Winona bubbles with an innocent enthusiasm that has stayed with her even after years of living in the city. It opens her eyes up to wonder and possibility. As for me, my eyes are glued to my iPad planner and my watch for so much of my day that I can barely remember the color of the sky. That all changes when I’m with her. I look around me and see that New York is brimming with miracles.
I grab her hand in mine and squeeze it as we move up in the line, reaching the counter.
“Do they have peach sundaes?” I wonder. “With fresh peaches and peach syrup and peach ice cream?”
“Do you ever have an original thought?” she scoffs.
“I do. I’m thinking it’s fun riling you up.” I grin at her. “I’ll have a banana split,” I tell the man behind the counter.
“It’s fun plotting revenge, and I have your sister’s phone number.”
“How? Why?” I shoot her an alarmed look. Not much scares me, but the idea of the two of them conspiring behind my back is nightmare fuel.
“Why not? She loves me, because I’m adorkable. I bet she could tell me your deepest, darkest fears. I’m surprised she hasn’t already.” She smiles at the man behind the counter. “I’ll have a peanut butter and chocolate sundae.”
My watch pings with a notification, and without even looking, I press the button and turn it off. I want just one night that belongs to nobody but me and Winona. One night before I have to go back to being the man who carries the weight of an eight-story department store directly on his shoulders.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Winona
I push my empty dish away, lean back, and pat my stomach. A group of German tourists barrel through the door, chattering excitedly, followed closely by a Japanese family who ooh and ahh over the do-it-yourself sundae section.
This will never happen when I move back home. No post-midnight adventures with a smorgasbord of choices.
These thoughts have been creeping into my head more and more often these days, and that’s not okay. Why am I such being such a dill pickle? I love my parents. I miss them. Of course I want to live near them. It won’t be for years from now, anyway. And I will have my own clothing store…selling whatever people in Peach Pit want to buy.
Not what I love. Just stuff that rolled off an assembly line somewhere.
What is the matter with me?
“What are you thinking about?” Blake’s uncharacteristically sympathetic tone says that I’ve let my inner monologue dim my smile. It’s not his fault. No reason to bring down the mood.
“I was thinking that was obscenely delicious, thank you kindly. So what did you write down for spontaneous fun tonight? What would we have done if I’d picked one of your ideas?”
“They were all incredibly lame.” Blake winces, his eyes crinkling with a rueful smile.
“I’m sure they weren’t. Come on, tell me. Let me get to know the real Blake Hudson.”
“One of them was to play trivia at my house.”
I brighten. “Ooh, I like trivia! I kick ass at trivia. My mind is a giant, dusty warehouse of random facts.”
“I’d never have guessed. I thought it was a carnival full of drunken clowns on tricycles.” He grins at me, picks up a paper napkin, and dabs my nose. “You look adorable with chocolate on your schnoz, by the way. And I’ve never lost at trivia. Prepare to be humiliated.”
“In order to feel humiliated, I’d have to feel a sense of shame. And you know me, I’m shameless.”
“I know, it’s one of your cuter qualities.”
One of them? Do tell.
As he pays for our sundaes, I’m grinning like a big nerdy goofball. I want to beg him to tell me all of them, but I don’t want to sound all needy.
We don’t stop to discuss it when we leave the sundae shop. It’s pretty much taken for granted that we’re going to go back to his house. Is it the smart thing to do? No, but I’m not thinking with my head tonight. I’m thinking with my heart, and other parts of my anatomy.
In no time at all we’re in his car, headed back to his house. He wraps his arm around my shoulders like a lover, not like a man who’d rather work sixteen hours a day than have a life, and I lean in to him and go with it because it feels so good.
When we get to his ton-y Upper East Side neighborhood, twenty blocks north of Hudson’s, the driver stops and lets us out. I pause on the sidewalk, tipping my head back to take it all in. I can hardly help it. His home was designed to command attention. It’s a wedding cake of a building, with carved stone friezes frosting the entire four-story exterior. Bigger-than-life-size stone lions crouch on brick columns on each side of the front steps.
“Be it ever so humble,” Blake says wryly as I follow him up the steps.
The front door is framed by fluted marble columns and topped by a triangular pediment with scrolls and cherubs. A security camera over the doorway and the security pad by the door are the only modern touches. As we walk up the steps, the door silently swings open to admit us to a grand foyer with a skylight.
I give up all pretense and gawk shamelessly as he leads me into the living room. Grecian sculptures, Ming vases on columns, overstuffed furniture, painted friezes, formal family portraits, eighteenth-century paintings of country squires, Tiffany stained glass…it’s like moving through one of those living history museums.
As we walk, I keep expecting costumed docents to pop out from behind the furniture and tell us the tour’s about to start.
“Say something,” he orders me. “Ground control to Major Winona?”
“I can’t lie, I’m kind of speechless.”
I let him guide me down a hallway, which is lined with oil portraits of cranky-looking men in stiff, formal suits. Then we step into a parlor that looks more like…Blake. It’s Scandinavian in style, with an umber-brown leather sofa in an angular wooden frame, lamps in wicker baskets dangling from the ceiling, and bookshelves stacked with hardcovers featuring photography, fashion and art. A trio of framed pulp sci-fi magazine covers on the wall and shelves of tin 1950s toy rocket ships and ray guns speak to his mostly hidden nerdy side.
“Whoa. That was quite the time-travel experience.” I stick my foot back out the doorway into the hall, tapping the Oriental carpet. “Look at me! My foot just travelled back to the eighteen hundreds!”
“I know.” He smiles wryly. “Alice doesn’t love the old décor, but I did it for my father. He hated having to sell our furniture; it was humiliating. Once our debt was paid down, I bought back as many of our belongings as I could find, just on principle,” he says.
He directs me to the sofa. I settle down and sigh against its buttery softness.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
He flops down next to me and drapes an arm around my shoulders. “Do I have to go look for my trivia game? Its’s…” He waves his hand at the double-door entrance to the living room. “It’s somewhere around here. I mean, just for the sake of pretending you came over to play trivia, I could ask you some questions. What planet are the Slitheen from?”