Page 8 of Head Over Heels

She smiles around her spaghetti, sauce smudged in a ring around her mouth.

Chase mouths something at me.

Thank you.

“It’s nothing,” I murmur.

He shakes his head. “Right now,” he says, “it’s everything.”

Chapter 4

Liv

Chase comes downstairs after putting Katie to bed and we settle in to watch our movies. He’s sitting on the couch with his iPad andJason Bourne,and I’m curled up in the armchair with my iPad andBridget Jones’s Baby.

Odd, right? How did this parallel movie-watching ritual ever come into existence? Excellent question.

The first ever Liv-and-Chase consolation party happened after our own ill-fated blind date.

Eve and Chase’s friend Jesse, who’s a Realtor like Eve, set the two of us up right after I moved here three years ago. It wasn’t too long after a really craptastic breakup, and I was feeling…brittle.

We met at a restaurant, Chase’s choice. Before I even got my napkin on my lap, Chase said, “I can tell already this isn’t going to work.”

I raised both my eyebrows. What kind of arrogant jerk judges a blind date that fast? “Oh,really?”

I knew he wasn’t saying it because he wasn’t attracted to me, because I’d already watched him give me an approving once-over.

“How tall are you?” he demanded.

“Five eight,” I said, grudgingly. “You?”

“I’m five ten.”

“Is that a problem for you?” I asked innocently. Honestly, it was a bit of a problem for me, because I liked wearing heels. In fact, that night, I was wearing five-inch heels, and when he’d stood from the table to greet me (points for that), I’d towered over him. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of saying so. I’d let him be the asshole, since he was already embracing the role.

“No. Do you always dress like that?”

Half of me wanted to get up and leave, and the other half was fascinated by his sheer nerve. And I suck with fractions, but the rest of me was relieved that he was a jerk so I didn’t have to worry about actually liking him. There was a big part of me that wasn’t ready to go there again after what had happened with Zeke.

“I don’t always wear dresses and heels.”

“Makeup?”

I hid a smile. “Yeah.”

“Your hair all—curled like that?”

That night it had been a particularly difficult battle to put the ringlet curls in my hair—but I was pleased with the results. “I wear it a lot of different ways. Sometimes I straighten it, sometimes I curl it.”

“But you always, you know,styleit.”

He saidstylelike it was a dirty word. Which irked me. For me,styleis everything. It’s hair, it’s clothes, yeah, but it’s also putting your stamp on a home or a room or a table setting or a greeting card—it’s making the world beautiful, one small act at a time. It’s taking your time with everything you do, because the littlest things can be works of art.

Regardless, I wasn’t going to pretend to be someone I wasn’t for the sake of this date. Especially not if he wasn’t going to even try to make nice. “Yeah. I always style my hair.”

“Not low maintenance, then?”

It’s funny how once you’ve decided you don’t care, you can be yourself. With another guy, I might have tried to pretend to be lower maintenance than I am, but since this wasn’t happening, I told the truth. “Nope. I’m not one of those girls who can go from shower to out the door in ten. Never have been, never will be.”

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