Page 33 of I Almost Do

And what will I be doing while he does? Finishing out a degree I never wanted at a school I never wanted to go to? I wanted to go to school in Pennsylvania before this marriage.

“I still have my acceptance for next semester at BSU,” I say tentatively.

Bronwyn’s eyes grow wide. She slaps her hands to my cheeks and lands a loud, smacking kiss right on my lips. I sputter and laugh, shoving her away.

“It’s perfect,” she says. “If you keep living with him and seeing him day after day, you’ll be miserable if he doesn’t change his mind about your relationship.”

I chew on the inside of my lip.

“Is there any chance he’ll change his mind about the sex?” Franki asks.

“I don’t think so. He seems pretty determined.”

“Come to school with me,” Bronwyn urges. “Let your relationship develop slowly without all that pressure of your hormones going crazy around him. We both know there’s no way you’re going to wait until you’re twenty-five, but you can make the next year or so easier on yourself.”

I look up at the ceiling and bob my head side to side while I think.

“Come on. You’ve never done anything without an authority figure hovering over you, telling you where to go and what to do. Live a little.”

At those words, my metaphorical spine stiffens a little. The last thing I want or need is for James to act like my boss or my father. I’ve been pushing back against that from day one.

“I’ll do it,” I finally say.

Bronwyn throws her hands in the air. “Whoo! Girl, we need to celebrate!”

I don’t feel like celebrating. This doesn’t feel like a win to me. It feels terrifying.

Franki reaches over and pats my hand. “It’s a good idea.”

“Think we can get Dean to celebrate with us?” Bronwyn asks as she reaches for the button to lower the privacy screen between us.

I push her hand away. “Don’t you dare. Leave the poor man alone.”

She throws herself back against the seat and crosses her arms. “You know he likes it when I harass him.”

“Dean doesn’t like anything or, as far as I can tell, anybody. You’re just mad because you can’t make a conquest out of him.”

Bronwyn’s jaw drops in outrage at my words. “Dean’s not a conquest. He’s the love of my life.”

“You don’t know a thing about him.”

“I know enough.”

Bronwyn’s upbringing differed from Franki’s and mine in more than the obvious ways. Until she was five years old, she lived with her single mother in a trailer in a little town in central Pennsylvania. She still has a huge extended family there and spends a lot of time with them.

When Bronwyn’s adoptive father met her mother, it was a whirlwind love-at-first-sight thing. He snatched them both out of their Podunk rural lives and dropped them right into the rarefied air of New York high society.

But the two of them never quite made what I’d consider a full transition. And there are things Bronwyn is positively rabid about that I wouldn’t have even considered if she weren’t a constant in my life.

One is that there’s no such thing as “the help.” The very idea of ignoring or not being friends with the people paid to take care of basic services is, in her mind, a symptom of a snob. And snobs are, to Bronwyn’s thinking, just the worst.

And that’s great if said employee is interested in being friends.

Dean is not. Dad hired him last year, and I’m pretty sure his instructions were along the lines of “Keep those girls safe and out of trouble.”

That’s what he’s done. That and nothing else. And when Bronwyn tried her usual friendly overtures, he met her with a stone wall of deference.

First, it infuriated her. Then she decided Dean was a challenge.

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