The Best Mistake - Cookie O'Gorman Page 0,73

them exactly what happened, leaving them to speculate wildly—which they did).

“Will you guys be having a summer wedding?” Charlie said. “I’ve always wanted to go to one on the beach.”

I rolled my eyes.

“What? I could get a great tan, and obviously, since I’m going to be your maid of honor and all, I’d need to look good.”

“I thought you said you always looked good,” Emmy said.

“This is true.” Charlie threw her a smile.

“Well then, there’s no need to subject yourself to the sun’s harsh rays. Also, a June wedding would be awful for Honor. She’d be so hot in her dress.”

I sighed. “There’s no wedding, and you guys are crazy.”

Charlie gasped. “But I already started looking at venues.” More soberly, she added, “Seriously though, Honor. As long as he makes you happy, I’m one hundred percent behind it.”

Even Emmy seemed okay with me and Archer’s relationship now.

“You’re a cool chick,” she had said at one point, “and he’s old enough to make his own decisions. If you’re both on the same page, who am I to stand in your way?”

But were we on the same page? I thought. It sure felt like we were the other night in my bedroom. I hoped we were.

With a sigh, I checked the time again.

It was Friday, and I was supposed to meet Dex at a bar called Shake & Pour for his interview. Coincidentally, it was the same bar I’d be meeting the girls at later. Charlie had planned everything. We were having a girls night out to celebrate Emmy’s moving in. It was obvious Charlie and Rose had bonded with her while I was gone at the away game. I was glad of it, too. There was nothing so difficult as having to live with people you didn’t like. We’d been lucky to find each other.

The bar had been Dex’s idea. It’d just opened and was dead at this time of day. We were supposed to meet at 4:00 pm, right when the doors unlocked, but that had been ten minutes ago.

Dex strolled in at 15 after.

Dropping his bag to the floor, he took up the seat across from me, put his elbows on the table and just stared. At me. I guess, that was my cue.

“Hi Dex,” I said. “So thanks for coming. I’m doing interviews of you and your brothers for the school paper.”

He tipped his chin in a nod. “That’s what Emmy said.”

“Yeah, it was really great of her to call you and arrange all this,” I said. “I’ve already done everyone else, but you were harder to track down. I guess I saved the best for last, huh?”

My joke fell on deaf ears because Dex didn’t even crack a smile.

“Okay,” I said after an awkward pause. Pulling out the sheet of paper, I passed it across the table to him. “Here are the questions. All you have to do is answer them, then turn them back into me, and we’ll be good to go.”

He glanced down at the sheet then back up to my face.

“There something wrong?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But why don’t you just ask me the questions instead? That seems faster.”

I smiled. “Well, some of them are kind of embarrassing, so I just thought—”

“For you or for me?” he cut in. “Because if it’s you, to be honest, I don’t really care. And if it’s me, I don’t embarrass that easily.”

Taking in his hair, buzzed much shorter than the other O’Brien brothers, the silver earrings lining one ear, the tats which I could only see a hint of at his neck, the scar running along the side of his face, his ensemble of all black, and the overall badass vibes he was giving off? Yeah, I could tell self-consciousness was probably not something Dex O’Brien struggled with.

Still…

“But this way you can take your time, have some privacy,” I said.

The next thing I knew Dex had crumbled the sheet with my questions into a ball. I gasped as he tossed it over into the bin behind the bar. The scandalized look on my face seemed to amuse the heck out of him, the perpetual smirk he had because of his scar becoming more pronounced.

“I’m good with doing it now,” he said.

His interview was definitely the shortest and strangest of them all. Short because he literally gave one-word answers to almost every question.

Question: What do you love about baseball?

Answer: Everything.

Question: Think you’ll play professionally?

Answer: (a shrug) Maybe.

Question: Do you have a girlfriend?

Answer: Sometimes.

Question: Would you care to