***
Half an hour later, we bid goodbye to our last customer and stood up.
“Congratulations. You did it.” Scarlett beamed so wide the store lights reflected off her perfect white teeth. “This was a very, very successful event. The manager is thrilled. I’ll have you guys on the TV interview circuit within a week.” She rubbed her cherry-tipped hands together. “You’re so perfect for this, it hurts.”
“Thanks, Scarlett.” I nestled into the crook of Adrian’s arm as he slipped it around me.
“I’ll say goodnight now and go close out with the manager. You kids have a fun anniversary.”
“We will. Thanks again.”
As she walked away, I heard her muttering, “Gorgeous, just gorgeous,” to herself.
I lifted my face toward my husband. “I’m so glad to get the first one over with. Now we can relax and have some fun. You’re meeting that stalker fan guy in the café first, though, right?”
“Yes, but Connor’s a friend. I’ve corresponded with him more than a year. He’s all right.”
I felt a little better about it, maybe three percent. “Five minutes?”
“Five minutes.”
“I’ll hit the ladies’ room and meet you at the café, then, okay?”
“Sounds like a plan, and I love me a good plan.”
I rolled my eyes at him in response.
He swooped me over backwards. A flashbulb lit up my peripheral vision. Scarlett’s hired shooter was still at it. “Hurry back.”
I put the back of my hand to my forehead and said, “Be still, my heart.”
He laughed and set me back on my feet, and we walked in opposite directions.
It felt strange and wonderful to have finished our book launch together, hell, to have written the book at all, instead of just enforcing the Chicago Manual of Style upon it. As an editor, most of my writers treat me like the punctuation police. Adrian doesn’t. Words matter to him, like they do to me. Even more, my words matter to him. Mine. I hadn’t even known I had my own words. Sure, I’d known I was prone to what my mother called an overactive imagination since the day I ran home from school, gasping for air, and told her I’d seen an elephant walk through my schoolyard and reach into my classroom window. That I’d felt the wiry hairs on his trunk as he lifted me from my seat, through the air, and out the window. Yet somehow—“It was like magic, Mom!”—I’d still been in my seat five minutes later to take the terrifying state assessment test. I’d kept that imagination under wraps until Adrian started unfastening all my buttons. And now my name was on a book jacket, too, and more words threatened to come out of me, this time forming themselves into an idea for a fantasy novel, for goodness’ sake, something I hadn’t told even Adrian yet because it was so crazy.
I made my way across the store toward the ladies’ room. Many of the browsing shoppers were people I recognized from our signing. I tried not to race-walk in front of them.
When I finished sprucing up—and answering questions from women in the bathroom who were more interested in my marriage than in triathlon—I broke toward the sounds of beans grinding and milk steaming. Adrian and Connor were talking with their heads together like longtime confidants—and Miss Boob Job was lurking behind them, more Mata Hari than Barbie now. When she saw me, she whirled around so fast her bag flew out from her body like a stripper from her pole. My eyes followed her retreat.
When the door closed behind her, I looked back at my husband and his new old friend. Connor was punctuating his speech with sharp nods of his head and smacking his closed fist into his open hand. Adrian snuck a glance back over his shoulder and saw me, then turned back to Connor and held up a palm. Connor looked in my direction, then back at Adrian, and nodded. They shook hands and Connor left through the same door Rhonda had, all before I could reach them.
I tilted my head. “That was some conversation.”
Adrian planted a firm kiss on my lips. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” I started to roll my eyes, but stopped when I caught a flash of white through the window. A small sedan was driving past the bookstore, sending me into another blood-soaked flashback of Adrian on the side of the road with the dead cyclist. I shook my head to clear the image and gripped my husband’s bicep. Warm. Solid.
He picked up a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of orange and yellow tulips from the table beside him and I took them from his hands. “But it’s Thursday!”
Adrian brought me tulips every Friday since one hour after our first not-a-date. It was still hard to believe that a man who looked that good would work so hard to make me feel special. Tan, muscular but lean, and blond with short curls at the nape of his neck, Adrian was delectable. Like double-fudge-brownie-sundae-with-a-cherry-on-top yummy, although he would rather be compared to a gluten-free brownie sweetened with coconut nectar, hold the fudge and double the organic fresh cherries, please. He made me forget that I’m on the wrong side of forty and haven’t changed my hairstyle since my fifteen-year-old started kindergarten. Sure, I have a good face and can render a pretty paragraph, but Adrian was the looker in our twosome.
He kissed the tip of my nose. “Pretend it’s Friday, then, since it’s our anniversary and book launch. Thank Scarlett, though. I ran out of time today, and she saved my ass.”
I laughed. “Well, I have a surprise for you, too, but I’m saving it for dinner.”
“Oh, that isn’t all I’ve got, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for your real surprise. Tomorrow night.”
“Then I’ll save mine until then, too.”
“Copycat.” He winked.
We started walking to the parking lot, my arm through his. Adrian’s strides were normally twice the length of mine, but somehow we made them match.
“So, what did Connor want to talk to you about?”
“We debated Coeur d’Alene versus Lake Placid.” Those were two famous Ironman triathlons.
“That’s caca.”
“He heard Lake Placid was the better race for a first-timer. I set him straight.”
My thoughts began to tumble like Keds in a drier. The scene replayed in my mind: Little Miss Boob Job skulking around in the café within earshot of the two men. I couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen, nor could I figure out the source of the dread that was seeping through me. But it was our anniversary. I had two options. I could act the paranoid fool or I could be a grown-up. I chose option B.
“Okay.”