about to explain to Courtney how far from ideal my situation is when my pacing takes me by the window and I see Dan getting out of his car. “Oh my God,” I exclaim, looking down at myself and realizing that I am still in pajamas. “Dan’s here!”
“He’s going to be so excited!” Courtney cheers.
“I’ll call you back,” I frantically explain, not even taking a second to clue Courtney in about how far off base she is.
I glance out the window and see Dan making his way around the front of the car, stopping briefly to rub a spot on the hood with his elbow, before running to my bedroom to put myself together.
In record time, I am able to get dressed, brush my hair and teeth, and make my bed, and I am just placing the final decorative throw pillow when Dan knocks at my door. I take a deep breath to try and calm my heaving chest before answering his knocks. When I open the door, Dan is leaning against the sill with a bouquet of pink tulips in one hand and the broad grin that melts my heart on his face.
“For my fiancée,” he says, handing me the bouquet.
See? I am the luckiest girl in the world. Clearly, he is the most wonderful man ever to walk the face of this earth. I am so taken with him at this moment that I am able to put the Tiffany situation out of my head and wrap my arms around his slightly sweaty neck.
“How was golf?” I ask, heading into the kitchen to get a vase for the flowers. My Saturday night roses are always in the center of my dining room table in a vase from Baccarat, but luckily I have a plain vase I got at Crate & Barrel to give a girl at work as a wedding present before realizing that I wasn’t invited to her wedding. I unwrap the vase, feeling grateful that I hadn’t gotten around to returning it yet, and arrange the tulips.
“Golf was golf, Elizabeth.” Dan launches into an anecdote about his game as I return to the living room and set the flowers in the middle of the coffee table, moving this month’s InStyle and a stack of coasters out of my way to do it. “But enough about golf,” Dan says, turning to me and smiling. “I want to ask you something…something important.”
“Don’t you think you’ve asked me enough important things this weekend?” I tease, flirtatiously.
“Elizabeth, let’s move in together. What do you think?”
I smile, a smile reminiscent of the smile that spread across my face when he proposed, and say, “Definitely.”
“Excellent!” Dan booms. “Because here’s what I’m thinking. We’re engaged, but there’s no reason to rush to the altar. Right?”
“Right,” I agree wholeheartedly, but I start to feel a little confused by the direction of our conversation.
“So we’ll move in together and then when it feels right, we’ll start thinking about setting a date. Marriage definitely isn’t something we want to rush into.”
“No, of course not,” I say, but my mind is thinking that an engagement generally means the time feels right to start planning a marriage.
“And kids are so far off. I mean, you’re young, I’m young; we both have careers. Of course we’ll have two kids down the line, but not for quite a while. Am I right?”
“You’re definitely right,” I say, the smile on my face starting to feel plastic and pinched.
“So, I think you should just move into my place since I’m in the 90210,” Dan says with an enthusiastic grin.
“90212,” I correct him. My heart is sinking all the way down to my stomach, causing the feeling of extreme nausea I suffered from most of the morning to return with a thud.
“You know what I mean. I’m going to jump into the shower and then I think we should celebrate this ‘next step,’” Dan says looking at me with one eyebrow up, a look I know means he wants sex.
I couldn’t be less in the mood for the three minutes of uncomfortable poking that Dan considers foreplay and the seven minutes of thrusting that Dan considers making love, but I smile seductively and say, “We should definitely celebrate.”
I concentrate wholeheartedly on not vomiting until I hear the shower water, and then I pick up the phone and dial Courtney’s cell phone again.
“Is Dan so excited?!?” she answers.
“Oh my God,” I moan for the umpteenth time since Buck Platner’s call this morning. “It’s so much worse than I even realized.”
7
“Shit,” Buck says again, this time out loud. “What am I gonna do now?” he asks Wildcat, who is still asleep on the unmade king-size bed.
His first problem is the now homeless teenage girl asleep in his guest room. The second is explaining his repeat bungle to his father. Not to mention the fact that he, once again, screwed up with Lizzie Castle. While trying to think of ways to put a positive spin on this to both Tiffany and Larry S, he stands up and heads to the door of his bedroom. Much to Buck’s surprise (horror), Tiffany is standing in the hallway.
She jumps slightly at seeing him, and Buck can tell that her brain is trying to calculate if he has seen her or if she can duck back into the guest room. It’s obvious that she had been listening to his conversation.
“How’d you sleep?” Buck asks, deciding to pretend that the awkwardness that accompanied him into the hallway doesn’t exist.
Tiffany does not follow his lead. “She doesn’t want me, does she.”
It’s a question, but she says it like a statement. Unfortunately, it’s a statement Buck knows for certain to be true.
“That’s not true at all,” Buck lies, hoping Tiffany can’t see through him. “She’s so concerned about you and your well-being. She just needed the weekend to collect herself.”
“I thought she needed the evening to collect herself.” Tiffany counters.
This is why people hate teenagers, Buck thinks to himself. This is also why he shouldn’t lie. “The evening, the weekend…it’s like twenty-four hours’ difference. Let’s have some breakfast.” Buck quickly changes the subject and lumbers down the hallway toward the kitchen.
The house is small—too small for a wide receiver like Buck Platner, but technically big enough for one person—and since Buck couldn’t justify a bigger house for just himself, he squeezes himself in like Alice in the rabbit hole. Once inside the messy kitchen, Buck opens the old refrigerator in hopes that fresh food has magically appeared overnight. No such luck. Starting to live like a grown-up is constantly on Buck’s list of things to do…it just never gets done. Instead of containing breakfast staples like coffee and Nutri-Grain bars, Buck’s shopping cart always ends up with marshmallow cereal, which he often has to eat dry since it seems his milk is perpetually past its sell-by date. To say that this home needs a woman’s touch is the understatement of the year.
Buck peers into the fridge, easily looking through the sparse contents—beer, mustard, and leftover pizza—and finding himself face-to-face with the buzzing old light bulb. He looks sheepishly over his shoulder, hoping he is alone, but finds Tiffany standing behind him looking skeptical.
