Page 16 of Falling into Place

Chapter Eleven

Carly

Yes, the food here’s incredible but no, I haven’t found a margarita as good as the one at Barrios. I can’t stand the thought of you sitting at the bar alone every week—promise me you’ll take Sasha next time?

—Email from Benjamin Wheeler to Carly Porter

“Why didn’t you tell me your brother was smoking hot?”

Carly couldn’t help but laugh at the look of distress on Sasha’s face. “Ew, because he’s my brother ,” Sasha said. “Which means he’s not.”

Their friend Kendall was having none of it. She flipped her phone around on the table so that it faced Sasha and Carly, displaying the LiveOKC website, and jammed her finger into Brooks’s smiling face. “He most certainly is. He’s got that sexy, smart, Stem vibe going on. Back me up here, Carly.”

“I’ll agree and take some credit,” Carly said, regarding the photo she’d looked at way more than was appropriate, probably. “Properly fitting clothes really took Brooks to the next level.”

“I’ve known you for four years and not once have you offered to set us up,” Kendall whined. “Where have you been hiding him?”

“He’s been hiding himself,” Sasha defended. “And if you want to date him, you gotta do it through the app and for everyone in town to see. Arranging something behind the scenes with someone I know would defeat the whole purpose.”

“Also, he should probably be the one in charge of who he dates,” Carly put in with a laugh. Sasha’s tendency to manhandle things to her liking came in handy sometimes, but it could also be too much. “This isn’t Regency England among the peerage.”

“Fine, I’ll do it.” Kendall pulled out her phone. “God knows I’m on enough dating apps already. What’s one more?”

Carly checked her watch. “He’s actually having coffee with someone as we speak.”

He’d texted her in a panic two hours ago, certain the outfit they’d picked out was all wrong and that he’d crash and burn in the conversation department within minutes. She’d talked him down by suggesting he recite the periodic table to himself. Slowly. “I wonder how it’s going.”

For his sake, she hoped he’d settled in just like he had with her.

What had people thought when they saw her and Brooks together that night, looking like they were on a real date?

Had they seemed stilted and awkward, like many first dates were, or had they looked as relaxed as she’d felt?

At times, their conversation had bordered on intimate, and while she got the feeling he didn’t have those often, it hadn’t felt weird. Not even a little.

Would he tell the woman he was with tonight about his parents? Would he open up about his job or tell her she looked beautiful?

“She’s a vet tech, right?” Sasha asked, startling Carly out of her thoughts. “He wouldn’t give me the login to his account, and I couldn’t get much out of him about her.”

Carly wouldn’t let Sasha within ten miles of her dating app account, either. “Yeah, I think so. He thought maybe they’d have some things in common, both being in the medical field.”

“Should I call him to check in?”

Kendall laughed, and Carly said, “God, no,” despite having the urge to do the exact same thing herself.

“Leave the poor man alone,” Kendall said, not looking up from where she was setting up the new account on her phone. “What about you, Carly? Still on your dating hiatus until Benjamin gets back?”

“Excuse me. I’m not on a dating hiatus.”

Kendall looked up to give her the side-eye. “Have you been on a date since he left?”

“I . . . well. No.”

“She’s been hanging out with Chet Princeton, didn’t you hear?” Sasha deadpanned.

Kendall’s jaw dropped. Anyone who knew anything about this town knew about that man and his exploits.

“Ew, I am not,” Carly said, glaring at Sasha. “I hate you.”

Sasha just cackled, and Kendall said, “Not funny.”

“Agreed,” Carly said, but went right back to Kendall’s question. “I’m just busy right now, okay? This whole thing with Brooks is taking a lot of my attention on top of my other Mode clients and, you know, my real job. So I hardly have any free time right now anyway.”

Sasha made a show of assessing the bar they sat in and the drinks on their table. “You made time to meet up with us for Friday happy hour ...”

“Would you prefer I ditch you two to pick up some rando at the bar?”

Her friend shrugged. “That might be better than holding out in hopes Benjamin wants to pick things back up when he gets back.”

Her friends didn’t dislike Benjamin, per se ... They just found him a little dull. Sasha’s exact words the night she met him had been, “He’s like the guy on that New Girl episode that spends the entire half hour talking about model trains and his favorite types of cheese.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Carly defended.

She and Benjamin hadn’t even talked about what might happen when he got back.

Though, except for that minor horny moment the first time she went to Brooks’s house, she’d been fine on her own during the five months he’d been gone.

Seven more didn’t seem impossible or, in her opinion, unreasonable to consider for the right guy, but that wasn’t something her friends would agree with.

“And I’d prove it with Plaid Oxford Guy by the dartboard, because I’d give him a 10/10 on that crisp sleeve roll, but I’m meeting my mom for dinner in an hour. ”

“You could have a quickie in the bathroom,” Kendall said, eyes still on her screen.

“Hmm,” Sasha said thoughtfully, and turned around to assess their options. “Maybe I’ll consider that with Blue Hat over there.”

“You’d probably mess up your hair,” Carly pointed out. “And wrinkle that Veronica Beard skirt.”

Eyes wide, Sasha put a hand to her blond curls. “You’re right. Not worth it.”

“It might be,” Kendall said, then tossed her phone down triumphantly. “Done! Brooks Martin, here I come.”

Sasha pursed her lips.

“What? You don’t want me to go out with him?” Kendall asked.

“No, it’s not that. I think you’re great, obviously, or I wouldn’t be friends with you. I just realized how much attention he’s getting all of a sudden. It probably feels like a lot.”

“I think it might be good for him,” Carly said. He had seemed a little overwhelmed when he let her look through all the matches he had, but a lot flattered, too. “Remind him what a catch he is.”

Sasha cocked a brow, and Carly held up her hands.

“I’m not saying I want to catch him. You should know after that whole Princeton issue and my dream position riding on this whole thing, I’m the last person who would go after a client.

But I have spent a lot of time with him lately, and I’m invested in his success and hope he finds someone that makes him happy. ”

“I, on the other hand, have no such professional hang-ups,” Kendall said. “So go ahead and wrap your brain around it, Sasha, dear. Because soon I plan on being the one sharing a latte with him. Oh my God, what if I marry him and we’re sisters-in-law?”

Sasha laughed. Carly smiled, too, but a strange sensation bloomed in her gut at the thought.

Kendall and Brooks? Married? Something about it didn’t sit that well with her, but why?

Kendall was smart, driven, and loyal. She had a successful career as a real estate agent and could always be counted in for a night of fun on the town.

She’d be a great catch and deserved to find happiness as much as anyone.

For Brooks, though? Carly just couldn’t see it working out long term.

“I could get on board with adding you to the family,” Sasha said. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It took some convincing to get him to even consider dating, so I think marriage is probably pretty far from his mind.”

“We’ll see about that,” Kendall said with a grin, and Carly secretly wished for some of that confidence.

They moved on to topics other than Brooks for the next half hour, then Carly bid her friends goodbye.

But as soon as she was in the car driving across town to her mom’s, the man of the hour crept right back into her thoughts.

She couldn’t help thinking about his date and wondering if he would ever compare his dates with the evening he’d spent with her.

A little while later, she pulled into the driveway of her childhood home, which had once been her grandparents’ and was the same house where her mom grew up.

If it hadn’t already been paid off when Carly and her mom moved in after her grandparents died, there was no telling when it would have been taken away from them.

Maybe that time in eighth grade when her mom lost her job and gambled away her severance package in the span of two weeks. Or anytime Carly’s sophomore year ... That had been rough.

But because they’d had this house, only water and electricity bills occasionally went unpaid.

When things started getting shut off, her mom typically realized she’d gone too far and stayed clean for several paychecks to get everything back and restore basic needs like clothes, food, and books for school.

There was just no telling how long she’d go before she got sucked back in again.

A foreclosure wouldn’t have been so easy to come back from.

Carly let herself in through the front door and walked slowly through the familiar furnishings.

It all looked the same as it had when she was a kid, but tidier.

Smelled better, too, like lemon and detergent.

Her mom hadn’t given much thought to cleanliness in the years she’d struggled with addiction, and Carly had always been terrified of what friends might see when they stopped by her house.

It was probably the reason she’d never invited people over, and why she was so obsessed with keeping her own space clean now.