Page 33 of The Getaway List
“I don’t wanna move,” I grumble, burrowing my head farther into him.
Tom laughs softly, his shoulder lifting against my cheek.
“Maybe you’ll unravel the flower mystery,” he says. He holds his finger over the ACCEPT button, waiting for my permission. I let out a sigh that he knows is a yes, and he taps it for me.
There’s another disappointment then, one that’s fainter and harder to define.
“You have to come down with me, though, so I look like less of a gremlin on my own,” I tell him.
He does, and ten minutes later we are the proud owners of a hunk of aged gouda cheese.
“Do I even want to know what’s going on in your life, man?” asks our dispatcher, who delivered both my wildflowers the other day and Tom’s tub of sunscreen this morning.
Tom examines the gouda and says, “Well, if we figure it out we’ll let you know.”
Naturally we break into the gouda the moment we get back upstairs, despite the very large and looming question of “Who the heck would send us these things, if not each other?” And it’s then that I fully cop to the strange disappointment—that it doesn’t matter, really, who sent the flowers or the cheese. There’s some not-small and decidedly silly part of me that wishes they came from Tom.
Halfway into the next episode of Tides of Time and three quarters of the way through the hunk of cheese and I’m worried that Tom’s in the same funk I am. We usually would’ve both pointed out inconsistencies from the books ten times over by now. Tom must be wondering the same thing, because he nudges me with his arm, his eyes clearly asking, Everything okay?
I bop my forehead into his shoulder. “Thanks for telling me about the texting thing,” I say.
Tom pulls in a quick breath, like he’s about to thank me right back, but I don’t want that.
“And I just want to reiterate,” I say, pressing my forehead deeper into him. “You can tell me anything. I’d always rather know than not.”
Tom rests his chin on top of my head. “Same to you,” he says after a moment.
I know he means it, but it still feels like a deflection. Like there’s something there in that beat he hesitated, if I’m willing to risk chipping away at it. But right now I’m somewhere I haven’t been in years—unscheduled and unhurried, with my best friend at my side. I close my eyes and breathe the calm of it into my lungs, letting it settle over me like a heavy blanket until we fall asleep pressed into each other, the city and every bend and break that brought us here nothing but a distant hum far below.
Chapter Ten
True to her word, Mariella takes the train up to the Upper West Side the next day to meet me to solve my “fashion emergency,” which is admittedly getting more dire by the minute. By the time I finish dispatch deliveries for the day, Tom’s borrowed clothes are turning into giant sweaty tents on my human form. The audacity of him to have those newly broad shoulders.
Once we’ve met up and secured coffee from a cute little French bakery Mariella loves, she turns to me and says, “Okay. Give me a sense of your style.”
“Comfy. But not this comfy,” I say, lifting my arms, which are half-swallowed by Tom’s ginormous NASA T-shirt. “More like—sporty. But sometimes edgy? Like if Jesse’s sense of style and a very cozy beanbag chair had a baby.”
Mariella nods and says in the tone of doctor giving a diagnosis, “Punk-adjacent athleisure. Got it. We’ll start at Housing Works and work our way up to the bazaar.”
She leads me to a thrift shop on Seventy-Fourth Street crammed to the gills with clothes, old records, and all kinds of trinkets, and immediately dives into the racks with the authority of someone who is quite familiar with the art of style hunting. It makes sense, given how unique Mariella’s own style is—today she’s rocking a pair of pastel green high-waisted shorts, a white crop top with a fringe trimming, and a pair of bright blue boots. It’s not unlike she stepped out of an ABBA music video.
“All right, these are some good bets,” she says within five minutes, handing me a pile of clothes. “You go try those on while I go look at these shiny things.”
Unsurprisingly, she captured my usual style to a T—well, an improved version of it, at least. Everything she picked out is very me, but with the volume dialed up just a bit. The vintage black jeans she found have tears in the knees; the sporty crop top she found has an unexpected strappy racer back to it; the black bike shorts have electric blue seams.
“You’re a fashion savant,” I declare on my way out of the dressing room.
Mariella is pouting at her phone. “Ugh. But a flirting disaster.”
“Oh, is that why you’re constantly getting sent stuff from the dispatch?” I ask innocently.
She smirks but says, “It’s Luca. I have this weird and kind of ridiculous crush on him?”
I pause like my brain is recalibrating. “You do?”
The initial surprise fades fast, though, especially when Mariella doesn’t so much as blink. Maybe it even makes sense. On our walk the other day the two of them had a few quick but animated conversations only actual New Yorkers could keep up with (including lore about “pizza rat” and a “hot duck” I’m still mildly confused by), and were laughing loud enough at each other’s jokes that they nearly fell behind a few times.
Huh. I’m not sure who I would have imagined either of them with, but now I don’t have to, because I’m already picturing it. They’d be very cute together. Mariella with her blunt cool-girl edge and Luca with his unabashed dweeby sunshine. I’m a sucker for an opposites-attract trope.
