Flirting with Forever

by Cara Bastone

  “That was last night!” Richie realized, nearly pouring an entire mug of tepid coffee all over his pants as he swung around to face John. “How’d it go? I’m guessing if you’re dodging your mother’s calls, it was a bust. Didn’t Estrella swear this was going to be a love match? Your future wife?” Richie slugged back half the mug of stale coffee without even a wince, something that all good public defenders learned how to do at some point or another.

  “It was a waste of a swipe,” John grumbled, referring to the MetroCard fare for the two trains he’d taken to get to that ridiculous restaurant.

  “Why?” Richie asked nosily, slugging back the rest of the coffee. “Was she boring? Rude to the waiter?” He leaned in and theatrically whispered, “Was she one of those horrible people who blow their noses into cloth napkins?”

  John laughed and shook his head. “No. No. There was nothing wrong with her.” As far as he could tell. Actually, as far as he could tell, she was pretty much the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in his life. He’d spent the whole forty feet of her walk across that restaurant attempting to believe that she was actually there for him. It couldn’t be. Mothers didn’t set up their sons with movie-star beauties. And then that smile. Gah. His heart barely beat that hard when he went jogging. He’d considered it a miracle that he hadn’t upended his water glass onto his pants or something idiotic like that. No. He’d made a fool of himself in a different way. A considerably worse way. Him and his clumsy freaking mouth. Guilt lanced through him. “It’s just—Dating is a waste of time for me right now. I’m not in the position to...do that.”

  “For someone who is so unbelievably articulate in the courtroom, you sure have a lovely way with words when it comes to yourself,” Richie said drily.

  John pushed the pads of his fingers against his forehead as if he could massage through the bone and straight into the headache that always seemed to brew right there. “I play enough mind games at work to want to do that in my free time.”

  “Ah,” Richie said with a sage nod. “Say no more. She was one of those.”

  Richie had already turned back to his desk, and John usually took every opportunity of averted attention from his chatty officemate to get as much work done as possible, but something about Richie’s words made him pause.

  “One of whats?” he asked Richie’s back and then silenced another one of his mother’s phone calls.

  “A game player. Someone who has their own set of rules. Who sets traps and then greedily rubs their hands together when they watch you fall ass-first right into them. Trust me, I know the type. Sounds like you dodged a bullet.”

  Still a little stymied by his friend’s assessment, John turned back around and woke up the twelve-year-old monitor that sat like a heavy, judgmental toad on his desk.

  John considered himself to be an excellent judge of character—you kind of had to be in a courtroom—and that had not been how Mary Trace had seemed to him. But at thirty-one years old, with a grand total of one and three-quarters girlfriends in his entire life, John wasn’t exactly an expert on women. Maybe Richie was right.

  His computer belched an error message at him and John groaned, his mind getting pulled back to the task at hand.

  Seven hours later, he emerged from the Brooklyn Supreme Court onto Jay Street, his messenger bag over his aching shoulder and his suit coat over one arm to keep it from getting wrinkled. It was that fleeting time of year in Brooklyn when there was very little difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures. The eight o’clock breeze kissed him through his cotton dress shirt. Welcome to the world, John.

  Unfortunately, most of his world existed within the walls of the building behind him. These brief, warm-breezed, pre-sunset moments were simply the garnish at the edge of his plate. The real meat and potatoes lived inside the messenger bag slung across his hip. He strode purposefully toward the subway, ignoring the siren’s call of Shake Shack, and jogged down the dingy yellow-painted stairs to his train.

  Forty minutes later, he emerged in his neighborhood, the sun already down and a deep regret lodged in his gut that he’d talked himself out of fast food. All he had waiting for him in his fridge were salad fixings and half of last night’s veggie stir-fry. Oh, joy.

  John thought about calling his mother on the walk to his apartment but decided to wait until after he’d fortified himself with dinner.

  He had just let himself into his third-floor apartment when a colorful blur snagged his attention. Actually, it was two colorful blurs. John’s mother, in a bright purple dress, her salt-and-pepper hair piled up on her head, stomped out from his kitchen, holding John’s cat, Ruth, who scrabbled and wheeled in Estrella’s arms, attempting to get away.

  “Ma,” he said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  His stomach plummeted.

  She’d found out what had happened on the date.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “KYLIE, GRAB THOSE two pink boxes from the storeroom, will you?” Mary called over her shoulder as she attempted to balance two armfuls of paper flowers she was about to place in the window of her homegoods shop. Mary had owned and operated Fresh on her own for almost five years now. And today was the day she got to put up her June window display, maybe her favorite of the entire year. She loved the chintz and glitz of the Christmas display as well, but in June she really let her flower flag fly. She let the colors clash and the fake greenery overfloweth. Mary loved the unabashed cheer of it.

  “Can’t find them!” Kylie, her teenage part-time assistant, called from the back of the store.

  “Maybe they’re purple boxes?” Mary shouted back. “They’re filled with the...you know...whatever you call those thingies.”

  Mary lost every word in her head as one of the most devastatingly beautiful men she’d ever seen in her life walked past the front window of her shop. Tall, wiry and broad-shouldered, he had light brown hair and was wearing a construction vest to boot. He looked like he’d walked out of a porn that Mary herself had cast. The man did a double take at Mary checking him out through the shop window, shooting her a cheeky grin as he walked.

  Damn. “Better than a shot of Red Bull,” Mary muttered to herself.

  “Do you mean the red boxes filled with the fake grass?” Kylie called.

  Setting the paper flowers down in a heap in the window, Mary walked back to the storeroom to help out Kylie. After half a minute of searching, Mary found what she was looking for.

  “Ah,” Kylie said drily. “You meant the blue boxes filled with the mason jars. How could I have possibly misunderstood?”

  Mary laughed. “Sorry. Got distracted by a hottie walking past.”

  Though there was more than twenty years of an age difference between them, Mary and Kylie were closer to friends than they were boss and employee. When Kylie had come to live with her half brother, Tyler Leshuski, one of Mary’s best friends in the world, around last Thanksgiving, Mary had offered her a job in the shop. Both as a way to discreetly keep an eye on her when Tyler was at work and as a way to get to know Kylie. She hadn’t expected the kid to be so freaking helpful. Seriously, Kylie worked less than fifteen hours a week and got more done than Mary’s other two employees combined.

  Mary’s phone dinged in her pocket and she tugged it out to make sure it wasn’t one of her artisans contacting her. It was just an email from her mother. The subject line was “Time Sensitive, Please Read Immediately.” Mary clicked into the email and was surprised when her molars didn’t crack down their meridians. It was an article about the drastic drop in a woman’s fertility after the age of thirty. Apparently her mother meant the phrase time sensitive in the cosmic sense. She deleted the email without reading the article.

  The front bell on the shop jingled and Kylie peeked her head out the storeroom door. She ducked back in. “Was your hottie wearing a construction vest?”


  “Eep! Is he out there?” All thoughts of her meddling mother evaporated away.

  “Sure is. I’m gonna...grab lunch for us.” Kylie scampered toward the back door.

  “Charge it to the company card!” Mary hollered before she smoothed her hair, sat a box of the jars on her hip and left the storeroom with a big old smile on her face. “Hi there, can I help you with anything?”

  The man, who’d been leaning over to inspect a series of ceramic clocks that Mary had arranged along one wall, straightened up and grinned at her. Damn, he really was attractive. Tall and smiley. Just like she liked.

  “Just, ah, looking. I guess,” he said, his eyes quickly tracing over her.

  Mary smiled harder. She wore tight jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt with flowers embroidered over both shoulders and brown high-heeled boots up to her knees. Her hair, naturally wavy, was behaving nicely today. “You’re welcome to look,” she said, setting the box of mason jars down at the window display and starting to arrange huge handfuls of mismatched paper flowers into them.

  “Never seen your shop before,” the man said in a smooth baritone. “You been here long?”

  “Five years now. You must not live in the neighborhood.”

  “Guilty. We—I’m up in Queens.” He had his hands shoved in his pockets and a slightly chagrined look on his handsome face when Mary turned back around.

  She hadn’t missed the accidental “we.” She clocked him at about thirty-five years old. Definitely old enough to be married.

  “You and your wife?” she guessed.

  His cheeks went pink. “Ah. Ex-wife. Force of habit to say ‘we,’ I guess.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” She meant it too. She’d never been married, but she’d seen enough of her friends’ marriages dissolve to know just how much it could screw up somebody’s life.

  “Don’t be.” He shrugged. “Long time coming. The name’s James, by the way.”

  “Mary.”

  “Well, Mary, pretty cool selection of, um, these thingies you have here.”

  She laughed, finding his bumbling, blushing manner to be pretty freaking cute. “Those are napkin rings.”

  James puttered around the shop as Mary worked on the window display, the two of them idly chatting about the knickknacks that she sold and his construction work on a brownstone three blocks over. He was glancing her way an awful lot, and Mary was starting to feel a little blushy. He was just so dang good-looking. A buzz started in her gut.

  In her early twenties, she never, ever used to ask a man out. Her mother’s training had been clear. It was a man’s job to do that. Being too forward would only emasculate him.

  Cora was the one who’d helped her see that if a man was emasculated, that was his problem, not hers. In her midtwenties, Mary had started to ask people out. That didn’t mean that it was any less scary now than it used to be.

  Her cheeks went hot and so did her palms as she turned to James. “I was wondering, James...”

  He turned to her, a complicated expression on his face.

  The bell jingled on the front door, but Mary didn’t turn around to see who’d come in.

  “Would you want to grab dinner with me sometime?” she finished, hoping her voice didn’t carry to whoever had just entered her shop.

  “Oh,” James said in that same smooth voice that had been making Mary’s stomach flip for the last fifteen minutes. He took a step closer to her and tugged a hand through his hair. It was then that Mary saw the flash of gold. On his left hand.

  Right. Rightrightrightrightright.

  “When I said ex-wife,” he mumbled, his eyes flicking behind her toward the newcomer in the shop, “I probably should have said soon-to-be ex-wife. But we’re, yeah, in mediation and I probably shouldn’t...”

  She refused to be the one who was embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. But she still couldn’t stop the flood of heat in her cheeks. And sure enough, here came the underboob sweat. Like freaking clockwork.

  “Oh. Okay.” She rose up from where she’d been crouching to arrange the flowers, still holding a few of them in her hands. “That’s fine. Good luck with all that.”

  James stepped forward. He seemed to be purposefully ignoring the other shopper. “I didn’t mean to mislead you or anything. You’re just so pretty and I was having such a bad day until you smiled at me.”

  Ugh. Did he have to be so cute? “It’s totally fine. Good luck with everything!” She gave him a bright smile so that he wouldn’t continue this apology that was only allowing embarrassment to dig its claws more forcefully into her.

  “Right,” he mumbled. “You too.” And then he ambled out of the shop, shooting Mary a fairly miserable look through the shop window as he went back the way he’d come.

  Mary resisted the urge to crumple up into a raisin and die and turned to the new customer with a sunny smile on her face.

  She’d once stood on a curb when a cab had driven past and splashed muddy puddle water all over her new Anthropologie skirt. This was pretty much the emotional equivalent of that.

  Because standing in her shop was a sympathetic-looking Estrella and a bitingly disdainful-looking John, his elbow firmly in his mother’s grip.

  The smile vaporized off Mary’s face and she just sort of stared at them. If there had been one person on God’s spinning earth that Mary would not have wanted to see her ask out a married man and be rejected, it would be John Modesto-Whitford. The memory of his surly judgment two nights ago was painfully fresh in Mary’s mind. She didn’t let that kind of thing get too under her skin, but this one definitely hadn’t quite healed over yet.

  “Mary!” Estrella said brightly, obviously determined to ignore the romantic crash and burn they’d just witnessed. “How are you? The shop looks beautiful as always. You know John, my son. He was taking his mother out to lunch around the corner and I wanted him to see your lovely shop.”

  Mary’s eyes flicked over to the man in the black slacks, white dress shirt and dark blue tie. And yup, shiny wingtips. It was Saturday, for God’s sake! How deep into the wingtip cult did a man have to be to wear wingtips on a Saturday?

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” John returned in a voice that was a bit scratchy, two-toned almost.

  “I’m going to quick run to the USPS up the block,” Estrella chirped. “Mary, do you have a second to show John your shop?”

  Estrella didn’t wait for an answer before she ducked toward the front door, nudging her son forward at the same time.

  And then there was nothing but echoing silence in the wake of Estrella’s departure. John blinked at Mary. Mary blinked at John.

  “Well,” Mary said, gesturing around her with the flowers she just now realized were still in her hands. “This is my shop. You’re welcome to take a look around. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  Mary felt his eyes on her as she turned back to the window display and started messing around with the bouquets she’d already put together. They’d been bright and haphazard and happy only moments before, but suddenly they looked messy and lazy to her. Maybe she should start over.

  She could tell that John hadn’t moved from where he stood in her front entryway, and she could still feel his eyes on her back.

  “Mary,” he said a moment later in that double-layered voice of his. How had she not noticed his voice the other night? It was so distinct. “My mother and I weren’t eating lunch around the corner.”

  Mary instantly decided that each vase of flowers was utter, cheery perfection exactly as they were. Screwing with them too much was bound to wring the magic out of them, like water from a sponge. She picked up an armful of the jars and began to set them around the shop. The rest she’d arrange in the window. “Oh?”

  John cleared his throat. “She told me that the two of you talked about our, uh, date.”

 
Mary whirled and was lucky that none of those jars actually had water in them because she would have been soaked down to her toes if they had. “I didn’t rat you out or anything. I just told her that—”

  “That you didn’t have a good time. I know. It’s fine, Mary. You were honest with her. And she showed up at my house last night, spitting mad, because she says that Mary Trace always has a good time, no matter what she’s doing, and if she didn’t have a good time, then it must be my fault. And if it’s my fault, then I owe you an apology.” John traced his wide hands outward, palms up. “So, here I am.”

  Mary frowned. “Your mother dragged you to my shop to apologize to me?”

  He grimaced, and for just a flash, that surly face had the grace to look a tiny bit chagrined. “I came willingly.”

  “She had you by the elbow when you came in here,” Mary said, arching an eyebrow.

  His mouth turned down. “I wanted to wait outside the shop while you had another customer. My mother didn’t have any qualms about that.”

  Mary blushed, embarrassed all over again about James the married man. “Right.”

  John glanced out through her front window, his eyebrows furrowed down, though not as aggressively as she knew he was capable of. His hands were pushed into his pockets.

  “Look, Mary. You were more right than my mother is. I’m not a nice boy. Although at thirty-one, I like to think I’ve graduated from not a nice boy to not a nice man.”

  She cocked her head to one side as she studied him. He seemed older than thirty-one. His dark, neatly parted hair was so shiny that she realized it gave the illusion of silver, but it was actually just a full head of black hair. And the lines around his eyes were more likely from fatigue than they were from age.

  He cleared his throat, those bright blue eyes stuck on her face. “I’m busy and grumpy and preoccupied and...rude. But none of that is an excuse for making you feel bad. So, I apologize. Really, I do. I’m sorry, Mary. I’m sorry for the mess I made of the other night. And I’m sorry I was rude.”

  Oh. That was actually a good apology. None of that fast-dancing, zero-vulnerability, I’m-sorry-if-your-feelings-were-hurt-by-my-actions crap. That was a real apology. He’d admitted he was rude.