Page 46 of Stuck With the Best Man

“Taking time off is good for your mental health,” I tell her.

“Succeeding in my career is also good for my mental health,” she counters. “Anyway, why do you care if I take vacations or not? Not only can I simply not afford the sort of lavish trips that I’m sure you’re used to embarking on, but I also have no interest in wasting precious time lazing around on a beach somewhere. Or whatever. I’ll go on a vacation after I retire.”

“That’s, like, a decade from now.”

“Exactly.” She pauses for a moment, folding forward over her outstretched leggings and grabbing the arches of her feet with ease. “What about you?”

“What about me?” I’m vaguely aware that my clothes are still damp and that I should probably change them before I invite the potential for contracting a cold in the middle of the summer. Still, it’s hard to pull myself away from a reasonably amicable conversation with this girl. I’m like a moth to a flame.

“When’s the last time you went on a vacation?” she asks.

“Well, unlike you, I consider a charming little destination wedding with my dearest friends to be a real vacation, so… this past weekend.”

Ruby rolls her eyes, sitting upright and moving her legs into a perfect split before folding forward again with her elbows resting on the ground. She doesn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that it’s not exactly a normal position to be sitting in while having a conversation.

“I meant before that,” she corrects me.

“I went to St. Bart’s in February.”“Good for you.”

I chuckle. “You’re the one who asked.”

Ruby huffs out a laugh. “I was just trying to be polite.”

“Polite? To me? That’s something new for you.”

I manage to dodge out of the way at the last minute as a pointe shoe comes sailing at my head. It lands with a disturbingly loudthunkon the floor on the opposite side of the room.

Ruby grins innocently. “Oops. I needed to break that shoe in anyway.”

“What would you have done if that actually hit me in the head?”

“I would have laughed, probably.”

I can’t help chuckling at that. I like this mischievous side of her, even if it almost resulted in me taking a pointe shoe to the head. Admittedly, she didn’t have particularly good aim. It was very easy to dodge.

I fetch the shoe from the other side of the room and hand it back to her. She chucks it into her suitcase carelessly. The shoe will get more beat up during an average day of rehearsal than it did just now being used as weaponry.

Ruby rises to her feet just long enough to take three steps and sit down beside me on the end of the bed. There are still at least two feet between us, but the reality of our situation strikes me hard at this exact moment.

“This is weird,” Ruby murmurs. “I’m sharing a hotel room with a member of the board. You can quite literally decide my fate.”

“You decide your own fate, Ruby. I just get to sit and admire as it happens.”

She wrinkles her nose, but there’s a glimmer in her eyes. “Maybe you really should write poetry.”

“You think I could be good at it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

I bark out a laugh. She smirks.

“Maybe that’s my true calling. Maybe I’ll leave the board and go get a degree in poetry. My father would roll his eyes so hard that they’d probably get stuck backwards.”

“Gross.”

“I know.”“Do you not already have a college degree?”

“Yeah. In business.”

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