by Elise Sax
“How long are you going to keep this going?”
“Forty years.”
Spencer sighed. “Okay. That’s fair. I thought you were going to hold a grudge. It’s good to know you let things go.”
“Let things go like letting Bridget go?”
“It’s going to be a long forty years.”
I lowered my head so he couldn’t see that I was smiling. I was secretly tickled that he was thinking we would be together for forty years. What would we be like in forty years? Would we still like each other? Would he take me for granted? Would he expect me to wash the dishes and wash his underpants? It was overwhelming to think of being in a relationship for forty years, even if it was with Spencer.
“You okay, Pinky? You’re breathing kind of hard.”
“Fine,” I lied. “I guess I’m hungry.”
“That’s the woman I know and love.”
After we checked on my grandmother and I dressed in a pornographic red dress and heels, Spencer took me to the fanciest restaurant I had ever seen. It was high up in the mountains with a view for miles. Inside, the restaurant was decorated in white and black, and the waiters all spoke French.
“Monsieur Bolton?” the maître d’ asked Spencer and walked us to a table next to the window.
The restaurant was so fancy that it didn’t have menus. The waiter explained to us what we were about to eat in a long monologue. “I didn’t understand a word he said,” I told Spencer. “Half of it was in French and the other half was in science. I don’t know either of those languages.”
“Whatever it is, it’s delicious,” Spencer told me. “Even if we don’t like it, it’s delicious. You’d think they would give us a basket of bread, though.”
An older man appeared at our table and opened a bottle of champagne, which he described in another long monologue. He poured two glasses and left the bottle in an ice bucket. Something about it triggered anxiety in me, but I didn’t know why.
“To you,” Spencer said, lifting his glass. I clinked my glass to his and took a sip.
Our first course arrived. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but it tasted delicious. “This is even better than fish and chips,” I said.
“Are you trying to poison me?” the man at the next table asked his waiter.
“No, monsieur. Of course not.”
“Whatever I’m eating is gassy.”
“No, we don’t serve gassy.”
“I’m telling you it’s gassy.”
“How about you?” I whispered to Spencer. “Is the food making you gassy?”
“Oh, Pinky. I love when you worry about me.”
He took my hand and caressed my palm with his thumb. He drank me in with his eyes, and I was almost not angry at him anymore for arresting my best friend. “Pinky,” he started, entirely serious and full of emotion.
“Yes?” I choked.
“The next course,” the waiter began, interrupting us. I longed to be at Chik’n Lik’n, where they served the food in a bucket and forgot all about their diners. The waiter continued to talk a long time about duck, while Spencer didn’t take his eyes off of me. I was warm all over, and I took another sip of champagne to cool off, but it only made me hotter.
Oh, mama.
The waiter stepped aside, and two young men served us our second course at the same time, as if they were synchronized swimmers. Then they stepped back, and I half-expected them to sing, “ta da!” But they simply turned around and walked away, leaving Spencer and me at our candlelit table with our gourmet food.
“Have I told you how beautiful you are tonight?” Spencer asked me. His eyes flicked to my breasts and returned to my face. He smirked his little smirk.
“I don’t think you mentioned it.” I was having a hard time breathing. It was all I could do not to swipe the dishes off the table, jump on it, and pull Spencer on top of me. It felt like Spencer was using the fancy dinner as a lead up to something big, and I wasn’t sure if it was sex in the car or something more Leave it to Beaver. Whichever it was, I was getting nervous and excited.
Slightly less nervous and more excited about the sex in the car, though, than Leave it to Beaver.
I took an absentminded stab at my second course with my fork and missed my mouth on the way up. “I paid a lot of money for this stuff, and it’s gassy!” the man at the next table grumbled to his wife.
“Don’t blame the food for your gas, Marvin,” his wife said with her mouth full.
“My appetizer was fifty-five dollars, and I’ve got a gut full of gas.”
“So sue me if I’m trying to keep our romance alive. Prince Charming never told Snow White that he was gassy.”
“You’re no Snow White, Blanche.”
I re-focused on Spencer. He was eating slowly, his attention still riveted on me. “Obviously, my life hasn’t been the same since I met you,” he said. Spencer had met me when I was hanging upside down from a telephone pole with my pants pulled off. I was waiting for his punchline about how wacky his life is with me in it, but he had different ideas than teasing me. “I think I only became alive when you came into my life. I can’t imagine you not in it. Every morning that I wake up with you next to me, I wonder what good deed I’ve done to be rewarded like this. This thing we have is so good. There’s passion and more than that. There’s friendship.”
Whoa. I was really turned on. My insides were hot and melting. I felt feverish. My face must have been bright red.
But I still wanted to make a snarky comment about him arresting my friend.
I took a sip of champagne.
“Go on,” I croaked. “You’re doing good.”
Spencer leaned forward. “I think we need to go to the next level.”
“Anal? You know how I feel about that.”
He blinked. “No. Not that. I mean, the next level in our relationship.”
I gulped back the rest of my champagne and adjusted my boobs in my dress. “I don’t know about relationship levels. What level are we on now?”
Spencer smirked. “You’re sweating, Pinky. Relationship talk freaks you out.”
He was right. Relationship talk freak me out. Freaked me out more than taxes but less than spiders. “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m a mature, responsible woman. I’m not afraid of relationships. Is there more champagne?”
He poured me another glass. “I’m committed to you, Pinky,” he continued. “I’ll always be there for you.”
“You will?”
Nobody had ever been there for me always, except for my grandmother.
Spencer took my hand. “Always,” he said, his voice full of emotion.
And then it happened. The moment I had been waiting for and fearing for weeks. With his other hand, Spencer put a little box onto the table.
A ring box.
A red ring box.
The crazy thought that flashed through my head was that the box matched my dress. If a ring box matches my dress, does that mean that I have to say yes? That was my crazy thought.
“I love you, Pinky,” he said and slid the box over to my side of the table. I stared at it, like I was expecting a troop of clowns to come out of it.
“I wish I knew that I should have brought Maalox to a place like this,” the man at the next table said.
“Marvin, I’m pretending you don’t exist. I’m going to eat my elk tenderloin and ignore you completely,” his wife said.
“With the food this gassy, I doubt you’ll be able to ignore me for long, Blanche.”
I opened the ring box.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Do you like it?” Spencer asked, bouncing in his chair, like he was five years old.
“I don’t know much about fashion.”
“It’s a key. I don’t think it has any fashionable use, Pinky.”
I held it up and studied it. It wasn’t a ring. I double checked the box. Nope. No ring. “It’s a key,” I repeated.
Spencer let go of my hand and sat back in
his chair. “It’s a key to the house across the street from your grandmother’s house.”
“The cursed house?”
“It’s not cursed.”
“Murders and a plane crash. That spells cursed to me.”
“Pinky, you and I both know that you’re a terrible speller.”
I put the key back in the box. “I know how to spell cursed.”
“The house has had some bad luck. That means it’s only going to have good luck from now on.”
I harrumphed and crossed my legs. The waiter returned to our table.
“For your next course, we have pheasant flown in from Madagascar,” he started.
“Good for them. You wouldn’t think a little bird could fly that far,” I said to the waiter.
“I know what this is about,” Spencer continued. “You don’t want to live with me. It’s fine if we play sleepover and it’s your room in your house. Your territory. But you don’t want to set up house with me. You don’t want to be with me. You don’t want any kind of with.”
“I have nothing against with,” I insisted.
“I just gave you a house, and you’re throwing it back at me.”
“No, you gave yourself a house and assumed that I would live there with you and do your laundry and iron your shirts.”
“Pinky, I’m not insane. I wouldn’t trust you with my shirts.”
“And I wouldn’t trust you not to arrest my best friend. My best friend!”
“The elk tenderloin is also a fine choice if you don’t like pheasant,” the waiter said.
“Don’t get the elk tenderloin,” the man at the next table warned me. “Very gassy.”
“Stay out of this,” Spencer growled.
“Or he’ll arrest you,” I told the man. “He likes to arrest people for no reason.”
“I arrest people when they’re supposed to be arrested,” Spencer yelled, throwing his napkin down on the table.
“Like Bridget would kill anyone. Like Bridget would take a knife and stab someone!”
“She was there, alone. She was holding the murder weapon, covered in blood!”
“She was trying to help him! She’s pregnant! She’s a single mother!”
“Well, now we’re to the point. That was her decision. She decided to hide her little secret from the father.”
“Father. Yeah right,” I said.
“I know you think you’re Miss Marple, but this is what I do for a living. You need to prepare yourself for the inevitable truth that your friend got angry and lashed out, and the result was a dead man.”
My eyes widened, and my nostrils flared. “You take that back.”
“See, Blanche? Even the good-looking couples fight,” the man at the next table said.
“Shut up!” I shouted at him.
“Don’t you talk to my husband like that. He has a sensitive stomach,” Blanche said.
To prove her point, her husband let it rip and farted. His fart sounded like a fog horn. “Excuse me,” he said. “I told you the food was gassy.”
“I don’t care about your gassy food!” I shouted. I stood up. “Don’t follow me,” I told Spencer. “I’ll call for a car. I don’t want to see you.”
I marched outside, and Spencer didn’t follow me. I was dizzy and disoriented. I didn’t know what had just happened, but I felt lost. No. I felt like I had lost. Lost everything.
And I would never be happy again.
CHAPTER 11
Love conquers all? Not every time, bubbeleh. There will be a time where you have a match, and the match is working. It looks like they’re heading toward their happy ending. And then it all goes to hell. All is lost. Or is it? Maybe not, dolly! Maybe not! Sometimes you can pull it back from disaster. Like fixing a bad meal, add some schmaltz to it. Schmaltz makes everything taste better.
Lesson 53, Matchmaking advice from your
Grandma Zelda
I was home fifteen minutes later. I had cried my makeup off. My grandmother’s room was dark, so I didn’t stop in to see her. Quietly, I went into my room and closed the door. I threw my dress in the corner of my room and put on sweats, a T-shirt, and thick socks.
“Men are all the same,” I muttered to myself, while the tears streamed down my face. “They wait until I love them, and then they show their true selves.” But Spencer was the only man I had ever truly loved. And he would probably be the only man I would ever love.
Because what are the odds of finding two Mr. Rights in a lifetime?
There was nobody on earth like Spencer. Sure, he was a frat boy, womanizing, cartoon-watching, baseball fanatic. But he was also…well, he was everything.
The bastard.
I sat on my bed, hugging my knees to my chest, and I replayed in my head every stupid word I had uttered during our fancy, romantic dinner. He had bought me a house. A big, real house across the street from my grandmother so that I would never be far from her. And the house had a pool.
I now owned a pool.
I tried to let that sink in. A pool. A house. Me.
Spencer told me that he would be there for me always. What was a better sign of always than brick and mortar? A house that could withstand a plane crash could withstand the likes of Spencer and me.
But I threw his always back into his face, crumbling the brick and mortar into dust. I was more destructive than a plane crashing into it. I had rejected Spencer, rejected his gift, rejected his promise.
I blew my nose on my pillowcase.
What kind of woman was I? I was a terrible person. He had bared his soul to me, and I had yelled at him for arresting Bridget.
But he shouldn’t have arrested Bridget. It was ridiculous to think that she was capable of murdering someone, even if that someone was threatening to take away her child. Of course, I would have killed someone if they threatened to take away my child. I would have picked up the nearest knife and plunged it into his chest.
Oh.
Uh oh.
No. She couldn’t have. She was Bridget. Human rights freak, not a cold-blooded murderer.
No. She didn’t murder Bradford Blythe. It was unthinkable. She had total respect for humanity and the individual. She had spent her life, devoted to making lives better. So, no matter how she had been threatened, she wouldn’t have reacted violently. I was sure of it.
I had to save her. I was determined to find the killer fast and prove her innocence. But I could understand how someone who thought they were a law enforcement official could have mistakenly believed that Bridget was the murderer. After all, she was holding the murder weapon. After all, she was being threatened by the murder victim. Motive, means, and opportunity.
Oh, Spencer.
Amateur.
I knew better. I knew that murder was never easy, never what it seemed. It was a rookie mistake to go for the obvious when solving a mystery. And something told me deep inside me that everything obvious with this mystery was a lie.
It was frustrating, and I was worried about Bridget. So, I had taken it out on Spencer, which wasn’t fair.
But if I was going to be really honest with myself, that’s not why I had gotten angry at him. If I was going to be truthful, my anger started with the key. Something about the key triggered my anger. Why did I get angry about a gift of a house and a promise to be together forever?
Because the always Spencer was promising me wasn’t the always that I had dreamed of.
Could that be it? I had wanted more?
I gasped with the epiphany.
“No, that can’t be it,” I said out loud in my bedroom. “That can’t be why I was angry. I don’t want more than what he’s offering.”
What was he offering? A committed relationship with me, living in a house across the street from my grandmother. That was a lot.
But something inside me didn’t trust it. It wasn’t enough.
I wanted…
I wanted…
No, it couldn’t be true.
Yes, it was.
; I wanted to marry Spencer Bolton.
“Holy shitballs. Holy mother-lovin’ shitballs. Holy The-Way-We-Were shitballs. Holy Doctor Zhivago, Romeo and Juliet, Here Comes the Bride shitballs.”
The truth was that I had wanted the red ring box to be an engagement ring. Diamond, ruby, Cracker Jacks, I didn’t care what kind of ring, but I wanted him to propose. I wanted to walk down an aisle or stand up in court or wherever we could exchange our vows to always be there for each other.
Damn it. What a moment for my commitment phobia to hit the road.
“I want to marry Spencer,” I whined into my snotty pillow and cried. It was a growing up moment for me, and I was terrible at growing up moments. But I was having one, nonetheless. I wanted to marry Spencer, but I had sabotaged our relationship, and now it was over, and I would never see him, again.
Then, everything changed. The nerves on the back of my neck came to life, and like a wind vane when the wind changes, I shot up from bed and looked around. With total certainty, I knew that Spencer was close. “Spencer,” I breathed.
I ran out of my room and took the stairs two and a time. I couldn’t get to the front door fast enough. When I reached it, I flung it open and ran outside.
There he was. Spencer was standing in the driveway, looking up at my grandmother’s house. He saw me, and we ran toward each other, as if we were in a movie. He grabbed me hard and kissed me like he never wanted to let me go.
Our tongues touched, our mouths crashed against each other. We kissed forever, unable to get enough. My body was on fire, but the kiss was more than sensual. As it continued, my heart filled up, knowing that we were together. It was real, no matter what happened.
The kiss finally ended and he cradled my face in his hands. “I thought I lost you. I was so stupid. I’m such a moron.”
“I know.”
He arched an eyebrow and smirked his little smirk. “In Gladie speak, that means you forgive me, right?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. I need you to forgive me. I was the jerk. I’m such a jerk.”
