Page 79 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“Of course,” she says, with the polite tone of someone who doesn’t entirely believe that.

“We have been just friends from the beginning,” I say. “Our friendship was basically inevitable given that my best friend is dating his brother. And we are still just friends. A handsome friend, obviously, but only a friend.”

Odette tilts her head. “I just assumed from the way he talked about you that perhaps you’d been together and things had ended and that’s why there was distance.”

I shake my head. “Nope. Never dated. And if we had been dating I think I’d have considerably more free time than I currently have.”

She frowns slightly. “What kind of relationship doesn’t allow for free time?”

I open my mouth.

“One with a lot of hands,” I say.

There is a brief pause in which Odette begins to formulate what is clearly going to be a very reasonable follow-up question and I make a very direct internal request to the universe that Raphael choose this exact moment to resurface.

The universe, for once, cooperates.

“Okay,” Raph says, pulling his headphones down to his neck with a grin that means he’s pleased with whatever he just did. “This is rough, keep that in mind, but…”

He hits the output.

The great hall fills with something that starts as a waltz, formal and sweeping, the kind of thing you’d hear at a black tie event, and then Raph’s hand moves and it shifts, layering underneath it something modern and rhythmic, and the two sounds find each other and lock and the result is genuinely, embarrassingly good. You could waltz to it. You could also absolutely not waltz to it. You could do something entirely more interesting to it.

Odette’s clipboard lowers three inches.

Raph watches her face while the mix runs with the careful attention of a man checking his work against the right metric, and when he’s satisfied he cuts it and grins.

Odette stares at him.

“That was a rough edit,” he says.

“That was…” she starts, and then seems to realize she’s been staring and corrects to professional. “Very effective.”

Raph’s grin does not dim. He steps away from the setup, crosses the hall floor, and stops in front of Odette with the fluid confidence of a man who has just determined exactly what note to play next. He dips into a small, theatrical bow and extends his hand.

“May I?”

Odette looks at his hand. Looks at him. Looks at his hand again.

She takes it.

I watch him lead her across the great hall floor, the mix still drifting from the speakers, and think: oh. So he does know she likes him. He absolutely knows. He’s been knowing this whole time and has been waiting for the right moment to do something about it and that moment was apparently right now in the middle of a midsummer event planning session.

My god he’s adorable.

Warmth comes up behind me. A familiar presence at my shoulder.

“Oh my god,” Sophia breathes. “They are so cute.”

“Right?”

We stand side by side watching Raph say something that makes Odette laugh, real and unguarded, the version she’s been carefully keeping behind the professional composure all morning, and Sophia makes a soft delighted sound.

“We should all do dinner tonight,” she says. “Some dancing. We can be the reason they officially happen.”

“I love this plan.”

“Vine,” Sophia says decisively. “So you don’t feel like a fifth wheel.”