“Is that what happened with you and Tommy?” I ask. “You really just knew?”
“Sure! And look at us now! We’re so close, we’re like brother and sister.” She cackles. “I’m ordering more Kate Mosses and nobody better stop me.”
Rufus and I nod, because no complaints here.
Minutes later, just as I’m about to shoot that inadvisable second shot of tequila, something in my periphery makes me stop. I tilt my head and feel my stomach rising to my throat, because I’m almost certain Noah Ross is walking south on Broadway. Right toward Maison Pickle.
He’s alone, in dark sunglasses, jeans, and a pea coat. His hair is damp and he looks casual without looking sloppy. He’s holding some sort of box in one hand and is certainly coming this way. A bolt of something shoots through me. Is it that lightning thing again? No, this is panic. I have approximately ninety seconds to figure out how to disappear.
A mental inventory takes place: my ratty college sweatshirt, bad hair, swollen eyes. Is it possible I look so terrible that he won’t recognize me? To be safe, I pull up the hood of my sweatshirt and grab Rufus’s sunglasses from his pile, making myself incognito.
My friends’ heads snap toward me, quizzical looks on their tipsy faces.
“Where’d you get these? They’re amazing,” I say, overdoing my enthusiasm.
“Paul Smith,” Rufus says slowly. “Remember, you were there?”
“Yes!” I lie, distracted by the advancing figure of Noah Ross. He’s walking much too quickly for a Sunday morning. “That was such a fun day. So fun.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Rufus says suspiciously. He tries to follow my gaze from behind his shades. “Who are you hiding from?”
“No one!” I slink down in the patio chair until my nose is level with my empty prosecco glass. “I’m just . . . tired. I was up all night. You know, crying.” This is true, and yet I do a great job of making it sound like such a lie that now Meg is onto me, too. She spins around in her chair. She turns to look—I swear—right into Noah Ross’s eyes.
But just when I’m sure I’m busted, Noah swivels to the right. He opens a door and disappears inside a storefront two doors down. I let out a gigantic sigh.
Rufus snaps his fingers at me. “Begin to make sense,” he says. “Now.”
I take off Rufus’s shades and lower my hood.
“I thought I saw someone I didn’t want to see,” I say. “No big deal.”
“Who?” Meg says, still peering around.
“Uh, her.” I point randomly at the nearest woman in view. “I thought she was my old neighbor who got evicted for selling CBD out of her apartment last year.”
“That seventy-year-old woman?” Rufus points at an elderly lady crossing the street with a wheeled grocery cart.
“She kept harassing me to put in a good word for her about the security deposit, and . . . you know what? It’s boring, and it wasn’t even her—”
“You’re being sketchy,” Meg says.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one running a drug ring out of my apartment. Oh shit!” I gasp, because the door Noah disappeared into has now swung open.
And he’s walking out.
And coming this way.
And I have wasted the past two minutes lying to my friends, instead of making a plan for his inevitable return to the street.
I grab my phone and jump up from the table. “Rufus, you were right. I really should call BD. Be right back! Don’t anyone take my tequila!”
“What is up with her?” I hear Meg say as I dash around the corner of the block. I pull my hood up again and sit on someone’s stoop with my phone to my ear, pretending to be on a call. Furtively I watch as Noah comes to stand on the corner of Eighty-Fourth and Broadway. It’s definitely him. Same pea coat. Same pomposity.
Well, he’s ruined the rest of my life. He might as well ruin Emergency Brunch.
He’s still holding that box, which I can now see is some sort of animal kennel. He opens the front of the crate and carefully pulls out . . . a fat black-and-white-spotted rabbit.
He holds the creature up close to his face, both of them facing a redbrick apartment building on the south side of the street. He points at a window, as if he’s explaining something important about Upper West Side real estate to the bunny. I watch the rabbit nuzzle Noah’s cheek. I am paralyzed with a feeling of incredulity.
Then Noah carefully puts the bunny back inside the crate, closes it up, and turns back the way he came, heading north on Broadway.
Watching him go, I exhale about a month’s worth of oxygen. I slump against the stoop and shake my head. What is he doing away from his pristine Fifth Avenue orbit? Why is he spending his Sunday with a rabbit on the Upper West Side? More important, why isn’t he writing, or at least attempting to?
And why did the sight of him alarm me so much that I had to literally run away?
Okay, that one is obvious: Because I can’t let Meg and Rufus know about Noah. Because of my NDA. And also, if I’m honest, I would still like at least the façade of a professional relationship. I don’t know if Noah Ross could look at twelve-hours-post-breakup Lanie and trust me as his editor.
I wish I didn’t feel the need to prove myself to him.
Now, I’m working myself up again over Noah Ross, and I don’t want to. I want to go back to brunch and get drunk with my friends. I round the corner, return to my seat.
“Sorry about that!” I chirp and make my tequila disappear.
“So, what wisdom did BD impart?” Rufus asks, his tone leading.
“Oh, she . . . wasn’t home. Got her voicemail.”
“It was that guy with the bunny,” Meg announces suddenly.
“What? No. What?” I laugh a very weird laugh.
“I recognized him,” Meg says. “Took me a minute, but he’s that guy from the launch. Man of the Year. You were talking to him at the end of the night.”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “I remember that guy. He was here?” I look around me. “I didn’t see him—”
“Lanie, you’re so bad at lying!” Rufus says. “Dig yourself out! Not deeper into the hole!”
“You sparked with that guy,” Meg says, eyes narrowed, finger pointing at me.
“What is this, an Anna Kendrick movie? I did not spark with anyone.”
The thought makes my fists clench, because Noah and I have done exactly the opposite of spark. But then, I see the commitment in Meg’s eyes. I realize that it’s going to be much easier to lean into her version of events than it would be to leave open any other possibility why seeing Noah Ross has got me so freaked out.