Page 49 of Flirting with Forever

“Mary,” he said after a second. “Maybe I could drop you somewhere. You could stay with someone tonight? Fin? Via?”

She was shaking her head. “No. No. They have Kylie and Matty. Enough on their plates. Their lives. I don’t—” She shook her head even harder. “Maybe a hotel instead.”

He thought of Mary alone in a huge hotel room. Somehow, even though he knew that the class of a fancy room would suit her better than his humble apartment ever would, the idea of her being alone tonight wasn’t at all palatable.

“Come to my place,” he told her, without taking a second to think about all the ways that invitation could be misconstrued.

Her brow furrowed.

“It’s nothing fancy, but it’s clean. And you’d have company. And I don’t have kids or a life. I mean, I have alife, but nothing you’d be interrupting. I have to get brunch with my dad tomorrow, but frankly, I’d be thrilled if I had an excuse to cancel. And first thing tomorrow we’ll get someone to fix your door so you won’t have to worry. And you could just have a break. Be in a different part of the city and relax. Not that Bed-Stuy is, like, an amazing vacation destination, but still, it might be nice to—”

“Okay.”

He blinked down at her. “Okay?”

“Okay, I’ll come. Let me just grab a few things.”

“Okay, you’ll come to my place?”

Now she was the one blinking. “Well, am I invited or not?”

“Invited.”

“So, let me get my stuff.”

He picked up his messenger bag and arranged it over his shoulder for something to do. Mary was coming to spend the night at his place. Huh. He’d thought for sure she’d say no. It hadn’t been an empty invitation, but he really hadn’t thought there was almost any possible way she’d say yes. But she was packing a bag that very second. With things she’d need to spend the night with him.

Well, notwith him. But at his house and—Oh,crap. He had a freaking studio apartment. How had this slipped his mind?! A bed and a love seat, that’s all she wrote. Not even a blow-up mattress. He pictured himself in some nineties rom-com where he and Mary would end up sharing his bed “platonically” only to wake up spooning and in love.

Yeah, right.Hemight wake up spooning and in love. And with a knee to the nads.Crossed off the list, remember?He pulled out his phone and quickly texted his next-door neighbors. They’d let him stay over once before, when his mother’s heat had been out and she and Cormac had stayed in his place. Hopefully they could put him up again, or he’d sleep on the floor.

“Ready?” She had a small overnight bag on her hip and a sad half smile on her face as she stood in the doorway. It was the half smile that did away with his reservations and worries. If she needed company and a place to stay, John was going to serve it up to her on a silver platter. No, a golden platter.

“Ready.”

They walked to the train side by side after making sure with the cops downstairs that it was all right for her to leave and that they were going to secure her shop tonight. On the walk, Mary called her employees, gave them a quick rundown of what had happened and explained she wouldn’t be needing any help for the weekend. They sat quietly side by side as the subway screeched and accelerated and slid into stop after stop, each one accentuating just how far they actually lived from one another. Two different dimensions.

John didn’t let these thoughts get him down as the two of them jogged aboveground in his neighborhood. She was in flats, which he realized now, she rarely wore, because he could look down and see the top of her head. He felt an expanding tenderness for the fact that her hair was messily twisted into a bun. She’d managed to make it look fashionable and delicate all the same, but she’d also been frazzled and tired enough to leave parts of it messy.

This, more than anything, illustrated to him just how trying this day had been for her. “All right,” he told her. “Let’s see. We’ve got crappy pizza, mediocre burritos or insanely good Cuban.”

“I think the crappy pizza sounds good, since you sold it so well.” She crossed her eyes at him. “Just joking. I choose Cuban. Can we get it to go?”

He nodded and the two of them walked the few blocks in silence. He could practically feel her fatigue spiraling off of her like heat from a light bulb left on too long. It was still a bit too early for the dinner rush, so they were in and out with their to-go bag pretty fast. John was grateful that this place was too expensive for him to regularly patronize because there was no one working there to recognize him with this gorgeous blonde ray of sunshine. There was no one to rib him about who the pretty girl was, to reveal loudly and obnoxiously—the way they would have done in the burrito shop—that he never brought pretty girls around here.

John clung to the fact that the man who’d farewelled them at the Cuban joint had barely acknowledged John and Mary. The man’s eyes hadn’t goggled at the idea of the two of them having dinner together. Maybe it wasn’t so outrageous.

They walked back to his house, and John’s heart started to bang. “It’s a walk-up,” he told her in a voice a little more cracked than normal. He took a deep breath as he started up the stairs to his apartment.

All right, John, he coached himself.You cannot be ashamed of your home. You worked hard to make it here. You live on your own in a clean apartment. She knows you’re not a Rockefeller. Don’t do yourself the disservice of apologizing for your life. There’s nothing to apologize for. She wants to be here.

He took another deep breath and didn’t linger in front of the door. He merely unlocked it and let her into his life.

“OH,NO,YOUDON’T,” John growled as he bent down in front of his door and scooped something up from the ground.

Mary was relieved to hear that his voice was back to a more normal pitch than it had been for the last few minutes. She’d begun to wonder if he’d been regretting bringing her here. Mary wanted nothing more than to just get inside his house and crash.

“Oh,” she laughed as John straightened up and stepped in the door, holding it open for her. He had a wiggling, black-and-gray-striped ball of fur in his arms. At first glance the cat looked to be struggling, but when Mary looked closer, she saw that the little beast was actually just wiggling farther into John’s arms, attempting to get comfortable in its throne. “I didn’t know you had a cat!”

---