Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  Well, whatever. She sighed and settled into her chair to wait.

  All of a sudden, an image appeared on the screen. It wasn’t a rainbow; it was…a PowerPoint presentation?

  She squinted at the first slide.

  It was an image of a restaurant, a sort of generic-looking one. There was a big sign on it that had been inexpertly photoshopped. It read “A Community Restaurant.”

  “Good morning.”

  She whirled.

  “Bennett!” He was standing by the computer and projector, impossibly handsome in his beachy groomsman outfit. “What are you—”

  He held up a hand to silence her, and once he’d achieved his aim, he pointed to the screen.

  The next slide said, “A proposal in two parts.”

  The next said, “Part A: Business.”

  “Why are you giving me a PowerPoint presentation?” she asked, truly bewildered.

  “Because you’re not the kind of woman flash mobs work on?” He cracked up. “Or words. At least not mushy ones.”

  Huh? Bewilderment gave way to full-on confusion.

  Then he started talking, the way you would if you were actually making a serious, professional presentation. She forced herself to set aside her questions about why he was doing this and to pay attention to what was happening. He was showing her plans for a community restaurant. But it didn’t look like he was talking about Boudin. Several things were different about this proposal—there were more tables than Boudin could accommodate, for one.

  “Wait,” she said. “Where is this going to happen? Are you asking for money?” Because she would totally give him money—without any strings attached.

  He smiled but spoke sternly. “I know you think I’m a controlling dick, but just hear me out. I’ll take questions at the end.” He shot her one of his crooked smiles. “And then I promise I’ll stop talking for a really long time.”

  “Okay, but can you just—”

  “I’ll take questions at the end,” he kept saying, every time she tried to interrupt or seek clarification. So eventually she gave up, sat back, and let him do his thing.

  She’d been right. He was outlining plans for a community restaurant, like he’d always imagined for Boudin, but not Boudin. A new place.

  “I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before, but it’s perfect. I’m the chef, and you’re the operations person.”

  “Wait. What? I’m the what?”

  “I hate that stuff anyway, and you’d be a natural at it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she couldn’t help asking. “Natural how?”

  Somehow he allowed that question. “You’re business-minded. You have great ideas.”

  “What ideas?”

  And then eff her if he didn’t proceed to list every offhand thing she’d ever said about the restaurant business, from the outdoor refrigerator to her thoughts about the restaurant makeover show they’d watched to the stupid truck stop salad bar.

  “And you’re good with people. It will be pay-what-you-can. No prices listed—just like you said. So if we do it right, we’ll get a mix of clientele. If you do the front-of-house stuff, you’ll put everyone at ease.” He grinned. “Also, you’re much prettier than I am. No one wants to see my ugly mug at the host stand.”

  She could not believe this. She opened her mouth to protest, to object, or…something, but nothing came out.

  Then, God help her, he flipped to a slide that was a picture of her. A scan of a Polaroid. She leaned forward. It was…her at the truck stop salad bar.

  “I took this picture while you were just casually dropping your wisdom on that manager guy. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that’s what you were doing. I just thought you looked…” He rolled his eyes. “You aren’t going to like this, but I thought you looked radiant. Animated. Alive.”

  “But—”

  He flipped to another picture of her, from the other day in his room. The one he’d taken of her that she hadn’t stuck around long enough to see.

  She sucked in a breath.

  She looked…so happy. She was half hiding her face, but it wasn’t enough to obscure a big, impossible-to-fake grin. She might even say that despite the fact that she was slightly sunburned and was wearing no makeup that she looked…beautiful?

  She hardly had time to process the image—and he said nothing about it—before he flipped to the next slide. It said, “Financials.”

  “This is the part where I’m supposed to have a bunch of charts and projections. I don’t have that. I’m just suggesting we pool our money and our skills and go for it. Well, actually, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting you’re smarter than I am about this shit, so you make a bunch of charts, and then we’ll go for it.”

  “Holy shit.”

  He continued like he hadn’t heard her, but it didn’t feel like the kind of steamrolling he’d been doing at the rehearsal dinner, when he’d been insisting she listen to him. “There’s no way around the fact that you have more money than I do. If this were a for-profit business, I’d suggest you take a bigger share, but of course it’s not. But I think we can figure out a way to work that out.”

  She blinked rapidly. Had they given her too many pain meds last night? Or was she just crazy?

  Or was he?

  “So that’s part A.” He flipped to a slide that said, “Part A: Summary,” which was, in fact, a summary of the main points of his argument, complete with bullet points. There was even one that said, “Charts: Gia to fill in.”

  She twisted to look at him. “What’s part B?”

  He smiled a slow, knowing smile that sent a lance of heat through her.

  Then he flipped the slide. She turned back to the screen. It was blank.

  “I don’t have visual aids for this.” He walked from the projector to stand near her chair. “But part B is us. I’ve been trying to talk less and just…show you stuff. But I don’t know how to show you this. You have to use your imagination. Can you do that?”

  No. But she swallowed that answer. That was the scaredy-cat answer. Instead she said, “I can try?”

  “Close your eyes, then.”

  She heaved a shaky sigh and bit back the automatic, defensive protest that wanted to surface.

  And then she did the scariest thing she’d ever done. She closed her eyes.

  “You’re right. I was trying to control you. Control us.”

  She rushed to speak, ordering herself not to open her eyes. “In some ways, you were good at it.” She thought back to what a relief it had been, that morning after her confession, to join him in the hotel restaurant to find he’d ordered her an egg.

  There was a Polaroid of that, too, of her perfect birthday egg, but he didn’t have it. It was in her bag.

  “And you were right that a lot of what I’ve done in my life has been about atonement,” he said. “I’m not sure I think that’s inherently a bad thing. I did something terrible, and I turned my life around as a result. It’s good to remember that. But you were right—I’d taken it to an extreme. It had become all consuming.”

  “I wasn’t saying that necessarily. I was just—”

  “But,” he interrupted—and oh, it was so hard to keep her eyes closed—“in this case, the two things are unrelated. I was trying to control you, but it wasn’t because I was atoning. It was because I didn’t want to see you hurting. Or taken advantage of in your job. You threw terms like sexual harassment around so casually, and it made me crazy. I just wanted to…help. Like you helped me with my parents, and with my restaurant, and with…everything. I wanted to help you because I love you.” His voice broke. “I love you so much.”

  She couldn’t do it anymore. She opened her eyes.

  She was ready for him to scold her, but he just smiled, her beloved Bennett, and kept talking. “It should be impossible. I just met you, for God’s sake. But I do. So in this case, trying to fix everything, to rearrange your life, was selfish. I want you around. I want you healthy. I wa
nt you with me.”

  She started to talk, but he held up a hand and fell back on his refrain from Part A. “I’ll take questions at the end.”

  It was nearly impossible to hold her tongue, but he clearly needed to get through what he was saying, so she nodded.

  “And before I say anything more, just for the record, I don’t give a flying fuck what you look like.”

  She sucked in a breath. He was angry, but not at her. It was like he was…angry at everything that had ever hurt her.

  He leaned forward, staring at her so intently it was like he was trying to make her believe what he was saying by boring the words into her with his eyes.

  “Blue hair, brown hair, no hair. I don’t care. One hundred pounds, two hundred pounds, I do not give one single fuck.”

  She couldn’t speak. Partly because of the boulder-size lump in her throat but partly because there were no words. This was beyond words. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because he kept talking. He spoke loud and a little bit quickly, like he wanted to get it over with as fast as possible but also to make sure she heard—really heard.

  “What I’m proposing here comes in two parts: a restaurant and us. Option A and option B. You can choose one or the other, or neither.” He swallowed hard. “Or you can choose both. I hope you choose both. But I want you to know that I know even though I’m making this massively long speech, I’m not going to try to control you. I know it’s not my job to fix you. I don’t even think you’re broken. I think you’ve backed yourself into a corner career-wise, and that option A—entering into a restaurant partnership with me—might give you the space to…rediscover yourself. See what happens when the pressure is off. When you unhinge your professional fate from what you look like. And if that doesn’t help, we—you—can go from there.”

  We. She wanted that we, now that she knew what it meant.

  “But I’m also a selfish motherfucker, Gia. I want you as my business partner, but I want you as my partner more. I know this probably looks on the surface like it isn’t any different than my past relationships, but it is. Those probably were about atoning. I was determined not to use people, so I went through the motions of being the perfect boyfriend without actually feeling the shit underneath the motions.”

  She had to talk now. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t say the right things, if she wasn’t as articulate as he was. She had to let him know he wasn’t in this alone. That even though it might seem like he was delivering a monologue, he was actually having a conversation.

  “But you feel the shit now?” she whispered. She smiled at the phrase, which was both clunky and perfect.

  “I feel the shit.” He laughed, and it drained some of the tension away. “Do I ever feel the shit. You’re so deep under my skin. Look what you did in a week: You brought me back to Lalande. You fixed my relationship with my parents, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t think I fixed those things. You did. I just nudged you in the right direction.” She got it now, though. She’d done for him a version of what he did for her—they made each other better. “Kind of like you did with me, right? Before I freaked out on you?”

  “Right. And what I was going to say is it’s not just that stuff. You’re like this angel-being who makes everything in my life better, but damn, I also want to jump you pretty much 24-7. I’m not used to that. I’m used to putting a leash on lust. But with you, all my discipline just goes out the fucking window. So everything’s all jumbled up.”

  “Maybe it’s okay for everything to be all jumbled up.”

  “Yes! That’s my big revelation. And that’s what this is about.” He pointed back to the screen. “Maybe I needed to give you the space to decide what you want—professionally and personally. And if that’s what you want, I get that. I respect that. But on the other hand—and I had some help from your friends here, to arrive at this conclusion—maybe it’s okay for everything to be all intertwined.”

  He cleared his throat and stood straighter, like he was delivering a closing argument before a jury. “I want to be with you. I hope you want to be with me. I think the restaurant will achieve both our professional aims, and that will make us happy. And better.”

  “It’s like doing both might create something that’s more than the sum of its parts.”

  “Yes, exactly. And I’m sorry if this slideshow was a stupid idea. If you hated it, I can still do a flash mob.”

  Gia let loose a big belly laugh.

  “I didn’t hate it. I loved it.” She dipped her head a little as her cheeks heated. “And I love you.”

  “That’s scary for you to say.”

  “Yeah. They’re just three little words, but…”

  “They’re not little, actually. They’re pretty big.”

  She nodded. He understood. “When you’ve spent your whole life—personally and professionally—being valued solely for the way you look, it’s hard to trust people. It’s easier to just assume the worst. It becomes a habit. It becomes armor.”

  “Hence the ‘two times max’ rule.”

  “Hence the ‘two times max’ rule. Which worked just fine until you came along, you jerk.”

  He started to move toward her, but she held up a hand. “Are you taking questions now?’

  He grinned. “Yes.”

  “Where is this restaurant going to be?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Toronto.”

  “What? Why not Charleston?”

  “Your idea that I could do the restaurant somewhere else was sort of shocking in its rightness. I’d never considered it, but the moment you said it, my world tilted on its axis—another example of how good you are at this clear-thinking business. I do love Charleston—you’re right about that. But I also miss Noah. And I see you with your friends, and I think, if you’re going to make a career change, to move into doing something that situates you in one place, I want you to be with them.”

  Gia choked up, her throat growing so tight she could barely whisper her next question. “But your parents…”

  “Can visit us. And vice versa. Anyway, you saw my mother. Do you really want to live in the same city as her?”

  “You would do this? You would uproot yourself for me?”

  He made a dismissive gesture. “A million times over.”

  And that was it. She couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. She took a big heaving breath in, and it came out as a sob.

  He’d been standing near her, but he hadn’t touched her. Now, though, he came closer and took one of her hands in one of his. “And hey, if you don’t want to go back to Toronto, name your place. If I have you, and I have my restaurant, and if I feel like I’m doing something moderately worthwhile in the world, I’m good. We can go to the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere, for all I care.”

  Another sob—a louder one this time. He looked dismayed. He was getting the wrong impression. So she grabbed him. She couldn’t stand, on account of her leg, so she inelegantly clutched his arms and pulled him toward her.

  His eyes widened as he stabilized in a crouching position in the sand at her feet with his head a few inches from hers.

  “Okay, I’m gonna go with both option A and option B,” she whispered, just before kissing him.

  He groaned and slid his tongue into her mouth. She reveled in the feeling of his hands threading through her hair.

  It was over too soon, though, rudely interrupted by a shout. “Can I have my goddamned wedding now?” Then, “Sorry, Aunt Mary!”

  Laughing, Gia pushed Bennett off her. He did not go happily, and she loved the grunt of displeasure he made as he stepped away. She twisted in her chair. Everyone was hanging back twenty feet or so, and they were all grinning.

  “I’m sorry I hijacked your wedding!” she called back to Wendy.

  “Eh.” Wendy waved dismissively as she led the group toward them. “We all did it to each other, right?”

  It was true. Both Elise’s and Jane’s weddings had ended in pretty spectacular—and unplanned—th
eatrics. In that sense, a little slide show on the beach was nothing.

  “But can we get this show on the road?” Wendy said, having come to a halt about ten feet away. “You guys good?”

  Gia smiled and took Bennett’s hand. Took her boyfriend’s hand. “We’re good.”

  “All right. Hit it!” Wendy yelled. The three of them—Wendy, Jane, and Elise—linked arms and started trooping toward Gia.

  “Dun, dun, dun, dun,” Jane sang, belting out a silly rendition of “Bridal Chorus.” Elise and Wendy joined in.

  The guys followed the girls, not singing, but smiling—even Tobias, who’d somehow taken it upon himself to escort Wendy’s aunt, which was actually kind of decent of him.

  A confused-looking officiant brought up the rear.

  Everyone got situated, and Gia sat in her chair and watched Wendy and Noah get married.

  It was the perfect wedding. It was, as Wendy had wanted, short and to the point, but it was also packed full of emotion. Ballsy, dauntless Wendy cried like a baby, which made Noah cry. Which made his sister Jane cry. Which made Jane’s husband Cameron cry. Which made Cameron’s brother Jay cry. Which made Jay’s wife Elise cry. So pretty soon, Gia and Bennett were the only ones with dry eyes—which was actually kind of hilarious considering the circumstances.

  So she laughed. Just let it rip.

  Bennett, who was standing next to her chair holding her hand, squeezed it as Wendy and Noah kissed.

  And hoo boy, did they kiss. It went on and on. Finally Bennett called, “Get a room!” The officiant looked scandalized, and everyone cracked up—even all the crybabies.

  “All right!” Wendy pulled away from her husband as everyone whooped and hollered. She wiped away her tears, grinned, and shouted, “Enough of that. Let’s eat!”

  Bennett crouched down next to Gia. “I made us a separate picnic.”

  It was, on the surface of things, an unremarkable sentence: I made us a separate picnic. But his drawl had come on strong. And there was no escaping his meaning, not with the way his heated gaze moved all over her. Not with the way he gave her a lazy wink.

  She decided to play dumb. “What do you mean?”