She offers a small smile. “I can’t tonight. I’m busy.”
“Tomorrow?” I won’t back down. I need to see her again.
“I have plans then.”
“The next night?”
She takes a breath, then gives a half nod and says, a touch reluctantly, “Sure.”
“Where do you live?”
She points north. “Upper West Side.”
“What is your favorite food?”
“Spanish,” she says, her eyes locked on mine and full of meaning. The look in her amber eyes is a challenge. But I like challenges, and I’m up to this one.
“Excellent. I know just the place to take you,” I say, and give her the name of the restaurant I have in mind. “Eight p.m. Friday. Can you be there?”
Something sad passes in her eyes, then she answers. “I’ll be there.”
I hold up a finger to tell her to wait and rush to the hostess stand to grab a piece of paper and a pen. I write on it and hand the paper to Penny, the dead ringer for Penelope, but that’s all. “My number. If you’re running late.”
“I won’t be late.”
“If you were, I’d wait for you.”
She purses her lips, as if she’s holding back. “I’ll see you Friday.”
“Do you want to give me your number?”
“I’ll text it to you,” she says and she leaves, but she doesn’t send me her number.
I spend the rest of the day bouncing between the kitchen here and the offices of my company a few blocks away, and I can’t get Penny out of my mind. I can’t stop thinking about her lips, her eyes, her voice, and the way they’re playing with my head, like a dream.
She feels like one—wispy, beautiful, just out of reach. The kind you want to be real, but when you wake up, you’re merely clutching to the hem of a cloud as it floats away.
Chapter Three
Penny
“No clue,” I say, slicing a hand through the air. “He had no clue.”
Delaney gives me a side-eye stare, complete with a fully arched eyebrow. “Sounded like he actually had a pretty good clue and you denied it,” she says as Shortcake trots over to a chocolate-brown mastiff in the dog park at West 87th and the Hudson River. We lean against the fence inside the park, and I wave to Mitch, the mastiff’s owner, a wiry guy with glasses and dirty blond hair. The guy waves back.
My tiny dog stands tall on her hind legs and bats the big dog’s face as best she can. To help her out, the mastiff bends his top half down to the ground, his hindquarters in the air. It’s the perfect giant-meets-the-pipsqueak playing position.
I point at my girl. “I want to be just like her.”
“Boxing the big boys?”
“Yup.”
Delaney nods, her high, blond ponytail swishing back and forth. “Don’t we all? She’s the underdog who’s now—what do we call her? The overdog?”
I laugh as Shortcake play-fights the dog who’s easily fifteen times her weight. “She’d approve of that description.”
Delaney turns and looks me in the eye. “Seriously, though, Pen. Why didn’t you admit it was you?”
I shrug, trying to make light of what happened yesterday at Gabriel’s restaurant. “Just wasn’t feeling it.”
She elbows me. “C’mon. That’s lame. You’re not a just wasn’t feeling it person.”
Like that, my best friend busts me.
The truth is, it’s hard to make light of seeing Gabriel again because every second with him felt like we were on the cusp of something, like a storm cloud swollen with rain before it bursts. I didn’t admit who I was because I didn’t want to get caught in the downpour. “I was going to,” I explain. “I swear. He seemed so legit when he kept asking if we knew each other, and it made me want to tell him. I was just waiting for him to fully make the connection. I didn’t want to do all the work.”
“I get that. Truly, I do.” She sets her hand on my arm. Delaney is a tactile person. She’s always touching. Makes sense, since she does massage for a living. “And I’m all for making the man suffer. But from what you told me, it sounds like he was trying hard to connect the dots.”
I point to my face. “You’ve known me forever. Do I look that different?”
She tilts her head to the side and taps her chin. “Hmm. Penelope Jones, the twenty-one-year-old Wall Street research analyst with the short news-anchor haircut? Or Penny Jones, lover of music and dogs, who abandoned the financial business after half a year to pursue her dream of working with animals and at thirty-one now has crazy long hair and tattoos along her shoulder?” She pauses to add, “Or Penny Smith now, evidently.”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “I gave him the wrong name at that point because I didn’t want to open myself up to hearing whatever bullshit excuse he was going to give me,” I say, trying to stay tough. The full truth is I would have been hurt all over again in a new, fresh way if he’d connected the dots and then said something nonchalant like, “Oh, sorry. I couldn’t make it to Lincoln Center that night. I was busy making a roast.”
Delaney levels her gaze at me. “What happens when you’re working together on the event and he refuses to deny anymore that it’s you?”
Her point is valid. But I’m not sure I’m ready to face that possibility. “I was going to say something. I was planning on telling him who I was. But then Greta the fruit lady, with her very own cantaloupes for breasts, appeared, and she was so flirty with him,” I say, seething as I picture the busty woman. “She called him handsome then said ‘see you later,’ and well, obviously there’s something going on with them.”