Page 33 of Can We Skip to the Good Part?
“I’m sorry those things happened. She seems to have been a good friend to you.” Max had a lot of questions and chose to hold her tongue. The knowledge that Ella had been engaged and broken up with was surprising new information that snagged her focus.
“Yeah,” Ella said quietly. Her gaze held Max’s, wistful and laced with regret. It was the natural time to end the conversation, for Ella to say goodnight. Tell Max she’d see her next week. Yet, she hadn’t moved.
Max did, though. She took a step into Ella’s space, and for what felt like a minute, but also five hundred years, they breathed in the same air. “I’m going to do us a favor and get in my car and drive away before I do something I want to but shouldn’t.”
She took four steps before the sound of Ella’s voice stopped her. “Max?”
“Yeah?” She said, turning back and offering a small smile.
Ella wrapped her arms around herself and shifted her weight. “Nothing.”
Max drove home, wondering what Ella was about to say, hating that their moments together only existed within the narrow confines of what they were allowed to say or do. They were two grown people who seemed to want the same thing, and yet, they were sidelined. She allowed herself to drift back to that one night, not too long ago, where they’d shared a moment free of any external constraint. She turned up the song on the radio and let the music drown out the rest of the world so she couldremember the feeling of Ella’s lips pressed to hers, the sound of her laugh, and the tucked-away hope she’d carried with her in the days after. It had been so nice while it had lasted. She sat at the red light and closed her eyes. So very nice.
EIGHT
Cordially Yours
“So, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” Why was Ella’s heartbeat so prominent, banging on her chest like a door-to-door salesperson? Get outta here, heartbeat. It had no business in this conversation because she had zero reason to be nervous. She wasn’t even digging her nails into her palms.Stop that. This was Rachel of all people. And all she had to do was put the cards on the table.
“Talk away. Everything all right?” Rachel, newly home from work, slid out of her shiny, gray pumps, which matched her belt perfectly. They must have been a matched set. She then pulled out the hairband and a variety of pins that had been holding her hair in the fancy swirly updo. She was de-Rachelfying. In the time they’d lived together, she’d come to know that the second Rachel walked in the door, she set about stripping herself out of work mode. The transition would start before Ella could count to ten.
“Everything is fine. But I’ve seen Max a couple of times. At book club.”
“Of course.” She winced. “Sorry about that.”
“Once at the grocery store.”
“Random. Did you at least say hi?”
“I did. She bought me grapes.”
“What? That’s so weird.” Rachel tossed a final pin onto the swirly white granite countertop and gave her red hair a shake, forcing it to drop like a waterfall onto her shoulders. Rachel had always had beautiful waterfall hair. “Why in the world would she do that?”
“I think she saw that I was worried about my budget, and was shooting for a peace offering.”
“Typical.” She rolled her shoulders as if ordering her body to relax. “Don’t fall for it.”
“Right. No. I won’t. But what I want is to, at least, try and keep things cordial between us, and I wanted to be up-front with you about that.” She met Rachel’s green eyes and waited.
“Right. Cordial, of course, which is different than friendly. I’m just looking out for you when I say that Max is …”
“What?” Ella asked, honestly wanting to hear Rachel’s thoughts.
“Trouble. And I happen to be very protective of you. I think there’s nothing wrong with cordial.”
She watched as Rachel breezed past her, effectively ending the conversation with a fragrance-filled exit. Yet, there Ella still stood in the kitchen, wearing her Wonder Woman socks and trying to decode the tiny differences between friendly and cordial, and what kind of interaction was crossing a Rachel-drawn line in the sand. Why did everything have to be so hard?
As if on a rescue mission, Ella’s phone began to scream from her pants. “Why couldn’t something else cause screaming in my pants?” she murmured, checking her phone’s readout. A smiling photo of her parents grinned at her, signaling their call from her mom’s phone.
“Hey, you two,” she said, accepting the FaceTime invite. “Where are we today? Is it Brussels?” Her parents, looking backat her, resembled near carbon copies of the ones in the photo, only these two were holding up fancy chocolates.
“Hi, sweetheart,” her mother said. “We’re stuffing our faces full of chocolates and saying cheers to you and your new adventure in Virginia.”
“Ha. Kind of you, but you might hold off until we see if I sink or swim.”
Her father shook his head. “You’d never sink. You have your mom’s street smarts. Speaking of, she knows this place so well, she’s already offering directions to lost tourists.”
“Impressive. Hey, are we still on for next month?” After losing her job, they’d talked about a meetup when they got to London. Ella had always wanted to see Buckingham Palace, and with her parents already there, it seemed like the perfect time. Plus, she hadn’t seen them in what seemed like forever.
