Chapter 13
Chapter 13
“What the heck am I going to do?”
I take another slug of sparkling wine, willing the alcohol to hit my bloodstream and somehow miraculously make Alex disappear. I let out a defeated sigh. Alcohol may be good, but it’s not that good.
Erin has dragged me to Cozy Cottage High Tea to help me eat and drink away my bad feelings about Alex. Of course, I made her check to ensure he wasn’t working here today first. Twice. You can’t be too sure when the person you’re trying to avoid seems to crop up wherever you go.
“Come on, Darcy. Is it really that bad?” Erin asks as she chooses another sandwich from the tiered cake stand.
“Yes, Erin. It is that bad.”
“I don’t get it. Why does he get under your skin so much?” She pops something into her mouth. “Oh, yum. You have got to try this, Darce. It’s passionfruit, I think. No, wait, it’s feijoa.” She raises her eyes to the ceiling as she chews. “Whatever it is, it’s delicious. Here.” She picks one up in her fingers and holds it out for me.
With a distinct lack of enthusiasm, I lift my plate, and she places in on it.
“Try it. Go on. It’s so good, I’m sure it’ll pull you right out of your Alex-induced grump.”
I blow out a puff of air and then put it in my mouth and chew.
“Well?”
“It’s delicious,” I say, my enthusiasm level at about a minus ten.
Erin laughs. “Say it like you mean it, babe.”
My posture sags as I slump back in my chair. “You see? That’s what Alex has done to me. He’s sucked all the pleasure out of eating delicious, sugary treats. And you know how much I love eating delicious, sugary treats.”
Erin pulls a face. “I do.”
“I was forced to work with Alex all day on Friday. All day! It was a nightmare.”
“Darce, it’s only Saturday.”
“You see? One day of working with the guy and I’m already off sugar. It’s a bad sign, Erin, a very bad sign.”
She twists her mouth as she studies me. “Has something happened with him?”
I move my glass of sparkling wine to my lips and drain it. Placing it carefully back on the table, I lift my eyes to hers. She’s looking at me questioningly, waiting for my reply.
I could really do with getting this whole Alex thing off my chest. You know what they say: a problem shared is a problem halved. I chew on my lip for a moment. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But you need to know that I’m working on it and it’s not going to be a problem.”
“Sure. Working on it, not a problem. Got it,” she replies with a business-like nod.
I glance around the room on the off chance Alex is about to jump out from behind the curtains and yell, “Surprise!” Which is crazy, I know, because a) Sophie’s told Erin twice that he’s not working here today, and b) that would be totally weird. But, as I said before, when avoiding someone who seems to crop up unexpectedly everywhere, you can’t be too careful.
With no sign of the man in question, I begin. “I needed to get the photos from him that were here at High Tea, so I went to see him at the café. He was in the kitchen. Bailey said I could go back there, which I did.”
“And?” I’m clearly not getting to the interesting part fast enough for her.
“Actually, I need to back up a bit.”
She lets out an exasperated sigh. “If you’ve got to.”
“At his apartment, I looked at something I shouldn’t have looked at.”
Her eyes bulge. “It was him, naked!”
“No! I’m not a Peeping Tom, or whatever the female equivalent of that is. A Peeping Thomasina, perhaps? Or a Peeping—”
“Just get on with it!” she exclaims in irritation. “I want to know what you saw.”
“Okay. So, I saw these photographs, totally by accident, and he got pretty angry with me.”
“What were the photos of?”
“A beautiful woman. Like, next-level beautiful.”
“Oh.”
“So, the next day, I went to the café to apologize to him.”
“And?” she leads.
“I apologized, and something else happened.”
“What? You’re killing me here, Darce. Talk about dragging a story out.”
I press my lips together for a moment. “We kissed.”
“You kissed?!” Erin shrieks.
People at the neighboring tables turn to look at us.
“Erin,” I protest through clenched teeth.
“Sorry, sorry. My friend kissed a hot guy, that’s all,” she explains to the room, much to my mortification.
“I cannot believe you did that.”
“Don’t worry about it. They’ve all gone back to eating their high tea. So, I want details. Did you kiss him or did he kiss you?”
“He was the one who came over and stood right in front of me, and he made it pretty clear he was leading up to it. But when it came to the actual kiss? It was mutual.”
A smile spreads across her pretty face. “How was it?”
“Oh, Erin, I wish I could tell you it was terrible, but it wasn’t. It was the opposite of terrible.”
“The opposite of terrible?” Erin repeats with a laugh. “You have got to get better ways to describe kissing hot guys.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing right now: it’s never happening again. And I told him that.”
“You did?”
“Of course I did. There’s no point letting him think I want to go there again with him.”
Her face creases into a smile. “But you do, don’t you?”
“No!” I protest. Heat blooms in my cheeks.
“I think the lady doth protest too much.”
“You sound like Sophie’s brother.” Sean, Sophie’s brother, loves to quote Shakespeare because he thinks it makes him cultured or super smart or something. It doesn’t. It’s just a bit irritating for everyone else.
“But I’m right, aren’t I?” Erin is persistent. “You’d like to kiss Alex again. Probably more than once.”
I clench my teeth and draw my lips into a thin line. After a moment, I give a deeply unenthusiastic nod.
“Interesting.”
“It’s not interesting. It’s terrible. I’m supposed to be dating Seth. He’s the guy I decided to go out with. He’s the one you and Sophie vetted. And more than that, he’s the good guy here. Alex is . . . well, Alex is not a good guy.”
She creases her forehead. “Why do you say that? He seems like a great guy to me.”
I harrumph. A great guy? Alex? I don’t think so. “He’s not.”
“But—” she begins.
“Can we leave it at that, please?”
Erin lets out a puff of air. “Okay, but one of these days you’re going to have to tell me about what happened back then.”
“Sure.” Like when hell freezes over. “The problem is, we’ve got to work together, and there’s this constant tension between us.”
She fans her face with her hand. “Oh, I bet there is, girl.”
“Erin!”
“Look, you’ve either got to just go for it with the guy and get over the whole high school thing,” Erin says.
“Or?” I add hopefully.
“Or you’ll have to set some clear boundaries.”
I leap on her second idea. The first one is so not an option. “Boundaries sound like an awesome plan. Like what?” I reach down to my purse and pull out my trusty notebook and a pencil, open to a fresh page, and write “Alex: Boundaries” at the top of the page. I underline it twice.
“What is it about him that makes you want to kiss him again?”
An image of Alex’s eyes looking at me intensely flashed into my mind. “It’s the way he looks at me.”
“Oooh, he smolders .”
I smile. “Yeah, he does.”
“In that case, tell him he can’t smolder at you anymore.”
“I can’t say that!” I balk. “It would seem completely weird.”
She bites her lip. “Good point. You’ll just have to look away at the first sign of one of his smolders coming on.”
“I guess I can do that.” I write “No smoldering” down as number one. “Good start. What next?”
“No more kissing. That’s a given.”
“Definitely.” I write “2. No more kissing” down. “Anything else?”
“Talk to him about how much you like Seth. The power of positive thinking is proven, you know.”
I write it down under number three before I look back up at her. “You’re saying I should try and think my way out of my feelings for Alex by talking about Seth?”
“Exactly. And make sure Alex knows you’re really into Seth. That way, if he tries to kiss you again, you can throw it in his face with the whole ‘I can’t be unfaithful to my man’ kind of thing. If he doesn’t feel bad about that, then he’s not a decent person.”
“This is good stuff, Erin. I’ve got three points now. What else have you got?”
She taps her chin for a while before her face creases into a smile. “I guess there’s only one other thing you can do.”
“What’s that?” I ask, my pencil poised.
“Pray.”
I write “4. Pr—” before I stop and look up at her. “Pray? That’s all you’ve got for number four?”
She crosses her arms. “Tell me again how terrible kissing Alex was.”
My heart sinks to my shoes. “The opposite of terrible.”
Erin gives a sage nod. “Pray, honey. A lot. Because from what you’ve told me, I think you’re going to need it.”