Page 15 of What Maple Heard

Maple held up both hands. “—we’ll fit them next week once Nancy gets the bows attached, so nobody is trying anything on today—“

Too late. One of the girls had already gotten into the open box and was holding a tutu out in front of her, turning side to side in front of the mirror on the studio wall.

A boy, around ten, looked at the tutu and started laughing.

“You’re gonna look SO SUS,” he announced.

Sus? What in the world was that supposed to mean?

Three other boys immediately lost their minds in solidarity.

“Blessing looks so sus. She looks so sus.” The boys started chanting.

“BOYS.” Maple stepped into the middle of it. “Blessing looks awesome. And as I said before, we will not make fun of each other. We’re here to have fun as a group, and we can’t do that if we pull each other down.”

“But we are having fun, Ms. Maple.” An older boy retorted.

Maple handled it like a pro, talking calmly to him. “Not at the expense of others, Dex, you know that. Now, please help Nancy carry these to the back.”

“But—“

“Now, please.”

Dex looked at the box. He looked at Maple, picked up the box, still grinning, and carried it away.

I stood at the door and watched all of this.

And that was when it hit me.

The idea.

The absolutely, undeniably splendid idea that would put me directly in the middle of Maple’s schedule. Every single day.

Oh, I thought. Hello, Phase Two.

***

Chapter 5

Cade

Here’s the thing about realizing you’re a colossal dick.

It doesn’t just hit you once. It hits you in waves. You’ll be doing something completely normal — making coffee, getting into your car, existing — and then a new layer of it arrives. A new way in which you were terrible that you hadn’t fully processed yet. And then you have to sit with that one too.

The wave that was hitting me hardest right now was this one: Maple had already been abandoned by everyone who was supposed to stay. Her father. Her mother. The entire life she should have had. She had rebuilt herself from nothing, alone, with a four-year-old on her hip, and the one thing she had been protecting herself against her entire adult life was exactly what I had confirmed for her that night.

That’s all you are to me. Don’t get too comfortable.

I hadn’t said those exact words. I hadn’t had to.

What kind of man does that?

A colossal dick is who.

The first time I saw her standing in front of me at the bachelor party salsa lesson, my brain had done something it had never once done before, which was stop working entirely.

She was gorgeous. I want to be accurate about this because gorgeous is a word people throw around too easily. Maple was the kind of beautiful that hit you before you had time to prepare for it. Her body, her smile, the way she moved — I had been around beautiful women my entire adult life and none of them had ever made me lose the thread of a sentence mid-word.