Page 73 of Cut Off
The Surprise
ZOE
There’s a dress on my bed.
Not a “grabbed it off the clearance rack” dress.Thedress: the one I pointed to in a magazine two weeks ago while Eli was reading Lego catalogs at the kitchen island, and Jonah was pretending to read his phone. The midnight-blue silk one with the slit up the thigh that I’d held up and said, mostly to Eli, mostly as a joke, “If I ever got invited somewhere fancy, I’d rob a bank for this dress.”
Eli, without looking up, had said, “That’s against the law.”
And Jonah, without looking up either, had said nothing at all.
And yet. Here it is. Draped across my comforter. There’s a shoebox next to it. Heels. Strappy. The kind of shoes that say “I’m going somewhere important.” There’s a note on top of the box, in Jonah’s blocky handwriting:
Be ready by six. Mom’s got Eli. Wear the dress. —J
I read it three times. I flip it over in case there’s more on the back. There isn’t.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. Claire, because the Holts run on group-text efficiency.
Claire:Picking up Eli at 5! We’re doing dinner, that new Pixar movie, and way too much popcorn. Don’t worry about a thing, and have fun tonight. xoxo
The xoxo is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The xoxo knows something. The xoxo is from a woman who’s not subtle and has not, at any point in the last two weeks, stopped looking at me and her son like she’s already mentally choosing a wedding venue.
I sit on the edge of the bed next to the dress, throw my hands on my thighs, and breathe.
There’s a dress, a babysitter, a note that uses an initial, and I have approximately two hours to figure out what a person wears under a midnight blue silk dress when the goal is to remove it.
I said what I said.
I shower. I shave. I do the makeup I usually save for on-camera work, and then I do it again because the first time, I smeared it. I blow out my hair in big, soft waves that will probably last forty-five minutes, tops, but for now, they look like the kind of hair that gets handed champagne.
The dress fits like it was sewn by someone who made it just for me, with my exact measurements. Which, fine. I don’t want to think about it.
At five-fifty-eight, I come down the stairs. Slowly, because heels, and also because I’m seconds away from stress hives. Jonah’s in the foyer, leaning against the wall by the door, and when he hears me, he straightens up.
And then he just—stares. Hands at his sides. Mouth open. The kind of look a man gives a woman when he has, in fact, lost his entire vocabulary.
He’s in a suit. Charcoal. No tie, top button open, white shirt crisp enough to cut a finger on. His hair is doing the thing where it looks like he ran his hand through it twice and gave up, and somehow that even sexier.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
We stand there.
“You’re staring,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“Are you going to do that the whole night?”
“Probably.”
I laugh, mostly to release the pressure in my chest. “Cool cool cool.”
He pushes off the wall and walks toward me, slow, and stops close enough that I can smell the soap on him. He puts a hand on my hip, light, like he’s checking that I’m real, and his eyes do a tour from my hair to the slit and back up.
“Zoe,” he says.
