I’m home by four-thirty. The message light is blinking, and I press Play, hear Drew’s voice start to say my name, and hit Delete. Nope nope nope. Never again.

There’s also a message from Kari, whose anger lasted exactly as long as I thought it would. “Hey, I’m sorry I was an asshole. Call me, okay? I have something awesome to tell you.”

I pick up the phone to call her back, then put it down. I don’t have time to get into a conversation with her right now. I’ll call her tonight.

Or, you know … tomorrow. Depending.

I barely have enough time to shower and primp and dig out some cute underthings that actually match and haven’t been through the washer a hundred times. I hesitate with my hand on the Vera Wang dress—it’s so pretty, and I always talk myself out of wearing it.

But I’m not going to wear it around the house. That’s just silly. It’s a going-out dress.

So then I have to agonize over what I am going to wear. It has to be special. It can’t be too fancy, because it’s dinner and a movie in my apartment. It can’t be too plain because he matters. It needs to be pretty, maybe even sexy, but not slutty. And I want it to be something he hasn’t seen before.

I settle on a rust-colored peasant skirt and a beaded, scoop-neck tank in cream. The top is casual, but the scoop neck is low enough that I think it qualifies as special. I fasten on an ankle bracelet, hit the mascara and lip gloss, and call it good. I can only be who I am.

Mitch arrives promptly at five-thirty, carrying a bottle of wine and looking a little wary as he comes in. But he loosens up once I open the wine and settle him at the table with a glass. I move around the kitchen, pulling out pans I haven’t used in ages, chopping and washing and mixing. I take it slow with the wine because I want my wits about me, and we make small talk about work—mine and his. I think, or maybe imagine, I can feel his eyes on me.

He wouldn’t have come if he wasn’t still kind of interested, right? I’m not out of time; even though I dithered about it there’s still a shot for us.

“Here we go,” I says, moving things from pans to plates. “If this doesn’t melt in your mouth, I’m turning in my apron.”

I only have a few recipes that are even close to being fancy, and this is the easiest of them. There’s chicken and little bow-tie shaped pasta, and tomatoes and feta and black olives. The salty tang of the feta is like heaven, and the pasta catches all the sauce and holds it in its little crinkles.

Mitch laughs and digs in. “This is great,” he says, after a couple of bites. “Almost as good as mother makes.”

“You’re a good son,” I say, smiling. “Was it your mom who taught you how to cook?”

“Of course.” He takes another bite. “She always said us boys had to learn how to take care of ourselves so we wouldn’t starve to death if no woman would have us.”

I laugh. “And why would she say that?”

“We were kind of hellions, always up to no good, always dirty, always noisy, always running in and out of the house and banging the screen door. She’d tell us no wife would ever want us, and we’d better learn to do our own laundry.” He refills his wine glass and tops mine off. “She was teasing, of course. Nothing my mother ever said to any of us was said with anything but total love.”

“My mom was pretty great that way, too,” I say. “Though mostly all she says these days is ‘When are you coming home to visit?’”

“They must miss you,” he says.

“They do,” I say. “They’re really great.”

“Sounds like sometimes it was rough, though? When you were a kid?”

I shrug. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Hey,” he says.

I look up and he’s just looking at me across the table.

“Tell me about it,” he says.

I open my mouth to say something distracting. What comes out instead is: “I never tell anyone how bad it was.”

He nods, takes another bite of his food, and waits.

I take a deep breath, and before I can talk myself out of it, I start to talk.

“I already told you, my parents bought the absolute worst house in a fairly upscale town, so I could live somewhere with good public schools? That’s a real feel-good story at its heart: poor people scrimping and saving to give their kid a better life, right? But there was nothing feel-good about it. It was the kind of grinding poverty that no one talks about except during election season. We were hungry a lot, and we were cold a lot.”

He sets his fork down.

I take a long, nervous breath. Only Kari knows this stuff about me, because she was there. “So okay, good that I got a good education—and I did, I worked my ass off—but it was bad, too, because I wasn’t like the other girls in my school, and we all knew it. They had more money, but it wasn’t just that. It was what growing up with money had made them. They knew how to talk, and how to say the right things. They had better clothes, they lived in better neighborhoods, they were prettier—”

“I doubt it,” he says.

I let that pass. It’s like a flood now; I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. “And as I got older, I saw the girls who were better than me dating a kind of guy who would never look at me twice. The kind of guy who was from a certain kind of family, a certain part of town. Mr. Right, you know? Just one more thing that I couldn’t have—like the clothes, only more important. Even I knew that. I didn’t go on dates. I didn’t go to school dances. Kari was my only friend, and she took some flak for it, too.”

He frowns, but doesn’t say anything.

“And all I’ve ever wanted, my whole life, was to be good enough. To be the kind of person those girls from my neighborhood would admire and want to be like. So I decided that I would become that person, and that’s what I did.” I gesture to the view outside the living room window. “You know how much it costs to live in this neighborhood?”

“I can guess,” he says.

“I pay it,” I say. “Because the person I want to be—she would live in this neighborhood. Or a better one, if she could afford it, which I can’t. I do all the right things, Mitch—I live in the right sort of neighborhood, I wear the right clothes, I date the right guys—and I know that if I ran into one of those girls from my high school, they would see through me in a heartbeat. They’d see that I’m a phony. I buy my clothes at discount because I can’t afford to pay retail. I pay more than half my salary for rent.”

“Whatever else you think about yourself,” he says, “I won’t let you sit there and say you didn’t make something of your life.”

I shrug again. “I did, but … I don’t know. It always feels like faking.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, then picks his fork up again and takes another bite. “I told you this before, but … seriously. You’re really tough.”

“Yeah, I guess.” I don’t talk about that stuff, and now I’m uncomfortable, and aware of his gaze, and a little embarrassed because that was all super-personal and he didn’t ask to get dumped on like that. “Let’s hear more about your family and less about mine. Tell me a story.”

“Did I tell you about when I fell out of our treehouse directly onto my brother, and each of us wound up with a broken arm?” he asks. Unerring instincts, this one. This is the exact right sort of story to follow up a big heavy confession.

“No,” I say, and for the next half an hour it’s just like our phone calls, except that this way I get to look at him while he talks. He tells the story about the broken arms, and the trip to the hospital.

“Tell me another,” I say when he’s finished, but he shakes his head.

“Your turn,” he says, standing and bringing our plates to the sink. “Tell me about your broken bones.”

“I never had any,” I say. I take my wine glass over to the chaise, hoping he’ll follow me, and to my satisfaction he does. “I stepped on a rusty nail once and had to have a tetanus shot, but that’s about it. I had a medically uneventful childhood.”

“I wish I could say the same,” he says, sitting on the other end of the chaise, turned sideways so he’s looking at me. “I broke my arm, my pinky finger, and my knee in that one summer. I was always falling into or out of something.”

“Clumsy?” I say.

“Not anymore,” he says, and I wonder if it’s wishful thinking that makes his voice sound deeper and sort of suggestive.

“Well, then,” I say. I’m trying to decide if that’s a good cue to start a conversation about our relationship—our potential relationship, that is—and not sure where to begin. Another date? Is this a date? This feels like a date.

I would very much like this to be a date.

I’m probably still supposed to be the one doing the pursuing, so I figure I’ll start there.

“You want to maybe do something this weekend?” I ask, purposely vague. Any time, any place, any activity you like, buddy. I’m all yours.

“I would, but I’m away this weekend.”

“Oh,” I say, disappointed. “Where are you going?”

“Fan Club Weekend in L.A.” He smiles. “It’s time to run the gauntlet again. I’m flying out really early tomorrow.”

But … he can’t go now. “You’re not even on the show anymore.”

“It’s not like they killed me off.” He sets his wine on the coffee table. “And I only just left, in TV time. People bought these tickets months ago, and I’m scheduled at a few other events. Plus, I’m still what they call a ‘fan favorite.’”

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “What about your fans here?”

“Am I a fan favorite here, too?” he asks, and he’s got that sexy, flirty growl in his voice that I haven’t heard since our first date. Our only date? I still can’t decide if this is a date.

Whatever the case, that voice is going to be the death of me.

“Yes, you are,” I say, trying to be flirty right back.

But he seems oblivious to it. “Well, good.”

“When do you come home?”

“Monday,” he says. “Late, probably.”

“I have Monday off,” I tell him. “It’s a bank holiday.”

“Banks take a lot of holidays,” he says.

I laugh a little. “That’s actually really true.”

He smiles at me, full force dimples and all. “You’ve earned it, though. You’ve been working your gorgeous ass off.”

“Yeah,” I say, but only because I’m too distracted to argue. Gorgeous ass?

“Let’s put this movie on,” he says.

Did he just say my gorgeous ass? I didn’t think he was noticing anymore.

Maybe it’s just a faint memory he has. Maybe it’s just an expression, and he says it to everyone.

Maybe I really do still have a chance with him.

There’s only one way to find out, I suppose. I put my wine glass down on the coffee table next to his.

And his cell rings.

Well, damn it. Someone’s got lousy timing.

“One sec,” he says, digging in his pocket for it. He does some impressive writhing around getting the phone out, and I admire every second of it. He really does know how to wear a pair of jeans, that’s for sure.

He peeks at the display and says, “It’s Kari. I should take this. She’s probably calling about L.A. this weekend.”

“L.A.?” I say, not understanding what Kari has to do with his trip to L.A.

“Yeah, I’m taking her to Fan Club Weekend,” he says, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, and answers the phone. “Hey, what’s up?” There’s a long pause and then he laughs and says, “Yes, you can wear the same thing to two events … No, it won’t be different people, but no one will care. Listen, I can’t talk right now. Can I call you later?”

I listen to this one-sided conversation, still and cold all the way down to my toes. I could cry. I could just curl up into a ball on the chaise and cry for a week. Or maybe throw up. Who’s got the lousy timing now?

He hangs up and looks at me, a little frown line appearing on his forehead. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say dully. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You’re white as a sheet.” He leans over and lays the back of his hand against my forehead.

I brush his hand away. He looks so worried, and he smells so good, and I can’t—I mean, I completely can’t—have this right now. I really am going to throw up, I think.

“I … I actually have a headache.” I press my fingers to my temples. “I think I need to lie down.”

“Do you want me to get you something?” he asks. “Some water?”

See? Nurturing. Lucky Kari.

“No, I’ll be fine. Shouldn’t you be going home to pack or something?”

“That won’t take long,” he says. “I’m pretty low-maintenance.”

I just bet. And he manages, somehow, to be ten times more appealing than some guy who worked at it. This is the cruelest kind of fate; I should have jumped all over him when Kari first told me he was interested. Why was I so willfully blind?

“Still, you have to call Kari back, don’t forget.” There’s a telltale prickling at the back of my eyes, but I will not cry. This is not a big deal. I’ve liked lots of guys I didn’t have a shot with; the only difference here is that I did have a shot and blew it. In the end it comes to the same thing, right?

“I don’t like leaving you with the mess, since you cooked,” he says. “My mother taught me better manners than that.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I say, waving my hand to show how little I care. “I love to do dishes.”

I absolutely do not love to do dishes.

“Okay,” he says, slowly. “If you’re sure?”

“Yes, very. Maybe I’ve had too much wine. I’m just going to lie here for a while.”

“I’ll see myself out,” he says, which is just more of those good manners, because the door is right there. It’s not like he has to find his way. “I’ll call you Tuesday?”

“That would be great,” I say, although that would be the opposite of great, and lean back against the mound of pillows.

He pulls the throw down over me, hands me the TV remote, and takes the wine glasses to the kitchen on his way out. When he’s gone, I lie there looking at the ceiling until sleep comes for me.