Ten first dates, p.15
Ten First Dates, page 15
I feel a little prickle, either annoyance or the other reaction I always have to him. The one that makes me want to run home and pull out my vibrator.
He’s handsome, is all.
He’s got this trim beard that frames a mouth that’s perpetually in some wattage of smirk. Just like my grandmother has a whole language in disapproving looks, Cole Garrison has a whole language of smirks. And he has these dark, broody eyes, framed with long lashes that are much too pretty for such a large, built man.
Damn him.
His gaze catches mine, and he sighs. I know this because I’m close enough to hear it. Somehow, without meaning to, I’ve drifted closer to him, as if magically compelled.
I guess I dread continuing my conversation with Bryn even more than I do talking to a man with whom I can only exchange barbs.
“Stalking me?” I ask, lifting an eyebrow.
“If I’d known you’d be here, I would have stayed away,” he says, but it’s with a smirk that says he’s not not enjoying himself.
“Always the charmer, Garrison. Isn’t it like cheating to hang out at a different bar?”
Smirk. “I like to change things up. Nothing illicit about that.”
I glance around in feigned confusion. “Speaking of which, where’s your usual fan club?”
“You Mayberrys might think every single person wants to be in a relationship, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. Sometimes people prefer to be alone. It can be better that way.”
“No shit. Any woman would be better off alone than with you.”
He puts a hand over his heart as if to mime being wounded. But he doesn’t move away. In fact his leg swings a little closer to me. I feel a rush of…something.
Hormones. It’s hormones.
“I’ve found plenty of women who want to spend time with me,” he says. And there’s something about the way he says it that’s different, like there’s been a shift in the energy between us tonight, although I couldn’t say why. We’ve been at each other’s throats, more or less, for decades.
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to sound breathless. “And I notice none of them stick around too long. You got something strange going on beneath the belt?”
Another smirk, and for a second, I wonder if he’s going to say, You want to see?
And I wonder if I’ll say, Yes, please.
But then he chuckles and says, “None of them stick around because I don’t want them to.” His gaze moves over my shoulder. “Your sister’s looking for you. She seems pissed.”
“That’s just what her face looks like,” I say. Although obviously she is pissed. I’ve been gone for an unreasonable amount of time. I’ll have to pretend I had diarrhea or something to lift the tension.
“Uh-huh. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you, Holly Mayberry.”
The words stab into me, because he said that same thing to me before, years and years ago, before all of the bickering and word stabs.
“I suppose I can hardly prevent it,” I say, pretending not to care. I turn my back to him, something else I’ve gotten good at, and sure enough, Bryn is staring daggers at me.
I give her a peppy wave and head back to the table.
“Get lost?” she asks pointedly.
“Nah, I can never miss an opportunity to needle Cole.”
She gives me a dubious look, like maybe she senses something else—the undercurrent buried beneath piles of shit—but she doesn’t call me on it.
“You were trying to change the subject,” she says, giving me an incisive look as I lower into my chair.
“Yes, obviously,” I say, grabbing a roll and taking an enormous bite. I can’t talk through a full mouth, now can I? It’s delicious, and I’m actually feeling moderately better by the time I swallow it down. Bryn’s still staring daggers at me though. “I want to enjoy our birthday dinner.”
“So did I.” This time, hurt seeps into her voice. I know how much she wants me to like Matt. I know how much she wants him to be the one, even if I sense the doubts coiled up inside of her, the bone-deep knowledge that wanting a person to be something isn’t enough to make it true. We’ve learned that the hard way, again and again. Our grandmother is a block of ice made human, our mother a narcissist who had five children by three different fathers and then abandoned all of us for Husband Number Four. And our father? Our father is a himbo who’s never remembered our birthday. Admittedly, I talk to him more than I do our mother, but that’s only because I find him vaguely entertaining and he likes the same computer games I do. Bryn hasn’t spoken to him in decades, because he left when we were kids and never bothered to visit.
“I’m sorry, Bryn,” I say. “If you marry Matt, I’ll obviously be right there beside you, rooting for you.”
“You assume I’d ask you to be my maid of honor?” she asks with a slight tilt of her lips.
“Well, I’m going to be standing at the front of the ceremony regardless,” I tease, “so you might as well make it official.”
The tension leaks out, thank God, and we spend the rest of dinner doing what sisters should—gossiping about people we know and speculating on when we can reasonably expect Nana to retire (never).
If my gaze strays to the bar a few times to check whether Cole’s still there, well, who can blame me? Like I said, unnaturally good looking. He certainly doesn’t check out in the personality department. Occasionally, when I look at him, he’s also looking at me, and it’s like an electric shock jolts through my body.
I decide to drink a little more than I should, because hell, it’s my birthday. I can uber home or ask our brother to pick me up. He’d complain about it—probably a lot, grumpy curmudgeon that he is—but he’d definitely come.
Finally, it’s time for dessert.
I brought the cake in earlier. They only offer single slices on their dessert menu, and if you ask me, a single slice is not enough for a birthday.
“We’re ready for our special delivery,” I say to the waiter with a wink. He looks nervous. Then again, I suppose that was suggestive.
“Oh, you know about it?” he says, which is sort of confusing, because duh, I’m the one who made the arrangements.
“Of course,” I say. His expression immediately eases, as if I’ve taken a weight off his mind.
“What’d you do?” Bryn says, but she’s sipping an Old Fashioned, and she sounds fond and indulgent. “You got us another princess cake, didn’t you?”
“You’ll see.”
When we were little girls, we always wanted a princess cake—the super freaky kind where it has a doll’s head, but the body is edible. I mean really, what the fuck? But kids are weird, and we were no exception, so we begged and cried for it. We never got one, of course, so a few years ago, when we turned thirty, I had one made for us. I’ve done it every year since.
The waiter leaves our table, and I watch him go, feeling a bit of little-kid excitement. It’s stupid because the cakes really are terrifying, but I guess I'm the kind of person who occasionally likes terrifying things.
Except the person who comes back with the cake isn’t the waiter.
He’s our father…
Although I’ve had video chats with Auggie before, neither Bryn nor I have seen him in person for decades.
CHAPTER TWO
Holly
“Surprise!” he says, setting down the princess cake with its two candles—a three and a three; if I’d actually put in thirty-three candles, it would have made the princess’s dress a bonfire. That might have been amusing, but it would have ruined the cake.
Auggie looks infinitely pleased with himself, as if he’d made the cake and painstakingly decorated it, not the new little Cakes and Crafts bakery on Main Street. Admittedly, this is the first time he’s correctly remembered our birthday, which is impressive, but someone should have told him that it’s probably best not to drop in on your daughters without warning after abandoning them in childhood.
Bryn gives him a weird look. “Did our other waiter clock out?”
She obviously doesn’t recognize him, not that I’m shocked. Unlike me, she never felt the desire or need to seek him out. Although she knows I have intermittent contact with him, she’s never once asked me about him…let alone looked up his picture.
“It’s me,” he says expectantly, his chest puffed out.
I nudge Bryn’s leg under the table. “It’s Auggie,” I hiss in an undertone.
“Who?” she asks, still dumbfounded. The candles are starting to drip onto the lovely skirt of the terrifying cake-bodied princess. I suck in a breath and blow them out, wishing like hell this won’t end in disaster. Well, you know what they say, if I don’t tell anyone, there’s a slight chance it’ll come true.
Or at least no one will need to know why I’m disappointed.
Auggie’s chest wilts like a dough that never properly rose. “Your father,” he says. “I’m your father.” Then, more optimistically, he adds, “I’m here on your birthday. I got it right this year.”
“Dude,” I say, rising and clapping him on the back. “You’re not doing yourself any favors. Most parents know their kids’ birthdays.” Even our fair-weather mother sent us a text this morning. Admittedly, it was a selfie of her and Husband Number Four going on a boat ride, accompanied by a message saying, I saw it was a low of 48 today in Highland Hills. Don’t you wish you were out here in Florida? Come visit!
Then: We don’t have enough room in the house to put you up, but there are a couple of hotels nearby that are very reasonable.
Is it any wonder that I used to fantasize about finding out my parents had kidnapped me from cool people?
“You knew about this?” Bryn says furiously, getting to her feet too. Her gaze is fixed on me, her eyes hot with betrayal. “You said you had a surprise.”
“I meant the cake,” I say wildly, pointing to it. “It was a small surprise. Not a horrible surprise. I know better.”
“You think this is a horrible surprise?” Auggie asks forlornly. Someone gave him a waiter’s apron, so he really looks the part. It’s weird, seeing him in person. He’s shorter than I thought he’d be. His eyes are the same green as mine, and his hair is a dark brown that I’m certain came from a bottle. He’s handsome, but in a slightly greasy way.
I’m guessing he saw this going down differently.
Well, at least this explains the waiter’s shiftiness earlier. When he asked if I “knew,” he wasn’t referring to the cake—but to the father who’d requested to bring it out.
“Yes,” Bryn hisses, shifting her attention to him. “Obviously. Who do you think you are, showing up out of the blue?”
“She asks a good question,” I say. I become aware that everyone in the dining room is staring at us, which makes sense. We’re all standing up, talking at each other in furious tones.
The waiter from earlier is watching us from a position near the bar, his expression a mixture of terror and fascination.
Cole’s watching us too. No, he’s watching me, and I feel a shiver of something. To my surprise, he makes a gesture, as if to say, Do you need me to intervene?
I give a small shake of my head, then tear my gaze from him as Bryn fumes to Auggie, “How’d you even know we’d be here?”
Shit.
“That is my fault,” I admit. “We were playing a game on Discord the other night, and I told him what we were doing for our birthday.”
“I only know what that last part means,” she says, “but I’ve asked you not to tell him anything about me.”
All I can do is shrug. “I figured he’d send a card on the right day this year.” I shift my gaze to him. “That’s what you should have done, Auggie. Jesus Christ. This isn’t the kind of thing you spring on someone.”
He looks sulky, like a kid who’s been sent to bed without any ice cream. “I saw a video where a dad popped out of his daughters’ birthday cake. They looked so happy—”
“That’s where you should have known something was wrong,” I interrupt. “No one is happy about lost cake. They had to be hamming it up for the cameras.”
“Anyway,” he says with a shrug. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“Mission fucking accomplished,” Bryn snaps. She looks as brittle and breakable as a spun-sugar statue.
I glance around. Yup. Everyone’s still staring. “Look, why don’t we all sit for a minute so we can talk this out without freaking out the whole restaurant?”
“I don’t want to sit with him,” Bryn snaps. “I’m leaving.”
“Just have a piece of cake,” I say. “You can’t not have princess cake.”
She glowers at me, but she lowers into her chair. I do the same.
Auggie runs a hand through his hair and then sits in one of the two remaining chairs. His attention shifts to Bryn.
I’m hoping he’ll have enough sense to apologize, but apparently that’s too much to ask for because he says, “You didn’t recognize me. Why? Is it the hair? Did I go too dark?”
Ha! I knew it was dyed.
I start cutting the skirt into pieces. Sorry, bodiless princess, but only delicious cake can help solve a situation this shitty.
Bryn doesn’t look amused, though. She’s staring at Auggie with murder in her eyes.
He gives a little laugh. “Why, the other day I mentioned to someone that I was planning to celebrate my daughters’ thirty-fifth birthday with them, and she couldn’t believe that I was old enough to have daughters, let alone ones so—”
“Don’t finish that sentence, bub,” I say, lifting a hand. “Also, can’t you read? Look at the candles.”
Bryn laughs too, but there’s no humor in it. “No woman said that to you,” she says, her tone dark, “or if they did, they wanted something from you. You look like you’re auditioning for a commercial for little blue pills.”
He looks horror-stricken now. “You’re just saying that to hurt me.”
“No,” she says. “I’m saying it because it’s true. You left when we were little, and we haven’t seen you since. What made you think we’d want to see you, of all people, on our birthday?”
“Because I’m your father,” he says warmly. Man, that cake video must have really gotten to him. He almost sounds like he means it.
I sense it happening the instant before it does, like Bryn and I really do have that twin connection people talk about. She lifts her drink and splashes it in his face. Then she gets up and turns to go. “Bryn, the cake!” I call out inanely. “There’s a crunch layer!”
“I’m not hungry,” she says without turning. “I’m going to see Matt.”
I make a face, which thankfully she can’t see.
I signal to the waiter, who’s still watching us like he’s eyeballing a car wreck on the side of the road. He probably regrets his role in this sad series of events, or maybe he’s just happy to have a mildly entertaining story to share with other guests.
“Check, please!” I say. And, because I really am excited about that crunch layer, I add, “ll need a box for the cake.”
That accomplished, I turn to look at Auggie.
“Are you wearing makeup?” I ask, confused. There are two dark lines running down from his eyes. I mean, no judgment, but it’s unexpected.
“Is it running?” he asks in horror.
“Is that really what you care about right now?”
The longing look he throws at the bathroom confirms it.
“I tried, Holly,” he says, seeming to really think it’s true. “No one can say I didn’t try. I mean, most dads wouldn’t fly across the country to show up at their daughters’ birthday celebration as a surprise.”
Indeed. Because most dads would have been invited. Admittedly, Bryn and I agreed long ago that our birthday dinner would always be an us thing—other people could hang out with us before and after, but the dinner would just be the two of us, even if we did it on a day other than our actual birthday. But even so.
“Your social graces need work, Auggie,” I say. “Do you want a piece of cake to go?”
He eyes it with hunger, then says, “No, I’m on a keto diet. No carbs.”
“More for me,” I mutter.
His gaze shoots to the bathroom again. Man, he’s really taking Bryn’s insult to his looks hard.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“I just want to freshen up,” he says, smoothing a hand over his hair.
“I mean here. What are you going to do here? I'm pretty sure Bryn’s not going to want to hang out with you again. When she says something like that she means it.”
“Oh,” he says sadly, then brightens up. “My friends are having a reunion this weekend. I’m crashing on Greg the Wall’s floor. They call him that because—”
“I’m gonna interrupt you right there with an I don’t care,” I say, because honestly, it’s pretty apparent he came here for Greg the Wall. He probably saw crashing our birthday dinner as an added bonus. I’m suddenly feeling very weary, down to the bones, about all of it. Auggie’s shitty surprise. Bryn’s shitty almost engagement. Even Cole, sitting at the bar, as appealing as a piece of princess cake until he opens his mouth.
Auggie takes his phone out and glances down at it, his eyebrows winging up. “Actually,” he says, “I’d better go. We’re all meeting at Ziggy’s in twenty minutes.”
Ziggy’s is Cole’s brewery, but he’s clearly left his second-in-command in charge for the night.
“Wait,” I say. “Let me get this straight. You figured you’d only spend twenty minutes with us?”
He tucks his phone back in his pocket. He looks so confused I almost feel bad for him. “Do people normally take more than twenty minutes to eat dessert?”
God Bless.
“Why don’t you go off and do your thing, Auggie? Maybe we can grab coffee sometime this weekend.”
He perks up a little. “How about Sunday morning?”
He really won’t be winning any Dad Olympics, this guy.
“Sure, sounds good.”
The waiter returns with a box and a whispered apology, which I nod away, and I hand him my credit card. I immediately start boxing up the cake, leaving the princess in the middle just because. Cake secured, I look at Auggie and say, “Well, have fun with Greg the Tall.”
