Chapter Ten
As soon as Blaine dropped his shopping bags on the floor, Cassie scurried over and gave him a kiss.
Yes, he could certainly get used to coming home to her.
He was still taking off his shoes when she pulled the first dress out of the bag.
“This is nice!” She held the dress up to her chest. “I love burgundy.”
“Burgundy?” What was that? A color? Why not just say it was red? “You can try on the dress right here. In front of the full-length mirror. I don’t have one in my bedroom.”
She slipped his T-shirt over her head and pulled on the dress.
As the shop lady had assured him, Cassie looked gorgeous in it. He pulled her toward him and kissed her lips. Her arms wound around his neck. He put his hand on the zipper and was about to undo it when there was a sharp knock on the door.
She jumped back.
“Probably a salesperson,” he said. “They’ll go away in a moment.” He pressed her against the closet door, but there was another knock.
Dammit.
“Maybe you should get that,” she said.
He opened the door with a sigh.
His friends Matthew and Sara were standing on his doorstep. Sara was carrying a baby car seat.
“Hey,” Matthew said. “Are you… Oh.” He froze in place. “You have a girl over?”
Great. Just what he needed. They had terrible timing.
“This is Cassie,” he said. “My girlfriend.”
Matthew’s eyes widened, as did Sara’s.
Blaine felt compelled to fill the uncomfortable silence with more of an explanation. “The woman I’m going to marry.”
There was certainly no silence now.
“What?” Cassie said, whipping her head around.
“What?” Sara squealed.
Matthew laughed. “Looks your girlfriend didn’t get the news. You sure move fast.”
Cassie held up a hand. “I’m not even his girlfriend. It’s just more convenient than telling the truth.”
“Now I’m definitely intrigued,” Sara said. “But I better put this little girl down first.” She took off her boots and walked in with the baby.
Blaine glanced at the sleeping Victoria. He’d last seen her when she was a week old and a bit funny looking, but she was cute now.
Still, she sort of freaked him out, which was how he always felt around babies. Could Victoria even lift her head yet? Matthew had tried to get him to hold her last time, and he’d refused, convinced he would do irreparable damage to the tiny baby. He liked young children, but little babies who did nothing but cry, poop, sleep, and drink milk weren’t the same.
“Oh, she’s so sweet!” Cassie gushed. “How old is she?”
“Six weeks,” Matthew said, making himself at home on the couch. “Her name is Victoria. So how did you meet Blaine? And when did this happen?” He gestured vaguely between them.
“You haven’t mentioned a woman in years,” Sara said to Blaine. “Tell me everything.”
He was a bit overwhelmed. What should he say? And why were his friends here? Maybe he should start there.
“Did we have plans?” he asked.
“We did, indeed,” Matthew said. “Sara is hosting a bachelorette party for her sister tonight. You and Victoria and I were supposed to hang out for the evening, order some pizza, and watch the hockey game. Sara just stopped by to see your new place.”
“And you, of course,” she interjected, touching his arm.
“This is Matthew,” Blaine said to Cassie. “And his wife, Sara. We all went to university together.”
“He was a much better student than I was,” Matthew said. “But I still graduated, so it’s all good.”
“Thanks to my help in differential equations,” Sara said smugly.
Blaine wanted to get this sorted out in a hurry, then get back to finishing Cassie’s fashion show. The red—well, burgundy—dress looked great on her, and he wanted to see the others. And give her the other thing he’d bought for her.
“So I’m guessing,” Matthew said with a grin, “that I’m unwanted and should find something else to do for the evening.”
“I wouldn’t say unwanted.” Though that was precisely the truth. “But…”
“I get it.” Matthew held up his hands. “We’ll leave soon. Once we get the full story. We’d also like a brief tour of the house you bought with your inheritance.”
“Inheritance?” Cassie said questioningly.
Oh God. Why couldn’t Matthew keep his mouth shut? Time for some damage control.
“Why don’t you two come upstairs with me?” Blaine said. “I’ll show you around. Cassie can keep an eye on Victoria. Okay?” He hurried up the stairs before anyone could protest, and his friends followed.
Matthew poked his head into the master bedroom. “What’s that on the bed?”
“It’s Cassie’s beaver costume. For Halloween.”
Matthew snickered. “Sure it is. I bet you’ve got some really weird rodent fetish.”
That comment rendered Blaine speechless. Did his friends seriously think he was that weird?
Matthew slapped him on the back. “I’m kidding. Now, why don’t you tell us what’s going on? Perhaps starting with how you met her?”
Blaine knew he would have to tell the truth sooner or later, so it might as well be now. He led Matthew and Sara to his office, and they sat down.
“The summer before last, I—”
“Wait. You met her more than a year ago, and this is the first I’m hearing about it?” Sara said.
“Shut up and let him tell the story,” Matthew said, looking at his wife fondly.
“Okay,” Blaine said. “So do you remember the summer before last, when I went on that camping trip?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, I didn’t actually do any camping. I met Cassie at a Tim Hortons on my drive out of Ottawa, and I, um, went back to her place. We spent the week together.”
He was comfortable talking about sex with Cassie. But with his friends, it was a different story.
“You just growled, threw her over your shoulder like a caveman, and that was that?” Matthew said, laughing. “Or was there a little more finesse to it?”
Blaine rolled his eyes. “Please. I have moves.”
“I remember that one time in undergrad, we were at a party and you—”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, okay.” Matthew held up his hands.
Blaine hesitated. “With her, it’s different. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just knew she was special, and everything…well, it just happened. And then at the end of the week, I went back Ottawa, and we didn’t see each other again. Not until yesterday.”
Matthew and Sara exchanged a look.
“Come again?” Matthew said. “You spent this amazing week with a woman, and then you didn’t make plans to see her again?”
“That would be correct.” It seemed logical at the time.
“Are you a total idiot?”
“Apparently.” He paused, glancing down at his hands. “I didn’t think it was anything real. I mean, it was just one week, and I was…not really myself. After my dad…” He didn’t want to go into details about the complicated emotions that had been swirling inside him about his father’s suicide.
Sara reached out and squeezed his knee.
He knitted his fingers together and continued to stare at them. “She made me feel normal again after my dad died. But I didn’t think it was anything more than that. I told her I could only give her a week. I refused to even tell her my phone number or that I lived in Ottawa. But ever since, I’ve been unable to get her out of my mind.” He picked up a pen and started fiddling with it. “So I went back to see her yesterday, and now she’s here for the weekend. Unfortunately, she’s still kind of pissed at me—”
“Understandable,” Sara said.
“But I bet her that she wouldn’t be able to walk away from me on Sunday night.”
“And now you’re having lots and lots of sex in order to convince her,” Matthew finished.
“Something like that.”
“Let me tell you a few things that are guaranteed—”
Sara smacked Matthew’s head. “Stop talking about our sex life.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything about our sex life. Just a few pointers.”
“Except I’m the only woman you’ve slept with, so—”
“I can’t wait until you have your postpartum exam so we can start having sex again,” Matthew muttered.
Blaine dropped his head in his hands. “Guys, can we please put an end to this conversation? I need you to get out of here so I can continue wooing Cassie. I only have one weekend. And I assure you, I do not need help in bed. I just need…time.”
“I should head out, anyway,” Sara said, rising. “The girls are coming over in half an hour. Matthew, I’ll see you tonight. You can go to my mother’s with Victoria if you like, since Blaine has other plans.” She gave her husband a kiss on the cheek and walked downstairs.
Matthew leaned forward. “She’s the one, eh?”
“She is,” Blaine said.
“Word of warning. You came on a bit strong with the whole ‘girl I’m going to marry’ business.”
Blaine grimaced. “I figured that out, thank you. But it’s too late now.”
Matthew slapped him on the back. “Good luck. Call me if you need any more advice.”
“Thank you for the kind offer, but I’ve got it covered.”
“Ask her to come upstairs to see your ammonite collection.”
“Actually, she’s already seen it. I keep it downstairs.”
Visions of her walking around naked in his living room after giving him a blowjob jolted through his mind… He almost groaned aloud.
“I won’t ask what you’re remembering right now,” Matthew said. “I don’t want to know. Probably has something to do with that rodent fetish of yours.”
Five minutes later, Matthew was out the door with Victoria, and Blaine was alone with Cassie once more. She was still wearing the burgundy dress, and she was still the woman he wanted to marry.
But surprisingly, that wasn’t the first thing she brought up.
“Your inheritance,” she said gently, studying his face. “Did a grandparent die?”
He shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about this now, but he wouldn’t lie.
“My father,” he said. “Last year. Three months before I met you.”
She wrapped him in her arms. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s why I was pretty messed up when we met. It was a huge shock. He was sixty-two, and he wasn’t sick. That I knew of.”
She held him for a minute but seemed to sense he didn’t want to say any more about it right now. “I like your friends, and Victoria is adorable.” She paused. “It’s nice to see a different part of your life. Before, you tried to tell me as little as possible. I held onto every scrap of information. Like, you love artificial banana flavor, and you liked when you had to take amoxicillin as a child. And you told me about crinoids, the marine animal. You usually just see cross-sections of the stem in the fossil record. Little donut shapes. But if you see the whole thing, they look a bit like flowers. Do you have any idea how many times I Googled ‘crinoids’ because it made me feel closer to you?”
“I framed the watercolor you gave me,” he said.
“I saw it on your bookshelf.”
“I look at it every day and think of you.”
She didn’t ask him why the hell he’d waited a year when he thought of her all the time.
“How about you try on the other dresses?” he suggested.
He’d also gotten a light brown dress with a V-neck and a blue dress with something called a boat neck. Women’s clothes had so many different necklines—he’d never really noticed that before. Cassie didn’t like the blue dress, but she liked the brown and burgundy ones.
“Keep them both,” he said. Frankly, he thought she looked amazing in all three.
“Which one should I wear tonight?”
“The brown one.”
“Because it shows more cleavage?”
“You got me.”
She laughed.
“Cleavage is a geology word, you know. Imagine how entertaining that was to a bunch of nineteen-year-old university students.”
“Oh, I can imagine.”
He reached into a bag and pulled out a box from the jeweler. “One more thing.”
“Blaine, you didn’t need—”
“Hush,” he said, opening the box. It contained a silver necklace with a small heart pendant. “May I?”
She hesitated but finally nodded, and he fastened it around her neck.
“I love you,” he whispered.
She opened her mouth, then closed it, without saying the words he so desperately wanted to hear.