Chapter 18 Tessa
Chapter eighteen
Tessa
Margaret's dining table has completely surrendered to the wedding. Fabric swatches cover every inch of it, fanned out between empty wine glasses and scattered brochures, and I pick up a square of ivory silk and hold it against the centerpiece mock-up like I have opinions about this, which I do not.
Eleanor drops back into her chair with the full theatrical weight of a woman who has been staring at linen samples for too long.
"I swear every shade of ivory looks identical after an hour," she says, and shoves the whole pile away from her.
She reaches down beside the chair and resurfaces with a worn photo album, the kind with the sticky pages and the plastic film, edges soft from years of handling.
"Fine. If we're taking a break, I need help choosing childhood photos for the rehearsal dinner slideshow anyway."
She slides it across the table like she's been waiting all evening for exactly this excuse.
We hover over the photo album. Margaret points at a gap-toothed Eleanor in a sundress and declares it mandatory.
Someone asks about a black eye. Eleanor waves the question off with the practiced ease of someone who has told that story too many times.
But George's photos keep appearing between Eleanor's, tucked in chronologically, and I find myself slowing down at each one without meaning to.
"You have to see him at eight years old," Eleanor says, already laughing before she's even found the page.
Beside me, George goes very still.
The photo is exactly as alarming as her laugh suggested. A small, extremely serious boy in a sweater vest, holding up a hand-labeled binder with the words CHORE TRACKER: ELEANOR printed on the front in careful block letters. I press my lips together hard.
"He built me a spreadsheet," Eleanor says, tapping it. "Then printed it out. Laminated the cover."
"It was a system," George says, with the flatness of a man who stands by his choices. "You kept losing track."
Margaret refills her wine and makes absolutely no attempt to disguise how much she is enjoying this.
I glance sideways at George. He is staring at the ceiling with the focused expression of someone pretending to find the light fixture interesting.
Eleanor turns the page to a school photo. It's George at maybe twelve, a split lip, and an expression of a kid who knows exactly who he is. The contrast takes me a second to process.
"There was this one time, George told a kid twice his size to leave me alone," Eleanor says, and her voice drops the teasing for just a moment, something quieter moving through it.
Something small and warm moves through my chest in answer.
"What happened to the other kid?" I ask.
"Nothing," George says. "I just talked to him."
Eleanor snorts. "George used words that kid had never heard before. Not insults. Just multi-syllable."
I laugh before I can catch it, and George turns to look at me with an expression caught exactly halfway between offended and amused. His eyes stay on my face a half-second too long before he looks away, and I feel the specific weight of that half-second.
Eleanor flips further into the album and I lean in without thinking, close enough to catch the faint smell of cedar from George's jacket. There's a photo of Eleanor at a science fair with a tri-fold board covered in handwriting that looks too neat and tidy to be a child's.
"He rewrote my entire project the night before it was due," Eleanor announces, with the satisfaction of someone who has been saving this one.
"You were going to fail," George says, in the tone of a man who has long made peace with this being held against him.
"It got a B-plus," Eleanor adds, pointing directly at me. "Because his hypothesis was too advanced and the judge got suspicious."
I press my hand over my mouth, shoulders already shaking. George reaches across and turns the page himself, firmly, closing the science fair chapter without ceremony.
His hand brushes the edge of mine on the table. It is barely a touch, incidental. And I feel it all the way up my arm.
Eleanor is still talking, something about a spelling bee, but I've lost the thread. I'm watching George's jaw in my peripheral vision. He is trying not to smile, and he is losing, and I am building some kind of portrait of this man that I did not have before tonight.
I've always known George Maddox as a coworker. Precise. Controlled. Efficient in a way that occasionally makes me want to slide something slightly out of alignment on his desk just to see what happens.
But this version of him who laminated a chore tracker at eight years old and got punched in the mouth at twelve defending his sister. This version is doing something to my understanding of him that I'm not sure I have a category for yet.
Margaret announces she needs crackers and disappears, and Eleanor follows to help, and suddenly George and I are alone at the table with the album still open between us.
I look at the photo of twelve-year-old George with his split lip and think about the word loyal, and feel it settle somewhere in my chest like it's decided to stay.
"She exaggerates," George says, without looking at me.
"She really doesn't," I say.
He glances over. Neither of us has anything to add to that. I drop my eyes first and straighten a stack of brochures that does not need straightening, mostly to give my hands something to do.
***
The evening winds down and coats are gathered slowly, promises made about vendor calls, and Eleanor hugging me like the sister she has always wanted.
In the driveway, George offers me a ride before I've even reached for my phone.
I get into the passenger seat. The car is quiet and warm and smells faintly of cedar and something underneath it, clean and specific, and I tell myself very firmly to be normal about all of this.
We drive two full blocks before either of us speaks.
"She's been waiting years to show someone that album," George says.
"I'm glad she did," I say, and it comes out meaning more than I intended it to.
He doesn't respond, but his thumb moves once against the steering wheel, and I watch it happen from the corner of my eye.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, watching streetlights slide across the dashboard.
"You're going to regardless," he says.
"Why a paper spreadsheet?"
A pause. "She was seven. She didn't have a laptop."
I turn toward the window so he won't see that I'm smiling like an absolute idiot.
"Fake dating is harder than I thought it would be," I say eventually, to the glass. "It's much easier doing the matching."
"You prefer being the variable controlling the system," he says, completely dry.
I laugh. It's too loud, in the confined space, but it bubbles out of me anyway. George glances over with a pleased expression.
He pulls up to my building and puts the car in park. Neither of us moves immediately. The streetlight comes through the windshield at an angle that is genuinely unfair to the line of his jaw, and I am very aware of the small, warm space between us.
"Goodnight, Tessa," he says.
My name in his voice does something to my heartbeat that I choose not to examine right now.
I say goodnight. I get out. I walk to my door and wait until I hear him pull away before I let myself stop moving.
I stand in my hallway with my coat still on.
A crush is manageable. A crush is noticing someone's hands or the way they take their coffee, and it passes, it always passes, you just wait it out.
But what I felt watching him tonight went beyond that. The quiet loyalty of him, the way he showed up for his sister without ceremony or credit, the way a laminated chore chart in his childhood somehow tells you everything about a person. That wasn't a crush.
That was something else entirely. Something that had apparently been assembling itself in the background for longer than I'd been paying attention.
I hang up my coat very carefully and let the thought finish forming.
I think I might already be in love with George Maddox.