The Rom-Commers(71)

He felt real.

But more than that: he made me feel real.

The kiss lit a warmth that spread through me like honey, softening everything tense, and soothing everything hurt, and enveloping everything lonely.

I’d dated other people before. I’d had a few mild relationships. But I’d never felt anything like this.

And then a thought hit me: This might be love.

Oh, god. This really might be love.

But then, before I could decide if that was a good thing or a disaster, the oven timer for dinner went off.

Loud. Off-key. Insistent.

We ignored it until we couldn’t ignore it anymore, and then we broke apart—him looking exactly as disheveled as I felt.

I walked over to the stove, but then it took me a second to find the oven mitts that were on the counter right in front of me. I pulled dinner out, and set it on the stovetop for a second while I tried to pull myself together.

I guessed Charlie was doing the same.

Because just as I turned to him, unsure of how to shift gears from whatever that just was to doing an ordinary thing like eating dinner … Charlie said, with a slow nod, “I get it now.”

“Get what?” I asked.

Charlie met my eyes. “Why we’re rewriting this story.”





Twenty-Three

THE NEXT MORNING, on FaceTime, Sylvie and Salvador were a little dismayed.

“You had a totally epic kiss,” Sylvie asked, more than once, “and then you just ate roasted chicken?”

“With herbes de Provence,” I said, in our defense.

“You didn’t … I don’t know—confess a bunch of feelings?” Sylvie asked.

“Or have a night of passion?” Salvador suggested.

“No!” I said. “No. It was a first kiss!”

But Sylvie was calling bullshit on that. “You’ve been living together for weeks.”

“But as professional colleagues.”

“So…” Sylvie said. “Was the kiss real? Or was it research?”

“It was real,” I said.

Sylvie and Salvador looked at each other like I was some kind of love weakling. “Are you sure?”

“It was real for me,” I said. “And for him, too—I think. Just based on nonverbal cues.”

Sylvie frowned.

“He said he didn’t want to kiss me for research—and then he kissed me. So that implies it wasn’t research.”

But Sylvie kept frowning.

“What?”

“Could that have been part of the research, though?” she asked. “To pretend it wasn’t research?”

“No!” I said. “That’s crazy!” But was it also a good point?

Now we were overthinking it.

“This is ridiculous,” Sylvie said at last. “Just go ask him.”

“Ask him?!” I gasped in horror. “I will never ask him!”

“You don’t want to know?”

“I desperately want to know,” I said. “But I will just privately obsess over it, like a normal person.”

“Why can’t you just have a conversation? Tell him you like him and see if he likes you?”

“Please,” I said. “If human relationships worked like that, I’d be out of a job.”

Sylvie thought it over for a minute before saying, “Guess it’s time for Plan B.”

“What’s Plan B?”

“I’m FedExing you my slinkiest slinky dress and my strappiest strappy sandals.”

“For what?”

Sylvie leaned into the FaceTime camera, like Duh. “Put them on and see what happens.”

“Just put on a slinky dress for no reason and walk around his house like a lunatic?”

“Like a sexy lunatic,” Sylvie corrected. “It’s a maxi dress with a plunging V-neck made of silky fabric printed with giant tropical leaves. You’ve never worn anything like this in your life. You’re going to discover a whole new side of yourself.”

“What possible excuse would I have for wearing something like that?” I demanded.

“You’re a writer,” Sylvie said. “Make something up.”



* * *



UGH. LEAVE IT to me and Sylvie to overthink that lovely kiss and drain its afterglow with overprocessing.

Had it just been research?

I hadn’t thought so at the time. But the fact that it hadn’t led to anything else seemed to refute that view. We had a mad kiss—and then ate dinner. It hadn’t seemed strange at the time, but the more I overthought it, the less sure I felt.

Maybe I didn’t really want to know.

I sent Charlie an overly cheerful text that said, Day off from swimming today! Enjoy sleeping in!

And then I took a shower and did the best I could with my hair and put on just a hint of eyeliner and lipstick—enough to try to look better without looking like I was trying. And then I tried on ten different outfits to wear before deciding to go with my usual writerly duds under my usual strawberry hoodie so that if that life-ruining kiss last night had, after all, only been research on Charlie’s end, I had plausible deniability.

It hadn’t been research for me.

But I would never, ever admit that—unless it hadn’t been research for Charlie, either.