“Mojo!” he cried as he lifted her off her feet and spun her around, his long black locs fanning out behind him.
“Hey, beefcake,” she said. “What’s shakin’?”
“Where’s your friend?” he asked as he set her down. “I’m excited to meet him.”
Jo shrugged and gave a casual, practiced smile. “He was tired from the drive, but he’ll be around all weekend. You’ll meet him tomorrow.”
“Good,” Trey said. He slung his arm over Jo’s shoulder as the hostess walked the group to their table. “I need someone to wander the exhibit hall with me and tell me it’s reasonable to spend five hundred bucks on a replica of Sting.”
“The sword or the singer?”
Trey’s full-bellied guffaw carried over the noise of the dinner crowd. “Honestly, I’d take either one.”
“You’re not buying a sword this weekend,” Aida called back to him. “We only packed carry-ons.”
“Damn.”
Jo found a seat at the table between Aida and their Korean friend Young Kwon. Young had gotten a new haircut since Jo had last seen them—short at the back and long on top, styled in a perfect pompadour and bleached platinum white. Their square glasses had tiny flowers on the frames.
Daisies.
Suddenly, all she could think about was Felix and his bees-and-daisies coffee tumbler. She looked around the table at her friends, ordering drinks and swapping MnM stories they’d told a hundred times. There was an empty seat at one end of the table. Jo held in a sigh as she stared at it.
Young nudged her. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “I just wish my friend had been up to joining us.”
“Yeah, bummer,” they said. “But so cool that you’re getting an MnM scene going in Kansas. How’s it been getting settled?”
Jo answered the question by talking about work, rather than MnM. Across the table, Heather Abrams, a bubbly, strawberry blonde, white woman, tuned in to their conversation and jumped in right away with questions. Heather was a nurse, too, in pediatrics, and she and Jo had bonded years ago over horror stories from college and floor training.
“Hey, Mojo,” said Trey brightly, commanding the attention of the entire table. “Does everyone know about the tornado?”
Multiple pairs of eyes homed in on Jo. She had told only Aida about the tornado, everything that had happened that night, and all the things she’d felt the next morning. Yup—safe to assume that Trey knew everything about Felix that Aida did.
“The, um… the what now?” said David Espinoza with a slight Salvadoran accent. The most soft-spoken of their group, he peered at Jo from down the table through a curtain of long black hair.
“Spill!” shouted Heather, tossing her curls.
Jo couldn’t help but glance over at the empty chair again. She wished Felix were here to tell the story with her. She was curious to hear his perspective of that night, especially of how they’d ended up in each other’s arms. Would he gloss over that fact or make light of it? Would he play up how scared they were or shrug it off like it was no big deal?
Everyone was watching her. And Felix wasn’t here. Fine. She’d tell the story on her own.
“So in Kansas?” she started, putting a wide grin on her face and leaning into her storyteller’s voice. “They have these things called tornadoes.”
Her friends were enraptured as she told the story, making it as dramatic as possible. Then she insisted someone else talk because she had barely touched her enormous Cobb salad and was starving. The conversation broke up into multiple small ones, and Jo listened to Heather and Young go back and forth about the best desserts from around the world. It was an ongoing debate between the two of them, and tonight it was tiramisu versus hamantaschen.
As people were ordering dessert (Young got the tiramisu; Heather went with crème brûlée), Aida bumped Jo’s knee and stood up. Jo followed her. They ducked into a single-stall restroom.
The door was barely closed and locked when Aida said, “Talk.”
Jo talked. She told Aida about everything: the café con leche and Felix’s music, their laughter-filled conversations in the car, the fact that they were sharing a room, the heart-pounding moment between them when she gave him her key, and finally, why she suspected he hadn’t come to dinner.
Aida steepled her fingers under her chin and paced the tiny bathroom, deep in thought. “What if—now hear me out,” she finally said. “You two fuck this weekend?”
“Aida!” Jo cried. “What happened to making good choices?”
“This is a good choice,” she replied. “You two clearly have the hots for each other. You need to bang it out. You either get it out of your systems and move on, or it’s magic and sparks and earth-shaking orgasms, and then you can be together. Either way, it’s a win-win, right?”
“Or…” Jo countered. “It becomes really awkward between us for the rest of the weekend and the nine-hour car ride home, and then we still have to work together to plan MnM for the library.”
Aida regarded her. “I’d say you could always quit volunteering, but something tells me you don’t want to do that.”
Jo let out a weary sigh. “No, I can’t quit. I promised to help him for six weeks. His job might be on the line, and I can’t—”
“I’m not talking about ‘can’t,’ babe. I’m talking about what you want.”
“I want—” Tears suddenly gathered in Jo’s eyes. “Him. I don’t want to bang it out. I want him. So much it aches sometimes. Felix is… Aida, he’s wonderful.”
Aida pulled her into a hug. Jo fell against her and lost it. Fuck texting and fuck video calls. Jo had needed her best friend these last few weeks, and now that she had her, everything came pouring out at once.
“No one has been wonderful to me like this in years, Aida. Why did I stay with Jeremy for so fucking long? Why did I beg him not to leave when he dumped me? I don’t even have Felix yet, and he’s so much better to me than that asshole ever was! Motherfucker stole my cat!” She wept and wept while Aida rubbed her back and made gentle, soothing sounds.
“I’m so scared I’m going to fuck it up,” Jo whispered.
“Babe, how would you fuck it up?”
Jo shook her head against Aida’s shoulder. She didn’t know. She couldn’t put the feeling into words. But it was always lingering in the back of her mind, in the pit of her stomach, in the core of her heart. Whenever Felix was too good to her. Whenever he saw her for all that she was and didn’t turn away from her. A monstrous voice inside Jo insisted she was only one false move away from everything crashing down around her ears. If it wasn’t inviting him to Indi-Con that did it, it would be something else.
