Page 19 of So This Isn't Love
She doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.
Her heels click away down the linoleum, each one a sentence I can't read, and then the door swings shut and I'm alone with an archway, six empty pizza boxes, and a growing ache in my chest.
CHAPTER 8
DARCY
By eight o'clock that same evening I have been interrogated twice, my wineglass refilled three times, and now accused of harboring feelings for the enemy by a licensed veterinarian.
Cathy's back porch is built for nights like this, with string lights, mismatched Adirondack chairs, a wine selection she describes as "whatever was on the end cap," and a view of her darkened clinic across the yard. Annie claimed the porch swing the moment we arrived. Jules is sitting on the steps doing calf stretches, because Jules is incapable of sitting anywhere without improving herself.
I have the deep chair and a Malbec and, apparently, the witness stand.
"For the record," Jules says, "Ernie's wife posted video. Forty seconds of your billionaire doing ochos. It has two hundred likes and a comment from my aunt in Tampa."
"He's not my billionaire."
"The caption says 'Darcy Gable's billionaire.' Take it up with Carol."
I take a long, dignified sip instead. The group chat has been handling the day's coverage since noon. The Ferrari sighting, theYorkie checkpoint, the tango footage. Mattichogue's surveillance network needs no help from me, which is convenient, because I have no interest in narrating any of it. Especially not the unsettling moments we spent holding each other on Jules’s dance floor, which I have placed in a sealed box, in a locked drawer, in a room of my mind I am not currently visiting.
"Annie already gave us the drama club report," Cathy says, topping off my glass like she's loosening a witness. "I want the part she couldn't see. What's he like when he's not on a stage?"
"He was on a stage all day. The man treats eye contact like a spotlight."
"Joshua Cline asked him to come back," Annie says, to the table, not to me. The swing creaks. "Voluntarily. Out loud. I've had that kid in two productions and I've never heard him ask a stranger for anything."
Jules stops stretching. "The little one who whispers?"
Annie nods. "He talked, Jules. Full sentences. Stood there while Finn taught him the drill and then asked if he could come back tomorrow to paint." Annie lifts her glass in my direction, gently, like an apology for what she's about to do. "Tell them what you told me in the hallway."
"I said he's exactly who I thought he was." The Malbec doesn't help the sentence go down. "He's just better at hiding it now."
"And do we believe that?" Cathy asks the porch at large. "Show of hands."
No hands go up. Including, I notice with some betrayal, mine.
"Here's my problem." I set down the glass so I can use both hands, because apparently this requires gesturing. "If he was awful, this would be simple. I built the entire weekend on awful. I had contingencies for awful. Instead he follows Ernie's lead for two hours without one complaint, learns three step patterns,buys a hundred dollars of pizza for kids he's never met, and spends twenty minutes teaching my shyest student to use a power drill without once making the boy feel small." I pick the wineglass back up. "Do you know how much pent-up animosity I put into this weekend? And he's ruining it by being decent."
"The monster," Jules says.
"Tragic," Cathy agrees. "A handsome man behaving well. Someone should call the authorities."
I gesture with my glass. "You're all fired as friends."
"You can't fire us, we have the wine."
The conversation mercifully wanders off me for a while. Jules is six days from her spring recital and has developed a twitch when anyone says the word "tulle." Cathy tells the saga of yesterday's emergency patient, a corgi named Biscuit who ate a sock and is recovering with, quote, "no remorse whatsoever." The sock did not make it. Annie's phone keeps lighting up on the swing cushion beside her, and she keeps almost not smiling at it.
"Who keeps texting you?" Jules asks.
"The drama booster account." Annie says it a half-second too fast. "The set photos are getting comments."
"Comments, plural?"
"One commenter," she admits, "who may or may not be recovering from a broken leg." As soon as the words are out of her mouth she buries her entire face in her hands while I feign outrage and Jules and Cathy giggle like we’re all in sixth grade.
Eventually Cathy tucks her feet under her, eyes going shrewd in the way that means the teasing is about to get a point on it. "So what happened, Darce? Because you didn't drive over here glowing about power drills. You drove over here like a woman composing a strongly worded letter to the school board."
