buzzes, and a moment later, both of us are heading down the stairs, each step giving me increasing dread. Nora’s got Rufus on a leash—she begged me to let him stay with her tonight, promising it wasn’t because she wasn’t expecting me to go home.
“You’re going to be fine,” Nora says when we reach the bottom step and push into the lobby.
Rufus barks, pulling on his leash. “Rufus!” I exclaim. But my heart is racing, seeing Eli’s truck out there. Seeing the man walking around to the passenger side.
And goddammit, he looks handsome as hell.