you haven’t touched your tap water yet,” she pointed out. She might not be a contract lawyer or have teams of experts like the man seated across from her, but she could fight. No one fought harder than a woman backed into a corner. And by her best friend, too. “You just sniffed it.”
His smile lifted the corner of his mouth, infusing a touch of the lopsided into his perfect features. It was all that was needed to take him from handsome to gorgeous. One of the first things they taught you in the modeling world was that blandly recognizable beauty would take you only as far as the catalog circuit. If you wanted to make it big, you needed an anomaly, a quirk, something that marred your perfection in the best possible way.
In addition to being known for her resting bitch-face, Livvie also had a heavy pair of brows she was contractually forbidden from overgrooming. A gift from the father she knew only from a single faded Polaroid, those brows had been the bane of her existence when she was a preteen.
Now it seemed the bane of her existence was the man seated opposite her.
Without dropping his gaze from hers, Ben lifted the glass of water to his lips and guzzled. Unlike frat boys and Wall Street tycoons—indistinguishable from one another except by age—he took his time with the act of chugging, his throat working up and down as the liquid made its way into his esophagus. Livvie wanted to look away and pretend she wasn’t witnessing this act that was half defiance and half foreplay, but her eyeballs were glued in place.
He even made drinking into a sexual act. How was that fair?
“There. That wasn’t so terrible.” He set the glass down with a satisfied sigh. “Though it tastes metallic. I wonder where it’s pumped from.”
“Are you asking me or being a conversational dickhead?”
“The latter, naturally. Now, it doesn’t say I have to eat the salad—just order it—but if this is all that’s going to sustain me until the next meal, I’m digging in. Pass the pepper?”
She grabbed the pepper and dropped it in her purse, heedless of spillage all over the satin lining. There wasn’t anything in there except her ID and an emergency tampon anyway.
He chuckled and picked up his fork, spearing lettuce with more flourish than the bland plant warranted. “Fair enough. I didn’t expect you to make this easy. Are you sure you don’t want to peek in the box?”
She ignored it where it sat, taking up a disproportionately large amount of table space. She also ignored her sea bass, even though she was starving and it was her favorite. Ben knew that, of course. He knew all her favorite things. It was what made that napkin so dangerous.
“Ben, you can’t be serious about this.”
“I assure you, I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
“But we made that list years ago.” Three years, to be exact, the pair of them tipsy and bored at some theater gala with an open bar. All major life decisions made near an open bar were immediately rendered null and void—it was the cardinal rule of city living. “It was for fun. We were just fooling around.”
“No.” He set his fork down carefully on the table and leaned closer. “You might have been fooling around, but I was serious. I’ve always been serious about you, even though you refuse to see it. We’re good together, you and I.”
“We’re only good together because we’ve never been together.” Livvie leaned right back, dropping her voice to a strained hiss. She wasn’t sure why, but it seemed important that no one overhear this conversation. And she was a woman who normally shouted sexual overtures from her fire escape, leaving them hanging there alongside her bras. “Sex ruins things. The second you cross that line, there’s no going back.”
“I told you, I already crossed that line. I crossed it the day I met you.”
Her heart picked up. That was the golden day. The origami day. How dare he ruin it?
“And I’ve been standing here for years, waiting for you to cross over and join me. I thought I could wait forever, but it turns out I’m not as patient as I thought. I’m sorry to have to call in your promise like this, but you leave me with no other choice.”
He made another motion toward his jacket pocket, this time extracting his cell phone. His umbilicus, she liked to call it. Although he was always polite enough to turn it off when they had their dinners, he kept it on for all other events and gatherings. She’d once thought about taking up smoking, if only so she could have a reason to step outside whenever he did.
But no one could smoke every time Ben was on the phone. Not even a chimney.
“Oh, shit. You’re not really—”
He dropped his phone into her gimlet. She could see the screen flashing out as the alcohol seeped into the cracks and rendered the expensive electronic useless.
“‘Number two. You must spend an entire twenty-four hours without your cell phone.’” He flashed her another one of those sympathetic grins. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay close by my side until, let’s see, eight thirty-four tomorrow night. You’re going to want to make sure I don’t cheat on this one.”
“You can’t really expect me to sit around babysitting you until then.”
“Oh, but I do. There are five other requirements on the list I need you to witness. I’m sorry, Livvie, love, but you’ve forced my hand. By this time tomorrow night, I’ll have satisfied all your obligations.”
“Don’t say it.”
“And then it’ll be your turn to satisfy mine.”
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