The Honey-Don’t List by Christina Lauren
Imeet Carey in the hotel lobby at five thirty the next morning, both relieved and a little disappointed that she now seems to be dressing the part on tour. Honestly, I liked the Dolly shirt, especially when she told me about the concert where she got it, and used the phrase three sheets to the wind to explain that she was so drunk, buying the shirt is the only part she remembers. Instead she’s in a pink skirt and a white tank top … which I make an effort to not study too closely.
Pop culture would have us believe that men look at women and immediately imagine them naked. That is not always the case, actually. As far as my job is concerned, I have generally been too busy and frazzled and worried about keeping it to think about Carey as a warm-blooded woman with responsive body parts. This morning is an exception. To be fair, though, the hotel does have the air conditioning on pretty high.
Hotel. Incorrect. We are most definitely staying at a motel—a Motel 6, to be specific, and I realize I ought to be grateful for the four hours of sleep I managed on the hard, creaky mattress. The pillows were roughly as thick and supportive as construction paper; the blankets as soft and warm as rucksacks.
Carey, holding a leather notebook and a steaming Styrofoam cup, seems to correctly interpret the deep blue circles under my eyes. “Don’t blame me,” she says by way of greeting. “This trip has been booked for months. The Ritz was full, and I had, like, two hours to find something else.”
“One might assume something exists in the space between Motel 6 and the Ritz.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she says with a sarcastically sweet smile. The sarcasm breaks and she hikes a shoulder skyward, admitting, “I was in denial and then full-fledged panic.”
“It’s Los Angeles,” I remind her. “There are approximately one billion hotel rooms.”
“Jim.” She rubs her eyes with the back of one hand and then takes a sip of coffee. “It’s too early to argue. Add me to your ‘negotiation’ spreadsheet for later.”
I repress the temptation to remind her that the early alarm, too, could have been prevented. We are scheduled to meet the Tripps at the tour bus at six thirty outside their hotel. Carey, who clearly has no sense of Los Angeles geography, booked us at the Motel 6 in Hollywood, which is about eight miles away from the Ritz-Carlton on Olympic. On an average LA weekday, this translates to an hour-long drive.
“You’re acting like we aren’t going to be in a vehicle for seven hours today anyway,” she says.
“No, I’m acting like an additional hour of sleep would be preferable to an hour in a car.”
“Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”
I give her an incredulous lift of one eyebrow.
“Seriously, it was clean and the bed was relatively comfortable, considering the price.” She reaches out to straighten a framed black-and-white print of some iconic Hollywood landmark. “It’s just a little drab and predictable. Nothing some different colors and updated furniture couldn’t fix. They could make the simplicity feel like it’s intentional. Wouldn’t take much money, either.”
She scribbles something down in her notebook before turning her attention to me, studying me in playful exasperation. “Again with the suit.”
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Dress for the job you want, not the job you have’?”
“Have you ever heard the word ‘highfalutin’?”
I laugh. “People actually say that?”
Ignoring me, she rolls her dilapidated suitcase toward a wall of vending machines, tucks her notebook away, and starts searching through her purse. “I’m familiar with the phrase,” she answers, finally, “but it seems like something people only say to girls.”
I follow and pick a wayward piece of lint from my sleeve. “My sister says more men should follow the advice women get.”
Whatever she’d planned to say next seems to stall in her mouth. She studies me again, open wallet in hand, but this time her eyes don’t stray from my face. “What does that mean?”
I shift a bit under the press of her attention, inexplicably unnerved. “Probably that women are always being told to behave in a way that makes everything more harmonious, productive, accessible. They’re told how to do everything from how to dress to how to smile. Men are never told to make things easier for people, but maybe they should be.”
She’s still staring. “Who are you?”’
“Who am I?”
“Why are you here?” she asks. “Why do you even have this job? Why didn’t you quit the second Robyn told you we had to go on tour? Actually, why didn’t you quit the first time Rusty asked you to get his coffee or clean his golf balls?”
I wince and press a hand to my stomach. “There’s something about that phrasing that really doesn’t work for me right now.”
She ignores this.
I watch as she carefully coaxes a handful of crinkly dollar bills into one of the vending machines. Her movements are stiff and unnatural, and I’m on the verge of offering to help her when the machine finally takes the cash. I glance away as she presses the button for a granola bar.
“Seriously, though,” she prompts, “why are you here?”
For a moment, I briefly consider telling her the truth and then decide evasion is easier. “That’s a long story.”
“We’ve got,” she starts, looking down at her phone, “eleven minutes until our Lyft is here.”
“It’s also a depressing story.”
“I live for other people’s drama.” Depositing the bar inside her bag for later, she grins up at me.
I blink away, looking across the lobby to the reception desk, where one employee is on her phone and her male counterpart is asleep in his chair. I don’t relish the idea of telling Carey about all of this. It’s not that I worry it makes me look bad, but I worry it will make her pity me, and few things are more emasculating than pity. “My last job—the only job I’d had in the four years since I finished my master’s—was at Rooney, Lipton, and Squire.”
Carey’s eyes narrow and then go wide in recognition. Blue-green. Neither blue nor green, but a pretty blend of the two. “Wait. What? Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Thankfully, her expression isn’t pity, it’s fire. “Isn’t that the firm that funneled all that money into—”
“The very one.” I reach up, scratch my chin, feeling uneasy in that nauseated way I always do when I remember that the four years of endless workdays and stress-induced sleepless nights were essentially supporting a completely corrupt company. “So, I really need to build my experience and contacts here. I can’t just bolt.” I reconsider. “Or, I suppose I could, but then I might have a hard time finding something else. Rusty promised me an engineering role. Ted promised me an engineering role. I’ve been Rusty’s de facto assistant so far, but if I can just hold on until season two starts shooting, I think I might actually like what we’re doing here. Plus, I admit I’m thrilled that no one here seems to be breaking the law.”
She whistles. “Wowza.”
Yeah, wowza. There’s also the fact that my plan only works if Rusty and Melissa can keep it together. Wanting to change the subject, I ask, “If you don’t mind my asking, why do you still work for them?”
Her answer is immediate. “Melly needs me.”
I believe that’s true, though from what I’ve seen Melissa also doesn’t treat Carey particularly well, so it seems awfully generous of Carey to prioritize Melissa’s needs over her own.
But surely she wants my pity even less than I wanted hers. “You don’t think she would manage, after a while?”
Carey turns her eyes up to me, and given the freedom to look directly at her, I’m struck by the awareness that not only is she a warm-blooded woman, she’s disarmingly pretty. More than pretty—she’s beautiful. Her skin is flawless, cheeks always flushed. I like her mouth, the way it curls up on one side before the other when she’s amused. The strong angle of her jaw, the hint of dimples in both of her cheeks.
Danger, James. I look away, trying not to stare. It’s part of Carey’s job to blend into the background, but now that I’ve seen her—really seen her—something heated turns over in me that I’m not sure I can turn back.
“What else would I do?” she asks. “I feel like I’ve given everything to the Tripps. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve helped them build all of this.”
“Oh, I’m sure you have.”
“I don’t really want to start over.”
I want to say You’re only twenty-six, but she takes a deep inhale over her Styrofoam cup, seeming to refocus and possibly even relish the smell of what can’t possibly be good coffee. The moment has passed.
“At least they weren’t terrible last night,” she says, a subtle subject change.
It’s true. Melissa and Rusty weren’t terrible at the meet-and-greet. They charmed the crowd, joked with each other, and generally left me with the hope that this might not be the worst week of my life.
“That was my first book signing, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but … they were great. Maybe we’ve been worried about nothing,” I say, trying optimism on for size.
“Yeah …” Carey starts, and then offers a thoughtful pause.
“But?”
“They were great last night, but that could have just been the adrenaline of a first event. I’ve never traveled with them across the country mere days after adultery in their twenty-five-year marriage. We’re in open water here. Anything can happen.”
This is the opposite of what I wanted her to say. “Did you have any idea their marriage was so bad?” I ask. “I certainly didn’t.”
She drains the cup and takes a couple of steps to refill it, lifting it as if offering me one. I decline with a small shake of my head. “I knew things weren’t perfect,” she admits. “But whose marriage is?” She adds in some nauseating powdered creamer and three packets of sugar. “Believe it or not, they used to be really cute together. I actually miss seeing them like that.”
I groan. “Do you ever just wish everyone would do what they’re supposed to do?”
“Heck yeah.”
“Think about what they’ve built, how lucky they are. Rusty needs to keep it in his pants. Melissa needs to calm down a little. I could help do some of the engineering work and …” I hesitate, awkwardly. “You’d hopefully have fewer messes to clean up.”
“Of course.” Carey gives me a knowing little wink and drains this second cup of coffee. “But think of all the fun you’d be missing if you were just an engineer! I mean, with all you know about LA hotels, you should have booked the rooms!”
We help Joe get everything reloaded onto the bus while the Tripps sign autographs for a crowd that has gathered outside the Ritz. I’m constantly vigilant, waiting for the Tripps to explode at each other any minute, but they’re both wearing steady, easy smiles.
Likewise, the seven-hour drive to Palo Alto is mostly uneventful: Carey is on her iPad again. Rusty stays pretty much in the back. The two of them used to talk more, but I’ve noticed a distinct strain on whatever father-daughter vibe they had going on. The sounds of ESPN float through the closed lounge partition door, and Melissa parks herself next to the driver, where her motion sickness is the mildest and she can wait for the Dramamine to kick in. I get the distinct impression that that is usually Joe’s seat, so he’s awkwardly hanging out near the back.
“Joe,” I say, and he looks up from where he’s shuffling a bunch of papers around. I motion to the couch across from me.
I watch as he passes Carey, and notice him noticing her. A weird beat of satisfaction hits me when she’s so focused on whatever she’s doing that she doesn’t even look up. She’s using the iPad stylus with her right hand—and I know she’s left-handed. Even so, her fingers move in small, precise strokes. I’m pretty sure she isn’t playing Minecraft; not even my nephews give it that much focus. It looks like she’s drawing.
She tilts her head, bites her lip, and the gesture sends a shock of heat through me.
My view of her is blocked by Joe as he sits next to me, startling me back into focus.
“Tired of sports?” I ask. For the day and a half we’ve been on the road, with Melissa up front, Joe has spent most of his time in the back; as likable as Rusty generally is, I’m sure the prospect of all-day beers and sports on TV has quickly lost some of its appeal.
Joe looks nervously over to where Melissa has dozed off, and then to Carey, who still doesn’t seem to register that we’re looking at her.
“They’re different than they seem on TV,” he says confidentially.
Mild dread feels like a tiny weight in my abdomen, sinking. Of course I know what he means, but—as much as I hate the role I’ve been given, I should probably chase down his meaning a little. “How so?”
Joe shifts, hesitating. “Nothing specific. They’re just not as … happy as I imagined.”
I close my book and set it on the couch. “It’s the travel,” I explain, leaning back and draping an arm over the back of the seat, going for unconcerned. “The stress of the road. They miss their kids.”
“How old are their kids?”
“Twenty and twenty-four.” I clear my throat when his brow lifts in surprise. I’m sure he was imagining toddlers or—at most—middle-school-aged children. “But they’re all very close.”
This … may or may not be true. In the short time I’ve been working for the Tripps, I’ve heard Rusty talking to TJ once.
“Plus,” I say, “everything is happening so fast for them, I think they’re both a little overwhelmed.”
“Right.” Joe’s smile looks a little forced. The Tripps have been megastars for a few years now, but he kindly leaves this unsaid. “Sometimes it takes a few days to adjust to the tour. It can make anyone a little tense.”
“They’ll get into a groove.” I pause. “They were great last night.”
Joe nods.
I’m trying to get a better read on him. He doesn’t seem all that enthusiastic about last night’s event. “Nothing they did last night set off alarm bells, right?”
He shrugs, distracted by a small spot on the couch that bears a striking resemblance to the color of Melissa’s trademark pink lipstick. “No, they were fine.”
“Seemed to really charm the crowd,” I press.
But Joe is oblivious. Motioning to the spot like he wants to get something to fix it, he stands and moves to crouch in front of one of the utility cabinets up front.
When I look up, I realize Carey is gazing with amusement at me.
She leans in, whispering, “Bravo, Jim, brav-o. That was a study in espionage.”
“What are you talking about?”
She stands, moving to sit where Joe had been, and, looking around first, quietly asks, “Were you trained in the CIA?” She glances over my shoulder and then back to me. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”
I give her a lingering, flat look, but inside, I’m fighting a smile. I like her playful like this. “I was just trying to get a read on what he thought about the blogger event.”
Carey leans back, pulling her phone out and swiping her screen open. “Everything I’ve seen has been pretty positive so far.” She smiles, turning her phone screen to face me. “In addition to Joe, various social sites on the interweb provide a great window into the impression the Tripps give at events.”
“Okay, Duncan.” I look back down to my notebook, hoping she hears my deep breath as exasperation and not that I’m taking a deeper hit of her. “I’m happy to leave all sleuthing to you.”
Carey laughs, and then startles a little when Melissa stirs awake up front. It’s an immediate shift in mood, like a tiger has just entered the arena.
“Where’s my phone?” Melissa asks, voice groggy.
“I plugged it in, hold on.” Carey jumps up, running to grab the phone from the small kitchen counter. Before she hands it to Melissa, she says, “Just no reviews.”
“I’m not going to read reviews,” Melissa snaps.
Carey walks back toward me with a roll of her eyes. She does not look convinced.
As expected, Melissa spends the three hours leading up to our arrival into the Bay Area reading reviews. From what I’ve seen, most have been good, but a few are downright nasty. No matter how much Joe tries to lighten the mood and explain that every author he’s ever taken on tour finds bad reviews, and how much Carey pipes in that books are subjective and not everyone will love them all, Melissa isn’t hearing it. By the time we’re pulling into the parking lot of the Palo Alto bookstore, Melissa is in a mood.
She’s tiny, but her energy isn’t. The bus door opens, and she sweeps past us, barely stopping long enough for the smiling event coordinator to lead her into the greenroom.
Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, but almost from the getgo I’m worried that the event is doomed. I wonder if, in three hours when we’re all done, I’ll find that it was just nerves making me feel this way or whether the tension seems as thick as the San Francisco fog to anyone else. Last night seems Smurfs’ Village–level utopia compared to this.
Although Rusty walks in right behind her, they head in opposite directions: Rusty to the snack-laden table on one side, and Melissa to a cooler of water on the other. While Rusty—oblivious to or intentionally avoiding his wife’s worsening mood—makes small talk with one of the bookstore staff, the event coordinator for the bookstore, Amy, goes over the schedule for the night to no one in particular: fifteen-minute talk, book signing, VIP photos and meet-and-greet to follow. Melissa aggressively opens a bottle of water, nods with tight smiles, and paces the room. She pointedly does not look at her husband.
Carey comes in loaded down with Melissa’s purse, a box of T-shirts for giveaway, Melissa’s lunch bag with her fresh squeezed juice, and about five other bags. Her skirt hem hits several inches above her knees and her tank top reveals smooth, tanned shoulders that make me think of biting. But her expression reads: I’m about to drop something. I rush over to help but once the load is in my arms, I give her a helpless apologetic look.
“Where should I put this?”
Carey laughs. “Do I get to have an assistant now?”
My first instinct is to tell her I have no problem with that at all, and then my brain snags on the echo of it, how desperate it would sound, and I’m quiet long enough that I just leave her comment without reply.
With a wink, she leads me to a table, standing close as she unloads things from my arms. She put her hair up into some kind of twist, but a few strands have come loose and fall prettily along her neck.
“I’ll take this.” She unhooks Melissa’s lunch bag from my finger.
Our eyes catch for a few loaded seconds. I’m thinking about how the first few times I hear a new song—even one from a band I love—I don’t like it. I resist the idea that something new could ever be as good as something old, but then slowly the new song works its way into my brain and I forget what it ever felt like to dislike it. Right now I’m looking at Carey’s face, thinking it’s like a song I’ve heard a few times now, and every time I hear it again I like it more.
“What?” Her eyes widen in horror and she reaches up to wipe her mouth. “Do I have crumbs on my face?”
“No, I just—” I pause, putting myself together. I’m developing a crush and I’m not sure what to do about it. “Let me know how I can be helpful tonight.”
Gratitude washes over her expression. “Oh. I will.” She glances across the room. “We need to get her to relax. She looks like a bomb right now.”
I follow her eyes across the room and we both take a deep, steadying breath. This is what we’re here for, right? Joe may be impossible to keep in the dark because he’s going to be with them unguarded on the bus for days on end, but here we have some control.
But I don’t know how to fix the tense mood in the room. Let me wrestle with the constantly changing world of city and municipal building codes. Let me navigate the complexities of engineering licensure or give me an impossible element to make possible in a final design. But handling emotions like this? Between two people I hardly know and who, quite frankly, probably shouldn’t be married anymore, let alone telling other people how to do it? I feel as useful as a leaf blower in a kitchen.
Thankfully, though, Carey knows how to manage Melissa’s proximity to combustion. She carefully makes her way over to the other side of the room. Beside Melissa, Carey looks so tall, but she bends, making herself smaller, speaking in a low, soothing voice.
Jesus, how many times has she had to play this role? For a beat, I’m mad about it—mad that Carey is only in her midtwenties and already having to be an assistant, usher, peacekeeper, travel agent, and who knows what else.
I feel intensely useless. Having no training in this sort of mediation, I am simply a body standing in the middle of a room. Trying to think like Carey, I walk over to Amy and make a show of looking at the schedule. She’s more than happy to explain everything again, and I’m able to keep an eye on Melissa and Carey. They’re not close enough for me to catch everything they’re saying, so I get only a bit of Carey’s murmured, “… okay? … great crowd out there.” And then Melissa’s soft, “… but the reviews. How am I supposed to … blood, sweat, and tears and—”
“Does that all make sense?” Amy asks hopefully.
I turn my attention back to her. I have no idea what she’s said. “Perfect. Thank you for all your hard work putting everything together.” I glance across the room, horrified to see Rusty chatting up a pretty young clerk. “Um, if you’ll excuse me for a second.” I gesture to my boss. “I’m going to just …”
“Oh, of course!”
He doesn’t look at me, still smiling winningly at the twentysomething brunette, but is aware of my presence because he reaches out to pat my shoulder and offers a lighthearted “Hey, Jimmy Jams.”
I let this one slide and smile at the woman. “Could you excuse us for a second, please?”
Her cheeks warm to a bright pink, and she nods before rushing off. I lean against a stack of shelves.
“Rusty.”
This earns me an innocent blink. “What?”
“You know what.”
“She’s a nice kid,” he says, waving a hand. “A big fan. I was just indulging her.”
Does he do this to drive Melly crazy, or is he genuinely unaware that flirting in front of his wife is always a terrible idea but especially now?
“Well, let’s focus our attention elsewhere.” I lift my chin. “Looks like Melly is having kind of a rough day.”
He gives me an easy shrug and pulls out his phone to check messages. “You get used to it.”
“Rusty.” I wait until he looks up at me again. “This is where you need to get involved. Her feelings are hurt, and she’s having some insecurities. She’s upset. You need to go help calm her down.”
“I doubt I’d be very useful here.”
“But at least appear to be engaged with your wife?” I tilt my head over to where Joe has just walked in and is introducing himself to Amy. “For this week, appearances matter. To anyone else in the room, you come off as totally uninterested in whatever’s going on with her.”
“What do you expect me to do, Jimmy? Pretend like everything is fine and we’re”—he has the nerve to motion between us—“not both here completely against our will?”
Against our will?I take a deep breath. Rusty is here so he can continue to live the sweet life and drive around the lake on his custom Jet Ski. I’m here so I can keep my job and not get evicted.
“Do you want people to figure out that you two are in trouble?” I ask him, growing desperate the longer Melissa is panicking by the window and Rusty appears completely unconcerned. Amy and Joe are still here, but another woman has entered the room and is watching Melissa pace and vent to Carey about bad reviews.
“She should know not to look at those!” Rusty hisses to me. “Reviews always get her back up, and they aren’t even that bad! She knows better.”
“Not helping,” I growl.
With an irritated exhale, he makes his way over to his wife. She looks initially like she’s going to blow up at him, but a glance over his shoulder clues her in that they’ve got an audience, which seems to be the one thing that pulls Melissa Tripp back into the right state of mind. She allows herself to be coaxed into the sturdy comfort of Rusty’s hug.
Carey looks at me. I look at her. It feels like we both finally let out a long, slow breath. But the calm is shattered by the sound none of us wanted to hear today.
“Hello to my two favorites!” Stephanie Flores has that husky sexpot voice, and when the former Miss America sashays into the room, completely oblivious, a chill swallows us all. Rusty closes his eyes and lets out a groan that seems to lament the inconvenience rather than the depth of his regret. Is it really possible that Rusty didn’t bother to give Stephanie the heads-up that Melissa knows about their affair?
She walks over, embraces a board-stiff Melissa first, and then kisses Rusty on both cheeks. Carey and I stare at the three of them like we’re watching a grenade with the pin pulled free. The room is filling with people with Instagram and Twitter locked and loaded on their phones, and who’d love to drop that they’re hanging out backstage with the Tripps!
To her credit and my unending shock, Melissa manages to slap on a gracious smile and let out a thrilled “Stephanie! Oh, my goodness, what are you doing here, silly? What a surprise!”
Carey sidles up next to me, tucking her hands beneath her crossed arms. “Holy shit. This is bonkers.”
“It’s like watching a car sail off a cliff,” I agree.
“I was really hoping the shit wouldn’t hit the fan at the second tour stop,” Carey hisses, glancing to where Melissa and Stephanie chat like they’re old friends catching up after months, instead of secret enemies who saw each other less than a week ago. “What is she doing here anyway?”
“She doesn’t know that Melissa knows,” I remind her. “In Stephanie’s mind, she’s just one friend popping in on two others. Not a—”
“Backstabbing asshole?”
I glance down to see her already smiling up at me. My blood heats at her proximity and the glint in her eyes that I know comes from being exhausted and stressed but translates as fuck-it-all mischievousness. Holy shit. I like her.
“That nicely sums it up.” I turn back to the two women. “So what do we do? Melissa is a mess with or without the backstabbing asshole, and there’s a room full of people out there and a lot more of these events to come.”
“First,” she says, “we have to keep her off the review sites. I’ll set up a blacklist of words to mute on Twitter and compile all of our four- and five-star reviews. If I give her a new list every day, it should be enough to keep her ego going.”
“And second?” I ask.
“Second?” she says, and then exhales as we both watch Rusty walk back over to the snack table, and catch Stephanie eyeing him like there might be time for a quick round of Hide the Hammer. “Second, we keep those two away from each other and just … hope the creek don’t rise.”
Even though I’ve never heard that phrase in my life, I know exactly what she’s saying.
It’s a tall order, but Carey’s intervention and Rusty’s hug appear to have scraped together a little team spirit: Melissa seems determined to keep it together. Walking behind Stephanie, Melissa smiles brightly at everyone she passes. It looks like Rusty is doing his part as well, and has a guiding hand pressed against his wife’s lower back as he walks beside her. Carey and I bring up the rear, and it’s only from this angle that you’d notice Rusty’s only touching his wife with his fingertips, like he’s rationing out how much physical contact he’s going to deliver.
With every step I think, I could just turn around and walk out of here and not come back. I could start over, work as an entry-level engineer somewhere in Omaha, Topeka, Sioux Falls. I’d have to live on instant ramen and roll pennies to pay for gas, but would that be worse than this?
I’m ripped from this internal debate when we stop just at the edge of the bookstore floor. There are streamers and balloons, and posters of the New Life, Old Love cover everywhere. The crowd erupts in a deafening cheer when the Tripps step inside, and then loses it again when they see the bonus appearance of Stephanie Flores, who gives a humble little wave and indicates she’ll be standing in the back, a simple fan just like the rest of them.
“Thank you so much for joining us tonight,” Amy says by way of introduction. “This has been quite a ride for you two, hasn’t it? I hear you’re traveling by bus?”
On cue, Melissa and Rusty share a fond look.
“Yes!” she sings. “A big, beautiful bus.” She’s careful to smile and make eye contact with individual members of the audience, and it’s easy to see why millions of women feel like they know her.
“But even a big bus can feel really small when you’re traveling with an entire team of people,” she continues with a self-deprecating smile. “Let’s just say I’m going to be better about picking up my shoes when I need to.”
“I almost went to the emergency room! They’ll tell you!” Rusty says, pointing to the back of the room where Carey, Joe, and I—their team—stand. We all shrug and play along with this fictional moment. The audience eats it up. They leave their shoes on the floor! They’re just like us!
The next question comes from a twentysomething woman in the back of the room. “Do you remember the first window display you ever did that made someone come in and say, ‘That. I want that’?” she asks.
And without waiting for his wife to reply, Rusty looks to the back of the room again and says, “What was that first window you did, Carey-girl? The dining room one, right?”
Carey stiffens at my side as the entire room swivels in their seats to look at her. Silence swallows the space, because the way he cut Melissa out of this recollection is palpably awkward. When I take in Carey’s horrified expression, I realize that this is definitely more than easy Team Tripp banter: Rusty has just dropped a bomb in the middle of the bookstore.
