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23
EMMA
As I take the stairs down to the lobby where I know Finn is waiting, I try to decide exactly how I feel about this date. All of my time with Finn has been fun. He’s clever and interesting and I like talking to him. I would love to feel the way I used to about him, before he decided he was going to try that fake marriage plan.
That’s the real challenge, I decide. Sure, I like him. Sure I want to think that he cares about me. But what if he just doesn’t? What if he doesn’t take me seriously? Then I’m just going to be hurting myself. And I don’t want to do that.
The problem is, even if he does really care about me, even if that whole marriage plan was just a dumb mistake he made because he was panicking, how can he prove it? I try to think of something that he could do that would make me totally sure, but I can’t. Any gesture I can think of, I can also imagine him faking. So what even can he do to prove he’s for real?
I step into the building’s lobby. Finn is standing in front of the security guard’s desk, and the moment he sees me, he beams.
“Oh, Emma, I’ve got such a beautiful night planned for us,” he says. “I was thinking we could ride horses under the moonlight! And then, we could ride the horses to the opera and watch Wagner’s classic tale of star-crossed loversTristan und Isolde.It’s not playing right now, but we’ll pay them to do that instead of whatever they were going to do instead.”
I can tell that Finn has been thinking about this date for a while, and that he’s nervous about getting it exactly right. That’s pretty sweet in its own, slightly silly way.
“Are the horses going to be at the opera with us?” I ask.
“That’s a good point. They wouldn’t fit in the seats. Do operas have stables?”
“Finn, you might be overthinking this night a little.”
“I just want to make a perfect date for you,” he says, and together, we walk out the door. “Shoot! I just realized that I forgot to include any food. Where can we go that will also allow horses?”
“I think it’s okay if we don’t do the horse thing,” I tell him.
“But if we don’t do horses, how are we going to get from the stables to the opera?”
“We don’t have to do the opera either.”
He takes a breath. “I’m being a little loopy, aren’t I?”
I shrug. “You have been working a lot.”
“Well, so have you,” he says, and he gives me a smile. I feel a warmth in my chest. I’m glad that he’s noticed. “I know I’m being silly. I just have been wanting to talk to you for a while, and when you said you’d be okay with going out with me tonight, my first thought was that I wanted it to be a big, perfect, romantic evening.”
“I know,” I reply. “But I’m having fun just doing this.”
He seems surprised. “But we aren’t doing anything.”
“We’re walking and talking,” I say. “That’s what I wanted to do.”
It’s true, I think as I say it. This is what I want. To just spend a little time talking with him. To chat for a while. To remind myself of the reasons I liked him in the first place. It doesn’t really make sense that it would fix things more than anything else would, but somehow, it’s what I want.
“Well, I enjoy just walking and talking with you.” He gives me a smile, and I can tell it’s the truth. He really is enjoying this. “Though I should ask. Are you going somewhere? I’ve just been following you.”
“I thought I was following you,” I admit, but neither of us slows down. Instead, we just chuckle and keep walking down the street.
“While we’re confessing things, I don’t actually know anything aboutTristan und Isolde.I just looked up what operas are romantic on Google.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “You sounded very smart saying it.”
I jostle him gently with my shoulder. He raises his arm and puts it around me. It feels nice to have him holding me again.
“So I guess we should talk about the serious thing,” he announces, finally.
I don’t really want to, but it’s true. We should talk about it. We should have talked about it earlier, probably, but I’ve been avoiding that conversation. “You’re probably right,” I say.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he begins. “That’s not a defense. I should have been thinking. But I wasn’t. The fact that something I had done was having this big effect on my brother and you and the whole firm just had me terrified. And I wanted there to be some quick thing that I could do to fix it, because…”
