Page 117 of Love Is an Art
“It’s fine.” Paisley shrugs. “I don’t need a salad. I’m interested in the main course.” She looks straight at Zeke. Like I’m not here as his date.
Am I salad? Soggy salad?
Tom clears his throat and turns to Brooke, who is next to him. “I enjoyed talking to you at the dinner the other night. I know you have Tessa on speed dial, but if you ever need a second lawyer from our firm, I’d love to have that opportunity. I speak French and Chinese, so I may be helpful in certain international deals. I admit I don’t speak French as well as Paisley. She sounded like a native the other night at dinner at Le Ciel.”
Does Tom want me to realize that Paisley is stiff competition? His reminder that I lost my last boyfriend because I was working all the time was not subtle. Or does he want Paisley to realize Zeke is truly no longer available?
Paisley blushes. “That’s very kind of you. French is the language of love, so I wanted to make sure I sounded like a native. I lived in Paris after college.”
“You went to Paris with your last boyfriend, didn’t you?” Tom asks, smiling at me.
“For a week.” I look down. That trip was one of the reasons I’d thought Wyatt and I were in a serious relationship.
Tom is trying to rattle me.
“Do you speak French, Sebastian?” Paisley asks.
Sebastian raises an eyebrow. “Yes.” He turns to his salad. At least he likes salad.
“What inspired you to learn to speak Spanish?” Brooke asks me.
“There was a lot of Spanish spoken in my neighborhood growing up, and I wanted to know what everyone was saying,” I say. “What inspired you to learn Spanish?”
“Same,” Brooke says.
Brooke and I share a smile. When Brooke and I first met, we’d learned that we had grown up pretty close to each other—in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.
“Zeke is fluent in Dutch,” Ben says.
“I spent summers in Holland, so if I wanted to play with the other kids, I had to learn,” Zeke says. “And my dad always extolled it as some secret language that nobody else knew. Other than Dutch people.”
“Aren’t Lindsay and Dylan going to Paris and Amsterdam on their honeymoon?” Ben asks.
“That’s what I heard,” Paisley says. Then she asks me, “Where would you pick to go for a honeymoon?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“Not Mexico?” Zeke grins at me.
“We should go back and actually see Mexico City,” I say. “There’s some cool bed and breakfast where they have a king-size bed on tracks that allow you to roll it out onto the rooftop terrace and spend the night sleeping under the stars.”
“That does sound cool, as long as there are no mosquitoes,” Paisley says.
“We worked on a case together in Mexico City, but we didn’t see much,” Zeke says. “Just the office, a few restaurants, and the hotel. It was a short turnaround time.”
“Mexico City is very different from Paris.” Paisley turns to me. “We always planned to go to Paris. I wanted to share with Zeke all my favorite places.”
They discussed where they’d honeymoon?
The whole table suddenly busies themselves with their drinks, napkins, finishing the salad—anything but watching this car wreck.
“I honestly don’t think we got around to jointly discussing honeymoon destinations,” Zeke says to Paisley. “That’s whereyoualways said you’d like to go.”
Paisley was confident enough in their relationship to mention where she wanted to honeymoon.
“Is your weekend basketball team looking for new players, Zeke?” Sebastian asks. “It sounded fun last time you mentioned it.”
“We play in Riverside Park around eleven. It would be great to have you.”
