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Then that one August night, almost exactly eleven years ago, when Kevin was about to start his sophomore year at Brown, someone had told Addie that Kevin was interested in her. Addie couldn’t remember who. But she sure remembered the feeling when he asked her out. Stunned, then euphoric, then terrified. She and Sarah had immediately started planning: clothes, makeup, attitude, everything he’d be sure to say and every way she should respond when he said it...
Get going, Addie.
She yanked the water off and dragged her towel briskly over her body. Back in her bedroom, she pulled on the clothes she’d ironed and laid out the previous evening, giving an exasperated groan when her first attempt at pulling on nylons ended in a run—and now she had no precious cushion of time left for disasters.
This was why she got up at the appointed hour every day and had everything prepared. Because she hated this flustered perspiring mess she got herself into when she deviated from the plan.
Great-Aunt Grace, her mother’s aunt, had been even worse—or better, depending on your perspective. Since she’d died, sometimes Addie went crazy, like she had cereal on Thursdays when Grace’s cereal day was Friday.
She giggled, pulling on her black pumps. Wild woman!
The smile faded. She hadn’t felt like a wild woman in a long, long time. Maybe never.
Kevin Ames.
The night of their date he’d picked her up in his gold Nissan sports car. He’d chatted easily with her beaming parents then they’d gone out for pizza on Nassau Street, and driven to Marquand Park, where she’d played as a child. Kevin had switched off the engine and produced a surprise fifth of vodka Addie had felt too intimidated to refuse, ignoring the voice that told her drinking was not a great idea for either of them.
At the fizzy height of her buzz, he’d taken her face in his hands, looked deeply into her eyes and kissed her.
Oh, that kiss...
She relived it until she realized she was standing on one foot, clutching her other shoe, and it was not getting any earlier.
“Time.”
“Seven forty-five.”
Eek!
Addie raced to the living room and snatched up her briefcase, stomach growling for breakfast she’d have to grab at work, headache demanding coffee. She let herself out of her apartment, snatched up the New York Times, which she usually read over breakfast, and ran down the hall, punched the button for the elevator, punched it twice more, as if that would do anything. Slowest elevator in Manhattan. While she waited, she checked her work schedule for the day.
Hey. She grinned at her phone. It was her half birthday. Addie Sewell was now officially twenty-nine and a half. In another six months she’d be thirty. Still at the same job. Still living alone...
No, no, she liked living alone, loved the independence and the freedom. Though sometimes she wondered about venturing out to the humane society and adopting a cat. Cats were supposed to be good company, and more suitable for a small apartment or condo than a dog. Dogs were a lot of work.
The elevator doors opened to a good day getting better. He was in there, Mr. Gorgeous, the guy from the tenth floor, one of the most good-looking guys Addie had ever seen. In the three years she’d lived here, she’d never once had the guts to say anything more than hi.
So...she would again. “Hi.”
Mr. Gorgeous nodded. “Hey.”
The door closed, leaving that peculiarly charged silence in elevators that Addie tolerated with this guy because saying something and then relapsing to silence would be even more charged and peculiar. But if she started a conversation that lasted all the way to the first floor, then what, would they walk together into the street? What if he were talking to her only to be polite? Better not to say anything. So she stayed silent, watching the lighted numbers at the top of the door descend.
Kevin Ames.
He’d kissed her again, and again. His hand had traveled inside her top to stroke her breast, which felt wonderfully intimate and very hot. Except then Addie had started thinking about his last girlfriend, Jessica Menendez, and the size of her you-know-whats, and the girlfriend before that, Isabella Tramontina, and how she had a body that made men fall like dominoes when she walked down the hall.
Addie had compared them to her own pudgy small-chested big-butt body and virgin status, and panic had erupted. Was this all he wanted from her? To make out in a car drunk on vodka in a public park?
