Loving My Best Friend Page 3

  “Admit it. You just wanted an excuse to leave the city so you can drive your car,” I say, and Jack’s grin is quick and bright as the early morning sun.

  “Guilty.”

  It’s too early to fight, so I sink down in those soft, soft seats and sip my double-shot full-fat latte with cinnamon, letting the purr of the car and the quiet rock Jack’s got playing on the radio sink into my skin.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as safe as I feel with Jack. Yeah, some of it is the fact that I know his car will never break down. His credit card will never get declined. His phone isn’t going to run out of minutes when we’re stranded on a dark night. But most of it is just him. He plans ahead. He remembers my coffee order. He remembers everything I tell him, actually.

  It’s hard to get on his busy schedule, but once you’re there, you’ve got his full attention. He’s always there if I tell him I need him, and he never makes a move on me.

  I steal a glance at him. He’s relaxed and sure, one hand easy on the wheel, his sunglasses on against the low morning light. He looks like some woman’s fantasy.

  Maybe there was a time when I wished Jack would make a move, but I know we wouldn’t have lasted if he had. I’ve seen the way he goes through women. He’s not disrespectful, he just doesn’t … attach. Not often, anyway.

  I can’t imagine my life without Jack, so it would not have been worth it.

  I don’t know if it’s the miles we slowly put between the city and us or that we’re dressed more casually, but our new boss-employee dynamic seems to recede into the background. For a little while, as we drive, it’s just us. Just Eva and Jack, like always.

  The sun goes behind a cloud, and Jack hooks his sunglasses on his collar. Then, he heaves a giant sigh and rolls out his shoulders. “Thanks for humoring me. I needed this.”

  “So, you admit this is a waste of time?” I tilt my cup up to get the last dregs of my latte.

  He barks out a laugh. “God, you’re single-minded. No, it’s not a waste of time, but it could have waited another week if I didn’t need …” He trails off and drums his fingers on the steering wheel.

  I look at him curiously. It’s not like Jack to hold back or have difficulty saying anything. He’s the most self-confident man I know. I wait, giving him the time he needs to pick his way through his thoughts.

  “I’ve been feeling restless lately,” he admits.

  I raise my eyebrows. “You’re bored? Your schedule’s always packed, and you fly all over the world.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t … it sounds stupid when I say it out loud,” Jack grumbles.

  “It sounded stupid when you told me you wanted frosted tips. Nothing you ever say to me will sound that stupid.”

  “It was the nineties!” Jack protests indignantly, but I can tell my teasing helped when he says, “None of the stuff in my day matters. Like, I enjoy it when I’m doing it, but when I go home, and it’s just me in a giant, quiet apartment, it just feels like nothing I did that day matters.”

  I blink. I wasn’t expecting that.

  “Jack. You keep thousands of people employed. You set better standards for your industry. You’re preserving—and building on—your family’s legacy. If that wasn’t enough, the work you do makes it possible for your family foundation to donate a shit-ton to charity.”

  Jack shrugs. “Yeah, but anyone could do that.”

  “Jack!” I whap his arm. “That is bullshit, and you know it. You’re a genius at hotels, you’re good with people, and you’re not a dick. You are one of the smartest, kindest, hardest-working men I know.”

  He shoots me a surprised smile.

  “What? You don’t know how good you are?” I demand.

  “No, I know I’m that good. But you don’t compliment me.”

  I shoot him a disbelieving look. “We complement each other all the time.”

  “I compliment you. You don’t compliment me.” He turns off the highway and into the side roads winding through gold and auburn overgrowth. We drive for an hour while I turn that over in my head, trying to think of one time I’ve complimented him.

  I open my mouth, wanting to argue, but he’s right.

  “It’s fine,” he says, clearly still thinking about it, too. “That’s just not who you are.”

  Except, it is who I am. I tell my girlfriends how great they are all the time. I told a drag queen who I saw on the subway I loved her heels the other day. Hell, I found compliments for all of my exes, and God knows that required some pretty strong rose-colored glasses.

  I guess Jack never seemed like he needed them. He was so much bigger and better than any compliment I could give him, but just because someone doesn’t need praise doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it.

  “It’s probably nothing. I just needed to get out of the city. I’ll be fine.” He slows down to a stop as an Amtrak train crosses in front of us. “This is why I picked this hotel. The train stop keeps it accessible from the city, and the station is quaint enough to pop up pretty regularly on travel Instagrams—”

  I cut him off with a finger to the lips. It’s going to be eons before the train finishes going past us, and I’ve got something to say. Even if I feel awkward saying it. Even if his lips are distractingly soft under my finger.

  You already knew his lips were soft.

  I clear my throat, ignoring that thought, and say the things I should have said years ago.

  “Jack McBride. You are the perfect road-trip partner. You have good taste in music. You have horrible taste in movies, but you always let me pick, so I forgive you for that. You are the only person I know with the discipline to wait until all the previews have ended and the movie has actually started before you start eating the popcorn. You’re devilishly good at leading a company that has repercussions for literally thousands of lives. You’re gorgeous. You’re smart. You’re kind. You’re not funny, but somehow you always make me laugh. And you know your own worth. So if you’re feeling restless, that matters. Don’t you dare pretend, even for a second, that you don’t deserve to be happy.”

  I finish, feeling oddly flushed and out of breath. Dimly, I realize the train was shorter than I thought, and it’s already past us. Jack’s blue eyes are so dark they’re almost black, and when he parts his lips to speak, I snatch my finger away.

  He doesn’t speak, though. He just stares at me until another car behind us honks, and then he snaps his attention back to the road, his foot a little too heavy on the gas pedal as he races through the golden trees.

  “You deserve to be happy, too,” Jack says.

  Then he turns the radio up before I can answer, racing through the trees like there’s something he needs to outrun.

  4

  Jack

  Is it normal to have sex dreams about your best friend?

  —Jack McBride, Google search, age sixteen

  I need to get laid. I need to get laid. I need to get laid. It’s a constant refrain in my head as we drive the rest of the way to the hotel.

  Why would she do that? Just look at me and touch me and say that? We don’t do that.

  And her finger on my lip. Hell, I had to fight every instinct I had not to just bite down on it. Make her gasp just a little bit. Remind her that she’s playing with fire.

  If it was any other woman, I would have. If it was any other woman, they wouldn’t have said something like that. They wouldn’t have made me feel so damn seen. With no damn warning at all.

  I need to think of something else. Anything else.

  I need to get laid. I need to get laid. I need to get laid.

  Eva under me, moaning that I’m gorgeous, that I’m the best man she knows.

  No! Not that thought!

  “So. Have you talked to Gabriel yet?” I throw out desperately.

  I instantly regret it because now I’m wondering if Eva’s that complementary in bed and if she’d let a man know exactly what she likes and what she likes about him. No games, just that soft finger, her husky voice,
and those straight-forward honey-brown eyes.

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

  It’s fine. Eva’s boyfriends almost never last more than a year, anyway. Except, those guys were all dicks. Gabriel’s actually a good, solid guy. It might work out. We’re not kids anymore. If it works out …

  If it works out, Eva might get married.

  I slam the breaks on as we finally reach the hotel, trying to figure out why that thought fills me with panic. Why should I panic? Why should I care? As long as she’s happy, I should be happy. That would be the definition of making sure nothing ever changes between us, a way to lock in our friendship permanently, which is what I want.

  So why does the thought of watching Eva walk down the aisle in a white dress to some other man make me want to puke?

  Because he wouldn’t understand our friendship.

  That’s it. He wouldn’t believe it was platonic. It would be like that movie my mom loves where the guy thinks men and women can’t be friends, which then ruins their friendship. Granted, I’m pretty sure that movie ends with them fucking, but this isn’t a movie, this is real life, and the thought of losing Eva to some good man and a wedding ring has my chest strangely tight.

  “Since when do you ask about my dating life?” Eva asks.

  “You’re right, stupid question.”

  We both get out of the car and walk up to the hotel. We fall into step easily as we cut through the overgrown grass to the quaint, old-fashioned entrance on the four-story, vaguely gothic stone building. Eva stops as we approach the door to lay a hand on the dark stone.

  “It feels like a castle,” she says, awed. “Something out of Wuthering Heights.”

  “You hated Wuthering Heights.”

  “I liked the house in the BBC version.” She rubs the stone. “It doesn’t fit in with your other hotels.”

  “You think I was wrong to buy it,” I say.

  Eva backs up, tilting her head back to take the whole thing in. “No, I think you were brilliant, but I can see why you’re having trouble figuring out how to market it.”

  I nod, unreasonably glad she gets it, and move around her to unlock the door. I get the heavy key in the old-fashioned lock and twist until I hear a click, but I hesitate before pushing the door open.

  “So. Are you going to talk to Gabriel?” I ask without looking at her.

  For a moment, I don’t think she’s going to answer out of pure Eva Price stubbornness. Then she says, “No. I can’t handle a relationship right now.”

  I let out a quiet breath of relief and haul the heavy door open, motioning for Eva to go in ahead of me.

  “For the first time in my life, I just want a quick, hot, fuck,” Eva says. “You don’t do that with coworkers.”

  * * *

  I take Eva through the hotel, talking her through the plans, showing her where there have already been basic renovations in the guest rooms on the second, third, and fourth floors to get everything up to code. The only thing we need to do upstairs is painting and decor. Which is being held up because we can’t decide what to do with the lobby. Specifically, the big open ballroom along the northwest side of the building.

  It’s got big, old-fashioned stained-glass windows, and the late afternoon sun sends all the brilliant colors dancing across Eva’s skin as she moves through the room.

  “We were going to keep it a ballroom, but our events and rentals team did a feasibility study, and apparently, we can’t make it cost-effective for the location. It’s too small of a hotel to turn into a conference destination, and the town doesn’t draw enough events on its own to sustain it.”

  “Even when you account for high school graduations? Personal parties?” Eva asks.

  “Not for our price point,” I say regretfully. “Which means we’d be solely relying on out-of-town weddings to book it. I thought of doing a restaurant, obviously, but we ran into the price point problem again with our celebrity chef model. Even if we figured out a way to make it work, the space would be way too big for a hotel of this size.”

  Eva stops in a pool of brilliant blue light, thinking. She looks oddly wistful, like a mermaid lost at sea. Which is stupid, for a number of reasons. For one, mermaids don’t get lost in the place they belong. For another, Eva’s never been lost in her whole life.

  Enraged at her current location? Sure. Lost? No.

  “Everything else about the hotel is perfect for us,” I say. “It had been for sale for so long that we got more than a great deal. I haven’t found its thing yet, though. Every Rose Hotel has a thing.”

  Eva nods noncommittally, and then suddenly, she snaps her fingers. “I’ve got it, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “Try me,” I say.

  She turns to face me. “Break it up into several small rooms with amenities appealing to the hotel guests, but also still accessible to the community for special events. A business center, a nail-spa, a small events room, a coffee shop, a yoga room.”

  I’m already shaking my head in horror. “But the stained-glass windows—”

  “Will still be visible if you do narrow rectangles, each with one window at its end. You always name each hotel after a flower, right? You can call them the garden rooms or something.”

  I look around the space, dismayed. I know Eva’s plan is practical. Makeda would love it, and our events and rentals team would be relieved to have more manageable targets for the space. My dad wouldn’t care one way or the other, as long as I make a decision so that the renovation isn’t held up.

  I think of my grandpa’s face when I drove him up last year so he could walk through it. He hadn’t been involved with the business side of things for years, but it was near the first anniversary of my grandma’s death, and we were all trying to keep him distracted. He was trudging through the hotel with his walker, being his normal curmudgeon self, when we got to this room.

  He stopped, and then he sat down in a chair someone had left behind years ago.

  Then he told me a story about driving all the way upstate to help my grandma set up flowers in a small hotel ballroom. He already owned his first hotel at that point, and he was young and handsome, but my grandma wouldn’t go out with him because she didn’t think he could be serious about a mere florist, and she wasn’t about to be anyone’s fling. He spent all his weekends one summer driving her all over the city to every event she booked, even with “those damn flowers dropping shit all over my car,” to prove that he was serious.

  Apparently, when they did that upstate drive all those years ago, it was the end of the summer. It turned out to be the wedding of an old friend of my grandpa. The friend invited them to stick around for the party, and as my grandparents were dancing under some long ago chandelier in a place just like this, she finally decided to take him seriously.

  His eyes were lit with memories as he talked, and this hotel started to feel like it mattered in a way most of my other work had stopped mattering.

  Then he made some crack about supposing he might as well stick around in this mortal coil until the opening, but when he looked at me, he was proud.

  I can’t slice it up into fucking conference rooms and nail salons. I can’t.

  “We’re not some boring beige budget chain,” I say coldly.

  “Of course not!” Eva throws up her hands, frustrated. “But you just said a ballroom isn’t viable, and the space is too big for anything else. You drove me all the way up here. What else did you think I was going to say?”

  I wanted you to say, “You’re right, Jack. Ignore the feasibility study. This space can only be a ballroom.”

  I didn’t realize how much I wanted Eva to say that until she drenched that hope in a bucket of icy-cold practicality.

  I run a hand up the back of my hair, frustrated beyond belief. “I can’t make it smaller, make it less. That goes against everything I’ve been building the flagship hotels up to represent. Glamour. Magic. Vacation. This sensual, larger than life pleasure where people can e
scape the shitty parts of ordinary life and celebrate the miraculous parts of it.”

  Eva crosses her arms. “Then what are you suggesting? Operate this hotel at a loss for the aesthetic? That’s doable for a few years, but over time, it will put every other hotel you own in a weaker position.”

  “I know that,” I growl, and she takes a step back, which snaps me out of my anger. “I’m sorry.”

  She softens and takes a step towards me. “I just don’t know what you want me to say. I know this business is personal to you, but it’s also still a business. As your friend, I can tell you to fuck the numbers and go with your gut, but as your employee, you’re paying me to give you my professional opinion. Even if that’s not what you want to hear.”

  I sigh. “I guess the friend-employee line is a little more blurry than I thought. I wanted some miracle idea that would keep the glamor and the magic and work on an ordinary, practical level. Even you can’t give me that.”

  She tilts her head. “Can I blur the lines a little more, just for a minute?”

  I nod.

  She comes up and steps into my arms, wrapping me in a hug. She only comes up to my chin without heels, but she puts a lot of heart in that hug. For a second, I freeze. Then I hug her back, grateful. Grateful for the soft curls pressing against my chin. Grateful for the way this sharp-tongued, quick-tempered woman always manages to find patience for me. Grateful for her heat, for all that softness pressed against me, for the way she smells, and …

  I spin her out in a playful twirl, so she won’t notice I’m already getting hard. Goddamnit, I need to get laid.

  Eva laughs, surprised, and you can’t just do one twirl when a woman’s smiling at you like that, so I pull her back in for another spin, grateful for all those prep-school dance lessons I hated. She starts singing one of the songs that was on the radio when we were driving up.