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“There isn’t. The bet. I shouldn’t have done it. Haylee wants to know what happened last year, and I don’t want to tell her. It’d break Febe’s confidence.”
Stuart sighed heavily. “Cherry, you’ve got to stop that already.”
“Stop what?” Cherish froze in the middle of her hallway.
“Febe is a grown-ass woman. Let her make her own mistakes.”
Wrinkling her nose, Cherish started pacing again. “That’s not the issue. It’s really not.”
“Then what is it?”
She could tell by his tone that he was losing his patience with her. Cherish swallowed the lump in her throat. She had called him for this. She needed to get it out.
“I kissed Haylee at work up against the printer.” Cherish rushed out the words, knowing if she gave herself any more time to think about it, she would talk herself out of saying them. And talking about Febe was a whole other minefield she couldn’t add to her already confused thoughts and actions.
“What?” Stuart’s voice would have been emotionless except for the tilt of confusion at the end. Confusion, mixed with doubt and just a dash of concern. “Did I hear you wrong?”
“No.” Cherish clenched her fists and her eyes with a deep breath before letting it out slowly. She had to move. “You probably didn’t. I kissed a coworker at work, in the middle of the day and now… Well, now I think I’m going entirely crazy.”
“To be fair, you’ve always been a little crazy.” The words were right, but the delivery lacked any jovial tones. “And going might be a little like closing the barn after the horse bolted.”
“Shut up and help me, Stu,” Cherish whined like she used to as a child, begging her big brother to help her with some chore or a part of homework she couldn’t figure out.
“Well, it must be serious if you are pulling out the Stu card.” Stuart’s voice hadn’t entirely returned to the calm nature Cherish knew as his baseline. But at least now some of the tension had slackened.
“It is.” Cherish’s lips curved in a small smile imagining Stuart rubbing the back of his neck as he tried to process this rather incongruous information. “Febe could fire me for this.”
“All right. You have my attention. Lay it all out for me. What happened?”
“That’s it. We kissed.”
“I’m going to need a little more detail.”
“Ew. No.” Cherish’s face scrunched up. She stepped up to the window and looked outside, a steady rain falling, which only served to remind her of that very heated kiss on the sidewalk. In hindsight, that kiss was everything the second one wasn’t. That one had been bare and vulnerable, and she’d seen Haylee for who she really was—kind, protective, generous. Sacrificial even. Cherish hadn’t seen that in a woman other than Febe.
“Not those kinds of details.” His laugh helped Cherish more than any of his words had so far. “These things don’t just happen. There’s a buildup.”
“Oh Christ, are you watching those Hallmark movies again? I told you those were bad for your outlook on romance.”
“Of course, I’m watching them. But there’s a reason they’re so popular. Art mimics life, dear sister.” He chuckled.
“All right, fine. Just shut up about the movies. It was just a moment. I don’t know, but Haylee said she couldn’t stop thinking about kissing me again, and I…basically told her to do it.”
“You dared her?” Stuart sounded interested now. Dishes clattered in the background along with the sound of the kitchen faucet running full force. He was probably doing a late-night kitchen clean while they talked—he often did that, keeping his hands busy instead of idle.
“I guess? I don’t think so, but it was insane.” She wished she had another word for it. “I’ve never felt something like that before.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Cherish started to shut down again. She wasn’t good at the emotions thing like he was. He could pull an emotion out from a mile away, but Cherish would stumble through them like a field of landmines. She was convinced it was the only reason he’d never figured out she had a crush on Febe all those years ago at the height of Febe and him dating. “I didn’t want to stop her.”
“You stopped her?”
“Yeah. We were in the office.”
“Is this the first time you two have kissed?” Stuart asked as though he sat at the dining table taking notes of all the pertinent information. Silence met Stuart’s question, with the sink turned off and dish noise gone. Cherish panicked as she realized he probably was doing exactly that. He was a hopeless romantic, but they had both gotten their structure and note-taking obsession from their mother.
“Cherry, when did you first kiss? You said again before…” His voice lost some of its clinical tone, and she swore she heard the click of a pen through the phone line.
