AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I followed his eyes up to the sky, which was cloudless and calm. “It doesn’t seem that way,” I said.
Jacob started walking again, slowly moving toward the house. “It never does.”
He paused.
“I feel like we’re going to get all the way to your parents’ house without me saying the thing I think would be the most helpful in regards to Ben,” Jacob said.
“You have a thing?”
“I have a thing,” he said.
“Go for it.”
“If you’re not careful, you run out of time.”
I tried to figure out what he meant.
He pointed straight ahead, down the driveway. And I realized what he meant was he had run out of time to tell his thing because we were no longer alone.
On the doorstep was the cutest girl in the world. Wearing heart leggings. The girl who looked exactly like her famously beautiful mother.
And Ben. Her father.
Part 2
The Crush
Ben and Maddie and Georgia and Jacob
The day I met Ben, he was wearing glasses. Tortoise-rimmed. Glasses he never wore, but he had forgotten his contact lenses. If I had seen him without those glasses, it would have been too much. He was take-your-breath-away good-looking. Suzannah said he looked like Superman: the same strong jaw and cheekbones, the same ridiculous shoulders. But he had one up on Clark Kent as far as I was concerned because he had these great eyes, green and deep and honest. And when he focused them on you, he seemed like he was going to do it. Make everything okay.
Ben had come out to Los Angeles for a profile Architectural Digest was running. He and a handful of other architects had been included in their “New Talent” issue—a title Ben thought was hilarious, considering he had been a working architect for a decade by then. But he was glad to take the work that came with it. He had an hour after the photo shoot before he had to head back to New York. We were sitting in a hotel bar near the airport, drinking watered-down martinis. Ben wanted to go over contracts—that was what he’d said. But he also said, out loud, that he was doing something else. Ben said that was finding out if the girl on the phone matched the idea of her in his head.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” he said.
“For me?”
“For me,” he said.
Ben looked like he never felt pressure. He sipped his martini, looking sexy in a button-down shirt and jeans, a sports jacket.
“Why pressure?”
“Why pressure?” He smiled. “You know why.”
He paused.
“Th
at woman, on the phone, is the best part of my day. She makes me laugh and she makes me feel happy. She makes me feel like everything is going to work out as soon as she says hello to me.”
My heart skipped a beat. I nodded, my way of saying I felt the same way.
“If she is the best part of my day, in person, I’m going to have to do it.”
“What’s that?”
He smiled. “You know, change everything for her.”
