Love Interest(102)
“But where are his bagpipes?” Alex grumbles.
“I beg you not to inquire.”
“God, I was starving,” Miriam groans around a mouthful of food.
“Same,” Brijesh says. “A happy hour appetizer would have been nice. Maybe some croquembouche. Or tuna tacos. With microgreens.”
“The nuptials started at seven thirty!” Miguel says. “Happy hour was already over. What we should have done was pregamed the ceremony.”
“That,” Sasha says, “would have been an abominably bad idea.”
I turn to Alex, who’s gone back to glaring at Lance—by far his favorite activity of the evening. We had an awkward introduction earlier (this time, Lance and his girlfriend didn’t bail), but it’s out of the way now, just like when I met Sonja.
Honestly, I only remember Lance is here every time I catch Alex staring at him like he could erase my ex-boyfriend if he glared hard enough.
“Alex?”
“Hmm?” He turns to look at me, arm coming to rest on the back of my chair.
“There’s no need to feel jealous.”
He doesn’t look the least bit sorry or embarrassed by my chastising. His eyes darken as he looks at me—my eyes, my lips, my body. I feel his hand weave into my hair. “I don’t feel jealous.” His tone is at odds with his expression. “I feel protective.”
“Oh, thank you for clarifying. By all means, glare on.”
Alex bites the inside of his cheek, leaning toward me. “Let me have this,” he says before pressing a kiss to my temple. “It’s a new experience for me.”
I shudder under his touch, annoyingly turned on. “Fine,” I say. He laughs.
When we all get up to dance a few minutes later, Alex leaves his suit jacket on the back of his chair. We top up our drinks and head to the dance floor, getting silly and ridiculous and spilling expensive wine on our less expensive clothes. Eventually, Alex puts our empty glasses on the nearest table and spins me in the makings of a swing dance.
“They teach you this at Harvard?” I shout in his ear.
“Twelve-hour credit!” he shouts back.
“Could you have possibly fathomed that when we fake-kissed in Sleight of Hand, you’d wind up here as my real date?”
“Fathomed it? I made sure of it. Now I can say I’ve seen Atlanta beyond the airport.”
The dance turns slow, and our bodies press in. I rest my head on his shoulder and let him hold me. “Are you having fun?” he asks.
“Of course,” I say. “But I’ll still be ready to go home.”
I don’t clarify which home I mean. Right now, it’s London. But really, it’s him. I trace the rose of Sharon tattoo on his forearm, and when I look back up, his eyes are twinkling.
* * *
Tracy Garcia fills the open CEO role at Little Cooper. Don is promoted to CFO, and Mrs. Cooper steps into the chairperson’s seat.
For one reason or another, Robert Harrison is never named to the board of Strauss Holdings. He’s never named anywhere, in fact, thanks to an SEC investigation suggesting he violated (a) his noncompete, (b) his confidentiality agreement, and (c) his fiduciary duty. But he gets no jail time. Go figure.
Alex puts in his resignation / is simultaneously fired, sells the Pottery Barn couch to Freddy, gives Cleopatra and Calliope to the guy across the hall, and kind of moves to London. (His mailing address is still his aunt’s apartment in Queens, which I don’t press at first because I’m not sure about the legal aspect of Alex living in a country where he’s unemployed and not a citizen.) After three months, he picks up his first freelance job here, and that’s when I ask him to officially move in by hiding his suitcase in the back of the closet and unpacking his things.
Gran loves him. She likes me fine (definitely more when I talk about finance, less when I talk about Dad or Tennessee or basically anything other than finance), and we get a meal together once every couple of weeks at very stuffy restaurants where I am required to wear something nicer than I wear to work. Once, she even invited a few other distant relatives, who are seriously awesome and therefore also on her shit list. But that woman fully thinks Alex Harrison is the best thing to happen to her since her daughter deserted their family thirty years ago. If Alex can’t come, Gran is not interested. If we ever move again, I’ll have to pry him from her cold, dead hands.
Like most other things, I grow into my job with time, and I think the job grows into me, too. I get to write a travel budget in the May issue. Alex prints it out and frames my first byline (which contains fewer than one hundred words but does include many numerical figures), then surprise-books the exact trip I budgeted—to Morocco—so we can take it in October.
There is one day at a pub near Bethnal Green where I have an allergic reaction and have to stick myself in the ass with my Epi Pen, right there at the lunch table. Alex is scarred so badly from it he stares into space for the rest of the day, even though I fully recover after twenty minutes.
We learn to cook together—because our apartment’s stove actually works, and because we’re trying to save for vacations. The result is a lot of burned things (burnt, if you’re British) and bursts of laughter, and occasionally even a take-out order. But we forge ahead meal by meal, since every trip we take leaves us hungry for more. High on the list is a visit to Korea so Alex can show me another part of himself, but in the meantime, I’ve gotten to see the White Cliffs of Dover. I got a headache trying to keep up with an outdoor play of Macbeth on Oxford’s spring grounds. Last month, we took a weekend-long flower-arranging class in Bath.