“You don’t have to explain anything to me, boss. I’m gonna go for a run, clear my head a little bit, mentally prepare for that gender reveal. Gotta earn my surfing lessons.”
So she lets him go, knowing that she did the right thing, but hating it more with every step he takes away from her.
Chapter 15
“You need to wear something blue.”
“What?” Xavier says, turning from where he’s digging through his suitcase from its new home on her bedroom floor. Julie has reclaimed her bedroom for her stay in LA and that means his stuff is stacked in precarious piles in the corners of Bianca’s bedroom. It’s a wonder Chloe didn’t notice it when she spent the night in his room, but then she was pretty distracted.
“Blue,” she repeats. “The guys have to wear blue and the girls have to wear pink.”
“You’re serious?” he asks, standing with his hands on his hips.
Bianca shrugs with a huffing breath. “It’s on the invitation and Isobel’s a little . . .”
“Insane?”
“Excited,” she corrects him, her eyes rolling indulgently.
“You know pink used to be associated with boys, right?”
“Yep, and blue was for girls, until the forties.” He loves that she knows that. Of course she does. She’s on a roll now though. “Which just makes this extra stupid. You’re talking barely two generations there.”
“So we’re gonna wear blue and pink to this thing?”
“We are.”
“You know the couple who first did one of these regrets it,” he says.
“I know, NPR did an article about it.”
“So we’re doing this because . . .”
“Because I’ve known Isobel for years and sometimes you do shit you don’t agree with because it’s important to your friends.”
“I gotta say, I don’t quite get you two.”
Bianca shrugs. “Izzy’s . . . she’s changed a lot over the years.”
“People do that sometimes.”
“They do. I thought . . . I guess I thought we were more alike than we are, but . . . anyway, she’s been through four rounds of IVF and wants a baby more than anything, so we’re gonna go and have appetizers and wait around to see which color the balloons are.”
“Four rounds? Fuck.”
“Yeah, it’s been incredibly hard.”
“So you want to support her.”
“I do. But seriously, if you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I get it. None of my other friends are going to be there and I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
He doesn’t want to go, but he’s going to go and not because of the bullshitliving up to his end of the bargainexcuse he gave her the night before. He’s going because of the pure and simple fact that she’s going to be there and he’s happy enough to just exist in her general orbit for the time he has left here.
Even if that means he has to dig out his blue collared shirt that he wore to her surprise engagement celebration the other night and try desperately to iron the wrinkles out of it before they have to go.
“Here, let me,” she says, after his third attempt with his crappy iron. She’s holding a small steamer in her hand and she takes the shirt with her other before hanging it from a hook on the back of her door.
It’s so . . . natural, as he sits on the end of her bed, shirtless, in jeans, watching her in her pretty pink dress that ties up around her neck, exposing the long line of her back down to where two dimples sit just above the top of her skirt, light against her darker skin tone. He’s never seen those before and he’s fascinated. He wants to press his mouth to them, trace them with his tongue and see how her body reacts. He blinks away the fantasy as her hair swings into view, straightened again today, a long shiny curtain down her back, artfully curled at the ends, neat and tidy and not the wild mess he really loves, especially if it’s his hands that have done the dirty work.
