Page 78 of Jesse

“What time?” he says.

“Give me two hours.”

“I’m counting the seconds, Ms. Dumas.”

“I might be early.”

“I wouldn’t object to you coming now. That was not innuendo. Unless you want it to be.”

“I have to shower and change. I’m still in my pigtails.”

“Awwwwwww. Is it too much to ask that you wear those again?”

“Yes.”

We both laugh.

“Two hours.”

“I’m holding my breath. Don’t be late or I’ll die.”

I hang up because I cannot stand how adorable he is.

And then waste ten whole minutes replaying his voicemail until I have the entire thing memorized.

I choose a short, loose-fitting, summer dress with revealing cold-shoulder sleeves. It’s yellow, and has a flirty skirt, and says casual summer evening. Yellow looks fantastic with my dark, wavy hair and the sun I got yesterday really makes my skin glow. I accent it with a pair of strappy silver wedges and a little silver bag for lipstick and phone.

When I look in the mirror everything about me says beach.

That’s what I’m going for. I want Jesse to think of our day together yesterday. I’m kinda proud of myself for planning that whole experience. Yes, I did it out of spite, and revenge, and maybe a little bit of hate.

But it kinda backfired on me. Because by anyone’s standards it was pretty damn perfect. Even my family. That was a move meant to put him in his place and make him uncomfortable. Let him know I’m protected by these big Dumas men and he should never fuck with me or hurt me again.

And now he has a standing Saturday night dinner invitation.

Life is so weird.

I drive the Huracán because sure. I bought it to show off and show him up, but I kinda like that monster. It definitely sends the right message pulling up to the Boston Brothers’ building.

Now that building is a character in its own right. And not that I stalked the Boston boys when I moved here to the city with the girls for Bright Berry Beach headquarters, but OK, maybe I did stalk them a little. Because I know all about this building.

Called the Bossy Building by locals and built mid-last century, it’s a contradiction of sorts. On the one hand it’s tall, and flat, and smooth. Very modern in that respect. But it’s also made of these almost-white stone blocks and tapers up to a point as it climbs into the sky.

There are open terraces surrounding the top five floors and they used to throw parties up there when the father was still alive. There are also gargoyles. Very creepy gargoyles. You can’t see them from the ground, they’re way too high up, but I’ve seen pictures. Weird contorted faces, some half-human, half-animal. A few that are all animals—a bull, a stag, a bear, and a horse. And then there are six that resemble the Boston Boys themselves. Including the father, the uncle, and that cousin of theirs.

No one knows when those were made. There doesn’t seem to be a record. But it had to have been in the last forty years because that’s when Boston Senior bought the building.

But crazy as that is, the really interesting thing about this building is the land surrounding it like a moat. You can’t drive up to the building. The street is a good hundred yards away on all sides. It literally takes up an entire city block.

And in that space there’s one of those spurting water sculptures. The kind that shoots water up in a straight line in a random pattern. Only, there’s hundreds of those little spouts around the perimeter of the block so they make a walled-in-water courtyard of sorts. And the only way to get past without getting wet is to enter the courtyard on the west side of the building.

It’s not the only building in the city with these water fountains, there’s a few in other neighborhoods. Kids are constantly running through them and families hang out at those other city water parks during the summer.

But the Bossy Building is deep in the financial district in a neighborhood where people like to work, but not necessarily play. They certainly don’t raise families there.

So the whole thing comes off more like a way to keep people out or herd them to the west side of the building than it does a work of city art or park for recreation.

Privacy. Yeah. That’s what those water spouts say.