She stopped in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“I will ask for the time off. Okay?”
Her face softened a little. “Okay.”
I would. But I secretly hoped I wouldn’t get it.
Maddy hadn’t come back last night, as promised, and I guess the date went well because he was taking her to breakfast and then some art exhibit. She wouldn’t be home until dinner. I was off and had nothing to do and nowhere to be.
I was in a robe in my room, fresh out of the shower, getting ready to paint my nails when Justin texted me a picture.
I clicked on it and burst into laughter. It was a selfie of him wearing a long red wig and crooked lipstick. The text said, “I babysat my little sister Chelsea this morning. I had to be Princess Anna. She got to be Elsa.”
Me: You look good as a redhead.
My phone rang.
I smiled and hit the speakerphone button. “Princess Anna?”
“Princess Emma,” he said back.
“Just a reminder, you can’t marry a man you just met.”
“You can if it’s true love,” he replied seriously.
I had to stifle my giggle.
“Chelsea made me stand frozen solid for fifteen minutes,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me move. It was that part from the end—I don’t remember that scene taking that long in the movie.”
“Ha.”
“That would kill me, right?” he asked. “Like if I was really frozen solid.”
I grabbed my red polish from the bathroom and shook the bottle on my way to the bed. “Maybe. We’d warm you up first to try and revive you. You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.”
I sat down on the mattress and heard the sound of keys and the click of a bolt lock on the other end of the phone. Then excited dog noises.
“Are you with your dog?” I asked.
“Yeah, I just got home,” he said. “He wants to go on a walk.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’ll let you go then.”
“I don’t need to hang up. Unless you need to,” he added.
I gave a one-shoulder shrug. “I’m not doing anything. Just ran an errand. Back at home.”
I heard the jingle of a leash attaching to a collar and the clickety-click sound of nails on tile.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “What kind of errand? Tell me your day today from start to finish.”
“Why do you want to know?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t I want to know? I’m curious. Unless you’re a reporter and you’re afraid to let it slip.”
“Ha ha.”
I heard a door closing and echoey footsteps in a hallway.
“Call me old-fashioned,” he said, “but we’re talking about undertaking the exhaustive, extremely intimate, time-honored tradition of breaking a curse together. We can’t start until you come back from Hawaii, but we can prepare by getting to know each other.”
“Oh, so it’s a curse now?”
“I mean, isn’t it? It’s keeping us from being happy.”
I scoffed to myself. He wasn’t wrong.
“What do you think we did to deserve it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, putting in my earbuds and grabbing lotion off the nightstand. “I think I’m a good person. I don’t think I do deserve it.”
“Me either. I can’t for the life of me think of why someone would waste a perfectly good hex on me.”
I heard elevator doors opening.
“So your day,” he said, getting back on topic. “Tell me.”
