“Thanks, Chad,” I say with a genuine smile.
I’m about to tell him that I appreciate his kindness when he adds, “Then you girls can hang out so much your cycles will get in sync, and Conner and I can get drunk without hearing you all nag.”
“Ugh.” I give him too much credit, I think as he and Evelyn exit. Far too much credit sometimes.
***
Greetings from Sydney! reads the front of the colorful postcard that arrived in the mail yesterday. It has a beautiful waterfront landscape picture emblazoned on it, the Sydney Opera House in the center. I’m about to tape the postcard to the large chalkboard in the café’s kitchen—a nice reminder of Emily’s delightful news—but decide to give it one more read.
Hi, Sophie! Gatz and I are in Sydney. School’s got a one-week break, and we hit the metropolis! Afternoon at Museum of Contemp. Art, saw Bangarra dance performance (WOW!), whale watching (most amazing EVER!), and watched a surf school in Manly hit the waves. We are so looking into this. May return to Seattle as surf bums. Ha! Hope all is well and the café’s filled (sure it is). Hugs and loves XO, Emily
P.S. Guess who’s coming for a Xmas visit? Can’t wait!!! Will email details soon.
If this doesn’t keep a smile on my face, especially given recent news about John, I don’t know what will. This is fantastic! Just when I thought all was made better for the holidays with a visit from Claire and Conner, Emily plans on visiting, too!
I happily pad my way back to the front of the quiet café. The rather silent morning allowed me to finish the majority of items on my to-do list. I’m grateful for the respite, since Evelyn’s out for the day. With only two customers up front right now and the lemon chiffon cupcakes cooling on the rack, I decide to take a moment to make myself a cappuccino.
“Good morning,” a familiar voice greets as the front door opens, the bells pealing merrily against the hissing of the steaming milk.
“Dean,” I say with a smile. “How are you this fine morning?”
“Well,” he says, walking to the counter, his messenger bag slung over one shoulder. “Will be better once I sink my teeth into a scone, or a muffin,” her peers into the countertop display case, “or whatever you recommend.”
I scrape a small amount of foam onto the top of my cappuccino. “Hmmm,” I sound. I bring the hot beverage to my lips and take a cautious sip. “I think the pumpkin-clove scones might be the ticket. Made them fresh about a half-hour ago. Still warm.”
“Then pumpkin-clove it is.” He sets his bag on the nearest table. “And for a drink…” He watches as I take another sip. “I’ll have what you’re having.”
“Cappuccino it is.” I abandon my cup and pull a fresh teacup from the stack atop the espresso machine.
I can see from the corner of my eye Dean survey the sparsely filled café. “Quiet, eh?” he says.
“Yeah.” My tone is nonchalant. “Not unusual at this time.” I clean out the filter basket, loudly banging it against the knock box filled with used grounds.
Dean says something as I loudly remove the grounds, but I can’t quite make out his words.
“What was that?” I ask, moving my jaw about as if to pop my ears. “Sorry, it’s a loud job sometimes.”
I fill the cleaned basket with a fresh, heaping scoop of ground espresso beans.
“I was saying that since it’s so quiet round here why don’t you join me for some coffee?” He points at my cappuccino. “You’ve already got yours, mine’s on its way…”
I give a light laugh through a tight smile. “Dean.”
“Come on.” He leans back on his heels and looks on at me with those soft eyes, his jaw strong and determined. His expression, though kind and confident, fortunately isn’t annoyingly pushy. “Surely you could use a quick break?”
“I’ve really got to ice some cupcakes, Dean,” I persist with a crinkle of my nose.
“All right, all right.” He holds up a hand briefly before putting it back in his pants pocket. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.” He smoothes a hand through his dark hair. “Then how about you have some coffee with me when you’re not busy?”
“It’s a solo day. Just me. I’m busy all day.”
“I’m busy with homework.” He motions with a nod to his messenger bag. “I was referring to a time outside of the café, actually. Say…a coffee date?”
“Oh.” I’m completely caught off guard, my mouth slightly open as I stare down at my cappuccino in a sudden awkward silence.
“Okay,” Dean rushes out, filling the stuffy void. “Maybe not a coffee date. You are always around coffee.” He makes an unsettled chuckle. “How about dinner? Or lunch?”
“Like a date?” I ask, immediately cursing myself for asking such a stupid question.
I turn fully towards the espresso machine so he can’t see my face. What a way to make a guy feel awkward in what is undoubtedly already an awkward situation. I close my eyes, think, Smooth move, Sophie!, then quickly look over at Dean with a tight, forced grin.
“Yes, a date,” he says slowly and in a low tone. “You, me, on a date. What do you say?”
What do I say? What do I say? I rub at the corner of the espresso machine where a circle of milk has dried, stalling, not sure how to say what I want to say.
“You can pick the restaurant,” he offers. “You can pick the date, the time.”
“Dean,” I say at last and turn to him, “I don’t think I’m quite ready for a date.”
“Oh.” His response is blurted out so rapidly.
“I’m sorry. It’s just not…not a good time. Not right now.” I nervously jam my hands in my apron’s front pockets as I stammer clumsily.
“I get it. I get it.” He waves a hand about. “You just got out of a relationship, you need time to yourself.”
“No—I—” I stutter, but then quickly hold my tongue.
No, I’m not getting out of a relationship. I haven’t been in one in the longest time, in fact. But this might be the easiest way out of this tricky situation.
“You take the time you need,” Dean says sweetly. “But when you’re ready,” he shrugs, “it’d be my pleasure to take you out.”
“Thanks,” I say, turning my attention back to the machine.
I pour some milk and crank on the steam, mentally rolling my eyes at my ridiculous behavior.
Great going, Sophie! I think. You’re lying now! A nice guy asks you out on a date, and you’re just not interested, so you let him go on believing you’re suffering from a broken heart? Post-mortem break-up going on? Good grief! And you wonder why you’re dateless? Loveless?
“Light on the foam?” I ask loudly over the hissing of the steaming.
“You know it,” Dean says as he walks to his table.
Real good move, Sophie, I scold myself. Real good move.
Chapter Seventeen
“You’re crazy, girlfriend!” Jackie wails loudly over the quiet jazz music streaming from the iPod dock in my living room. “A guy asks you out on a date—single Sophie on a date—and you say no?! What are you smoking?”
“Stop it,” I say, carefully cutting out a picture of a swanky forest-green wingback chair from a magazine page. “If the spark’s not there, the spark’s not there.”
“Here,” Lara says. She reaches over me to retrieve a pair of scissors.
Jackie’s been pleading with all the girls to help her cut out pictures of interior decorating items for what she calls her “Inspiration Notebook.” She insisted that it was something all the girls did in her sorority when they wanted to redecorate their room, plan a party, even figure out what kind of gown to wear to the philanthropic ball. She’s certain it’ll help her with indecisive clients who don’t quite know what they want for their interior design project but aren’t fans of letting go and giving in to experimentation, allowing Jackie to work her magic unapproved.
I asked Jackie if she’d ever heard of Pinterest, and she told me to shut up and just cut.
“Oh, th
is book will look great!” Jackie gushes, looking fondly at the mess of cut-out images covering my large coffee table, some having floated to the carpet below. She excitedly claps her hands, scissors in one, a magazine page in the other.
“But not to get off topic.” Jackie points the scissors at me accusingly.
“Oh, Jack,” I moan. “Stop it or I’ll cut this picture all jig-jag.”
“You will not.” She purses her lips as she goes to work on her own cut-out. “You don’t have the balls.” She snickers. “Just like you don’t have the balls to go out on a date. Gaw.”
“Come on, Jack,” Lara says, pulling out that maternal card of hers. “Don’t pester her too much. If the guy’s not the right one, he’s not the right one.”
“Thanks, Lara,” I say.
“How will she ever know if he’s the right one if she’s not goin’ out on a date and hittin’ the sheets?” Jackie cackles loudly, tossing her head back in mirth.
“Whatevs, Jackie.” I finish cutting out the wingback chair, not a single crooked cut. “I’m just not…I don’t know…ready.”
“Well whatevs,” Jackie says all huffy as she retrieves a few magazines from her large Louis Vuitton handbag. “When you’re tired of cutting we can go back to searching. I brought tons of mags.” She waves the magazines about.
“Yes, please,” Lara says with a sigh. She immediately turns in her scissors for a copy of Design & Redesign. “My fingers are going to fall off.”
“I don’t even know why you’re waiting, Sophie, sitting around and passing on dates like this.” Jackie looks at me with a blank face. “I mean, what the hell are you waiting for? You think love’s just going to come a-knocking? You’ve got to search for it!” She slaps the top of the coffee table with vivaciousness. “Go after it, attack it, fight for it!”
“Damn,” Lara says, peering over her opened magazine. “Someone’s a tiger.”
“That’s right.” Jackie sits up higher on her legs, which are tucked underneath her in her seat on the floor. “You have nothing to lose by dating this Dean guy, right? It could be a nice way to get you back out on the market. You have been off the market for so long. I mean, when’s the last time you had sex, Sophie? You’ve probably forgotten how to do it!”
“Ha, ha. Whatever.” I try to dismiss the topic. “I’m not interested in Dean for sex, anyway.”
“Or for anything, I take it?” Lara says judiciously.
“Yeah.” I give a one-armed shrug. “I guess.”
“How about you go out on one date just to get to know him?” Jackie raises both brows inquisitively.
“I’ve gotten to know him, Jack. He’s at the café all the time. We’ve talked before. And,” I lean into the coffee table and point the scissors at Jackie, “if after all that I still have no interest in him…then…well…”
“Take a chance!”
“Take a chance?” I wag my head.
“We’ve all taken chances!” Jackie looks from me to Lara, who’s now abandoned her magazine and is looking at the both of us thoughtfully.
“Me with Andrew,” Jackie continues, “getting back together this summer! Major chance. Claire and Conner getting married! Robin and Bobby tying the knot, too. Marriage is one big chance. And Lara!” Her eyes dart back to Lara. “She’s taking a chance on Worth, even though that Nathan guy tore her heart out, the son-of-a-bitch-bastard. I so should have given him a real piece of my mind…slashed his tires, or—”
“Thanks, Jack,” Lara says with a flutter of the lashes.
Jackie crosses her arms over her chest and huffs and puffs a bit. Then she blurts out, “And after she shacked up with that Paul guy from work!”
“Thank you, Jackie,” Lara says, her words louder and more pronounced. “We get the picture.”
“She’s made some horrible choices along the way,” Jackie runs on.
I try my hardest to suppress a big burst of laughter at Lara’s growing exhaustion at hearing the run-down of her life’s less-than-stellar choices when it comes to the opposite sex.
“And I’ve made some horrible ones, too!” Jackie says, finally taking the heat off her BFF. “I’ve done a ton of jacked-up shit in my life, and I can’t even begin to tell you the number of lousy choices I’ve made, chances I’ve taken. But babe.” She rests a manicured hand on my arm. “Oh, Sophie, Sophie. If you don’t take those chances and risk something, even if it means your dignity, your virginity, or your homecoming crown, once upon a time.” She titters like a little girl. “If you don’t take a risk, you’ll end up living a half-lived life. Trust me, I know all about that.”
“Girls,” I sigh. I lean back against the sofa and cross my arms, sinking slightly further down in my position on the floor.
“She’s kind of got a point,” Lara says. “I mean, I disagree with a good seventy-five percent of what she’s spewing.” She puckishly tosses a wadded magazine page at Jackie. “But, she does have a point. It’s one date. One harmless date. If things truly aren’t going anywhere, then you can just tell Dean thanks but no thanks and move on.”
“At least you tried!” Jackie cuts in.
“Yeah,” Lara says with a nod, “at least you tried.”
“Make it a no-strings-attached kind of thing.” Jackie flashes me her bleach-white, million-dollar smile.
“I’m not sleeping with him, Jackie, if that’s what you’re hinting at.” I raise one brow.
“I’m not saying you need to test out those goods,” she defends with a groan. “Although that’s not the worst idea ever.” She simpers to herself. “Just a…you’ve-got-nothing-to-lose thing.”
“No strings, yeah,” Lara agrees. “You expect nothing, he expects nothing. Just—I don’t know—I guess let him know you’re not really looking for a relationship—”
“Liiiiie,” Jackie interrupts in a high-pitched, singsong voice. “You so want a relationship, Sophie. You want that L-O-V-E! I can see it in your eyes.”
“Whatever,” Lara brushes off, leaving Jackie to her own personal bout of giggles. “He expects nothing from the date, and you expect nothing from it; no-strings-attached. Nothing but fun and getting to know someone.”
“Yes!” Jackie shouts. She makes a fist and pumps it against her side. “Just fun!”
“Come on.” Lara opens her magazine, eyes still on me. “Think about it.”
“Fine,” I say at last. “But not until after Thanksgiving. The holidays are a busy time, and—”
“That’s just around the corner,” Jackie cuts in.
Lara says that’s right as Jackie presses with, “We have a deal then, yes? A no-strings-attached, crawling-out-of-your-hole, getting-some-action date in a couple of weeks?”
I pick up a loose cut-out from the floor and say, “I don’t like the idea.”
“Sophie,” Jackie drawls.
“Fine,” I say, reluctant. “Deal.”
It’s not like I haven’t done a no-strings-attached arrangement before, I think as I busy myself with a new cut-out. That just didn’t go as planned, that’s all. Sex was involved, so that was probably the problem. The thing totally spiraled out of control. But that’s okay, because I’ve learned from my mistakes. I can forge ahead a wiser and more experienced woman now.
I catch Lara’s eyes on mine over the top of her magazine, and I give a weak smile. “No strings attached, Sophie,” she says merrily. “And you’ve got weeks to think about it, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I say, but I think, I don’t need weeks to think about a no-strings-attached arrangement. All I need to do is close my eyes and remember.
Chapter Eighteen
Seven Years Ago, End of Summer in Seattle
It was the summer after my junior year in college. The start of the new school year was just around the corner. I could almost feel the nervous energy that always arises when the first multiple choice exam pops up; I could almost smell the sweet aroma of the fresh cut lawn that spread all over the University of Washington’s picturesque campus that ti
me of year; I could almost taste that first hamburger at the first tailgate of the Huskies football season. But first I’d taste the endings of summer. The bitter, sour, utterly humiliating endings of that summer.
“If you dare breathe a word of this to anyone, Chad Harris, anyone,” I rasped, shoving a pillow into his stomach. As angry as I was, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his chiseled abs. He even had what Claire and I liked to call “the Brad Pitts.” You know the kind? Those really V-shaped things at his hips—the chiseled love handles. The way the torso ripples with muscles and cuts at the waist, caving in and slimming way down and—
“Chill, Sophie,” Chad guffawed, tossing the pillow onto his bed, leaving himself once again completely exposed.
“Oh, god, please!” I held up a hand and turned my head away.
“You said a lot of that last night,” he said, chuckling some more.
“Please, for the love of god, put some clothes on!” I refused to turn around until he’d put on his boxers, his boxer-briefs, his tighty-whities, the pillow—anything!
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“And it’s nothing I want to see again.”
“Yeah, right…”
I could hear him rustling about. I sure hoped he was finding some clothes to put on.
I looked down at myself, wrapped up in a silky, champagne-colored sheet. “Oh, what is this, anyway?” I ran my fingers over the sheet’s smoothness.
“Expensive silk sheets,” he answered simply. “Wrapped around a sexy-as-hell woman.”
He strutted into view, and I quickly whipped my head around, letting out a small shriek, fearful he was enjoying humiliating me by walking about in all his nakedness.
He leaned into my view once more and sang, “I’m dressed. Chill, sweetie, okay?” He placed one strong hand on my hip and flashed a cocky smile.
When Girlfriends Find Love Page 13
