As I helped him collect his overcoat from where we’d draped it over one arm of the sofa, I said, “I’ll walk you out.” I went with him as far down the stairs as the first landing, then he paused.
“Thanks again for a nice night,” he said.
“And thank you.”
“Do you want to get together tomorrow? Maybe for brunch, and then we can spend the day together?”
It sounded like heaven to me. “Sure. That would be great.”
“Okay. How about we meet at ten at that coffee shop on Irving Place near my house? I’d pick you up, but I’m not sure your roommates could deal with that right now.” Although his tone was teasing, a flush shot up from his collar to his hairline, and I suspected that he was the one who wasn’t sure he could handle my roommates.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Great. I’ll see you then.” And then he placed his hand on my cheek and bent forward to kiss me, a soft, warm, firm, gentle kiss that somehow felt like a hug at the same time.
Even the next day, the memory of that kiss made me almost warm enough to have to unbutton my coat, although it was a raw December day. If I thought about it, I could still feel the touch of his hand on my face.
I doubted much had changed in those few hours. He was just being Owen, utterly dedicated to his life’s work. That was one of the things I liked about him. If he’d blown off the crisis at work because he wanted to spend the day with me, he wouldn’t be Owen and I wouldn’t have liked him nearly as much.
I got to my apartment building, unlocked the front door, and went up the stairs, pausing only briefly on that landing where the last kiss had taken place. Then I went the rest of the way to my apartment, which was more crowded than I expected it to be. Not only were Gemma and Marcia there, but Connie, the former roommate who’d married and moved out soon before I came to New York, was there, as well. They were gathered around the kitchen table, looking like they were having a summit meeting.
“Katie! You’re back early,” Gemma said when she noticed me. “What happened?”
“He had an emergency at work, so we just had coffee,” I said as I took off my coat. I left out the part where we had coffee while we walked to the subway station. Gemma and Marcia, in good girlfriend form, weren’t inclined to be forgiving toward what they perceived as my dates’ missteps.
“What did you say he did?” Marcia asked.
I hadn’t said anything about what he did. It was kind of hard to explain without bringing up the concept of wizards, and if I said he worked in research and development, it didn’t sound important enough to warrant the kind of emergency absences I could expect from him. “He’s an executive with the company I work for,” I said. That was probably vague enough and sounded important enough to cover a lot of bases.
Marcia nodded. “Yeah, that’s the downside of dating powerful men.” As driven and career-oriented as she was, she was the most likely to understand someone else who made work a priority. I was surprised, though, at how wistful her voice sounded.
“When you’ve got one who looks like he does, you can make the occasional allowance, but don’t let him get away with it too often,” Gemma said. She turned to Connie and added, “You should have seen this guy. He seemed pretty nice, too, what little we saw of him. Our little Katie snagged herself a good one.”
“What brings you down to this end of the island?” I asked Connie.
“Minor relationship crisis,” Gemma answered before Connie could speak. “And you’re just in time.”
“For what?”
“Ice skating at Rockefeller Center.”
While I was still trying to figure out what ice skating had to do with a relationship crisis, Gemma handed me a piece of paper. “What do you make of this?” she asked.
The paper was stiff and heavy, the kind used for formal correspondence. I unfolded it to see a handwritten note in a flowing script. The note invited Gemma and her friends to go ice-skating this morning at Rockefeller Center, and specified a time that Philip would call for us. “It looks like an invitation to me,” I said with a shrug.
“You don’t think it’s odd?”
I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Saying there was something odd about Philip, Gemma’s boyfriend, was putting it mildly. Although she didn’t know it, he was a magical person who’d been living under a frog enchantment for decades before he was freed a month or so earlier. You couldn’t expect a guy who’d been living near a pond in Central Park and existing on flies to be anything approaching normal. I thought he was coping pretty well with adapting to modern times and readapting to life as a human, but it wasn’t as though I could tell Gemma all that. She didn’t know anything about magic, and there’s no way to explain the frog thing without getting into magic.
