Chapter 49

Chapter Forty-Nine

Things have been a little tense between me and Tom.

He texted me a few times the day after he blew me off for his mother, but I decided not to answer. I was irritated enough to let him stew a bit, and also still wound up over the situation with Real Kevin.

But then he sent me a text message inviting me to his apartment for a homemade candlelight dinner. And I decided I had punished him enough.

Despite the fact that Tom must earn at least several times as much as I do, his building isn't any fancier than mine. Like me, he doesn't have a doorman. But even worse, he doesn't have an elevator. And he lives on the fifth floor. By the time I get up there, I am slightly out of breath. What can I say—yoga is not an aerobic workout. I have to check my armpits to make sure they're not sweaty.

Tom looks thrilled to see me when he opens the door. He grabs me and kisses me for, like, sixty seconds, which is a lot in kissing time.

"I missed you," he whispers in my ear.

"Well," I say, "I might come to your apartment more if you didn't live in a fifth-floor walkup." I place a hand on my chest. "My heart is still pounding. I might be having a heart attack."

"You know, when you're exercising," he says in that excited voice he always uses when he's telling me some factoid about the human body, "the blood vessels supplying your muscles expand to bring more blood to them, so the heart has to pump more blood. Your heart beats faster to maintain your blood pressure."

"Wow, fascinating, Dr. Brewer."

He laughs. "Anyway, it would be impossible to get my furniture downstairs if I wanted to move. So I'm pretty much stuck here forever."

If Tom and I ever decided to live together, he could move into my building. Or else we could find a different place to start fresh.

But even as I'm thinking that, in my heart I know that Tom will never ask me to live with him.

"Come on in." He takes me by the hand and tugs me into the living room, where he indeed has a candle burning on the table. He has set up two place settings, including bottles of water, because what comes out of his tap is slightly brown, and between them is a brown paper sack. "Let's eat before it gets cold."

"Hmm. I feel like I was promised a homemade dinner."

He nods soberly. "Yes, I realize that. But then I got stuck late at work, and realized that while I'm an excellent cook, I'm also excellent at calling Luigi's to order a delicious dinner for two."

Fair enough. "Okay, let me grab utensils."

I walk into Tom's kitchen, and as I'm heading over to the drawer to get the silverware, I notice movement on the floor in the gap between the refrigerator and the cabinets. I crouch down to get a better look, and then…

"Tom!" I scream. "Oh my God, get in here!"

Tom comes running into the kitchen, just in time to find me cowering by the sink. He follows the direction of my gaze, where a small gray mouse seems to be stuck in the space next to the refrigerator. A freaking mouse .

"Oh!" he says. "That mouse has been terrorizing me for the last month. I guess the glue paper I bought worked."

I clasp my hand over my eyes. "I can't look! It's so gross."

"It's just a mouse." I peek through my fingers just enough to see him smirking at me. "Just go in the other room. I'll take care of it."

I am happy to oblige. I dash back into the living room, trying not to think about that wriggling vermin on the floor of the kitchen.

I wait at the dining table, holding my breath. I hear loud scuffling noises from the kitchen, and I try not to imagine Tom handling that mouse with his bare hands. I'm holding my breath when, all of a sudden, there's a loud bang. Then a second one. A few minutes later, Tom emerges from the kitchen holding a handful of silverware. (I hope he washed his hands.)

"All taken care of," he says casually.

I frown, wondering about the noise I heard. "What did you do to the mouse?"

"I put it in a bag and then smashed it with a hammer."

I gasp. Smashed it with a hammer ? "For real?"

"Uh, yeah."

"How could you? That was a living creature."

His jaw drops. "Are you freaking serious? You were screaming and couldn't even look at it! I told you I was going to get rid of it, and I did. I didn't tell you that I was going to rehabilitate the mouse and make it my pet."

"Still. You didn't have to do that . That's…awful."

"Well, what would you have preferred?"

"You could have released it into the wild!"

He gapes at me. "It was stuck on a piece of glue paper. And we're up five flights of stairs. How did you want me to do that exactly?"

I wring my hands together. What he did is bad enough, but I'm even more unsettled by the fact that he barely seems bothered by having to smash a living creature to death with a hammer. "I don't know…"

"I'll tell you what. Next time I have a mouse stuck in a trap, you can go ahead and release it into the wild." He raises his eyebrows. "Now can we eat this delicious meal I ordered?"

Fine. I suppose he has a point. But still, everybody knows that glue traps are inhumane. He could have gotten another type of trap that wouldn't have required him to kill the mouse. Maybe I'll buy him some more-humane traps.

I dig into the brown paper bag and discover that he has ordered chicken parmigiana for me, and chicken piccata for himself. And lots of crusty rolls. As I slide into the seat across from him, the silverware glints in the overhead lighting. I notice the knife he placed on one side of the plate is larger than your standard steak knife.

"My God, what did you think I'd be cutting?" I say as I pick it up.

"Well, it's a slab of chicken. You need a knife, right?"

"Yes, but…" I turn it to the side. "Jesus, this is sharp. Most of my knives at home don't look sharp enough to cut through a piece of bread . Do you get these sharpened?"

"Christ no." He picks up his own knife to cut into his chicken. "I just don't use them much, so they stay sharp."

This knife is definitely making me wary. With my bleeding issues, I would probably lose a pint of blood if I cut myself with one of these. I'll have to be extra careful.

As we dig into our food, I tell Tom all about my encounter with Kevin on Zoom. I try to play it down and make it into something almost comical, but by the end of the story, his face is bright red—almost purple. He looks absolutely furious.

"The nerve of that jackass!" he growls. "I should have called the police on him the first time. I knew he was trouble." His hand balls into a fist, and if Kevin were standing in front of us, I have no doubt Tom would be throwing a punch right now. "You can't let him get away with this, Sydney."

"Unfortunately," I say, "I don't know much about him. All I got from the Cynch app was his first name and a phony photo."

"So? There are other ways to find a person. It's not like this guy is some sort of criminal mastermind."

"Like what?"

"Hire a private detective? Hell, I bet some high-school kid who is good at hacking could figure out where he lives based on your Zoom session."

"Maybe…" I'm not convinced it will be that easy to find Kevin. In any case, it's not what I want to think about right now. Especially since it seems to be getting Tom so angry. "Hey, I found out some interesting news the other day."

"What?"

I carefully slice another piece of chicken, attempting not to sever my finger in the process. "Gretchen's boyfriend came to my apartment and showed me a ring he bought her. He's planning to ask her to marry him."

"Oh." Tom could not possibly look less enthusiastic. And why should he be excited? He has refused to meet Gretchen and Randy, so why would he care that they're getting married? "That's great."

I play with the spaghetti curled up in a pile on my plate. "I suppose you're going to refuse to be my date to the wedding."

"Wedding?" He raises his eyebrows. "Syd, the guy hasn't even popped the question yet. These engagements last forever. I bet they won't get married for two more years. Do you really need me to make plans for two years in the future?"

This is essentially the reaction I'd expected from him, but it still irritates me.

"I don't need you to save a date," I say through my teeth. "But it would be nice if you didn't look quite so panicked at the idea of going somewhere formal with me and actually meeting people that I know."

"I don't—"

"You do. You know you do, so please don't make it worse by lying about it."

Tom's brown eyes drop to his dinner. "Look, I'm not saying you're wrong, okay?"

"Okay…"

"But, there are things about me that you don't understand. That you could never understand."

"Try me."

He drags his fork across his plate. His shoulders rise and fall, and it almost looks like he's mumbling to himself. Except I'm not sure what he's saying.

"I like you, Sydney," he says. "I like you a lot . I really, really do."

"But…?"

It's so quiet in his apartment, I can hear his neighbor's cat begging for dinner. Tom rakes a shaking hand through his black hair.

"Okay," he finally says.

"Okay?"

He raises his eyes and a smile twitches at his lips. "Okay, I'll be your date for the wedding, whenever it is."

He's right—it probably won't end up being until some date in the far away future. But still, it's nice to know he's willing. Maybe there really is a future between the two of us. Maybe someday we'll be getting an apartment together. This could be something. He could be the One .

My eyes meet his across the table. God, he is really sexy.

And now he's giving me that look, which makes it hard to think straight. He's not hungry for dinner anymore. And neither am I.