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“Ky, what’s back home for you? Mom? Dad? You’re thirty years old. You can move wherever you want. If it’s me you’re worried about, I’m fine. And I’d visit, or you’d visit me. Now that we have some money, we could visit each other a lot.”

“You’re suggesting I just pack up and move down here?”

“I’m suggesting you keep things open. And before you tell me that you took my advice before about asking Melinda out and that it was a bad idea, remember that I was tired and hungover. Now, I’m totally sober and wide awake. I think this is a good idea. Tell her you’re sticking around for a while. Tell her you’d like to see what happens.”

“She’s at a wedding in Baton Rouge. At least, that’s what she told me. I don’t know that she’s the kind of woman to lie about that, but she might have just wanted some time away from me.”

“I doubt that. She literally told you when she was coming back. She said Saturday afternoon, right?”

“Yes,” she replied, wondering where her sister was going with this.

“Kyle, she told you Saturdayafternoon. She didn’t say Saturday and make it vague or even lie and say Sunday and that she’d be too tired to hang out. Telling you that she’d be home before the night suggests to me that she wanted you to know she’d be available.”

“That’s a big assumption,” Kyle replied.

“Will you just tell her you’re staying for a while and that I’m going home? If she knows your party-loving sister, who treated this place like a true tourist, is leaving, and you, the person who is genuinely interested in New Orleans and its history, along with some of its locals, are staying, she might take her no back and change it to a yes.”

CHAPTER 14

Baton Rouge was a short drive from New Orleans, but since there would be drinking at the reception and it would be late when they wanted to leave, Bridgette had gotten them a hotel room about twenty minutes away from the church where the ceremony would take place. On the drive there, Melinda couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Kyle’s face. The image in her mind would alternate between how Kyle had laughed and smiled when Melinda had gotten back downstairs after changing to then the look of disappointment when Melinda had turned her down.

“Had I known you’d just be sulking the whole time, I wouldn’t have invited you,” Bridgette said.

“I’m not sulking,” she replied, turning her head toward her friend. “I’m just looking out the window.”

“And sulking,” Bridgette insisted. “Why did you say no to her if you want to go out?”

“You know why.”

“But you’re clearly upset about it. You told Jill it was a mistake right after you did it.”

“It was a mistake because I’ve ruined whatever friendship we could have had.”

“But she’s leaving, anyway. So, what’s the point of being friends?”

“People don’t have to live nearby for you to be friends with them, Bridge. You can have friends all over the world now,” Melinda teased.

“Yeah, I get it. I just don’t understand why you can’t at least try to see if there could be something there. You’re already hurtingnotdoing it, Mel. We’re about to go to a wedding where two people will profess their undying love to one another and agree to commit themselves to another person, and I will likely be rolling my eyes because I’m jealous theyhave what I want. What about you?”

“I plan to sit still and clap when appropriate until it’s time to drink,” she replied.

“But you like her.”

“Please say that again because I have no idea how much I like Kyle,” she replied sarcastically with a little bite in her tone that she hadn’t intended.

“Okay. Sorry, it’s just that if I can’t find happiness, I want you to.”

“You’ll find happiness, Bridgette,” she replied. “It’s not like you’re a hundred years old and you’ve been without love your whole life. You’re twenty-seven.”

“I’m being dramatic, yes,” Bridgette said, pulling into the hotel’s parking lot. “But, Mel, you didn’t see it.”

“See what?”

“How you two looked at each other in the bar. I did. I saw it.”

“Us looking at each other?”

“Yes. Deeply, annoyingly, like two people who are so attracted to each other that they want to maybe get out of there and show the other person just how much.”