23. Jules
— ? —
Jules
I’ve been ready since a quarter to six. I changed my outfit three times and redid my makeup twice, and I stared at myself in the mirror and wondered what the hell I’m doing.
I take a breath and turn around.
Harry is standing in the hallway in a full suit, dark charcoal and perfectly fitted. He’s holding a bouquet of pink and white peonies.
He looks terrified.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“These are for you.” He holds out the flowers. “I didn’t know what you liked. First date and all.”
“Peonies are my favorite.”
“Lucky guess.”
I take the bouquet and bring it to my face, breathing in the sweet, delicate scent, and my chest gets tight.
“You look beautiful,” he says.
I’m wearing green. It’s a different dress from the anniversary, but the same color, and I’m making a point. I’m reminding both of us what we’re trying to rebuild.
“You clean up okay,” I say.
His mouth twitches. “Ready?”
“Let me put these in water.”
I find a vase in the kitchen, fill it, and arrange the flowers on the counter. He waits in the hallway, watching me move through this house as if I belong here.
I don’t know if I belong here anymore. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
“Okay.” I grab my purse. “Let’s go.”
When we get to the garage, he opens the passenger door for me and stands there waiting. It’s old fashioned and gentlemanly, and he’s trying too hard.
I slide in without comment.
We pull out of the driveway and head toward the city. The sun is setting and the sky is orange and pink. He’s quiet and focused on the road, and his hands are tight on the steering wheel.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“It’s a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
“You’ll like this one.”
Twenty minutes later, we pull up to a restaurant I recognize, and my stomach drops.
It’s the place from our first date, the real one, three years ago.
It’s also the place where I sat alone for ninety minutes on our anniversary while he was in a parking garage with Avery.
“Harry…”
He turns off the engine and doesn’t look at me. “I know what this place is. I know what happened here.”
“Then why…”
“Because I need to fix it.” He turns to face me. “I need to come back here and do it right. I need to sit at that table and not be late. I need to look at you across the candlelight and not have my phone silenced in my pocket. I need to make a new memory in this place that isn’t about her.”
My throat is tight.
“Is that okay?” he asks. “If it’s not, we can go anywhere else. I just thought…”
“It’s okay.”
He studies my face. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
We walk in together. My leg protests a little, because it’s still weak and still adjusting to working without the boot, but I manage. His hand hovers at my back, not quite touching, ready to catch me if I stumble.
The ma?tre d’ recognizes us. His eyebrows lift just slightly, but he’s too professional to say a word, and he leads us to a table by the window.
We’re seated at 6:45, and the reservation is for 7:15.
“You’re early,” I say, looking at the time on my phone.
“I’m never being late to this restaurant again.”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I pick up the wine list.
We order drinks, wine for me and whiskey for him, the same things we ordered on our first date all those years ago.
“So,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “Tell me about yourself.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Pretend I don’t know anything about you.”
He considers this. “I’m thirty. I run a company that does…” He waves his hand vaguely. “Business things.”
“Specific.”
“I don’t want to bore you with the details on a first date.”
“How considerate.”
“I grew up in a children’s home outside the city.” His voice is lighter than the words deserve. “I have terrible taste in movies and excellent taste in women.”
“Do you?”
“I asked you out, didn’t I?”
“That remains to be seen. The night is young.”
His mouth twitches. “Your turn.”
“I’m twenty-six. I run a foundation that does…” I mimic his hand wave. “Charity things.”
“Vague.”
“I learned from the best.” I take a sip of my wine. “I have excellent taste in books and questionable taste in men.”
“Questionable?”
“I said yes to dinner with you, didn’t I?”
He laughs, and it’s the first real one I’ve heard from him all night, and I feel it land warm in my chest.
His phone buzzes in his jacket. He goes tense, glances at the screen under the table, and sends it to voicemail without a word, and then he asks me what I feel like eating.
We order food and we talk. We really talk, about nothing important, about favorite movies and worst first dates and embarrassing stories from our pasts. It feels like the beginning again, as if we’re two people getting to know each other.
Halfway through the appetizers, Harry excuses himself to have a word with the ma?tre d’.
He’s barely out of sight when a shadow falls across my table.
“Couldn’t help but notice you’re sitting alone.”
I look up. He’s tall and dark haired with an expensive watch, and he has the confidence of a man who’s never heard the word no and doesn’t expect to start tonight.
“My date stepped away,” I say.
“Lucky guy.” He slides into the chair Harry just vacated, uninvited. “I’m…”
“Not interested.”
He blinks. “I didn’t even…”
“I know what you’re about to do. You’ll buy me a drink, make small talk, and slide your number across the table. Save us both the time.”
“Ouch.” He doesn’t leave. His eyes drop to my left hand. “No ring. You sure you’re not available?”
“Positive.”
“Because you look available to me.”
I open my mouth to tell him exactly where he can put his assessment of my availability.
Harry appears behind him.
“Excuse me,” Harry says pleasantly. “You’re in my seat.”
The man turns and takes in the suit, the build, and the expression on Harry’s face.
“Hey, man, no offense.” He holds up his hands. “I didn’t see a ring, so I figured…”
Harry opens his mouth, and I watch him realize what he can’t say. Every instinct he has wants to say “my wife,” and tonight I’m Jules Rivers, and he’s a man on a first date who has no claim on me at all.
I could help him. I take a slow sip of my wine, and I let him stand there and stew for what feels like a full minute.
“She’s taken,” he says at last.
“She said she’s not interested, but I thought…”
“She’s taken.” Harry’s voice is still pleasant and still calm, and his eyes are anything but. “She just hasn’t agreed to it yet.”
I choke on my wine.
The man looks between us, reads whatever’s on Harry’s face, and decides retreat is the better option.
“Right. Sure.” He stands and straightens his jacket. “Enjoy your evening.”
He goes back to the bar. Harry slides into his chair, puts his arm along the back of mine, adjusts his cuff, and looks at me with complete innocence.
“Where were we?”
“You just told that man I’m taken.”
“You are.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“Hence the ‘yet.’”
It’s the old Harry, arrogant and possessive and certain. I should be annoyed, and what annoys me is how much I like it.
“Fine,” I say. “But next time, let me handle it first. Then you can swoop in.”
“Deal.”
We finish dinner. The food is good and the conversation is better, and by the time we’re done my cheeks hurt from trying not to smile too much.
“Dessert?” I ask.
“Actually, I have another stop in mind.” He stands and holds out his hand. “Come with me.”
***
The bookstore is ten minutes from the restaurant.
Harry parks on a quiet side street and comes around to open my door. The neighborhood is dark except for the soft glow coming from one storefront, and I know that storefront.
“You rented a bookstore,” I say.
“You mentioned it once, on our first date.” He offers me his arm. “You said you found it when you first moved to the city, and it felt like a sign that you were in the right place.”
I don’t remember telling him that. Three years ago, on our first date, I talked so much that I barely remember what I said.
He remembered.
The door is unlocked. We step inside, and the owner, a woman with silver hair and reading glasses, smiles at us from behind the counter.
“Mr. Winslow. Right on time.”
“We have it until midnight,” Harry tells me. “You can take anything you want.”
I stare at him. “Harry…”
“First date. I wanted to make an impression.”
I wander through the stacks, trailing my fingers along the spines. He follows at a distance, watching me explore.
I find the romance section tucked in a back corner. The shelves are packed tight with paperbacks, and their covers are bright and shameless. I pull one down and flip it open.
“‘His hands found her waist,’” I read aloud, “‘and pulled her against him. She could feel the evidence of his desire pressing…’”
“Evidence of his desire?”
“It’s a euphemism.”
“For what?”
“You know what.”
He takes the book from me and examines the cover, which shows a shirtless man clutching a windswept woman against a dramatic backdrop.
“‘I need you,’” he reads in a completely flat voice. “‘More than my next breath. More than…’” He stops and looks up at me. “Do men really talk like this?”
“Some do.”
“Do they really growl?”
“You did. At the restaurant, when that guy was at our table.”
“I did not growl.”
“You definitely growled.”
“I made a sound.”
“A growly sound.”
He puts the book back on the shelf with exaggerated dignity. “I don’t growl.”
“Whatever you say.”
We keep browsing. He asks about my favorite books and actually listens to the answers. He tells me about what he read as a kid, which was mostly whatever was lying around the children’s home, worn paperbacks with missing covers and pages falling out.
“I’ve never read a book for fun,” he admits. “Not as an adult. I was too busy, and too focused on proving myself to people who were never going to care.”
“And now?”
“Now I read contracts and spreadsheets.”
“That’s not reading. That’s suffering.”
“Fair point.”
I pull a book from the shelf and hand it to him. “Start with this one.”
He looks at the cover, which has the usual shirtless man and dramatic embrace.
“Romance?”
“It’s a good story.”
“There’s a half naked man on the cover.”
“He’s fully naked by chapter three.”
He tucks the book under his arm without further comment.
His phone buzzes again while the owner rings us up, and he declines it without looking. He insists on buying everything I touched, plus the one I gave him, and we step back out into the night.
The walk to the car is quiet and comfortable. His hand finds mine along the way, and I let him hold it.
At the house, he walks me to my guest room door, as if it’s really the end of a first date and he’s going to kiss me goodnight and leave.
“I had a good time,” I say.
“Me too.”
“Can I see you again?”
“I was going to ask you that.”
We stand there, close enough to touch. The hallway is dim, and the house is quiet around us.
“Goodnight, Jules,” he says.
“Goodnight.”
He doesn’t move, and I don’t move.
The air between us is thick with everything we’re not saying and not doing.
He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers linger on my jaw and my neck, and then slide into my hair.
“Harry…”
His voice is rough. “We’re supposed to be taking this slow.”
“We are.”
He leans down. I think he’s going to kiss my cheek, do the gentlemanly thing, and walk away.
His mouth finds mine.
The kiss is soft at first, tentative and testing.
Then my back hits the doorframe and his hand tightens in my hair, and it’s not soft anymore.
He kisses me deep and desperate and hungry, as if he’s been holding it back all night, and he has. I grab his shirt and pull him closer, and he groans against my mouth.
His hands find my waist and my hips, and slide down to grip my thighs. He lifts me, and I wrap my legs around him with my back pressed against the doorframe and his body hard against mine.
“Jules.” My name is a ragged sound in his throat. “We should stop.”
“I know.”
Neither of us stops.
His mouth moves down my neck, and his teeth graze my pulse, and I gasp. My fingers dig into his shoulders. I can feel him hard against me, and I want him so badly I can’t think.
I put my hand flat on his chest and push, just enough.
“First date, Harry,” I say, and I barely recognize my own voice. “Jules Rivers doesn’t take a man to bed on the first date.”
He drops his forehead against mine, and we’re both breathing hard. He laughs, and there’s real pain in it.
“Jules Rivers is a cruel woman.”
“Jules Rivers has standards. Ask her out again.”
“Tomorrow,” he says. “And the day after that.”
He presses one more kiss to my lips, soft and brief. Then he sets me down, steps back, and walks away down the hall, and I can see exactly what it’s costing him.
I watch him go with my heart pounding and my skin flushed and an ache between my thighs that won’t quit.
I go into my room, leave the door open the way I always do, and sit on the edge of the bed until I can breathe normally again. I’m aching, and irritated with my own rules, and a little charmed by how he took them, which irritates me more.
Sleep takes a long time to come, and I’m awake again long before dawn.
Three times tonight, his phone buzzed, at dinner and in the bookstore and once more in the car on the way home. Three times, he went tense and declined the call.
I didn’t ask who it was, because those are first date rules.
But now I’m lying alone in the dark, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
What if it was her? What if the restraining order doesn’t matter, and she’s found a way to reach him?
I tell myself to stop. I tell myself he isn’t hiding anything, and he was just focused on tonight and on doing this right.
The old doubt doesn’t listen to reason. It never has, and now it’s wide awake, and so am I.