Jasmine Guillory - The Proposal

Good deeds—plural. Not only had they pulled her away from the camera crew, gotten her away from the stadium of doom, and delivered her to her friends, but as she’d discovered on Saturday night after winning the fight with Dana and Courtney to pay their bar tab, Carlos had already paid for it. And she didn’t even know his last name, or how to get in touch with him to thank him.

“Wait a minute, Nikole,” she said out loud. She talked to herself a lot when she was alone in her apartment, which was frequently. “You are a journalist. You should be able to find this man in less than five minutes.”

It took her about a minute and a half. There he was, Carlos Ibarra, picture and all, on the website of his hospital. Thank God the bourbon on Saturday hadn’t dulled her memory. There was no email address listed, but she clicked around the hospital website to see what the other email addresses at his hospital looked like. She jumped over to her email account, opened the “compose” pane, and tried to ignore the dozens of new emails that had come in since she’d last looked.

To:Carlos_Ibarra@eastsidemedicalcenter.com

From:Nikole@NikoleDPaterson.com

Subject:Thanks again

Hi! It’s me, your friendly non-princess from Saturday. I just wanted to a) thank you again for everything you did, and b) yell at you for not letting me buy you the drink I owed you afterward. I don’t know if you saw, but the whole proposal has kind of gone viral, which . . . is an experience, that’s for sure. Anyway, I hope you’re well, and thank your sister for me, too!

Nik

She typed the email in a hurry and pressed send before she could reconsider. Her friends would be so triumphant if they knew she’d emailed him. They would think she bought into their stupid rebound idea, when that wasn’t at all the case. Obviously she found him attractive—she wasn’t made of stone—but just as obviously, it was the wrong time to get involved with anyone. She just wanted to thank him again for saving her, that was all.

Of course it wasn’t until after she’d hit send that she thought about the major downside of actually sending an email right now—she’d have to look at her incoming messages to see if he responded.

She couldn’t even get any work done. The story she’d been working on at the baseball game was still stuck in the same place it had been when Fisher had told her to look at the JumboTron screen. She’d been halfway through a sentence, and now she had no idea how the sentence was supposed to end. She probably had important work-related emails, but she’d have to wade through the hundreds of other messages to find them. She threw her arms in the air, went into her bedroom, put on the first real clothes she found, and left to go for a walk. Without her phone.

By the time she’d walked the thirty minutes to Courtney’s cupcake shop, she felt a little better. Despite herself, the fresh air and the blue sky made her relax, and the physical activity even cheered her up a little. When she walked into Cupcake Park, she didn’t quite have a smile on her face, but at least she could tell the scowl had gone away.

“Hey!” Courtney was alone in the shop when she came in, wearing her trademark pink lipstick and a pink polka-dot apron. “You haven’t been answering your phone. Dana and I have both been trying to call. How are you doing?”

She groaned and leaned against the counter. Courtney’s brightly colored cupcakes, all decorated with frosting flowers or trees, stared back up at her from the other side.

“Coffee, please?” She shouldn’t have even bothered to ask. Courtney had already poured cups full for both of them and set one of each of her favorite cupcake flavors in front of her. “You’re the best, thanks.”

“We both know that,” Courtney said. The bell rang, and Nik stepped aside so that the three teenage girls who came in could see and debate their cupcake choices. By the time they left five minutes later, Nik had finished her lemon cupcake and most of her coffee. Courtney poured her a new cup.

“How did business go today?”

Courtney had opened her cupcake shop just under a year ago, and there had been a number of touch-and-go moments with it, but lately business looked like it was picking up.

“It was great. There was a line out the door for like half the day, and I just got two big orders, including one for a wedding.” Courtney looked hard at Nik. “But I know you didn’t walk all the way over here to find out how my business is going. How are you? How bad is it?”

Nik groaned.

“It’s so bad.” She took a sip of coffee and reconsidered. “I mean, I’m not dying or anything, and this should all fade away within a few days. But God, it doesn’t feel like that right now. I’m not answering my phone because I had to turn the sound and the vibrate off, and then put it in my refrigerator to chill out, because it feels like the whole world is calling me or texting me. I needed a break.”

She could not tell Courtney that she’d emailed Carlos. She would do her “I told you so” dance around the whole cupcake shop. Had Carlos replied to her email yet? Ugh, she wished she’d brought her phone, just so she’d know.

Courtney checked the time and walked over to flip the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED.

“Do you think all of the proposal brouhaha will blow over?”

Nik grabbed a broom to help Courtney do her end-of-the-day cleaning of the shop.

“I’m sure it will. I just hope it blows over soon . The only email I responded to so far today was from the TODAY show, telling them no, I would not come on the show to talk about the proposal. I’m kind of worried that Fisher will say yes to them or someone like them, but there’s nothing I can do to stop that, and I feel like reaching out to him at this point is a very bad idea.”

“Have you heard anything more from him?” Courtney tossed Nik a cloth to wipe down the countertops while she packed away the rest of the cupcakes.

“Unfortunately, yes. I’ve blocked him everywhere, which probably means he’s saying all sorts of shit about me that I can’t see, but at this point, that’s better than the alternative.”

Courtney turned on Missy Elliott to keep them company as they cleaned up.

“Oh, I’ll find out what he’s saying about you, don’t worry about that.” Courtney had an evil grin on her face that Nik decided not to ask about. It was probably better that she be ignorant of whatever Courtney was planning to do to Fisher.

“Want a ride home?” Courtney asked her. “Dinner? Leftover cupcakes?”

“No, no, and yes. Or rather, no, yes, and yes. Have I ever said no to leftover cupcakes? But I can walk home. I need to work up my appetite for these.”

Courtney filled up a box of cupcakes and put it in one of her pink and white bags.

“Let me know if you need anything else. And if you need company tonight, I can be there at the snap of your fingers; you know that, right?”

Nik walked around the counter to give Courtney a hug.

“I know. Thanks.”

Of course, once Nik walked home, she’d started to regret not getting a ride from Courtney. Not because the walk tired her out, but because she wished she wasn’t alone. As she approached her building she was on high alert for Fisher’s silver sports car in the area.

“You’re being stupid,” she said to herself on her doorstep. “Also, you’re talking to yourself in public this time; you should really save that for inside the house, Nikole.”

She unlocked her front door, and then hesitated on the threshold. Finally, she grabbed a cast-iron pan from her kitchen and, feeling like an idiot the entire time, looked in every hiding place in her apartment. After finding nothing other than a lot more dirty laundry than she thought she’d had, she tried to relax and sat back down at her laptop to check her email.