Jasmine Guillory - The Proposal

She let out a deep sigh and picked up a piece of bacon with her fingers.

“Excellent.” She bit into the bacon, and the salty sweetness of the bacon and syrup combined exploded in her mouth. What a great morning.

He stood up, walked around the counter to get the rest of the bacon, and tossed a strip onto her plate.

“I promise we can hang out and eat pancakes and drink rosé and I won’t propose to you on a JumboTron.”

She clinked her coffee mug against his. Oh thank God. They wanted the exact same thing. This was perfect.

“That sounds pretty ideal.”

Chapter Thirteen

. . . . . . .

Carlos was just driving out of the grocery store parking lot a week and a half later when Drew called. It had been a brutal day at work, so he’d decided to cook something elaborate for dinner to help himself relax.

“Hey, man, what’s up?”

“Hey!” Drew’s voice boomed through the speakers in his car. “How’s the assistant director doing on this fine Wednesday?”

Drew had been the whole reason he’d even applied for the job in the first place. He hadn’t actually seen the opening, but Drew—all the way up in Berkeley now—had and had emailed it to him immediately. Carlos had jumped at the opportunity to move back to the Eastside, but he hadn’t been sure if they were looking for someone with his background for the job. When he got it, Drew maintained that he’d known he would all along.

“I’m still alive; that’s the best thing I can say after today at work.”

“Ahh, one of those days, huh?”

Carlos sighed.

“One of the worst kinds of days. You know the kind.”

“Well, maybe this will make it better: you around this weekend to hang out with your best friend and his fiancée?”

Carlos downshifted as the light changed.

“Oh, you mean Jake and Melissa? Yeah, I’m probably going to see them this weekend, why do you ask?”

“I ask because you can go fuck yourself, that’s why I ask,” Drew said, and both of them cracked up.

“Okay, but seriously, you and Alexa are coming to town? You need a place to stay? You know I live on the Eastside now, right? I don’t know if you know how to get to this side of town.”

“You are such an asshole. Yes, I know you live on the Eastside now. But we don’t need a place to stay. Alexa’s got to go down there with her boss for a conference, so I’m tagging along.”

“Awesome. Everything was so crazy at the engagement party I barely got to talk to you.” He hadn’t seen Drew since Christmas-time and Alexa since before that. “I’ll get to congratulate you two in person.”

“And we’ll get to see the new house, I hope?” Drew asked.

“Of course, but I haven’t put in the basketball hoop yet.”

“And meet whatshername?”

He never should have told Drew he was sleeping with Nik; he knew he’d get the wrong idea. But Drew had texted him the day after they’d first slept together and had asked if he’d seen her again, and it was impossible to not say he’d seen a hell of a lot of her the night before.

“Her name is Nik. I can check to see if she’s free, but I told you, this thing with her is very casual.”

It was a frequent casual thing—they’d only started sleeping together three weeks ago, and they’d already seen each other six times. But after Nik had been the one to bring up that she didn’t want a relationship, he wasn’t worried about how often they saw each other anymore.

How had he gotten so lucky? It was so rare for him to find women who didn’t want a relationship, especially women who were interesting and funny. Not to mention hot. Thank God Nik had dropped into his life.

“Yeah, yeah, you told me. But, you know, check to see if she’s free Saturday night. We’ll even come to your precious Eastside.”

He thought Drew and Alexa would both like her a lot, though. Alexa had always laughed at his jokes, so she’d like Nik’s sense of humor.

“All it takes to get you to the Eastside is for you to move to the other end of the state.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll text you our flight info and details, okay?”

Carlos pulled into his driveway and grabbed the groceries from the back seat.

“Sounds good.”

“Hey, how’s Jessie?”

Carlos had just checked in with her before leaving work. He knew she was getting sick of him checking in on her every day, but that didn’t mean he was going to stop doing it.

“Going stir-crazy, but otherwise hanging in there.”

“Okay, I gotta go. Go make your risotto or enchiladas or whatever.”

Carlos laughed as he set his groceries down in the kitchen and took the risotto rice out of the bag. It was good to have friends who knew you better than you knew yourself.

He turned on the basketball game to keep him company while he cooked. One of the only things he’d made the time and effort for after moving into this house was to put his TV on a pivot, so he could watch it in the kitchen while he cooked, and then turn it so he could watch it from the couch while he ate. The ideal set up, really.

He chopped an onion, sliced the fresh mushrooms and soaked the dried ones, and peeled the asparagus. The rote movements gave him the feeling of zen that this kind of cooking always did for him. He couldn’t think about the stuff that had happened at work that day or worry about what would happen tomorrow when he was busy carefully dicing an onion so that all of the pieces were the exact same size. Just as he turned the heat on underneath his big sauté pan, he heard his phone buzz and grabbed it out of his pocket. Nik.

I just finished a huge story and I’m starving, want to get dinner?

He texted her back without stopping to think.

I’m in the middle of making dinner. Want to come over? How do you feel about mushrooms?

Holy shit, what was he thinking? He never invited women over to his place; it was kind of a thing of his. After a few way too fast relationships in his mid-twenties, he’d learned to keep the women he was dating away from his space. If women came to your place, they always wanted to change things to how they liked them, probably in preparation to move in all too soon.

I feel great about mushrooms. What’s your address? I’ll leave here in about fifteen minutes. Does that work?

Okay, but wait. This was Nik. She’d made it very clear to him that this was a rebound for her, just quite not in those words. And unlike a few of the conversations he’d instigated with women about keeping a relationship casual where they’d said that was fine with them but had made it clear shortly afterward that that was absolutely not fine with them, he knew that Nik hadn’t been bullshitting him.

4242 Sequoia Street. See you soon.

Plus, Nik was fun to cook for. She’d gone crazy over those pancakes he’d made her. And it seemed like they’d both had busy days. Some stress release with her in his big bed sounded like an excellent way to end this day.

• • •

As Nik walked up the front steps of Carlos’s little gray cottage, she suddenly felt shy about basically inviting herself over to his house. Had he really wanted her to come over, or did he just ask because she’d texted him out of the blue and he didn’t know what else to do? She wished she’d called him instead, even though the two of them never talked on the phone—it was always easier to tell from a voice how someone really felt than from a text message. Well, it was too late now. He opened the bright red front door before she reached it.

“Hey.” Okay, he looked normal. “Come on in.”

The house was as masculine and put together as Carlos always was. The living room had a big fat leather couch, a huge TV on one wall, and a fireplace against the other. She dropped her stuff by the door and followed him into the big open kitchen that looked like something out of the Williams Sonoma catalog.