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“Come on in,” Mira says brightly. “You cracked the code. We only welcome people who come with acceptable offerings.”
I step inside and shut the door behind me. “You’re going to give me a bigger ego if you applaud me for something so simple. I’m told my ego doesn’t need any help.”
“You underestimate how much I hate being cold,” she says, making a grab for the bag. I hand it over immediately. “My ankle still throbs like a motherfucker when it’s cold.”
She broke it several months back and only got her cast off a few weeks ago.
“Who said that to you, anyway?” she adds. “Was it Ruthie?”
The corners of my mouth tip up without any conscious effort on my part. “How’d you guess?”
“Danny told me about your super mysterious collaboration with her.” Speaking of Danny, my buddy steps into view from the back of the apartment. He’s wearing his reading glasses and has the squint-eyed look of someone who’s already been on the computer for a couple of hours. “I told him you were—”
Danny gives her a significant glance, and she cuts herself off and mimes zipping her lips. He smiles slightly and shakes his head. “Nope, I don’t believe you.”
She shrugs, uncaring. “You probably shouldn’t. You know I’m terrible at keeping my mouth shut. Anyway, who wants pastries? I’ll make more coffee too. You can never have too much coffee.”
“You did,” Danny insists, wrapping an arm around her hips before releasing her.
“Yes, but I’m going to have more.”
“I’ll have some,” I say. Because I’m working on maybe two hours of sleep. I felt a strange compulsion to stay awake at Ruthie’s house, probably because I knew that if I fell asleep I might not wake up in time to leave. Or at least that’s all I’m willing to admit to. It would be more disturbing to my peace to consider the possibility that I’d done it purposefully, so I could memorize the feeling of her curled up next to me, her hand on my chest.
“Thank you,” Danny says with a grin at his girlfriend. “Otherwise Mira’s going to drink it all, and she’ll decide we have to go ice skating or something.”
“Ice skating?” Mira repeats. She leans over and gives him a hug. “Look at you giving me great ideas.”
“I fell into that,” he says with a half-smile, but he doesn’t seem at all sorry for it. That’s interesting given that I’ve been ice skating with him before, and he hated everything about the experience, from the slickness of the ice to the way the skates fit his feet.
It strikes me, not for the first time, that he’s a different man with her. More confident. More at peace.
I feel an uncomfortable wriggling sensation inside of me, because I’m going to have to break that peace.
Better to pull it off like a Band-Aid, advice I’ve always believed in but haven’t always followed.
“Can we talk for a minute, bud?” I ask Danny.
“Aren’t you talking now?” Mira asks, then laughs and waves a hand at my imagined objection. “I get it, you want to talk privately. I’m cool with that. Why don’t you go out on the deck and sit near the space heater.”
“Thanks.” Danny leads the way, and I follow him, my heart thumping erratically in my chest.
He switches on the space heater, and we settle in the chairs we’ve occupied hundreds of times, maybe thousands.
The feeling of I fucked up is getting more powerful—a throbbing that overtakes even the euphoria of last night. Of the feeling of happiness it lit deep in my chest, in a place most things don’t touch.
We’re quiet for a moment, and then my friend turns to me, eyebrows raised. “I’m guessing you didn’t come over here to ask me if I have a plan for the proposal yet.”
“No,” I admit, “but you can tell me if you want.”
His mouth twitches. “I’m going to do it in the elevator, obviously.”
Obvious, because he and Mira got stuck in an elevator together for two hours last fall, and are probably together because of it.
“Appropriate,” I say with a laugh. “You going to arrange for it to stop too?”
“You’re not the only one who can make things happen,” he says, messing with the arm of his chair. “I told the building super, and he gave me the green light to use the stop button as long as we’re the only two people on it. As if I’d propose in a full elevator.” He angles his head. “So, what’s up? I could tell something was on your mind the other afternoon, but I figured you’d tell me in your own time.”
He had? That means my poker face is off, and if my poker face is fried, I’m fried with it. A lawyer is only as good as their ability to hide emotion—or at least that’s what Myles told me. Given he’s such a successful asshole, I have to imagine he was correct. Then again, I’m going to be defending a psychic and probably helping with some property deals, so I’m guessing it’s unnecessary for me to be on my A-game immediately at Freeman & Daniels. Maybe the poker face is something I can reclaim, just like the dignity I lost in my old job.
