He buckles it and doesn’t look at me. “Yes.”
“Goddamn it, why are they always Tall Blondies? I bet she has brown eyes and a tan, and her dad is a plastic surgeon.”
“You’ve been reading my diary.” He looks faintly disturbed.
I press my face into his shoulder. “I was guessing she’s my polar opposite too.”
“She was . . .” He lets out a wistful sigh and my heart twists. The territorial little cavewoman inside me appears at the entrance to her cave and scowls.
“She was just so nice.”
“Ugh, nice. Gross.”
“And her eyes were brown.” He watches me mull this over.
“Sounds like a legit reason to break it off. You know what? Your eyes are too blue. This just isn’t going to work.” I was hoping for a clever retort, but instead, his tone is withering.
“You’ve actually thought that this would work?”
Now it’s my turn to say um. I’m halfway recoiled into my own shell when he blows out a breath.
“Sorry. It came out wrong. I can’t help being such a cynical asshole.”
“This is not news to me.”
“It’s why I don’t have a girlfriend. They all trade me in for nice guys.”
He looks at the ceiling with such deep regret in his eyes I have an awful thought. He’s pining for someone. Tall Blondie broke his heart when she moved on to someone less complicated. It would certainly explain his bias against nice guys. I try to think of how to ask him, but he looks at the clock.
“We’d better hurry.”
Chapter 22
Please give me a crash course on the key players in your family. Any taboo topics of conversation? I don’t want to be asking your uncle where his wife is, only to find out she was murdered.” I rummage around in my bag.
“Well, before last night when I carried forty-five individual flower displays into the hotel because they couldn’t find her a fucking cart, I hadn’t seen my mom in a few months. She calls me most Sundays to keep me up to date with the news of neighbors and friends I never cared about. She was a surgeon, mainly hearts and transplants. Little kids and saintly types. She’s going to love you. Absolutely love you.”
I realize I’m pressing my hands over my own heart. I want her to love me. Oh, jeepers.
“She’ll say she wants to keep you forever. Anyway. My dad is a cutter.”
I flinch.
“It’s the nickname for surgeons. When you meet my dad, you’ll understand why. He was mainly on call for emergency room surgeries. I’d hear all sorts of things over breakfast. Some idiot got a pool cue through the throat. Car crashes, fights, murders gone wrong. He was forever dealing with drunks with gravel rash, women with black eyes and broken ribs. Whatever it was, he fixed it.”
“It’s a hard job.”
“Mom was a surgeon too, but she was never a cutter. She cared about the person on her table. My dad . . . dealt with the meat.”
Josh sits on the sill lost in thought for a minute and I search in my bag for clothes, giving him some privacy. I start swiping on makeup in the bathroom.
After a few minutes, I peep through the gap in the door. In the reflection of the dresser he’s shirtless, gloriously so, and he’s unzipped my garment bag. He holds the dress between two fingers with his head tilted in recognition. Then he rubs his hand over his face.
I think I’ve made a mistake with my blue dress.
My Thursday lunchtime dash to the tiny boutique near work seemed like a good idea at the time, but I should have worn something I already had. But it’s too late now. He unfolds an ironing board and flaps his shirt over it.
I slide the door open with my foot. “Yowza. Which gym do you go to? All of them?”
“It’s the one in the bottom of the McBride building, a half block away from work.
I have to swallow a mouthful of drool. “Are you sure we have to go to your brother’s wedding?”
I have never seen so much of his skin, and it glows with health; honey gold, flawless. The deep lines of his collarbones and hips are an impressive frame. In between are a series of individual muscles, each representing a goal set and box ticked. Flat, square pectorals with rounded edges. The skin of his stomach pulls tight across the kind of muscles I usually stare at during Olympic swimming finals.
He irons his shirt and all the muscles move. His biceps and lower abdomen are ridged with those blatantly masculine veins. Those veins ride over muscle and tell you, I’ve earned this. His hips have ridges that point down toward his groin, obscured in suit pants.
The amount of sacrifice and determination to simply maintain this is mind-boggling. It’s so Josh.
“Why do you look like this?” I sound like I’m about to go into cardiac arrest.
“Boredom.”
“I’m not bored. Can’t we stay here, and I’ll find something in the minibar to smear all over you?”
“Whoo, are those some horny eyes or what.” He waggles the iron at me. “Get finished in there.”
“For a guy who looks like you, you’re awfully bashful.”
He doesn’t say anything for a bit, stroking the iron over the collar. I can see how much effort it is taking him to stand shirtless in front of me.
“Why are you self-conscious?”
“I’ve dated some girls in the past . . .” He trails off.
My arms are crossed. My ears are about to start whistling with steam. “What sort of girls?”
“They’ve all . . . at some point made it pretty clear my personality is not . . .”
“It’s not what?”
“I’m just not great to be around.”
Even the iron is steaming in indignation. “Someone wanted you only for your body? And they told you that?”
“Yeah.” He redoes one cuff. “It should feel flattering, right? At first I guess it did, but then it kept happening. It really doesn’t feel good to keep being told that I’m not relationship material.” He bends over his shirt and analyzes it for creases.
I finally understand the Matchbox car code. Please see me. The real me.
“You know what I honestly think? You’d still be amazing, even if you looked like Mr. Bexley.”
“You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid, Shortcake.”
He’s smiling a little as he keeps ironing. I’m almost shaking with the need to make him understand something that I don’t fully know myself yet. All I know is, it hurts me to think he feels bad about such a fundamental aspect of himself. I resolve to objectify him less, and turn away until he puts on his shirt. It’s robin’s-egg blue.
“I love that color shirt. It matches what I’m going to wear, um, obviously.” I cringe at my dress again. I go to my handbag and dig in it, finding my lipstick.
“Can I see something?” He’s got his tie flapping loose as he takes the tube from me and reads the bottom.
“Flamethrower. How appropriate.”
“Do you want me to tone it down?” I rattle my handbag, searching.
“I fucking love your red.” He kisses my mouth before I start to apply. He watches me applying the lipstick, blotting, reapplying, and by the time I’m done he looks like he’s endured something.
“I can barely take it when you do that,” he manages to say.
“Hair up or down?”
He looks pained. He gathers it up, and says “Up.”
He lets it fall and scoops it in his hands like snow. “Down.”
“Half up, half down it is. Quit fidgeting, you’re making me nervous. Why don’t you go and have a drink at the bar downstairs? Liquid courage. I can drive us to the church.”
“Be down in, like, fifteen minutes okay?”
Once he’s gone and the silence fills the hotel room like a swelling balloon I sit on the end of the bed and look at myself. My hair falls around my shoulders, and my mouth is a little red heart. I look like I’m losing my mind. I strip down, put on my support underwear to smooth out any lumps, hook my stockings up and look at my dress.