“A girl doesn’t say no to an invitation like that,” Tiff said.
There was no reason Jack was inviting everyone else to the pool house other than that he was rescuing her. Jack didn’t like people and wouldn’t normally welcome them into his private space.
He knew.
What could she do, though, but be grateful? What could she do but turn tail and head to her bedroom to wait out the storm?
Chapter 17
More Cahoots
When, a few days after Thanksgiving, Jack suggested they knock off the last episode ofThe Bear, Blair said she had to work late. She couldn’t afford for him to get any deeper into her head.
Blair:I have to work tonight, sorry.
She was being weird. Normally she would have teased him about initiating watching TV, even if she had to decline the invitation. She started typing something to that end, but his answer came in before she could hit send.
Jack:OK.
Jack was being weird, too. She would have expected him to question her, to try to persuade her. She had been prepared to tell him she had never gotten her year-end stuff done, which wasn’t even a lie.
His easy agreement confirmed that he was onto her.
But what could she do but keep her distance and work on resetting herself? This was her third bout with the cyclone. Both other times—after her deb ball and during COVID lockdowns—she’d found her footing again. In each case, she’d weathered a few monthsof storms, but eventually she’d come out the other side. She had to trust she would this time, too.
She and Jack had been taking their morning walks, but Blair kept them brisk and mostly silent. There was precedent for that. Historically, sometimes they talked on those walks, and sometimes they didn’t.
She missed him, though. Which was a strange thing to think about someone she was walking next to daily, but it was true.
But when the second week of December rolled around, she had to get over herself. If she was going to throw an entire freaking Christmas party as a stealth opportunity to get Jack to sing, she was going to have to actually invite Jack to said stealth Christmas party.
Of course, she was also throwing the party to meet her self-imposed goals. She had done the restaurant. Now on to the party. She hadn’t had an episode since Thanksgiving. Maybe this season of the cyclone was passing and she was finally on the upswing.
So, in a fit of hopefully not misplaced optimism, she marched over to the pool house and rapped on Jack’s door, and, oof, when he opened it, there he was.
There he was.
Listen to her. Of course there he was. He lived there.
But damn, he was wearing the ratty Prince T-shirt, and he was just so… compellingly disheveled. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him on the morning walks, but… she hadn’t really seen him. She’d avoided looking directly at him, had walked ahead of him more often than not.
“Hey,” he said, as if everything were normal between them.
Maybe everythingwasnormal. Maybe Jack didn’t think about her as much as she thought he did.
She sucked in a breath. “OK, listen, I am here to invite you to a Christmas party, don’t get mad, but it would be great if you couldcome, it’s Friday, just a smallish affair, and as I told Tiffany, every party needs a grinch, she might have that covered, but we all know you do, too, I know you don’t want to, but do it anyway, OK?”
Wow, holy run-on sentence, Batman.
“OK,” Jack said.
“It’s a Christmas caroling party.” She smirked. “It’ll be exactly your thing. There’s going to be a champagne bar.”
Wait. She’d kept talking as if he’d said no, as if she’d needed to convince him. It had taken her brain a moment to process that he’d accepted the invitation.
“I’m not sure what part of a Christmas caroling party you think is exactly my thing.”
“The singing part.”
