17. Brynn
brYNN
I called Dani from the car on the drive home.
She answered on the second ring, which meant she was already up, which meant she was going to be unbearable about this. “You never call this late unless something happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Brynn.”
I kept my eyes on the road. “I have a lunch date tomorrow.”
The sound she made was not a human sound.
“brYNN.”
“I need you to be calm.”
“I AM CALM. WHO IS HE. IS IT THE COACH. IT’S THE COACH, ISN’T IT.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Yes, it’s the coach.”
“THE ONE YOU WERE TRYING TO SET UP WITH YOUR MOTHER.”
“Yes, Dani.”
“Oh my God.” I heard her sit down somewhere. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Start from the beginning. Leave nothing out.”
So I told her. All of it. The meeting with mom. The woman sitting next to him at the bar. The way he asked me to lunch by gripping my chin and saying I’m not going to have lunch with your mother. The forehead kiss.
When I got to the forehead kiss, Dani made a noise that probably disturbed her neighbors.
“He kissed your FOREHEAD?”
“It sounds less significant when you yell it like that.”
“No, it sounds MORE significant. Brynn, men who want to sleep with you do not kiss your forehead. Men who want to keep you kiss your forehead. Those are completely different categories of men.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “We barely know each other.”
“He kissed your forehead,” she said again, like she was filing it somewhere important. “What are you wearing for the date?”
“I haven’t thought about it yet.”
“Think about it. Do you still have that green dress from Portland?”
“Somewhere in the boxes, maybe.”
“Find it. Wear it. It makes your eyes do a thing.”
“My eyes don’t do a thing.”
“Your eyes absolutely do a thing, and I say this as your best friend who has watched many men discover this thing in real time.” A pause. “He’s older, right? How much older?”
“Fourteen years.”
Silence.
“Dani.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re doing the silent judging thing.”
“I’m not judging. I’m computing.” Another pause. “Okay, I’m done computing. He sounds like exactly the kind of man who would kiss a woman’s forehead and mean it. I approve. Go to lunch. Be yourself. Stop trying to talk yourself out of things before they happen.”
I laughed despite myself. “That’s it? That’s your advice?”
“Also find the green dress.”
“You’ve mentioned the green dress twice.”
“Because it’s important.” I heard her coffee mug hit a counter. “Call me the second you get home. I want everything. The food he orders, the way he looks at you, all of it.”
“It’s just lunch, Dani.”
“Brynn Caldwell, nothing about this man is just anything and you know it.” A beat. “Go find the top.”
I hung up.
The city slid past the window the way it always did at this hour, lit up and indifferent and not interested in what was happening to any one person driving through it.
He was right there, somewhere across town in that penthouse with all those lights.
And I had just agreed to have lunch with him tomorrow and let Dani lose her mind about it and now I had to go home and find a shirt in a storage box and figure out how to act normal for the rest of the evening.
The thing was, I already knew what I was doing.
I’d known since about the third time I caught myself thinking about the way he looked at me across the bar.
I was attracted to him. Fine. He was older and steady and had this way of paying attention that made you feel like the only person in the room, and I was apparently not immune to that, which was inconvenient, because I had a plan.
The part that sat wrong was Mom. Not the plan, not the matchmaking.
That ship had sailed and I knew it. Just Mom.
The fact that I’d spent the last few days telling myself I was doing this for her, and somewhere along the way I’d stopped thinking about her entirely the second he walked into a room.
That felt like something worth sitting with.
I thought about the book I’d been meaning to write for three years.
The one about a girl who came home to take care of her mother and stayed so long she forgot what she’d been going back to.
I hadn’t written a word of it because every time I sat down to start I couldn’t figure out how it ended.
Whether the girl got out. Whether she stayed.
Whether staying was a choice she made or just a thing that happened to her while she was looking somewhere else.
I didn’t have an answer for any of it. I just had a green dress somewhere in a storage box and a lunch date tomorrow and a best friend who was probably already texting me from across the country.
Information gathering, I reminded myself as the lights of the Strip faded in the rearview. That’s all tomorrow is.
I didn’t fully believe that anymore. But it was still a good thing to tell myself.