Page 37 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
Chloe’s eyes went wide. Is this what Bergdorf life was like? If so, then yes, please.
Greta led them to a cream-colored suite with elegant white crown molding where the wall met the ceiling. It was nicer—and bigger—than Chloe and Becca’s living room. There were two plush chairs and a small carved wooden table, and then in a connected room separated by a door, there was a huge three-panel mirror complete with the fancy kind of raised step that Chloe had only ever seen in movies.
“Looks like you’ve got it from here,” Tolly said, moving back in the direction of the escalators.
“No! Please, stay,” Chloe said.
“I probably shouldn’t—”
“Please?” She might’ve been like a kid in a candy store, but she still felt like a kid—she didn’t quite belong here without someone else by her side. “You can sit in this outside room and enjoy the free champagne and just be moral support. I won’t take too long, I promise.”
Tolly looked skeptically from the suite to the exit behind him.
Chloe squeaked.
He snorted. “Did you do that on purpose to manipulate me?”
She bit back a laugh. “Maybe?”
“You know, that’s not how the real squeak sounds.”
Chloe couldn’t help laughing now. “Well, I tried. So you’ll stay?”
He nodded, the right corner of his mouth lifting, and Chloe’s stomach fluttered, because that’s how her Oliver used to smile at her.
He didn’t have a monopoly on crooked smiles, Clo.
Right.
“Well, cheers,” Tolly said, once Greta had left them with a bottle of champagne in an ice-filled bucket. It was the real stuff, too, from France, not cheap supermarket prosecco.
“Cheers,” Chloe said, taking a long, bubbly sip. “Can you believe this?”
He shook his head. “You implied you’d never been in a store like this. So how are we affording this? And by we, I mean you?”
Chloe nearly choked on her champagne. She’d fallen headfirst into the fantasy and forgotten who was making this afternoon possible. And he was not the man she was spending it with.
“Um…”
Tolly’s brows rose, mildly alarmed. “Chloe, you’re not doing this with no intention of—”
“No, no! I’m really going to buy a dress here! If I find one I like, I mean.”
He didn’t relax back into his chair, but at least he didn’t immediately get up to leave.
Her mind drifted again to her past, to Oliver. Even when they were younger, he had lived by a strong moral compass. If they went trick-or-treating and a bowl of candy was left outside the front door of a house with a sign “One per kid,” he would only take one. And if someone else around them audaciously grabbed two or three, Oliver wouldn’t take any and, in fact, would reach into his own bag and deposithispieces of candy into the bowl to make sure it all added up right.
Chloe!she yelled at herself.This isnotOliver.
Still, she felt like she owed Tolly some sort of explanation to put him at ease. “I didn’t have anything suitable for the party, because, you know, high school guidance counselors don’t usually have a bunch of gowns in their closets. So my date offered to buy me a dress.”
Tolly took a long pull from his glass.
“You have a very generous boyfriend,” he said.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
Tolly chewed the inside of his cheek.
