Page 2 of Flirting with Forever

A waste of time because she wasn’t going to sleep with him? Apparently, he’d gotten all dolled up, schlepped his way across town, and now he expected a cookie.Hercookie, to be exact. After he’d straight-up called herold.

She sucked in a deep breath and stepped closer to him, not wanting to cause a scene by raising her voice. He stiffened and pulled back from her as if age were contagious.

She didn’t want to be rude, but she’d stopped allowing herself to be bullied about a decade ago. Social niceties be damned. Mary tossed her hair back over her shoulders. “I’m not going to say anything to Estrella about this, don’t worry. But she was wrong. You arenota nice boy.”

John blinked at her, his face quirking up into an expression that told Mary that he thought she was a prize idiot.

She wasn’t an idiot, but shehadlearned a lesson. This was the last time she was letting a mother set her up with a son. Even if she was one of the best local artisans Mary stocked at Fresh.

She turned on her heel and sailed out of the restaurant.

Mary was just unlocking the door to her apartment when the worst part of what had just happened really hit her. It wasn’t the cruel and unnecessary commentary on her—apparently geriatric—age. It wasn’t the sneer of the mean-faced man as he’d eyed her across the table or the way he’d looked at the waitress.

No. The worst part of it was right now. This very moment, standing in her own doorway, when she couldn’t call Cora. Her best friend of all time. Whom Mary had only had ten short years with before Cora had been killed in a car accident. And that had been five years ago.

For the most part, Mary had found her peace. She’d done the requisite universe cursing, the wondering why something so useless and pointless and painful could possibly have happened. She’d had the drunken, teary nights with the other people who’d loved Cora. She’d cried the tears.

And most of the time, she was okay. But not tonight. Not tonight when she wanted to call her best friend so freaking badly. When she wanted nothing more than to hear Cora’s rude, snarky, biting tone over the phone. Cora would have hidden in the bathroom so her son couldn’t overhear her say something like “Give me that loser’s phone number. I’m going to tell him to sit on it sideways. I’m going to tell him that he just screwed up the best opportunity that he ever had. He had a date with Mary Freaking Trace and he screwed it up in the first sentence! What a moron. Don’t give him another thought, Mare, unless it’s to pity the fool.”

But was it even the mean-faced blind date that Mary wanted Cora to tell off? No. Because, really, Mary had done a good enough job of that on her own. She’d left the restaurant, hadn’t she? Wasn’t it this voice in her own head Mary needed help dispelling? This voice that sounded suspiciously like her own mother.Too old...Running out of time...You don’t want to die alone, do you? Thirty-seven and single and what a shame that is.

Her mother would view tonight’s debacle as comeuppance for Mary. Comeuppance for years of having the audacity to think that she had plenty of time to live her life before she looked for love. If she ever told her mother this story, she’d purse her lips and give Mary a look very close to an I-told-you-so.

Mary closed her apartment door behind her and locked it. All the lights in her apartment were still off, which always made Mary feel like she’d just walked into an exhibit in a museum that had closed for the evening.Behold: the life of Mary Trace. She viewed the lumpy shapes of her furniture, the blank geometric grace of the rugs on her floor, the frames on her walls. And then, across the way, the shadowed, ghostly version of herself in the hall mirror.

She ached for Cora.

I was expecting someone younger, the disdainful voice said again, popping up out of nowhere, threading in with her mother’s voice. How many times had her mother warned her that she was rapidly approaching an age when men would, in fact, wish she were younger? A hundred? A thousand?

“What an ass,” Mary huffed and flipped on the lights, tossing her home into bright, sharp focus. He was an ass who didn’t deserve her. An ass who’d sneered at all the years she’d lost just trying to say goodbye to the friend she couldn’t call tonight.

“TOUGHLOSSTHISMORNING, Whitford.”

John’s shoulders tightened as if his muscles were connected by a string that had just gotten half a foot shorter. He swiveled in his creaky chair, careful not to bash his knees on the filing cabinet he basically had to sit on top of to make room in his tiny office. And there was Crash Willis, leaning in his doorway, smirking like the royal asshole he was.

Willis was an assistant district attorney and John’s least favorite person in the borough of Brooklyn. Even within the confines of his own mind, John refused to refer to him as Crash. What kind of parents named their kidCrash, for God’s sake? Rich parents, apparently.

John let his eyes trace Willis from the top of his blond head to the tips of his teal leather loafers. Everything from the two-hundred-dollar haircut to the matching teal pocket square in the breast pocket of his suit screamed money. No one invested in teal loafers unless they had at least fiveotherpairs of work shoes already.

“Wouldn’t count it as a loss yet,” John said, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles, just because he knew his nonchalance would piss Willis off.

“Your girl gets indicted on all counts? Pretty big hit to the game plan, pal.”

John took a deep breath. It was true that one of John’s state-appointed clients—Hang Nguyen, first-generation Vietnamese-American, seventeen years old and officially tried as an adult in the state of New York—had been indicted on three different counts of solicitation and one egregiously heinous count of sex trafficking that morning. But that was to be expected. Everyone got indicted for everything in Brooklyn. But not everybody got sent to jail in Brooklyn, and that was where John’s job came in. He was a public defender and proud of it.

He considered it a matter of course to sneer at the ADA smirking in his doorway. Though defense attorneys and district attorneys tended to be cut from different cloths, there were plenty of ADAs that John respected, some who he even counted as friends.

Willis wasn’t one of them.

They weren’t enemies by nature, he supposed, but more by endgame. They were born into different worlds and wanted to end up in different worlds too. Crash Willis, with his pocket squares and butter leather shoes, wanted the prestige and notoriety of someday becoming Brooklyn’s DA. He chewed through cases as fast as he could, tough on crime and celebrating every indictment he could smooth-talk out of unsuspecting grand juries.

John just wanted to keep minors out of prison. Willis and John weren’t exactly bosom buddies.

Besides, Willis was one of those assholes who insisted on shortening John’s last name from Modesto-Whitford to just Whitford. John hated that.

In his mind, it was Willis’s way of intentionally reminding John of his father. A small way of insinuating that John’s crusade to defend the innocent rang hollow. At least in Willis’s eyes.

“Well, next comes the fun part,” John said amiably, knowing that Willis had come in here attempting to get a rise out of him. “The fun part” being the hours and hours of underpaid, stress-inducing, nail-biting research, writing, negotiating, coaching, performing and defending of a kid who, in John’s opinion, did not deserve up to thirty-five years behind bars.

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