Jasmine Guillory - The Proposal

Carlos got off the freeway exit for his house. A trip up to the Bay Area sounded like the break from his life that he needed.

“As soon as the baby’s at home with Jessie and Jon, I’ll drive up there. I was just thinking that I needed a long solo drive.”

“Perfect. Tux shopping sounds basically terrible, but at least we’ll get a fun weekend out of it. Oh, and please text me how to spell Nik’s name so we don’t get it wrong on the invite.”

Shit. He couldn’t dodge this one.

“Actually . . . you don’t need to know how to spell her name. We broke up.”

He heard a horn honk at the other end of the line.

“What? I almost ran a red light. When? What happened?”

It felt so depressing to say it out loud, but he had no real choice.

“Last weekend. Sunday morning, the day after Jessie had the baby. We were at the hospital together . . . long story, it’s not important. Anyway, I told her I was in love with her and . . . it didn’t go well.”

“Catch me up here: you’re in love with her? I thought you gave me some bullshit about how it wasn’t serious.”

He sighed.

“I guess you realized that was bullshit sooner than I did. But it doesn’t matter; she doesn’t feel the same way.”

He’d only told this terrible story twice and he was already sick of it.

“Oof. She was at the hospital when Jessie had the baby? So she met your family?”

Thanks, Drew, for narrowing in on one of his sore spots.

“Unfortunately. Get this—she sent cupcakes to Jessie at the hospital on Monday.”

He had been both touched and furious when he’d walked into Jessie’s hospital room on Monday to see that Cupcake Park box. He knew, even before Jessie had told him, that they’d come from Nik.

“That was so nice of her,” Drew said. “I bet you wanted to smash every single one of those cupcakes with the bottom of your foot.”

“I wanted to throw them out the fucking window.”

He heard the noises from the other end of the phone that signaled that Drew had driven into the parking garage.

“Do you have to go?”

“Nah, I have at least three or four more minutes,” Drew said. “The staff parking is way on the top floors. It’ll take a while to get up there. What do you mean it didn’t go well? I’m guessing she didn’t say it back?”

Carlos pulled up in front of his house and turned off his car, but he didn’t bother to go inside yet.

“Not only did she not say it back, she said it would be better if we could pretend I’d never said it, which wasn’t exactly the reaction I’d hoped for. So I got mad, said some not great stuff to her, left the house, and drove away.” He sighed. “You don’t have to tell me that I didn’t handle it well. I already know that.”

He looked out the window while he was talking. Damn, he really needed to mow his lawn.

“Have you talked to her since?” Drew asked.

Carlos sighed again.

“No. I want to, but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if there’s anything I can say.”

He’d thought about texting her, especially after Jessie got those cupcakes. He’d wanted to say thank you and to apologize for being such an ass. Mostly the latter. But after he’d seen all of those texts from Fisher after their dramatic breakup, he sort of felt like he should avoid texting her anything. He didn’t want to be that guy.

“Hmmmm,” Drew said. Carlos heard him get out of his car. “I can think of a few things. I seem to remember a certain conversation last year right around this time . . .”

“That was different—you hadn’t told Alexa how you felt,” Carlos said. He should have known Drew would throw his own advice back in his face.

He’d be lying, though, if he tried to pretend that the only reason that he hadn’t texted Nik was because of Fisher’s crazy texts. The real reason was: what if it didn’t make any difference?

He’d obviously sprung the whole thing on her too fast, which had been a big part of the reason everything escalated like it did. He should have done it all so differently. He’s already thought of at least five or six better ways he should have told her. He wanted another chance to talk to her about everything. About them. But it all still felt so tender. He wasn’t ready for her to reject him again.

“I know, I know. Sorry, forget my advice. What I should have said was, that fucking sucks; do you want to come up here this weekend and get really drunk with me? We can pick out some incredibly ugly tuxes for the wedding if you want.”

Carlos laughed.

“Alexa would skin me alive. And really, man, thanks. I would, if the baby wasn’t still in the hospital. But as soon as she’s home, I’m on my way. I’ll keep you posted.”

A weekend getting drunk with Drew sounded like exactly what he needed.

“Awesome, I’m looking forward to it. Okay, now I really do have to go.”

“Tell Alexa I said hi.”

He hung up the phone and got out of his car. Talking to Drew had helped in some ways and made it worse in others. He was so happy about marrying Alexa in just a few months that it made the breakup feel even worse.

Oh well. He walked up his front steps and unlocked his door. Drew couldn’t sit around in his underwear on his couch and eat pizza and drink beer all night like he could. Who had it better, huh?

He tried not to answer that.

• • •

Nik jumped at the noise outside on Monday afternoon. Did people really need to set fireworks off in the middle of the afternoon? The Fourth of July wasn’t even for a few days. The amateur fireworks got earlier every damn year. She stood up to get some water and realized she couldn’t remember the last time she’d left the house. Oh right, for her last self-defense class. Four days ago. She’d been buried in work all week—or as her friends claimed when they tried to get her to go out to brunch that weekend and she’d refused, she had buried herself in work.

At least she’d been able to concentrate on work again. It was a relief to dive headfirst into a story and not let herself think about Carlos, and what he was probably doing right now, and how much she missed him, and why she hadn’t heard a single thing from him in the eight days since he’d slammed his front door. The thing was, as soon as she stopped working, those things were all she could think about.

She looked down at herself and winced. She was wearing the same leggings she’d been wearing for days and a threadbare tank top. And she desperately needed a shower.

Twenty minutes later, she left her house, showered; in a mostly clean pair of jeans, a gray T-shirt, and her biggest pair of sunglasses; and with her hair in a topknot. See, she could act like a human being. Sort of.

She walked the mile to the coffee shop while she listened to the audiobook of her latest true crime book. She wished she could tell Carlos to get it for Jessie.

She still wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing when she’d sent Jessie cupcakes. But she’d been a few hospital rooms away when Jessie had had her baby. She’d cried along with Carlos’s whole family when Eva was born, and she’d seen the tiny baby just hours later. It still hurt, more than she wanted to acknowledge, that Carlos had said it was a waste for her to meet his family, after everything they’d shared that night. But it felt wrong to pretend none of that had happened, that she didn’t care, just because she and Carlos were over. So she’d sent the cupcakes, the ones that Carlos had told her that Jessie and her husband had particularly liked. None of the spicy chocolate ones.

She thought about sitting down to drink her large iced coffee at the coffee shop, but she hadn’t brought a book or her laptop, and she didn’t feel like staring at the tiny bright screen of her phone. She wandered down the street and half-heartedly glanced into boutiques, but she wasn’t really in the mood for shopping. After a few blocks, she turned around and walked home.