Willow Spring (10 page)

So she said, “Um, yeah—sure. Thanks.”

And then she held open the garbage bag while he stuffed more trash inside. Which occasionally meant incidental touching, his hands brushing over hers, their arms grazing. And things got even better when it came to breaking down the tables to be returned to town hall. Unlocking the table legs to press them flat required some strength, and Logan kept telling her to stop, then shoving his way into her space to take over. She kept purposely having trouble with them.

“That’s a great dress, by the way,” he told her at one point.

And she blushed like a schoolgirl. “Thanks. I spotted it at the Daisy Dress Shop during our last fitting for Rachel’s wedding.”

“It’s nice. You look really pretty today.”

And that—oh my—she even felt fluttering down through her chest and tummy. “Thanks.” Yet still, somehow it embarrassed her a little. She wasn’t used to that, looking pretty. So she heard herself adding, unplanned, “Probably a mess now, though.” Then she blew a few wayward strands of hair out of her face.

After which he just grinned and said, “No, still pretty, freckles.”

Then he even lifted his hand to brush back the out-of-place hair. And he looked into her eyes as he did it. And for a few seconds, she forgot to breathe. And she thought about kissing him some more. Oh God, how she wanted that. With her whole being. And she suddenly knew with her entire heart that she’d never be fully complete if she didn’t someday get to kiss Logan again, the way she wanted to. With utter abandon. Full-on passion. The full-on passion she’d never quite known was hiding inside her until that day on his couch.

Only then he began telling her how Anna had asked him out.
Swell
. And everything that had been feeling so wonderful there for a few minutes turned decidedly less so. But apparently Mike then put the kibosh on it.
Thank you, Mike!
Except then Mike had invited him over for dinner with them instead. She let out a sigh. Before she knew it, he’d be tooling around Destiny in Anna’s Mustang with her. And probably doing other things with her, too. Her stomach sank.

“I guess you didn’t get a chance to talk to her,” he said, “about fixing us up.”

“Um, no,” she said, adding a very small and not very heartfelt, “Sorry.”

“No problem—I know you had a lot to take care of today. And if it doesn’t happen, well, like you said, maybe it’s not necessary. But still, if you get a chance, like you
also
said, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if you put in a good word—just give the relationship the magic Amy touch.”

“Um . . . yeah, sure,” she said. “Of course.”

And by the time they were finished, Amy felt completely conflicted. In fact, she almost wished she’d let him leave. In one sense, spending time with him was now heart-stoppingly special. But in another, hearing about another girl . . . not so special after all.

“Well, looks like everything’s back to normal,” he said cheerfully when all that remained were some full trash bags next to Edna’s back door and a stack of tables Mike would return the next day.

But for Amy, nothing was back to normal at all.

And that was when it hit her, hard, like a punch in the gut. That it really never would be.

No matter what happens now, my life will never be the same.

A
my stood in Under the Covers, saying goodbye to Rose Marie Keckley, who held her enormous cat, Milo, in her arms. Milo was a Maine Coon who weighed twenty pounds and nearly dwarfed Rose Marie.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Amy said earnestly. She clutched Mr. Knightley firmly in her grasp, but he continued hissing at the visiting long-haired cat.

“Yes—me, too. It seemed like a good idea, didn’t it?” Just then, Milo took another light swipe at Mr. K. and both women took an additional step backward.

“Best laid plans,” Amy said. And this seemed like just one more thing out of her control lately. When Rose Marie had mentioned at the shower that she thought Milo needed some interaction with other cats, Amy had thought of Mr. Knightley, deciding he could use some socialization, too. She’d thought if Mr. Knightley got used to being around some different felines that maybe he’d learn to get along with Austen, as well. She’d even gone so far as to envision playdates with all the cats in town, for both Knightley
and
Austen. But as it turned out, he and Milo had begun hissing and screeching and swiping at each other the moment Rose Marie had brought her big, handsome cat through the door. Mr. Knightley had even ended up scratching Amy, for heaven’s sake.

“Well, that was a weird idea,” Tessa said after Rose Marie left.

Amy just flashed a look across the room. “What was wrong with it?”

“Well, if the goal is to get Knightley to be friendly to Austen, shouldn’t you be putting
them
together, as opposed to sticking him with other cats?”

Okay, Amy supposed that made sense. She’d just thought . . . “He was so mean to Austen before. I kind of didn’t want to put her through that again until I thought he’d be nicer.”

“All right, I guess I can understand that—you’re trying to protect the innocent. But sometimes you have to go through some unpleasantness to get troubles worked out, you know? I really think it makes more sense for you to keep pushing them together if that’s what you really want.”

Amy nodded, because she knew Tessa made sense. But she just held such a soft spot for the little black-striped kitty—who currently hid somewhere in the bookshelves to escape all the catfighting going on at the front of the store. She wasn’t sure why since she loved
all
cats, but something about Austen made her feel overprotective. Maybe Amy just sympathized with feeling unloved more than ever right now, so much that it was carrying over to the bookstore’s current stray.

“Well, either way, Mr. Knightley’s in too much of a mood for me to try making them play together again today, so I’m taking him back up to the apartment,” she told Tessa. “Then we can shelve the new romances.” Even if the very idea of romance shredded Amy’s heart every time she thought about it lately.

By the time she returned to the bookstore five minutes later, Rachel had shown up. And Amy had no sooner walked in the door than Rachel said, “Okay, out with it. Start talking, girlfriend.”

Oh crap. She’d almost forgotten. That she’d been forced into promising Rachel she’d explain what she was doing skulking around the parked cars at the shower, and why Tessa had been keeping Logan occupied. She’d even forgotten to yell at Tessa for letting Rachel know something was up. She supposed her thoughts had been all over the place the last couple of days—like on Logan, and cats. And Logan, and Anna. And Logan, and the fact that she’d watched all six hours of the Colin Firth version of
Pride and Prejudice
last night, while draining a tub of strawberry ice cream, just to distract herself a little.

“Don’t you have more pressing things on your mind?” she asked Rachel. “Like your wedding in less than two weeks? Or your honeymoon?” She and Mike were going to Italy to rediscover his roots, and though everything was completely planned, she knew there were plenty of last minute things to be done.

“Yes, that’s why it took me an entire two days to track you down and find out what’s going on. What are you keeping a secret from Logan?” she asked, eyes wide with wonder.

And Amy simply sighed. She didn’t look forward to going through this again so soon after having just shared it with Tessa. So she cut to the chase. “I’m in love with him.”

Rachel gasped.

“But he’s all into Anna.”

“Oh,” Rachel said glumly.

“And the whole thing is very weird right now, that’s all. So it’s not my favorite topic.”

“But what were you doing at his car?” Rachel asked, her voice a little softer now.

Another sigh left her. And her stomach churned. She felt so childish about this part. “I don’t have the guts to tell him how I feel, since I know he doesn’t feel the same way. But Tessa felt I should do
something,
so the something I’m doing is . . . sending him letters from a secret admirer.”

“Wow,” Rachel said. “This is far bigger than anything I could have imagined was going on. You and Logan? I guess, actually, it makes perfect sense in a way—I just never thought about it before.”

“But the thing is—there
is
no me and Logan. There’s Logan and Anna. And then there’s me by myself. Like always.”

“Oh Amy,” Rachel said, looking profoundly sad for her and sort of making her want to cry. Especially when she moved in for a hug. It was sweet and all—in fact, it was exactly the way
she
would normally respond to something like this, always ready to comfort a friend—but what she’d just learned was that when someone was feeling down, this kind of reaction could be almost enough to push them over the edge.

So she struggled to hold herself together as—oh God—now Tessa joined the hug, too, making it into a group experience, and that was when a few tears snuck free. Amy simply couldn’t stop them. Because she did feel alone. Because everyone was getting married, everyone else had love in their lives, the true, deep, lasting kind she craved. It was still hard to fathom that she’d gone from being her normal, generally happy self to feeling so empty inside.

And yet . . . as she stood there hugging her friends, finally letting out her tears, she realized that maybe this had been coming for a long time and that she’d just gotten pretty good at hiding it, even from herself. She’d
always
wanted love, but figuring out who she wanted it from had just pushed all these yearnings, all this emptiness, to the surface in a way nothing else had before.

And as awful as it felt to stand there and cry, she supposed she needed to get it out, and she was thankful to have such good, caring girlfriends to do it with.

Almost the second the tears waned, though, as they pulled back and reached for tissues for Amy, Rachel said, “There’s really only one thing to be done here, Ames.”

Amy blinked, surprised that Rachel was coming at her with a plan that quickly. “There is?”

Rachel gave a succinct nod and said, “You have to seduce him.”

Oh brother. Some plan. “I can’t do that,” she said simply.

“Why not?” Rachel argued. “Look, I know that’s not your usual mode of operation, and it will take you out of your comfort zone, but it’ll be worth it. And not that I want to scare you or make things feel any more dire here, but . . . it might be a matter of beating Anna to the punch. Because don’t get me wrong—she’s great, and she’s going to be my sister-in-law, but she . . . isn’t shy with him. So you have to not be shy with him, too, now. If you really want him, Amy, you have to just go for it.”

Amy couldn’t hold in her sigh. The advice sounded so much like Tessa’s in a way, like everything was on the line here if she didn’t make a bolder move. And she even believed that was true. But she didn’t have a bolder move to make. “Look, it’s not that I don’t want to, and believe me, I see the urgency, it’s just . . .”

“Just what?” Rachel asked. “Because even if it’s been awhile, it’s only sex, you know? You’re both adults, you’ve both done it before, and you know him really well, so . . . what’s the problem?”

Only sex.
Rachel
would
look at it that way. She had no idea, no idea at all, what she was actually suggesting here or how impossible it was.

And as much as Amy had never wished to share this particular tidbit of information, now she suddenly heard herself blurting it out, because there seemed to be no other way to make Rachel understand why she couldn’t seduce Logan. “The problem is—both of us
haven’t
done it, okay?”

Amy felt the weight of her words as they left her. God—it was even worse saying it out loud. She felt . . . so left out, so undesirable, so utterly childish as she watched both their expressions transform into pure shock.

And when they said nothing, just stood there gaping at her as if she were the two-headed goat they’d once seen together as teenagers at the summer carnival, she said, “You guys have to swear you’ll take this to the grave. And Rachel, you absolutely cannot tell Mike! I’d be even
more
humiliated. And he would probably tell Logan, too.”

“But I have this honesty thing going with him, remember? Because I’m marrying him.” Honesty between Mike and Rachel had been an issue a few times since they’d met.

“Well, not about this you don’t! This doesn’t affect him, so he doesn’t need to know. Got it?”

Rachel blinked, still clearly stunned—apparently by Amy’s laying-down-the-law attitude as much as anything else. “You’re seriously not yourself these days, are you?”

“No, it just so happens that I’m not. Got a problem with that?”

Rachel gave her head a speculative tilt and said, “No. In fact, like I said before, I actually kinda like it.”

“So you’re not telling Mike any of this, right?” she felt the need to confirm.

“Okay, yes, correct. I won’t. Because you’re right—it doesn’t affect him.” Yet then her expression became pinched. “But . . . oh my God, Amy—you never did it with Carl back when you dated him for so long?”