Once and for All(60)
“When this boy does come,” William said to me in early September, as I sat texting with Ethan after school as he rode the bus to a lacrosse game, “I’m going to have to sit him down and have a talk.”
“You?” my mom asked from her desk, where she was busy checking a spreadsheet of attendees to the next wedding. “Isn’t that my job?”
“I’m the father figure. If anyone gets to sit cleaning a gun while making the boy squirm talking about honor and chivalry, it’s me.”
“A gun?” I said.
“You maced yourself the last time you tried to carry pepper spray,” my mom told him.
“Well, I obviously wouldn’t do that while giving this talk,” he replied snippily.
“No one is lecturing Ethan about anything,” I told them both, using my own stern voice. “We’re all just going to make him feel welcome and show him the best of Lakeview.”
“Which is what?” William asked.
“Louna, of course,” my mom said. “That’s what he’s coming for after all, right?”
At this, I blushed, even as my phone beeped, Ethan responding to my last message. NOW WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
PUTTING UP WITH MY MOM AND WILLIAM TEASING ME ABOUT YOU.
HA! CAN’T WAIT TO MEET THEM.
“Look at our girl,” William said then. “She’s crazy in love. We didn’t ruin her with our bad attitudes after all.”
“Not yet,” my mom said. “Remember, they’ve only spent one night together.”
William gave her a look. “Natalie, for God’s sake. Let the girl have her fun. It’s not her fault we’re all dried up and unlovable.”
“Speak for yourself. I am very lovable.”
William snorted. My mom caught my eye, then mouthed an I’m sorry, looking genuinely apologetic. I knew in truth she was happy for me, but just worried, as her own love story hadn’t ended well. But this was different. I was different. And Ethan, well, was Ethan. He would never do anything to hurt me. It never occurred to me that, in fact, it might be someone else.
CHAPTER
17
SURELY AMBROSE had always been a person who hummed. I probably just hadn’t noticed.
“Isn’t it time for morning coffee run?” I asked him, as he launched into the second go-round of a currently popular dance song, wordlessly. “You know how my mom gets without her caffeine.”
He paused the instrumentals. “I thought you’d want to do it. To see Leo. Don’t you?”
I shifted in my seat, then realized I was literally squirming at this question and made myself still. “I’m kind of deep in these place cards right now.”
He looked over from his own stack, equal in size to mine. “You are?”
“Well, yeah.”
I tried to sound breezy, offhand, two things I never was. It didn’t work, a fact made clear when he gave me his full focus of attention. “Hold on. I thought you guys had a good time the other night.”
“We did,” I said, folding another card. The paper was thick and embossed, each name done by a professional calligrapher. Wreck it, you pay for it, had been my mom’s directive. Never before had paper made me nervous. “I’m just, you know. . . .”
Usually, when you trail off, people just finish the sentence for you in their own heads. Ambrose’s was clearly still full of beats and choruses, because he said, “You’re what?”
“I’m busy,” I told him. “And it’s your job.”
He drew back. “Gosh. Okay. Sorry. I’ll go right now.”
With that, he pushed out his chair and got to his feet, then headed to the back office, where my mom and William were conferring with the valet parking company about Elinor Lin’s rehearsal dinner, whistling as he went. I was sure he’d never done that before.
So he was happy. No crime in that. And just because he’d had a great time with Lauren the night before—he hadn’t said so exactly, but the music-making spoke volumes—didn’t mean he was going to win our bet and me lose. I only had to keep going on dates, just like I’d done with Leo. I wasn’t humming, mind you. But I’d done it.
I winced to myself even as I thought this. After Lauren and Ambrose had left the night before, Leo and I had talked for another hour or so, mostly about his writing, the conversation interrupted occasionally by Jilly, coming to complain that the party sucked and she wanted to go home. Finally, around eleven, she bumped into some guy she knew from yet another food truck—the community was wide reaching—and decided she wanted to stay indefinitely just as I was ready to leave. In the end, I got a ride with Leo on the back of his fixed-gear bike, where I felt every bump and rattle of the handful of miles back to my house.
Once there, I could tell he expected to be invited in by the way he kept glancing at the door. But William’s car was still there and I didn’t feel like making introductions. In the end, we sat on the curb, the bike lying beside us like a literal third and fourth wheel. I was tired of talking, tired in general, and trying to come up with a good exit strategy, but Leo was still going full speed about his writing.
“Really, it’s all process,” he explained to me. “You have to dig, you know? Fiction is blood, sweat, tears, shit, all mixed together. Like the lotus from the mud. If you nurture it, something beautiful comes.”