And I’m tired of being treated like one.
“Company?” he echoes. Now he’s smiling. “What, did you and that girl from the limo go and pick up some sailors while you were out cruising around or something?”
“No,” I say, still not smiling. “Ava’s going to be spending a few days at my place. She and her fiancé just broke up, and she can’t go back to her place because it’s being staked out by the paparazzi.”
Luke’s smile vanishes. “Lizzie,” he says. “Jesus. So, you’re just letting her stay with you? Why can’t she stay in a hotel?”
“Because—” I break off and glare at him. “You know what? Who cares? She’s not. She’s staying with me. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” Luke says, “is that she’s a client. And you’re treating her like she’s a friend. You can’t get business mixed up with your personal life, Lizzie. This is exactly what we were just talking about, back at the restaurant.”
“Oh, really,” I say. I’m ignoring, with effort, a man who is walking by with an Italian greyhound on a leash. The man is pretending he’s not listening to our conversation, but he totally is. I don’t care, really, except that the dog is distracting. It’s so… skinny. I know it was born that way, but it’s still freakish. How does it digest its food with such a tiny stomach? “And just what does my grandmother’s drinking problem have to do with the fact that I refurbish wedding gowns for a living?”
Luke reaches out to grab both my shoulders in his hands and gives me a gentle shake.
“Hey,” he says in a gentler tone than he’s used until now. “I’m sorry about that. Okay? I know I was out of line, and I apologize. I tried to apologize there in the restaurant—I chased after you and would have told you so right there, but you jumped into that limo and were gone. If everyone standing out there hadn’t told me that was Ava Geck you were with, I would have… well, I totally would have thought you’d been kidnapped or something.”
“No, I wasn’t kidnapped, Luke,” I say, trying not to notice how good his hands feel on my skin. I can’t let sensations like that distract me. “I just… we just… I want… ”
What am I saying? What do I want?
Where am I going with this?
Why won’t that man take his dog and go somewhere else? Seventy-eighth Street is really long. Does his dog have to pee right there in front of my shop?
“Luke… I’ve been thinking. And I think… ” The next thing I know, words are coming out of my mouth that I honestly don’t remember thinking. They just come out of my mouth. Like air.
Or vomit.
“Luke,” I hear myself say. “I think we need to take a break.”
Oh. My. God.
T he first hand-printed wedding invitations in the Middle Ages were done in calligraphy by monks, who were commissioned to do so by royalty. By the time metal plate engraving had been invented, engraved invitations—the kind that come with a fancy sheet of tissue paper on top, to keep the print from smudging—became more popular than calligraphy. This same kind of engraving is still used today (and is why you still get tissue paper with fancier wedding invitations). The traditional double envelope in which wedding invitations are so often sent stems from the fact that in olden times, mail was delivered via horse, and no one wanted the dainty hands of the recipient to be dirtied as she opened her invitation. It was assumed a butler would open the icky outer envelope and hand the clean inner envelope to his mistress.
How sad for us modern, butler-less mail openers, daily soiling our hands on germy outside envelopes!
Tip to Avoid a Wedding Day Disaster
Remember, your wedding invitations should never be mailed at the last minute… but you don’t want to mail them out too early, either! The ideal time is somewhere between eight weeks and one month before the actual wedding day. Six weeks in advance is perfect.
And please, never use a laser-printed address label on your invitations. That’s considered beyond tacky. Handwritten only! Yes, you can advertise for and hire an engineering student with impeccable handwriting for this task.
LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS™
• Chapter 12 •
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), German poet
Luke stares at me. “You think we need to what?” he says, his grip on my shoulders loosening.
“Oh!”
I let out the sound in a whoosh. At least I think it was me. I realize I can’t even be sure what sounds are coming out of my mouth anymore. That’s how little control I have.
I sink down onto the top step of the stoop and hug my knees to my chest. The man with the dog, I notice, has hurried away. Apparently, he is no longer enjoying the show—the show of a girl in vintage Shaheen going crazy right in front of him.
“Lizzie.” Luke sits down on the step beside me. “What do you mean, you think we need to take a break?”
“I don’t know,” I groan into my knees. God, what is happening to me? “I just… I mean, you’re going to France for three months anyway… so we’re kind of taking a break, whether we want one or not.”
What am I saying? What is coming out of my mouth? I do not want a break from Luke. I do not. I love Luke.
Don’t I?
“It’s just,” I hear myself saying, though at no point did I formulate the words in my head beforehand, “I know that you love me, Luke. But I don’t always feel like you respect me. Or at least… not my job. It’s like you think it’s just this hobby I have that I’m doing for fun until something more serious comes along. But that’s not what it is. This is really what I do. What I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Luke blinks down at me with his gorgeous, sleepy eyes. “Lizzie, I know that. And of course I respect what you do. I don’t know what would ever have given you the impression that I don’t. All I meant, when I said that about Ava, was that I’ve worked in the business world for a lot of years, and we just never let our clients take advantage of us the way I think you sometimes do.”
“It’s not what you said about Ava,” I explain. “It’s the way you just thought I could leave with you to go to Paris for the summer. You know. When you brought it up.”
Luke stares at me. “Last January? You’re bringing up something I said in January? Now?”
I nod. “And maybe I do business a different way than you do,” I point out. “But I’m not you. Different doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Point taken,” Luke says. “Listen, Lizzie—”
“And,” my mouth goes on. Why, oh, why, won’t it just shut up? “I don’t think you respect my family very much, either. I know they aren’t as sophisticated as your family is. But you’ve never even met them. So how do you even know? And that’s another thing. You’ve been going out with me for a year. For six months of that year we’ve been engaged. And you’ve never met anyone in my family. And yet you make remarks like the one you did tonight—”
“I apologized for that already,” Luke says, moving to put his arm around me. “I know what your grandmother means to you. And if I hadn’t—well, let me tell you, Chaz really let me know, back at the restaurant. But, Lizzie, you have to admit, you complain about your sisters a lot. And your grandmother… well, everyone talks about her drinking problem. And you know the only reason I haven’t met your family is because I’ve been busy with school—”
“You could have come home with me at Christmas,” I interrupt, “instead of going to France with your family. Or at spring break. But instead, you went to Houston to see your mother. And my family isn’t rich like yours. It’s not like they can go jetting off to New York to meet you like yours can.”
I glance at him to see how he reacts to this. He isn’t looking at me, however. He’s looking at the Honda Accord parked across the sidewalk in front of us.