Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Wes
But there was Mo, suddenly in front of him.
He’d been looking for the bathroom, but instead he’d found the woman he had royally pissed off.
If this was a kind of magic, it was a backward and twisted kind, that was for sure.
He’d only come to Doug Buhman’s retirement because Ulla had begged him to be her plus-one.
Wes’s dad was in Tahoe, and he’d always been on her arm for this kind of party.
Wes had arrived late as it was, already feeling off-balance.
Beforehand, he had been fielding calls from his boss, who’d asked for his assistance in the estate transition, and from Gary regarding Estelle’s death.
The lawyers had prepared for this moment since she was rehospitalized, but it didn’t soften how awful it was to talk business in the aftermath of someone’s death.
Gary excused himself from the multiline call, his voice thick with emotion, leaving the lawyers to talk about the timeline for reading the will.
Wes had barely known Estelle outside their client relationship and that one strange weekend.
And now, after rushing to get to this party for someone he’d only met a few times, of course he would run into Mo.
Mo’s face was set. With her hair back in a severe bun at the top of her head, her bangs shaded her eyes.
They had gotten longer, long enough to need a trim, and he had the impulse to brush them aside to investigate her face more clearly.
The room fell away, the low chatter as inconsequential as cicadas in a forest. “Mo, hi,” Wes said dumbly.
“Can we talk?” He hadn’t planned what to say, and he did really have to pee but could hold off to sort things out.
Nothing, not even a full bladder, was as uncomfortable as the air between them.
“I’m working,” Mo said after a shocked pause.
Wes glanced at her black apron, which covered a button-down white dress shirt and modest black pants. “I didn’t mean to give you the impression that—”
“I said I’m working, Wes.” She shouldered past, toward the tables of other guests.
He remembered her ex suddenly. The at-work proposal she’d turned down.
He wasn’t here to ask her that question.
He wasn’t here for her at all, but if he could find a way to talk to her, he could at least apologize.
She was asking for her space, though, and she would be here at least until the end of her shift.
Wes could regroup and find a different way to approach her.
He didn’t want to get her fired or get in her way, but he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if they didn’t get a chance to talk.
The restrooms were down the hall opposite the kitchen, so at least it looked like an honest mistake.
After washing his hands, he splashed water on his face.
Wake up, he told his reflection. Figure out something smooth to say.
Maybe smoothness wasn’t the issue here, but honesty.
He had closed so many deals, shaken so many hands, charmed so many people with his words, but he couldn’t figure out how to explain that he hadn’t screwed her over.
He didn’t know if she believed how much he loved her book, how often he thought about her—both her talent and her personality.
Her body too, but he didn’t think it was appropriate to mention that.
Wes was walking back to his table when he caught Mo’s outline across the room.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t not look at her but that her body language was basically screaming.
She held a silver carafe of coffee, and the guest she was about to serve was holding his cup out of reach, moving it up, down, sideways.
The movements were jerky—intoxicated, Wes thought as he started walking that way.
The man’s right hand was doing the cup game, while his left hand was cupping something else.
Wes couldn’t stop himself. He moved across the dark space, maneuvering around other tables and chairs, and landed in front of Mo.
As he got closer, he realized the man was a photographer, a big-deal one, but he certainly wasn’t getting the picture here.
Wes tried to remember the man’s name, but it was hard, as his vision was going red.
Might be Tim. Tom? He’d done some freelance work for Ulla, but Wes had never liked him.
The urge to do something he would regret was almost overwhelming, but Wes couldn’t do that again.
He could control himself, and the situation.
He had to. Wes moved alongside the table and grabbed the cup from Tim’s reach.
He held it steady. Since he’d interposed, Tim’s other hand broke contact with Mo’s backside.
Her cheeks were flush, expression pained.
“Tim,” Wes said, voice full of false cheer and fist still tight around the cuff of his shirt. “Good to see you. Want some coffee? Might help you sober up.”
Tim tried to take the cup back, but Wes held it steady directly over Tim’s lap.
Wes glanced at Mo, who looked away, but she still handed him the coffee carafe and moved back a few steps.
“Hold still or I might spill this all over your lap, and we don’t want that,” Wes said.
He didn’t spill it, but he filled it all the way to the brim.
After a second, Wes lowered the cup to the table as he maintained eye contact with Tim.
“Enjoy,” Wes said. “Sorry if you wanted room for cream.”
Wes turned away from the table and took a breath.
He’d been well behaved enough. He didn’t want to cause a scene for Ulla to have to clean up, like she’d had to with the NDA after he’d punched a guy.
More than anything else, Wes didn’t want to further embarrass Mo, but it certainly wasn’t for Tim’s sake that the man didn’t get a scrotum-burning dose of half-caf.
Wes handed her the carafe back. As he was walking back to Ulla’s side, past the long tables covered with pictures and memorabilia from Doug’s early journalism days, he felt a hand on his back and turned.
Mo stood in the corner of the room. This was as private a time as they would get, Wes realized. A few other people stood at a table six feet or so from them, paging through old newspapers and picking up framed photographs.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Mo said.
“I wanted to, though. I have really bad impulse control.”
Seemingly despite herself, a smile tugged at the corner of her lips. He was so relieved to see it that he would have talked about anything with her in public. She could ask him anything and he would give her the truth. He owed her that much.
“It’s so good to see you,” Wes said.
She didn’t respond for a moment, then said, “I really don’t have anything to say to you except congrats, I think.”
“Mo—”
“No, it’s fine. Are you going to Estelle’s funeral?”
“The wake, maybe.” Wes didn’t want to talk about Estelle. He didn’t want to talk about anything except how he could get Mo back into his place to make sandwiches again. “Listen, I think it’s kismet that you’re here. My mom never invites me to these things.”
Her expression dimmed. “I don’t believe in fate. Unless your parents getting a divorce is all part of some grand plan.”
“Maybe it is,” Wes said. “My parents were going to divorce anyway. I see that. They weren’t happy, but the timing worked out so that—”
“I think relationships end for all kinds of reasons, in their own time. Ours had an expiration date. You knew that. I knew that. You knew once one of our books was chosen it was going to be over.”
It was the first time she’d acknowledged that they’d been something.
Wes’s heart clenched. He should have told her earlier just how much he wanted to be with her.
He had never dated someone who hadn’t asked a single thing from him before and whose interest in him seemed so genuinely based on who he was, not on what he could give her.
And now, he would give her anything, make any number of promises, to find a way to make it up to her. “Nothing is official yet,” Wes said.
“Our relationship never was either.”
That stung. “I would buy a million fancy cheeses and watch ten million hours of bad television that you chose if you would come over again. I will watch Lord of the Rings with you high on edibles. I will carve you a whole-ass butter sculpture if you have dinner with me again.”
She glanced over her shoulder, and Wes followed her gaze.
More people were starting to mingle, leaving plates and silverware behind.
“I have to clean up and get on a plane,” she said.
“And you need to go save your mother from whatever is happening over there.” A jerk of her head directed Wes’s attention to Tim pointing a finger at and animatedly talking to Ulla.
When Wes turned back, Mo was gone, and he couldn’t find her again the rest of the night.
Wes woke up the next morning with what felt like a hangover, even though he hadn’t drunk anything.
His sheets rumpled around his body, and he wished they smelled like Mo.
He wished they had Mo in them too. He had dreamt of her on an airplane flying away from him—farther and farther—and he was hanging on to the wheels of the jet that had never retracted.
Once he’d blinked the sleep from his eyes, he snatched the phone from the nightstand.
He had a dozen missed calls. Four from Ulla, six from unidentified numbers, and two from Loris.
Loris worked at the New York Post . Wes sometimes fed him publishing gossip, and he filled Wes in when his newsroom was sniffing around something that pertained to Wes’s family.
He hadn’t had a call from Loris in two blissful years—blissful not because Loris was a bad guy but usually because this meant there wasn’t drama to discuss, as Ajay took care of the social plans.
Since the story of Wes punching the guy at the agency had gotten bought out, buried under an NDA, and stayed out of the papers, thanks partially to Loris’s connections, Wes hadn’t had a call.
But Loris had texted too. Sorry, Wes. I tried to warn about the story getting out. Let me know how I can help. We love you.
Wes was wide awake now. Not even seven thirty, and his brain whirred.
Story? His brain first went to Estelle and the adaptations.
He shouldn’t have emailed anything to Elena.
He Googled his name and checked the news section.
It wasn’t about the books at all. The first entry, published four hours ago: “DIVA DIVORCE? Ulla Unhooks From Hubby.”
Wes skimmed the first paragraph of the article, heart turning to ice under his rib cage.
“At a gala event last night, Ulla stepped out sans ring and sans husband. Her son, Wesley Spencer, confirmed at the event that Ulla is now a single woman. Her car-collecting ex-hubby has fled the city for parts unknown. Fortune hunters: start your engines!”
Oh fuck.