I sighed. That cleared it up. “Okay . . . ?”
“My grandparents. This big family party for my grandparents’ anniversary.”
“Oh!” I barely managed to keep from cooing. “That’s adorable! How long have they been married?” It had to be a big milestone for the Malone family to be throwing them a party like this.
But Mitch squinted his eyes and his mouth twisted while he thought. “Fifty . . . seven years? Fifty-six? Something like that. That’s not the point.”
Oh. So not a milestone, then. “How is that not the point?”
The pizza arrived, and Mitch took over, serving us each a slice before getting back to his story. “The point is, the past couple times I’ve seen my extended family, I’ve gotten the ‘so when are you going to settle down and get married and pump out kids’ thing. It wasn’t a huge deal at first, but now that I’m over thirty it’s like they’re starting to panic. It turns into an interrogation.”
“You’re over thirty?” The words came out of my mouth before I could check them. I always associated a person’s thirties with being settled, maybe even a little boring. But of course I’d had a kid in elementary school and an office job by then, so maybe I was biased. Mitch, however, still acted like a teenager in a ripped man’s body, so I’d always thought of him as being somewhere in those amorphous midtwenties.
“Thirty-one.” He rolled his eyes. “Ancient, according to them, which is stupid. Guys don’t even have biological clocks.”
“True.” I managed not to roll my own eyes. If he was ancient, then I was a withered old crone. Good to know. “Anyway . . . they’re starting to panic?”
“Yeah.” He nodded emphatically while he chewed a large bite of pizza. “So I thought maybe if I brought a girlfriend that might shut them up. But I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Right. Definitely a flaw in that plan, then.”
“Yep.” He didn’t sound bothered by that. “But you’d be perfect.” Before I had time for my self-esteem to rise from the compliment, he kept talking. “You know, you’re older . . .”
“Hey.” I sat back in the booth and crossed my arms.
“No, I mean, you look pretty good for being someone’s mom.”
I shook my head. “Not any better. So the minute you have a kid you’re not hot anymore?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. You’ve heard of MILFs, right? It means Mom I’d Like to—”
I put up my hands. “I know what MILF means.”
“Well, you’re totally a MILF.”
“Um.” I had no idea how to process that. Something must have shown on my face, because he sighed.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, you are. But I don’t . . .” He huffed in exasperation. “What I mean is . . . You’re smart. You’re mature. If you went to the party with me like you were my girlfriend, you’d make me look more mature by association, you know? Then maybe they’d get off my back.”
“Okay . . .” I could see his point. We’d just pretended to be a couple in front of the whole bar here, so I definitely had the skill set for it. But that had been what, about a minute and a half? This would be a whole evening, with his entire extended family. That was a long time to keep up a pretense.
Then again . . . I stole a glance across the table as Mitch waved down Nikki for the check. He wore his usual tight T-shirt, and his muscles were a great thing to look at. There were certainly worse ways to spend an evening than to be the fake girlfriend of Willow Creek’s hottest bachelor. I could waste a few hours hanging on to one of those biceps. And besides, Mitch was a nice guy who’d just saved me from a creep in a gray suit. While we hadn’t logged a whole lot of one-on-one time, whenever we’d hung out together we’d had a fun kind of push-and-pull banter between us. Not flirting, exactly, just . . . messing with each other. When it came down to it, Mitch was fun to be around. There wasn’t any reason to say no.
But I wasn’t quite ready to say yes. Big family party. That’s what he’d said. That sounded like quite the crowd. And I hated crowds. I took another gulp of cider.
“Can I think about it?”
Mitch’s face cleared up as though I’d already agreed to this whole thing. “Yeah! Of course. It’s not till next month. Plenty of time.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.” I tried to hand Mitch my card to pay for the pizza, but he batted it away with an annoyed look.
“Cut it out, Mama. I got this.”
I let him pay, but I sighed at the nickname. Everyone had a nickname when you were with Mitch. “Mama” kind of annoyed me, but it was better than “MILF,” at least.
I left Jackson’s with my ex-husband’s card in my purse and Mitch’s words echoing in my head. Be my girlfriend. I had a lot to think about.
Two
So, wait.” There was a whir of noise from the espresso machine as my sister, Emily, frothed the milk. “He wants you to do what?”
“You heard me.” I dropped into a chair at the table nearest the coffee bar. I’d swung by Read It & Weep, the bookstore that Emily managed, right when it opened. There weren’t many people clamoring for books at ten in the morning on a Saturday in May, so I had her all to myself. She’d taken one look at my under-caffeinated face and led me to the coffee bar section to make us some vanilla lattes.
“I did hear you.” Emily poured the steamed milk into two mugs with a half-hearted attempt at latte art. She was terrible at it, but the coffee itself was excellent, so who cared. “But I think the machine was too loud and I heard you wrong. Because it sounded an awful lot like Mitch wants you to be his girlfriend.”
“Fake girlfriend,” I corrected. “I don’t think he’s proposing an actual relationship here.” Wouldn’t that be something.
Emily came around the counter with the mugs, passing one to me before sitting across from me at the table. “You’re going to need to give me more info than that.”
“I don’t have much.” I blew across the top of the mug. “He needs a date to a family event, and thought I’d be a better candidate than the girls he usually picks up.” He hadn’t put it in exactly those words, but I’d read between the lines.
“Are you gonna do it?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, it seems harmless, right?” I took a cautious sip of coffee; it was still hot.
“True . . .” Emily tapped her index finger on her bottom lip while she thought. “But you have a lot on your plate right now. Don’t want you to overextend yourself.”