Chapter 9
I had written seven scripts and was working on an eighth when my phone buzzed with a text from Dash.
I will never admit to lunging for the phone, but I will say that I reached for it a tad too aggressively, and found myself reading the text while on my back, my shaggy rug tickling the back of my neck and the remains of my cookie crushed under my elbow.
I finished editing and was just about to upload the first couple of videos (one spicy, one mild). But then I thought… an occasion this momentous has to be celebrated, right? Or commemorated in some way?
I tapped out my reply a moment later. Hit pause on the uploading for like ten minutes. I’m coming over.
To the surprise of absolutely no one who’s ever met me, I had two shoeboxes and a shopping bag’s worth of party supplies in my closet.
Rooting through them, I extracted a bag of confetti, two paper noisemakers, a sparkling plastic tiara, and a party hat shaped like a pineapple.
It took me approximately two minutes flat to sweep them into a grocery tote, exchange my shorts and cropped tee for a blue tulle dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Disney princess, and make my way to the bodega at the end of my street, where I bought a couple cans of LaCroix in lieu of champagne and a few packages of powdered donuts.
Another few minutes and I was bursting through Dash’s door as he pulled it open. “You have no one to blame but yourself,” I told him, wielding the sparkling water like I was presenting him with the finest vintage. “You could have told me to stay home.”
“I wasn’t aware that was an option,” he said, but he was smiling when he reached for a pair of long-stemmed wineglasses from the shelf above his sink.
“I mean, I probably wouldn’t have listened.”
“You look beautiful, by the way,” Dash said, still facing away from me, so casually that for a second it didn’t register as a compliment.
He turned around right as it hit me, so he saw me go suddenly and uncharacteristically still, less deer in the headlights and more I want to live in this moment forever. “Should I change?”
He was in jogger shorts and an intensely blue T-shirt that made his eyes look deliciously brown. Was it the amber glow of his kitchen pendants making his cheekbones look flushed, or was Dashwood blushing?
Feeling a little hot under the collar myself, I shook my head and tried to sound as casual as he had.
“Nah, you’re fine. I just wanted to look festive.” I dumped my bodega purchases onto his fancy quartz countertop, trying not to think about how soft his T-shirt looked or wonder what it would feel like against my cheek. “Sorry about the crappy snacks. I can bake, but I don’t have an oven.”
“You can use my oven anytime you want,” he offered as he set the glasses on the counter.
As gorgeous as his kitchen was, it was still Manhattan-apartment small, with so little space to maneuver that we were standing way too close for comfort. Maybe that was why my voice came out a little breathless when I repeated something I’d only said over text. “Stop trying to seduce me, Dashwood.”
Blushing even harder, he eyed the powdered donuts, which had gotten slightly—okay, severely—crushed in my tote. “I think we can do better than those.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Excuse me, are you dissing my bodega-shopping skills?”
“I’m just saying that I’m marinating two pieces of salmon and I have an arugula, goat cheese, and grilled nectarine salad to go with them. Have you had dinner yet?”
“Not unless you count the two donuts I had on the way here,” I said, showing him where the package was open.
He uncovered the wooden bowl on the counter. Had it been in my apartment, it would’ve been filled with hair ties and stray earrings. This being Dash, the salad bowl held an actual salad, the arugula glistening with dressing and dusted with crumbled white cheese.
It wasn’t covered in sugar, but it looked good.
“Did you seriously whip that up in the ten minutes it took me to get here?” I asked as he got a glass container from the fridge.
He shrugged. “It’s not really that complicated, especially when you meal prep. I try to always have something ready to toss on the stove.”
“Your grandmas taught you well.” I snagged half a crushed donut from the open package, adding, as an explanation, “Appetizer.”
“My grandmas don’t cook,” he said, swirling oil around a grill pan.
“Hence the senior buffets at the casinos they’re always in.
They don’t get many home-cooked meals unless I come over and bully them into eating their vegetables.
According to Nana, she’s rebelling from the tyranny of the kitchen and something about patriarchal expectations. Grandma just can’t be bothered.”
I licked powdered sugar off my finger and said, “God, I love your grandmas. Any chance they’d want to adopt a moderately talented sugar fiend who could do some serious damage at a senior buffet?”
As Dash flicked on the range hood and eased both salmon fillets into the sizzling pan, I busied myself with putting out the party supplies.
The noisemakers and confetti joined the two round white plates and gleaming cutlery on the dining table, and the hats I held out to Dash so that he could have first pick because I am nothing if not gentlemanly. “Pineapple or princess?”
Dash took the tiara. “I mean, I am the nobleman.”
“What does that make me?” I asked, adjusting the green elastic under my chin.
“Cute.” There went his fingers again, raking through his hair, just before he swiveled slightly to flash that smile at full strength, right into my face.
Another small piece of my resistance crumbled away, like dirt on a cliff wall that I was hanging on to by my fingertips.
The compliments and the flirting and the brief touches that were casual enough that they had plausible deniability built right into them were all great, amazing even, but they were making it so hard to keep holding on.
I couldn’t let myself fall—not off the metaphorical cliff and not for Dash.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said, pointing at him as he looked at his reflection on the microwave to make sure his tiara was on straight.
Dash looked confused. “Don’t what?”
“Try to charm me. I’m instating a firm no compliment policy for this partnership.” I pretended to think about it for a second. “Unless it’s about my earrings, my outfits, or my powdered donuts.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you tend to get a lot of compliments on your powdered donuts?”
“Nope, and it’s about time that changed.”
I had taken my shoes off at the door, per Dash’s instructions, and now I roamed barefoot on his perfectly clean hardwood, sipping my sparkling water.
Since my last visit to his apartment, he had taken the time to put up a bunch of stuff on the white walls.
In actual frames, too, all neatly arranged and very unlike the haphazard collection of stuff held together by scraps of washi tape and free stickers that was on my wall.
Dash had framed postcards scrawled with messages, artsy prints, and pages that looked like they’d been ripped from vintage design magazines, as well as pictures of two older ladies I assumed were his Grandma and Nana.
I was studying one of the pictures when I felt Dash walking up behind me. “Your grandmas are beautiful,” I told him. “Those cheekbones!”
“Nana was a beauty queen in the late sixties,” he said, pointing at one black-and-white snapshot that depicted a young White woman with a beehive hairdo and a satiny dress bisected by a sash. “And my Grandma was the prettiest debutante in her year, at least according to my aunt.”
“No wonder you’re so gorgeous,” I blurted out. “It’s bursting out of every branch of your family tree. I’m guessing that at some point in the past, one of your ancestors was responsible for a thousand ships being launched into war.”
Dash looked amused. “How come you’re allowed to compliment me?”
“I’m not,” I shot back. “I’m complimenting your ancestors. And I’m really looking forward to complimenting your salmon if it’s ever ready.”
“It’s almost done.”
Dash lived in a prewar apartment. Where a more modern building might have had floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a sweeping view of Manhattan, his looked out over red brick, black iron fire escapes, and lush ivy.
One of the fire escapes on the building across the street had been swagged with fairy lights, and music wafted faintly from the person sitting cross-legged below the glowing string, holding a guitar like a lover as he strummed it softly.
I recognized the song he was playing from Lady Cerulean’s newest album, a ballad that was really a political manifesto wrapped in poetry.
“Romantic view,” I commented.
“Why do you think I bring all my dates here?” he quipped in a way that made me suspect that he hadn’t brought up anyone at all.
Except for me.
“I’d do actual crimes for a view like this—my apartment looks out into the back alley where they keep the dumpsters.
” I glanced at him, smiling slightly to try to conceal the awareness zipping up and down my spine.
“Just wait until our videos take off. I’ll be out of there so fast, my landlord will think he’d been renting to a cartoon superhero. ”
“On that note.” A sizzle from the pan on the stove punctuated Dash’s sentence. “It’s time to move on to the main event.”
He plated the salmon and I carried the salad to the table, which had already been set with cobalt-blue place mats that matched the wineglasses, as well as rolled linen napkins in wooden rings.
“All that and you’re a domestic god, too?” I asked as I slipped into a seat.
He pretended to ponder it. “Not a god, no, but the Domestic Duke has a nice ring to it. Think there might be something in that? A side channel for sharing recipes and tips for spring cleaning my castle?”