Page 83 of Signed, Sealed, and Smitten
“It’s not,” I say. “All of our conversations up until now have been about how we’renotgoing to date.”
“You mean your monologues?” But his tone has a touch of humor.
“Inevitable. That’s what you said about us kissing,” I add when he looks confused. “You said it was inevitable, and yeah, it kind of felt like it. But at the same time, it’s all coming at me pretty fast. The pen pal thing …” I shake my head. I still can’t believe it.
“Is it weird that it’s not that weird to me?”
I know he’s asking a deeper question, one I’m not ready to answer. “I don’t even know how this would work. You’re going to finish your book and go back to Boston. I’m going to be working constantly. And even if we decide to give this a shot, it won’t look great to the board that I’m dating you a month into the job.”
“I’m equally responsible for that,” he says.
Did he not hear the whole point of the story with Hayes? “They might rationally acknowledge that, but at some level, they’ll question my judgment, not yours. And that’s not even getting into how Catherine Crawford will react.”
“Then what do we do? Pretend this never happened? That there isn’t something between us?”
I want to askWhatisbetween us? But I won’t. Because if he feels even half of what I do, I cannot walk away from that. I’m not sure I can walk away as it is, and I don’t even know where his heart is. At best, I have a guess. A hope, while I’m being honest. And that’s too much. More than I should have.
“I don’t know.” I draw my knees up again, this time wrapping my own arms around them. It’s not nearly as satisfying. “But I do know that this will have a major impact on my job, and I can’t just follow a wild impulse.”
Jay studies the ground, and I see a muscle twitching in his jaw. “This job? Or the job you reallywant?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Phoebe. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you never gave me a straight answer when I asked you about this two weeks ago. Did you take this job so you could rehabilitate your image and get hired back at the Sutton as a senior curator?”
My silence gives me away.
He gives an unhappy-sounding laugh. “Every time I talk to you, you have a new idea for this place, and you get to do whatever you want. Didn’t you say the Sutton constantly rejected your ideas and told you that you needed to be ‘more professional,’ or more traditional, or whatever it is they were hammering at you for? Why would you even want to go back there?”
“Why do you want to be a professor so badly? You’ve got a million followers already listening to you teach history. Whyisn’t that enough?” It’s a rhetorical question. “Because it just isn’t, right? Because you’ve had a different goal for years, and maybe this other thing you do is pretty cool and interesting, but it wasn’t thedream? Am I close?”
“Do you know you act differently when you’re around the board? You talk differently. Formal. Subdued.”
“Professional,” I shoot back.
“You dress differently. Less color. More conservative.”
“Again, professional.”
He shrugs. “Pretending, because Catherine Crawford convinced you that you weren’t enough at the Sutton. But I know you, Phoebe. I see who you are when you’re letting yourself be happy and climbing through hidden passageways. I see how no matter how professional you try to dress at work, you always include something subversive and bright and fun in your outfit. And I can’t figure out why the best things about you are the things you keep trying to suffocate.”
“You’re not the guy for this lecture, Jay. What about you, leaning into your charming slacker persona instead of showing up in the world as the expert you are? Is it easier to tell yourself that you’re being overlooked because of your influencer stuff if you never put yourself out there as your deeply nerdy history self?”
I hadn’t even known that it bothered me, but I’m hitting back as a reflex.
Instead of a comeback, his shoulders drop. “I don’t want to fight, Phoebe. This doesn’t feel good.”
I press my forehead to my knees. “It doesn’t. I’m sorry. You’re doing cool work, and I shouldn’t have criticized it.”
He comes back to the bench to sit beside me. “I shouldn’t act like Catherine Crawford isn’t a major issue. I saw how she treated you. She’s definitely holding your Sutton days against you. I don’t blame you for trying to figure out how to defang her.”
I nod to show I appreciate his apology, but I’m not sure what else to say. Nothing is resolved. I don’t know what we do next.
“We had our first makeout and our first fight at the same time.” He shakes his head. “That’s a new one for me. Somehow I’m not surprised it’s with you.”
“It was interesting to watch you lose your temper,” I say. “I was beginning to think nothing ever got to you.”
“All the time, when I care.”
