Not the Girl You Marry Read online

  Jack looked at his friend, feeling nothing but abject disgust. “Have you actually done that? To a real, live woman who didn’t brain you afterward?” Still, he wrote it down because it was properly boneheaded.

  Chris took a deep interest in his beer glass. “Maybe.”

  “Did you do it to Bridget?” Jack seriously thought about punching Chris once a week over dumping Bridget, but if he’d been sending his sweet baby sister dick pics or calling her fat, he could not be accountable for his actions.

  “No. Bridget would’ve taken my balls and worn them as earrings had I called her fat.”

  “Did you send her a picture of your Johnson?”

  His former best friend turned red from his collar to his hairline, but Jack shook it off. He needed to shake him down for intel on how cads treated women. He couldn’t go balls-to-the-wall shithead right away because Hannah would be wearing testicle earrings in less than a minute. The fact that she took no bullshit was one of the things that attracted him to her.

  “I need to start with some low-grade stuff.” Jack took a swig of his beer and looked around Dooley’s, the dive bar owned by Chris and Patrick’s dad, to make sure that none of the old-timers were listening in. They were all deep in their cups by three thirty on a Saturday afternoon, so he didn’t need to worry. “Like maybe something that makes her think that I’m a little too interested.”

  “Like stalking her or some shit?” Joey always took things way too literally. That was how he ended up in jail for a night that one time that they didn’t talk about.

  “Not stalking, but maybe make her think that I’m already at wedding bells in my head.” He turned to Chris. “You know, like you did with that first girl you dated after the second time you broke up with Bridget—the one you took to meet Patrick without telling her that he was your brother. She thought you were going to a Pre-Cana class or something on your second date.”

  “That was definitely an unforced error.” True. The girl had run screaming and put Chris’s picture up on a website that had anonymous reviews of dudes. The site had been taken down after a few months because of multiple defamation claims, but it had slowed Chris’s roll for a time. “But I’m not sure that Hannah is going to see you being too serious about her as a turnoff.”

  “What do you mean? She’s the most skittish girl I’ve ever met. As a fellow child of divorce, she’s going to see seriousness and commitment as a red flag. If I start acting like we’re walking down the aisle in six months, she’ll freak out—at least a little.”

  It wasn’t until that moment that he realized how effective Hannah had been at steering their conversation toward the calm waters of the superficial—movies, food, celebrity gossip—and out of the rocky shoals of their childhoods. Maybe that’s why he liked her so much. She didn’t pry into his family business right away, and he hadn’t been forced to confront his mommy issues on the first date.

  “C’mon, Nolan.” Joey motioned for another round of beers. “You’re the best-looking guy out of all of us. Excepting Patrick—God rest his soul.”

  Chris scowled. “He’s not dead.”

  “Might as well be.” Joey and Chris had been arguing about this since Patrick had decided to enter the seminary. Despite the fact that Joey was kind of an idiot about feelings, he knew in his bones that Patrick hadn’t really wanted to become a priest and had wanted to have an intervention. Chris had refused for reasons Jack still wasn’t privy to.

  “I don’t see what my looks have to do with whether me taking Hannah wedding dress shopping on a second date is going to freak her out enough for her to break up with me—or at least think about it.”

  “Don’t do that,” Chris and Joey said simultaneously.

  “Then how am I going to seem too serious?”

  Chris shrugged. “Introduce her to your mother.”

  The air might have been sucked out of the dank bar right then. Jack didn’t like to talk about his mother, and he saw her as little as possible. Sunday brunch was a command performance, but he kept all other contact to a minimum.

  Ever since she’d left and made a new life for herself—along with a fancy-pants new husband and high-society stepkids—their relationship had been about the same as his adult relationship with the Catholic Church. Even though the new husband and stepkids were no longer around, he saw her on holidays, stayed long enough for air-kisses on the cheeks, and showed up when directed to at the MCA, where she was head curator.

  But he didn’t tell her about his life, and he’d never introduced her to a woman he was seeing. If this whole thing with Hannah was really for real, he wouldn’t even think about subjecting her to Molly formerly Nolan and now Simpson.

  It wasn’t that his mother was a bad person, but he always had the sense that she was vaguely embarrassed by him. Didn’t matter that he had a master’s degree in journalism from an Ivy League school or was gainfully employed in a field that had been contracting for decades. There was something vaguely blue-collar about him that he would never overcome.

  That, and the fact that he was the spitting image of his dad at that age. She must see her worst mistake—getting tied down to Sean Nolan—every time she looked at him. Her disdain was unspoken, but that didn’t make it any less real.

  “I can’t do that to Hannah.”

  “You gotta be all in with this or it ain’t gonna work.” Joey had started dropping consonants, which meant Jack was in for a South Side truth bomb. “You like this girl too much, man. And she’s like every otha girl you’ve eva liked—too fancy and shit for you.” He held his hands up. “No offense.”

  “She gave me the finger when we met.” A weak defense of Hannah’s down-to-earth nature to be sure. She’d been much more at home at the best restaurant in the United States than anyone sitting at this table would have been. “Not that fancy.”

  “Would you want her on your team in a back-alley knife fight?” Chris offered the ultimate test for whether a girl was tough enough. The one they’d come up with while still in grade school.

  Truth was that Hannah was probably perfect for him. She was whip smart and witty in a way that none of his exes had been, they were interested in the same things, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the way she tasted and smelled. She didn’t suffer fools, and she’d probably withstand the back-alley knife fight of an evening with his mother with minimal bruising. He didn’t want to give the right answer—that Hannah just might be the perfect combination of South Side tough and inside-the-Loop class—so he shrugged.

  “Introduce her to your mother.” Chris was firm on this as the next step in the plan. Even though his friend was awful with women, he was probably right.

  He did have that exhibit opening that his mother had left him multiple messages about. His fingers itched to text Hannah about it right now, but he knew he had to wait until the day of to spring it on her. By the end of the evening, with his mother air-kissing and name-dropping, Hannah would probably be about twenty percent turned off, which was right where he needed her to be.

  * * *

  —

  “IF THOSE SWAN-SHAPED VODKA luges do not show up on time and in good condition, I swear that I will”—Hannah listened for a hot millisecond to her ice vendor’s bullshit excuses before continuing—“end your worthless life.”

  After a few useless excuses and her escalating threat to rip his balls off and serve them as hors d’oeuvres, he agreed to the terms of the contract she’d signed with his firm for a local professional football team’s benefit the following week. She hated that everybody always wanted ice sculptures. She despised the things.

  Hannah didn’t even bother looking around to see if any of her coworkers had heard her tirade. They were used to it, as it happened at least once a week. In fact, most of her coworkers—with the glaring exception of Giselle—came to her when they had very serious issues with vendors because the vendors were all afrai
d of her wrath and went out of their way to placate her.

  She lived by the motto that her good regard was very cheap and her anger was very expensive. It was easy for the people she worked with to earn her good regard—all they had to do was their jobs. Well, if they didn’t, they paid the price and then they did their jobs. And Annalise liked having her as an employee / secret weapon. So did everyone she worked with—excepting Giselle.

  Her rants were entirely mundane, part of the background noise of the office. Except today someone had heard. Noah—someone who never wanted to hear her when she was on a tear.

  Although she didn’t gasp when he entered the office, she sucked just enough air in to ensure that she could breathe through what was about to happen. Whatever Noah had to say to her was sure to suck all the oxygen out of her tiny—and shrinking—glass office.

  “You know you catch more flies with honey.”

  She felt her face heat even though she snapped back, “Next time I’m trying to catch flies, I’ll try that. For now, I’m doing my job.”

  He smiled at her, and she remembered why she’d dated him for so long even though they were woefully mismatched from the start. That was a lie; she never forgot the cursed dimple in the side of his deep brown cheek that popped whenever she said something challenging to him.

  Always with the dimple. She needed to learn to hate dimples, or they would be the death of her. She just needed to remember the why of this particular dimple: he’d always thought it was cute when she challenged him.

  Her face stayed hot, but not because of how good Noah still looked in a suit. He was six feet four inches of perfectly tailored man. Not a loose string or a line out of place on his closely shaved head. He filled her office with the scent of his aftershave, and she could almost remember sinking into that smell on her sheets.

  The only thing that kept her in that room and firmly out of fantasyland was the way he’d always thought she was cute. He’d always thought it was cute when she did her job well, or when she had a new idea, or when she got angry. He never took her seriously, and that had always enraged her, which he subsequently thought was cute.

  Until he’d dismissed her.

  Hannah tried not to think too much about the fact that her parents’ relationship would have been illegal less than three decades before she was born. It was depressing, and it made her chest feel tight. And it reminded her that a lot of people still didn’t know what to make of her.

  When asked about her racial identity, she always told people that she was biracial. This tended to bother black people—it had certainly bothered Noah and his parents—because they thought that she was trying to deny or downplay her blackness. That wasn’t the thing at all. It just didn’t sit right with her to deny her whiteness, either. There was privilege inherent in having a white parent—an acceptance in certain white spaces that Noah didn’t have. To deny that would be denying half of herself.

  Hannah had the sneaking suspicion that Noah had put her in the category of Not the Kind of Girl You Marry the moment she’d told his mother that she was biracial. The woman looked as though Hannah had slapped her in the face. Before seeing Noah again, she’d regretted that. But now she felt as though she’d dodged a lifetime of pretending that half her family didn’t exist for the benefit of his.

  White people tended to be curious about her race and then ignore the fact that she was half-black until it became inconvenient for them. For the white guys she’d dated, it usually became inconvenient around the time that it seemed natural to date exclusively or introduce her to their parents.

  So, no. She wasn’t going to take herself on a walk down memory lane back to the time when he’d had his criminally lush mouth all over her skin, back to the time when she’d thought that he was the only man she’d ever be with again for the rest of her life. Or the time after he’d dropped her like last week’s takeout into the trash. Because, of course, it was her fault that she hadn’t been able to keep him in her bed. Because she was such a raging bitch—even though it was only in service to her coworkers, her clients, and the people she cared about.

  Under Noah’s strict rubric, she was not the sort of girl you married. And Noah was looking to get married.

  “What are you doing here, Noah?”

  “I work for Senator Chapin.”

  Her thoughts about the past went away, and she was happy for him. Noah had always wanted to work in DC. He’d always been miserable in advertising. And she was beginning to suspect that he’d chastised her frequently because he’d needed to spread that misery around. After their breakup, she’d erased any trace of him from her social media, but she knew through friends who wanted her not to worry about seeing him around town that he’d taken the foreign service exam and gone off to the Middle East for two years.

  He must have done well in his post to score a job with the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. And it meant he was here on business—probably to fire her—instead of out of some desire to see her again and apologize for destroying her self-esteem.

  “I see.”

  “I’m his press secretary.” Again, she couldn’t help but be impressed. He’d found a way to join up his skill with spin and his interest in the wider world. “And I’m concerned that if you’re planning the wedding, it could cause the senator embarrassment.”

  There it was. She was gauche and embarrassing because she’d declined her acceptance at law school and decided to do something fun with her life. He thought she was trashy because of the job she did and the way she did it—and because of who she was.

  Before she could stop herself, she was standing and leaning across her desk. “I understand that a political wedding is a different kind of thing than the first-string quarterback’s booze cruise.”

  “I know you do, and that was why I was surprised to hear about you planning Madison’s wedding.” The way he said the senator’s daughter’s name made her suspicious. It sounded almost—wistful. “You’re smart enough to know where your talent lies, and it isn’t with marriage.”

  Screw him.

  Instead of contradicting him, which would just lead to his explaining her and her talents to her, she forced a one-sided grin and said, “I’m working with Sasha on the event.” A look of mild relief crossed his face; he’d always liked Sasha. He’d once asked her how she and Sasha could possibly be friends because they were such opposites—herself being the opposite of good-girl, quiet-girl Sasha. But she wanted to probe the way he said Madison’s name. She hadn’t known him for almost a decade for nothing. If he tripped over a word, it meant something. “And Madison has somewhat eclectic tastes, so I’m on as a sort of consultant.” She skipped the part about how planning the engagement party was just a trial run for the wedding. He didn’t need to know that. And the slightly ashen tone his face had taken when she’d said “Madison” was sort of delightful.

  She’d always liked Noah best when he was back on his heels. Right in that moment, she was almost tempted to mention Jack, the fact that she had a man in her life who seemed to like her for her, but something stopped her. She didn’t want to share about Jack, because it was temporary—not something that was real and solid. It was just some faux relationship for the benefit of her career.

  So she didn’t mention Jack because he wasn’t worth mentioning. She was dating him for a job, and she would go out with him for two weeks. As much as it would feel good to see Noah jealous of what Jack temporarily had, she would keep her mouth shut. Maybe she’d matured since their breakup and during her period of self-enforced singledom after all.

  “This is important for me.” Noah was emphatic, but he wasn’t making any sense. Senator Chapin’s daughter’s wedding shouldn’t really be any of his business. She was getting married, not announcing any policy initiatives.

  But Hannah didn’t have time to dwell on that cryptic statement, because Sasha walked into her offi
ce after a wide-eyed rubberneck past the glass wall. Ever the professional, she schooled her face before Noah turned to greet her. “Such a surprise, Noah.”

  “Noah works for Senator Chapin, and he came here to make sure we don’t have strippers at Madison’s wedding.” Noah flinched at the woman’s name. Something was definitely up.

  By the time Sasha had assured Noah that they weren’t going to humiliate the senator with a wedding theme of nudism, Jack had texted her. Her hopefully sly glance at the screen determined that he’d asked her to an event at the Museum of Contemporary Art—fancy.

  Maybe they were turning into a thing after all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY Art was chock-full of people for the opening of a new exhibit. Hannah was excited to be there because she’d formed a friendship with the artist due to an unfortunate and serendipitous incident a few years ago during which they’d shared a holding cell after being arrested on charges of public indecency.

  Not her proudest moment, but there had been a minor miscommunication between the artist and the gallery owner regarding the content of the show. Artemesia “Artie” Valencia was known for throwing her paint-slathered naked body up against canvases. The fateful night when Hannah had gone from planning her first party for a major gallery to wearing handcuffs—and not in a fun way—she’d made the erroneous assumption that the gallery owner would be excited for the artist to create a canvas live.

  She hadn’t known that the very conservative gallery owner’s assistant had planned the show as revenge directly before she quit by going outside to move her car and never coming back.

  Artie had been naked and covered in black and pink paint in front of an audience of mildly liquored-up patrons when the cops showed up to arrest her. And then Hannah had ended up spending a night in jail for “resisting arrest,” which was total bullshit. She had just enough white privilege and Artie had enough charm that things didn’t turn too ugly. And the desk sergeant had actually cowered in fear when Annalise’s lawyer husband showed up to bail them out. For her part, Annalise had laughed it off and said that it would make both Hannah’s and Artie’s careers.