Page 39 of Flirting with Forever

“Us too, Mare. And I’m so freaking glad this party is inside. It’s brutal out there.” Sebastian had the beads of sweat on his forehead to prove it. “I’m melting.”

“Cold drinks. Air-conditioning. A cold shower in the guest room if worst comes to worst.” She beckoned her friends inside and was just closing her front door when she realized that another guest was standing on her landing already.

“John!”

“Hello.” His frown was in full force, his hair immaculately parted on one side and smoothed back. He wore the party version of his typical outfit, meaning no tie and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. Mary glanced down at his wingtips and suddenly felt a rising, unexplainable glee that John was going to take those ridiculous shoes off. It would be her first time seeing him without them.

“I brought you this.” He shoved a paper bag into her hand. “You said not to bring food or drinks, but Estrella would keel over if she ever found out I came empty-handed.”

Mary looked into the bag and felt that glee rise a few more inches. He’d brought her crappy beer and expensive lemonade, presumably to mix together. “It’s perfect! Thank you so much. Here, come in, come in.”

As he was stepping through her front door, though, Mary stepped in front of him and reached forward, pressing two fingers to his eyebrows the way she’d done once before, changing his expression from judgmental to neutral. “I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself while you look around my fancy Cobble Hill house for the first time.”

Color rose to his cheeks as he looked down at her. For the first time, she caught a familiarly masculine scent from John. Aftershave. The old-school kind. She thought of barbershops and shaving strops. Her eyes dropped from his pink cheeks to his freshly shaved jaw, smooth but shadowed blue by his dark hair. “I’m not going to judge you, Mary.”

They were standing a bit closer than she’d previously realized and Mary’s fingertips sort of buzzed where she’d just touched his brow. “Richie’s not here yet,” she told him, just to say anything at all.

John smirked. “I don’t expect him for at least another hour. He’s only on time for court.”

His eyes flicked over Mary’s shoulder and his frown came back. It was then that Mary saw something else in those ever-present lines in John’s face. It wasn’t just his job and his past that he wore there. It was nerves as well.

He was nervous to meet new people at a party.

Cute.

John carefully took off his shoes and set them aside. Mary surreptitiously glanced down at his feet and almost rolled her eyes when she saw his crisp, predictable, perfectly black dress socks. She should have known.

She closed the door behind him and immediately swept him along to her kitchen, fixing him a drink and then herself one as well. She parked John next to Sebastian and Via, where she knew he’d be in safekeeping, and then went to answer the door, where Fin, Tyler and Kylie all waited, laughing. Richie stood on the landing with them as well.

She greeted them all with hugs and kisses and closed the door behind them.

“This has got to be some sort of New York City record,” Mary said to Richie as they walked into the kitchen together. “One hundred percent attendance at a party in the first hour?”

Mary looked around for John, wanting to check and see if he was still nervous, and not finding him where she’d left him. She craned her neck and found him in the living room, sitting on an ottoman, but hunched forward over the coffee table, where he and Matty were chatting over a puzzle that Matty had just started. Matty loved jigsaw puzzles more than anything and Mary always kept a few for him at her house. Apparently he’d been able to rope a grown-up into helping him. Matty’s signature move.

“Don’t worry about him,” Richie said over Mary’s shoulder. “John generally finds the kids’ table pretty fast at a party.”

“Really?” Mary laughed.

“Oh, yeah. You should see him at his family’s Thanksgiving celebration. He spends an hour or two coloring with a billion of his little cousins. Does a requisite half an hour playing hide-and-seek. Eats dinner, does a few dishes and waves at the grown-ups on his way out.”

Mary looked back at John, a little mystified at this new information. “Why?”

Richie shrugged. “Family is really important to John, but small talk is not his thing.”

“You two have been friends for a long time?”

Richie’s hand toggled back and forth in the air. “A few years.”

“Really?” Mary said in surprise. “It seems like you’ve known each other your whole lives.”

Richie grinned. “That’s just John. Once he decides to get to know somebody, he really gets to know them. When I first got assigned to be his officemate, I thought,Great, of course they pair me with this buzzkill. But not three months later, I realized he’d become one of my closest friends.”

One of her neighbors caught Mary’s attention and the party unfolded from there. She loved the energy of a party. She loved watching the web of her life become more intricate and stronger as the people in it spoke and laughed and got to know one another.

A few hours later, a group of them sat in Mary’s living room, Mary perched on the arm of the chair where Fin was sitting.

Jewel was playing with some toys her parents had brought for her, piling plastic scoops of ice cream on top of one another and bringing them around for the adults.

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