Dolly All the Time(15)

“I’m actually going out tonight,” I say to the general space. “To Hog Tied for a bit. Some old high school friends. Charlotte and those guys.” I am a terrible liar, and I am forever painting myself into a corner with unnecessary details.

“Sounds fun,” my dad says, eyeing the cocktail sauce stain on my jeans. I don’t know how I didn’t cover this with Naomi, but I have nothing to wear out to dinner.

I go upstairs to see if I can find anything suitable in Patsy’s and my old closet in Gus’s room. The two twin beds are covered in clothes from the explosion of Gus’s duffel bag, and the window seat has a rip in the upholstery. I’ll add it to my list. The little bookcase by the closet has a few framed photos—Pasty and me, Gus and my dad, my mom holding Patsy as an infant while I sat next to them, beaming.

I turn to the closet. My side is empty because I moved out like a grown-up. Patsy’s side is like a museum exhibit of 1990s fashion that she shows no sign of coming back for. I sort through the mainstays of an unfortunate grunge phase and several too-short skirts before finding a navy-blue sundress. Sleeveless and sensible, it’s the coastal Rhode Island version of a business suit. It’s cotton, T-shirt material, and fine for standing but too short for sitting down. I’ll hopefully be sitting across from him with a giant napkin in my lap, so this is probably fine. I take my hair out of the knot on top of my head and brush it out. I let it fall over my face, like a cloak of invisibility. I part it down the middle and pull it into a low ponytail to prevent me from fidgeting with the ends over dinner.

Gus eyes me as I come down the stairs. “Why are you wearing that?” he asks.

“My jeans were filthy,” I say, and kiss both Gus and Christopher on the forehead. “I won’t be late.”

It’s fifteen minutes to Harvey, just north of Newport, and I pull into the mostly empty parking lot of Bistro Belle Vie.

The restaurant is dark. Couples, just as Naomi said, are leaning into each other in the booths toward the back. I’m about to ask the hostess for a table for two when I see him in the corner booth. He has a bottle of red wine and two glasses. He holds his up to me.

I make my way over to the table and sit across from him, and the whole thing feels so clandestine, like he’s going to pass me some money in exchange for compromising photos.

“Interesting spot,” he says. He’s in a white dress shirt, open at the collar and bright against his tan skin. I let my eyes dip to his neck and over the curve of his Adam’s apple. There’s a votive candle on the table that’s uplighting his square jaw, and I wonder if he appreciates how perfectly things line up for him all the time.

I look around. “Yes, weird choice.”

“It was your choice,” he says.

The roof, the ruse, being anyplace at all with Stewart Whitfield—it’s all too much. I can’t be lying about small things. “That was my friend Naomi texting you. She has a history of grabbing my phone out of my hand when I’m faltering.”

He smiles a real smile, and it must be the first time I’ve seen it because I don’t remember the single dimple on his left cheek. It brightens his eyes. “I knew it,” he says.

“Knew what?”

He leans back in the booth. “I don’t know you at all, but I thought your texting style seemed off.”

“How so?”

“Wine?” he asks, and then fills my glass. “I thought, for a person who has been busting my balls since I met her, you used a lot of exclamation points.”

I laugh. “Good call. I am definitely exclamation point averse.”

“Me too,” he says. “See, we have something in common.” He raises his glass to me and takes a sip. My eyes stay on his mouth, even though I have specifically instructed them not to, and I consider how an occasional kiss this summer, just to prove we’re a couple, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. The last man I kissed was a thin-lipped guy in a sleeveless hoodie who I felt bad for because I beat him in darts. That was at least two years ago. I drag myself back to the reason I am sitting in this too-dark restaurant with this too-handsome man. My roof.

“Yes,” I say. “Good. So where do we start? Is there an agenda?” I pretend to look under my napkin. “I didn’t get my copy.”

“You were the one who had terms,” he says, and pulls a laptop out of his leather satchel. He opens it and looks up at me. “So I’m thinking a few times a week. I never saw Audrey more than that.”

“You didn’t live together?”

“Well, sort of. Sometimes she stayed at my house. But she’s very social and I didn’t always go along. I was mostly asleep when she came home.”

“Could have been part of the problem,” I say.

He shrugs. “Also occasional photo ops. Just around town. At the house.”

“There’s press at Eight Oaks?”

“No, actually. But that’s the other thing. My family can’t know about this, besides my sister, Busy.”

“Why are we lying to your family? I thought this was a business thing.”

He folds his hands together. It’s a deliberate movement and each of his fingers lands separately. They are beautiful hands, lightly tanned and perfectly manicured. There’s no way Naomi has ever seen a photo of these hands; if she had, she would have mentioned them in a pervy way.