Chapter 4
Chapter four
Tessa
Ipush through the coffee shop door already three versions deep into how I'm going to explain what happened between George and me. All three versions sound either too dramatic or not nearly dramatic enough.
My best friend, Callie is going to freak out about it, no matter how I tell her.
I've rehearsed the opening line twice on the walk over and discarded both. There's no clean way into this.
Callie isn’t here yet, so I sweep the room once and claim our usual corner booth before a stroller, laptop bag, or aggressively parked tote can beat me to it.
I slide in, set my phone face-down on the table, and fold my hands in front of me like I’m about to be called into a very personal performance review.
The email is still on the screen. Even upside down, I feel weirdly aware of it, like it is giving off heat through the tabletop.
Callie arrives in a gust of cold air, still buttoned into her coat, and she takes one look at my face and holds up two fingers to the barista without breaking eye contact with me.
She doesn’t even sit down all the way before narrowing her eyes.
"You have the look."
"What look."
"The look where something happened and you've been anxious to tell me all about it." She drops into the seat across from me and starts unwinding her scarf. I open my mouth and she points at me. "Wait for the lattes."
The lattes arrive with a plate of chocolate chip cookies that neither of us ordered, warm and slightly glossy, still soft from the oven. Callie tips the barista, wraps both hands around her mug, and levels her full, undivided attention on me.
"Go."
"Well, a few days ago, George came to my desk."
Callie sets her mug down. "He voluntarily approached you."
"Yes."
"George Maddox left his desk, crossed the office, and came to you."
"It's not that uncommon."
"I'm already suspicious."
I push through it.
"He wanted to discuss a proposal."
"A proposal?"
"Not that kind of proposal, Callie."
She settles against the booth with the careful, effortful stillness of someone physically restraining themselves from grabbing me by the shoulders.
"He said he needed a girlfriend for his sister's wedding."
Callie stares at me.
One second, two, three.
Then she picks up a cookie, takes a slow and deliberate bite, chews, and says, with great composure, "Run that back."
I pull out my phone, open the email, and slide it across the table without a word. At this point the document can really speak for itself.
She reads the subject line (Briefing Materials. Please Review) and makes a sound like a Victorian woman being informed of a scandal.
"'Briefing Materials,'" she says, her voice climbing a full octave.
"He wanted to make sure I had everything I needed," I say, which somehow sounds more incriminating out loud than it did in my head.
She scrolls slowly, lips moving, and I watch her face move through confusion, then delight, then something approaching reverence. "Acceptable Behaviors," she groans. "Tessa. This is a rulebook."
"Rules can be helpful. Going into an unfamiliar situation."
Callie scrolls further and her jaw drops in increments, like a building being condemned floor by floor.
"'Appendix B: Family Notes,'" she reads aloud, and then simply holds the phone up to show me, as if I haven't already read it four times this morning.
"This man didn't ask you out," she says, setting the phone down. "He issued a project charter."
"He's incredibly thorough in everything he does." The defense slips out softer than I intend, and I hear it immediately, hear the fondness sitting right there in the middle of the sentence with nowhere to hide.
"Tessa."
"He built ERS's entire algorithm from scratch, Callie, the man thinks in systems —"
"You're defending the girlfriend manual."
"I'm providing context."
She points at me with her cookie. The look on her face is insufferable. "You still like him."
Heat climbs straight up to the tips of my ears. I wrap both hands around my latte as if ceramic and caffeine can save me now, and say absolutely nothing, which is, of course, a spectacularly loud answer.
Callie cycles through her reactions: first the shriek she swallows down into a grin, then the narrowed eyes, then the slow, dangerous nod of someone hatching something genuinely inadvisable.
"Here's what I think —"
"What if I'm his last resort," I say, cutting her off before she can get momentum. "What if I'm convenient."
The word sits badly in my mouth. It sounds practical on the surface and bruises on impact.
Callie goes still. Not the bright, performative stillness from before. This is the real kind, the kind she reserves for when she's actually listening.
"What if he looked around for someone low-risk and landed on me because I'm easy to manage."
"Or," she says, carefully, "he looked around and picked you."
I look at the phone between us on the table.
It's open to the backstory section, to the gallery cover story.
March. Three months ago. Which means he didn't choose a random date.
He chose a beginning for us, a version of our story that had already been taking shape in his head before he ever crossed the office to my desk.
"Did you meet at a gallery opening?" she asks.
"No," I say. "He invented a meet-cute." I say it mostly to myself, and something in my chest does a strange, weightless, swooping thing that I'm not going to examine in a coffee shop.
"He invented a meet-cute," Callie repeats, and now she sounds almost awed, the teasing entirely gone out of her voice.
She takes a sip. "Well, have fun on your dates with the robot."
"He's not a robot," I say.
"Tessa. He sent you a six-page girlfriend manual."
"Five pages. The sixth is just the appendix."
She stares at me for a long moment. Then she starts laughing, real laughter, helpless and full-bodied and impossible to resist, bent forward over the table like the sheer force of it has knocked something loose.
And despite the email, the appendix, the low-grade emotional fever I have been running since yesterday, I laugh too.
It spills out of me like something I didn't know I'd been holding.
Callie wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, lifts her mug, and says, with total and utter sincerity, "I hope you love every single second of this romance."
I walk out into the cold a few minutes later, the email still glowing on my phone screen, the gallery cover story blinking up at me. March. A start date. A beginning he'd already chosen.
George Maddox, it turns out, has already decided how our story starts. And I desperately want to know how he thinks it ends.