Chapter 20
It was a full house in Zoe’s bedroom, all of them jostling for a place.
When she’d recklessly told Maggie she was going on a date with Dan, everybody had decided to get involved.
Well, Maggie, Jenna, Laurie, and Annie, at least. More friends than Zoe had ever had in her bedroom before, by a long shot.
It was making her feel a little uncomfortable, truth be told, but the energy was amazing—and alarming. Everybody was having a say.
“Don’t go too sexy,” Jenna advised. “Not on the first date.”
“Says the girl who wore a sexy red sweater to her first date,” Zoe reminded her, and Jenna grinned.
“Be yourself,” Laurie advised. “Because that’s who you want him to fall in love with.”
“Are we talking about love already?” Maggie asked, her eyebrows raised and her eyes dancing. “Ooh!”
“I say go with what’s comfortable,” Annie declared. Six feet tall and solidly built, Annie was a force of nature. “Mike fell in love with me when I was wearing overalls and a flannel shirt.”
“And you rock that look,” Jenna murmured, her gaze full of affection for her best friend.
Zoe shook her head, gratified by her friends’ interest but also a tiny bit overwhelmed by it all. Amazingly—or not—they’d taken the presence of her parents in their stride.
“Hey, Mr. and Mrs. W,” Jenna had said, like she’d known them all her life, which, it was true, she had. “Nice to see you again.”
Her parents were thrilled that Zoe had friends over, but also, she suspected, a little anxious about it all, which she understood.
She was anxious about it all, too. They’d been like an island, just the three of them, for so long, that letting people into their lives felt like a lot, especially when her friends acted the way they did—boisterous and outspoken, in the best possible way, of course, but loud.
“The question is,” Jenna pronounced, her beady gaze on Zoe, “how much of an effort do you want to be seen to have made for this guy?”
Zoe knew she was parroting a version of what Zoe herself had told Jenna, back when she was getting ready for her date with Jack Wexler. Zoe had insisted that you wanted to make an effort without seeming like you had… which was, she reflected, basically how she lived her whole life. Faking it.
But she didn’t want to fake anything with Dan.
“I want him to know I made an effort,” she stated definitively, and four pairs of eyes widened in surprise. “I want him to know I wanted to make an effort.”
“Wow,” Maggie breathed, looking admiring. “This is serious.”
“It’s not serious,” Zoe was quick to say, “but it has the potential to be. And truthfully, I’ve spent way too much of my life looking like I’m too busy and cool to care about anything.” She gave them all a mock-stern look. “I’m trying to be different.”
“Oh…” Laurie shook her head, wiping her eyes. “Zoe, you’re going to make me cry.”
“And me,” Jenna added, “and I never cry.”
“Oh, come on,” Annie said with a guffaw. “We all know what a big softie you are.”
“I think we’re all going to cry,” Maggie announced, but Zoe shook her head.
“I am not crying, because I’ll wreck my mascara,” she told them. “And I intend to have fun, because I’m going on an honest-to-goodness date, for the first time in forever.”
“Amen!” Annie exclaimed, and the others murmured their agreement.
“Okay,” Jenna said finally, wiping her eyes as discreetly as she could, “but we still haven’t decided what you’re going to wear!”
“How about this?” Laurie suggested, pulling a dress from the back of the closet that Zoe had never worn before.
She’d bought it on a whim a few years ago, then decided it was far too girly for her—pale pink, with a flouncy skirt, a sweetheart neckline, and spaghetti straps tied in bows at each shoulder…
it definitely was not her usual look, but she’d liked how feminine it had made her feel when she’d tried it on.
“I love it!” Maggie exclaimed. “And Zoe, it matches your hair.”
Zoe reached up to touch her spiky pink hair. “Maybe,” she allowed. “But… it’s not my usual.”
“Exactly, and you said you wanted to seem like you’re making an effort,” Laurie reminded her. “This is it, Zoe.”
Gingerly Zoe took the dress from the hanger. It was fun and flirty, she decided, and very much not what she usually wore… which was maybe why she should wear it tonight.
“I’ll try it on,” she said. “But everybody out. I don’t need an audience for this.”
With some good-natured protests, her four friends filed out in the hallway.
Zoe stripped off her usual uniform of ripped jeans and a t-shirt and slipped on the dress, tying the straps at each shoulder.
She smoothed the material over her hips, liking the way it cinched in her waist but also feeling exposed, like she was trying so hard, which she was, but did she really want Dan to know it?
He would with her wearing this dress.
Then she remembered the way Dan had looked at her a few nights ago at the barbecue, with such tenderness, and the way his eyes sparked with warmth and something more.
He’d gone out on a limb, telling her he wanted to go on a date with her.
She’d been the one who had been so cautious, backing away whenever she had the opportunity, telling him it was too complicated.
And maybe it was too complicated… but she still wanted to try.
“Okay,” she called to her friends. “You can come in.”
The door was thrown open as Laurie, Maggie, Annie, and Jenna all jostled to get a view of Zoe in the pink dress.
“Wow,” Laurie said softly, while Jenna wolf-whistled.
“I like it,” Maggie said just as Annie gave out a hearty, “Va-va-voom!”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Zoe had shooed her friends out the door, made sure her parents were settled in front of the TV with the phone next to her dad in case he needed to call.
She’d told Dan they couldn’t go far, just in case, and he’d promised they wouldn’t, which had left Zoe wondering where they would go.
She’d really rather not have their first date at The Starr Light, but there weren’t many other options.
Her heart skipped a beat as he answered the door, dressed in a pale green, crisp button-down shirt and a pair of khakis. His eyes widened at the sight of her in the flirty pink dress, and then his mouth curved in the kind of smile that made her stomach flip.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You look amazing.”
“So do you,” she said, and then let out a nervous giggle because this felt so strange and so sweet and she really didn’t know how to be. “Where’s Sophie?”
Dan gave a little grimace. “Up in her room, sulking.”
“Ah.” Zoe rocked back on her heels. “She’s not taking this development very well?”
He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know what goes through the fourteen-year-old female’s mind. She blows hot and cold on pretty much everything, me included.”
“And me, it seems,” Zoe replied on a sigh. “It’s hard to be fourteen.”
“And I’m finding it hard to be forty-one,” Dan quipped. “Let me get a few things, and then we’ll be ready to go.”
Get a few things? Intrigued, Zoe nodded, and a few seconds later Dan returned with an old-fashioned wicker picnic basket in one hand and a woolen blanket draped over his arm.
“Are we going on a picnic?” Zoe blurted, surprised. It was certainly better than The Starr Light, but…
“You said you couldn’t go far,” Dan explained. “And I did not want to have dinner at The Starr Light or Take a Slice, so that left me with limited options.”
“True,” Zoe acknowledged. “And I didn’t want to go to The Starr Light or the pizza place either, but… where are we going?” She pictured them sitting on a blanket on the town green, with half of Starr’s Fall looking on.
“Well, I took inspiration from a certain magnet,” Dan told her as he closed the door behind him, and they started toward the car.
“A magnet…” Zoe let out a laugh. “You mean the one Sophie—”
“That’s the one.”
“Starr’s Fall?” Zoe guessed. “That is, the waterfall?”
“That’s the one, too.” He walked around to hold the passenger door open for her.
“Less than ten minutes away, no wait for a table, and there’s a great view.
” For a second, his lighthearted manner dropped, and he looked serious, even a little anxious.
“Maybe I should have cleared the idea of a picnic with you. I know it’s a little out there.
I mean, it’s not The Litchfield Inn, but that’s twenty minutes away, and I thought that was too far. ”
“I love it,” Zoe told him warmly, realizing as she said it how true it was. “Thank you for thinking of it, and also for being so thoughtful.”
Dan’s expression lightened, his eyes crinkling in the way Zoe liked so much as he gazed down at her.
And as she gazed back up at him, it felt, for a second, like something more might happen between them, right then and there, but then Zoe slipped into the car and Dan closed the door and she remembered to breathe again.
It was only a five-minute drive to the waterfall parking area, and then another five minutes’ stroll up to the first vantage point of the waterfall, which was a good thing because Zoe was wearing strappy sandals that were not the appropriate footwear for a hike.
The sun was just starting to set, streaking the sky with orange and violet, cloaking the forest in shadows, the last of its beams making the spray of the waterfall glint and sparkle, as Dan spread the blanket and then knelt to open the picnic basket.
“Full disclosure, I cheated,” he told her, “I got all the food from the deli in Litchfield. I didn’t want to risk making anything myself. I’m a pretty basic cook.”
“That sounds perfect,” she told him as she sat down on the blanket, tucking her legs underneath her and smoothing her skirt over them. Dan started taking various containers and items out of the basket—strawberries, olives, crusty bread, quiche, thinly sliced beef, and even a lobster salad.
“This all looks amazing,” Zoe told him. “And like a lot of food.”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d like,” Dan confessed. “And I was hungry when I bought it.”
She laughed softly, and he smiled at her, and once again the moment spun out before Dan looked away.
“I haven’t been on a date in about twenty years,” he told her frankly as he handed her a paper plate. “So please tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”
“I haven’t been on a date in a while myself,” she replied.
She remembered, uncomfortably, how Sophie had said Lindsay had been Dan’s only girlfriend.
But why was she thinking about that now, when she really didn’t want to?
They both had romantic histories, hers a little sparser than his, true, but none of it mattered now.
“Good thing we’re both rusty, then,” Dan quipped with a wry smile. “We can be equally awkward.”
She laughed as she loaded up her plate with delicacies and Dan brandished a bottle of white wine, already chilled, and poured two glasses.
It was all so romantic, Zoe thought, and yet there was something endearingly awkward about it too, just as Dan had joked; they were both clearly trying so hard.
They both clearly wanted this to work so badly.
And it was working, or at least it felt to her like it was; the moon came out, looking like a silver coin slipped into an indigo sky, and as they chatted and laughed about nothing too important, both of them starting to relax, a few drowsy fireflies blinked as they tumbled through the air.
Zoe stretched her legs out and tilted her head to the sky to gaze at the first stars; with endearing clumsiness Dan put his arm around her shoulder, and it felt right there, a solid, comforting weight she leaned into.
Sitting on the blanket in the moonlight with the waterfall in the background…
it was like a scene from a movie, something so perfect it didn’t feel completely real, as much as she longed for it to.
Was that why she couldn’t trust it? Zoe wondered as she rested her head against Dan’s shoulder.
Why did she feel like she was waiting for the scene to end, and real life to begin again, with all its challenges and anxieties?
Why couldn’t she let this be her real life, just for once?
And then her phone, lying discarded on the blanket, buzzed with an incoming call, and with her heart leaping into her throat, Zoe saw it was her parents’ landline. She snatched it up, her heart now starting to hammer as dread swirled in her stomach.
“Hello? Dad? Dad?”
At first, she couldn’t make out the garbled words on the end of the line, only that it was her mother speaking, and she sounded terrified.
“Mom… Mom… what is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s your father,” her mother wept. “Zoe… Zoe… he just stopped breathing.”