by Sara Celi
Damn it. I was not going to let an ex-boyfriend affect me this way.
Was I?
“So, you dated Nick, right?” James asked once Trip’s best man finished his elongated story about some crazy childhood fishing expedition. “And he broke your heart, or you broke his. Either way, it ended badly.”
I fumbled with another piece of the dessert. “Something like that. It was a long time ago, and I thought I was fine, but—” I shook my head. “Forget it.” Then I smiled at him. “Let’s just have fun tonight, okay?”
James studied me. “I have a better idea.”
“Which is?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Absolutely. Right now.”
I liked this woman. I did.
Which was probably why I was staring at her as we walked along the public beach that night, after we’d escaped the hotel and the rehearsal dinner. We carried our shoes in our hands, and the water beat a calming rhythm against the sand.
“Nice night for a walk,” I said, searching for something to say.
Margot chuckled to herself. “That’s a movie quote, I think. From the eighties.”
“It is?”
“Mm-hmm.” She knitted her brow. “I can’t place which one, but yes, it is.”
“Well, either way, it’s true.”
For the last ten minutes or so, we’d walked alongside the municipal beach that started near the foot of Worth Avenue and traced up and down the coastline. To our left, the waves crashed and churned. To our right, multi-million-dollar homes sat like cupcakes in a perfect display. And above us, a clear night sky.
“So, this is better?” I asked. “You certainly seem calmer.”
“I am.” She moved her shoes from one hand to the other, and it wasn’t lost on me that this freed up her hand closest to mine. I glanced in its direction and felt another twinge of electricity pass between us.
Things were changing, and even someone as dense as I was could feel that. My final time under the knife of the plastic surgeon had been when I was twenty-one. My confidence had been knocked around. Teenage kids could be cruel. I’d fucked around in college, had a few girlfriends like any other guy. But for some reason, Margot’s comments about my looks made an impact. She thought I believed I was some good-looking, model-worthy man who had women tripping all over me. But I wasn’t. Not for some time anyway.
So I wouldn’t take her hand. Not yet.
“What do you think of Palm Beach?” She moved closer to the shoreline and let the water lap at her feet. “Do you like it?”
“Yes.” I regarded the nearest beach house, a columned Italianate offering that could have been the backdrop for an expensive movie. That house alone looked like it cost millions, but it fit with the other opulent homes on the street. “This part of Florida is unique. Like nothing I’ve seen, really.”
“What parts have you been to?”
I thought about it.
“Orlando, of course, and Jacksonville. When I was a kid, the big thing in our part of town was to go to Panama City for spring break. Everyone went together and met there.” I wrinkled my nose. “I hate that, but hey, it was a beach, right? I was lucky enough to get that.”
She laughed. “Spring break, Panama City. Somehow, I can’t see you there.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated.
“What? It’s too commercialized for a guy like me?”
“Well, you’re so artsy, and I”—she laughed to herself— “I just can’t visualize it.”
“Try to. Because it happened.”
We stopped walking and turned toward the ocean. The Atlantic was calm that night, and the saltwater lapped at our toes. In the distance, a few ships lit up the evening sky.
“My parents weren’t big on doing things out of the box,” I said after a moment. “They’re typical suburban folks. Did what was easy.” I shrugged. “And going to Panama City with everyone else was easy.”
“But you wanted more than that.”
“I did.” Placing my shoes on the sand, I shoved my hands in my trouser pockets. “So, I rebelled against them, I guess, and got a graphics design degree instead of the reliable engineering one they expected. And once I moved away, I stayed away. Of course, now I have the gallery, so”—I spread a hand—“that makes it easy to stay gone.”
“That’s sad,” she murmured.
“Why? You moved away, and the last I noticed, you’re not rushing back to Tarrytown any time soon.”
“Well, but I—”
“How is it different?”
“I guess it isn’t. You’re so successful with the gallery, and I would think they would be more supportive of that.”
“I guess they are in their own way.” I rocked back and forth on my feet. “They don’t hate it. It just took them a long time to understand it. They had always envisioned that I’d become an attorney or work in finance, because those jobs pay well. Even engineering.” A small laugh escaped my lips. “You should have heard my mom growing up, always saying that an electrical engineering degree was the direct route to a stable future. Gallery owner wasn’t close to what she wanted.”
We stood at the shoreline for a long time, studying the waves. The rhythm of the ocean soothed me. I should take more beach vacations. But of course, I always had a decent reason—money, college, not enough time to take off, the time it took to run a small business, and countless others.
Still, here I stood, enjoying myself for the first time in a long time, and standing next to a woman who intrigued me more than the others who’d recently crossed my path.
I glanced at Margot. The moonlight coming off the water gave her face a glow, and it softened her already beautiful features. “You know who you remind me of?”
“Who?”
“Sophia Loren.”
“What?” She laughed once. “I look nothing like her. She didn’t have red hair.”
“You do, hair color or not. You have the same cheekbones.”
“Isn’t she like eighty?”
“Not her now.” This compliment wasn’t going the way that I expected. I sighed. “Her then. In the sixties.”
“In her sixties?”
“No.” I chuckled to myself. “The sixties. When she was in films with Clark Gable and Charlton Heston.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a Sophia Loren movie. I know who she is, of course, but I’ve never watched one of her films. Certainly not the older ones.”
“Well, they’re very good. She was an international star for a reason.”
Margot frowned. “Do you like old movies?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Something about them. It was a simpler era for movie-making. Now, everything is so computer-generated and fake. Back then, they had to build the sets and really think about things like how the backdrop would look with various lights. They couldn’t get away with it through computers or editing tricks. Making a good movie took skill.”
“What would you say is your favorite one?”
I thought about her question as I bent down and picked a few small seashells out of the sand. “Citizen Kane.”
She puffed out a quick breath. “Why am I not surprised? Everyone likes that movie.”
“Because it’s a masterpiece.”
“Isn’t it about the myth of the American dream? That’s what every critic says.”
I tossed a shell out in the tide. It skipped over the water then sank into the abyss. “You’ve never seen it, have you?”
She shook her head.
“You’re missing out, Margot.” I threw another shell into the ocean. “Missing out on a lot.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s all about how hard it is to sum up someone’s life after they die. That people are complex and complicated and don’t fit into neat little boxes.” I threw another seashell into the water. “The main character isn’t always bad, but he isn’t good, either. He’s a flawed individual. Just like eve
ryone else.”
“Sounds like I need to see it.”
“You should.” I turned to her. “Maybe we can watch it together sometime.”
“I’d like that,” she said, her gaze fixed on mine.
And there it was again—the moment. The energy. The shift in the space between us. A breath where time slowed down, and I knew she wanted something more than what I had already given her. She wanted me to kiss her, to take her in my arms and claim her with my mouth.
She wanted us to step beyond friendship and into the realm of something more.
More than that, I wanted it too.
But instead, I said, “I’ve been thinking about something. When we get back to Cincinnati, how about you come work for me?”
The breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding left my lungs in a hot rush. “What?”
“As my social media manager. Well, not mine. As the manager for the gallery. We could use your skills and your eye for the latest ideas. You know what you’re talking about, and frankly, neither the rest of the staff or I have the time to do any of it.”
“Social media manager?”
“You’re good at it. You know you are. Look at all you’ve done with the @sociakitten account, for one. You know how to build a following, and we don’t have a huge one on social media. The gallery has recently done well, but I don’t want to the fire to go out. We need to step it up.” He moved closer to me. “And that’s where you come in. Can’t you see it? It’s perfect.”
I opened my mouth then closed it. Good grief, here it was again—a time when I had totally misread the moment and misinterpreted every signal by someone. Here I’d been thinking he wanted to take a walk by the ocean to get me alone, to cross the barrier between friends and something more. And instead, he offered me a job. It also sounded like the job I’d hoped to find—one that kept me on social media all day long and allowed me to be creative.
But I didn’t want to work for James. I wanted to date James.
I was such a damn fool.
“Um …” I struggled to find an answer to his offer. It was generous, of course, and intriguing enough, and at any other moment I would have probably accepted it without any further thought.
But this wasn’t any normal moment.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said, then broke his gaze and turned my attention back to the rolling Atlantic. Why am I so bad at reading men? I could have sworn he seemed into me. “It sounds good, but I’m—”
“I hope you’ll take the job, Margot. Whatever you were making at WCIN, I can probably match it. And we have benefits. It’s not a lot, but it’s pretty good health insurance, along with two weeks of vacation and paid holidays.”
If I’d been thinking anything at all was passing between us, anything deeper than friendship, it was gone now. If James thought of me as a possible future girlfriend, the last thing he’d do would be to employ me. That was the cliché no-no in every romance I had ever read. No dating the boss.
“Sounds wonderful.” About as wonderful as sharp seashells slicing my bare feet. I didn’t try to hide the flatness or the disappointment in my voice. “I’ll think it over.”
“Good.” James pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. “It’s just after ten.” He jerked his head in the direction of Worth Avenue. “Want to head back?”
“Sure,” I said, still unsure what bothered me more: my epic misread of the connection between us, or the way this evening walk had turned from a scene in a romance movie to a job offer. I sighed. “Let’s go.”
We turned and headed back to the hotel. Once we arrived, we took the elevator in silence and headed to our shared room. I searched for my least sexy T-shirt and black yoga pants, which I wore to bed along with a sports bra and underwear. When we slid beneath the covers that night, I gripped the sheets like a life raft.
He’d never said we were anything more. All the compliments in the world, and all the snappy banter we could find wouldn’t mean we’d ever get anywhere past the dreaded friend zone. As I drifted to sleep, I sent up a few silent curses, scolding myself for being so stupid.
He’d called me beautiful, said I looked like Sophia Loren. But that was where any hope ended. I may have been beautiful to him, but once again, it seemed I’d never be enough for anyone to want more. I’d never be that girl. Like Julie, who tomorrow would rub her happiness and successful match in my face to her bitter heart’s content. I may not be sitting at the singles table, but I had thought I’d feel less alone and pathetic with a gorgeous man by my side. The joke was on me.
Thirty pounds lighter or not, I still wasn’t enough.
The following afternoon, I continued to ruminate about James’s offer, and how something between us felt lost in translation. I wanted a boyfriend; he wanted a friend and employee.
What a screwup.
“Oh, Julie, that color nail polish will go so well with your jewelry,” Karen, one of Julie’s bridesmaids, exclaimed in a high voice that grated on my eardrums. “I love that blue. Something old, something new something borrowed—”
“Something blue,” everyone else in the room exclaimed. We’d all gathered in a large two-bedroom suite on the top floor of the hotel for a hair, makeup, breakfast, and “girl talk.” It had started at eleven with scones and a small buffet, followed by an array of spa treatments featuring exotic products.
“Something borrowed, something blue, something borrowed, something blue,” repeated a few of the bridesmaids, as if it was a sorority chant. Then they began working out a hand clap to go with the words.
I bit the back of my bottom lip to keep from rolling my eyes. This was Julie’s day, and I had to keep sending myself silent reminders about that. I might disagree with her, and even find plenty of reasons why I didn’t like her, but that didn’t stop her from being my cousin, and she still deserved to be happy when she got married. My job, along with everyone else’s, was to make sure that happened.
Right then, that meant complimenting her choice of bright blue fingernail polish.
Karen instructed all the bridal party in the room to gather for yet another photo she wanted to post on Instagram, this time with all of us wearing our bridal party bathrobes and holding glasses of mimosas. I was two drinks in already, so I didn’t object to her demand.
“We should have given the wedding a hashtag,” Karen mumbled as she scanned the app filters on her phone. “Hmm—”
“There’s still time to think of one,” I said as the hairstylist gave my locks a final coat of hairspray strong enough to punch a hole in the ozone layer. Just like the bridesmaids, I had extensions in my hair, tight ringlets around my hairline, and a fascinator of blue and white flowers behind my ear. “How about Tripping into Love?”
“Oh, I love that,” Julie said after a dainty sip of champagne. “That is perfect.”
“It is,” Karen agreed. “I’m totally using that. We should have thought of that a long time ago.”
“Thank you,” Julie said, and I realized it was probably the first time in her life that she’d said that to me with any sincerity. “You always think of the best things.”
“You’re welcome. I’m really excited for you, and you look gorgeous.”
I meant the sentiment. Julie did look beautiful. Apart from the blue nail polish, the hair and makeup artists hired for her big day had done masterful work: her hair had a mass of curls that offset her veil and her makeup made her features appear inviting, soft, and well rested. She would rock her wedding day.
If she didn’t get too drunk first.
“Look at the time,” I said, with a quick glance at my cell phone. “I should probably head downstairs.”
Julie leaned into me, expecting a quick kiss on the cheek, which I gave her. “Just remember to be there at three forty-five, so we aren’t late.”
“I won’t miss it.” I gave her another quick once-over. “And it is going to be a beautiful wedding. See you then.”
Relieved to have a few m
oments to myself, I slipped out of the suite and headed to the elevator. I rode it to the room, changed into the first thing I found, and headed to the pool bar. I collapsed onto one of the sofas that lined the deck. From there, I had a view of the lawn, the water, and the sun.
I savored the time alone because it gave me time to think. I ordered a club soda from a passing bartender and slid my sunglasses over my eyes.
Did I want to take the job at the gallery? In many ways, I did.
It would be easy and fun. I wouldn’t have to think much to do it, and for the first time in my career, I’d get to make decisions without a team of consultants coming in to switch up strategies two times a year, all so they could get a tremendous payment from management at the TV station. A job as a social media manager at one of the buzziest spots in town would give @socialkitten some serious street credit. Working at Gallery 29 would also mean no change at all in my lifestyle, and perhaps a decrease in expenses. I’d walk to work, keep normal hours, and not endure the stress of breaking news.
Plus, it meant working every day with James.
James Newhouse, the man of mystery. James Newhouse, the guy who kept me guessing. James Newhouse, the man who teased me only to put me in the friend zone.
And James Newhouse, the first guy I’d been more than passingly attracted to since Nick.
Ugh.
He had to go and do this to me, didn’t he?
The bartender arrived with my club soda. I thanked him then sucked down a third of it in the hopes of counteracting the drinking I’d been doing for the last hour. I wanted to return to my room with clarity and control. I needed both of those things, and I often found them in short supply around James.
Maybe this weekend had been a mistake. I could have come to the wedding alone and suffered through it. It wouldn’t have changed much if I’d done that; I still would have returned to Cincinnati in the friend zone, instead of the “more” zone, and he could have offered me the job when he saw me around the apartment complex, instead of blurting it out as we walked on the beach. I thought back to my non-response to his offer, and the sinking feeling that had ripped through my stomach as it became apparent he would not be kissing me.
