information, but she stared back at him and let the silence between them grow. He got the feeling she was the type of woman who wasn’t uncomfortable with silence.
“Okay, then,” Everett said, tapping a hand on the counter. “In that case, I’ll be off.”
“It was nice to meet you, Everett,” Josie said with a genuinely warm smile. “You should go ahead and email her.”
Everett stepped out of the way as another customer plopped their merchandise on the counter and Josie turned her attention away from him. She was right. He should send Theodora another email—after all, that was how they’d been communicating up until now. Why not ask her to—I don’t know—get a burger somewhere? Or, wait. Is she a vegetarian? He didn’t even know. There were so many gaps in their communication. He’d have to find out.
“Are we done here?” Gretel asked. “There’s no food allowed in the shop so I had to shove the rest of it in my mouth, and I almost choked. Not that you noticed.”
“You didn’t almost choke,” Everett said. “Come on. You got what you came to HighBall for. Let’s get you home.”
Gretel whined a bit, but Everett knew she’d be content as soon as she got up in her turret bedroom with her twinkle lights and her books. And then he’d go back out with Natalie and Lillian, get a little bit drunk in the street, and maybe eventually email Theodora. Or Teddy. Or whatever he was supposed to call her.
36
Dear Theodora, who I now know is also Teddy,
Should I keep calling you Theodora? Do you prefer Teddy? I don’t want to be rude. What I do want is to see you sometime, in a situation with no karaoke and no masks and also without my sister (who I love, but come on).
Do you want to go out sometime?
Awaiting your reply,
Everett
PS: I know that’s not a very clever sign-off, but I just got back from HighBall and I am drunk and also I’ve eaten far too many alligator bites. Please excuse any typos.
Even when he was drunk, he didn’t make typos. Ugh. He was perfect.
Teddy shook her head. No, she knew he wasn’t perfect. He had plenty of bad habits—maybe he didn’t clean the sink after he shaved, leaving tiny little prickly hairs everywhere. Maybe he wore his shoes inside the house, which everyone knew was disgusting (Teddy had once read an article that said “every inch of sidewalk has been peed on” and now she couldn’t get it out of her head). Maybe he smelled bad.
She wrinkled her nose. That ought to be enough to stop her from thinking about him.
But as it turned out, it wasn’t. She didn’t even care what he smelled like; she liked him, and she wanted to keep knowing him, but she was terrified.
She closed her laptop and didn’t respond for one day. Two days. Then three days. He didn’t email her again; he probably assumed she didn’t like him, which was so far from the truth it made her want to laugh, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his perfectly earnest face when they’d “met” at Colossal Toys. He hadn’t known who she was yet but he’d trained those deep brown eyes on her, looking at her like she was the only person in the shop. If those eyes ever looked at her like she was boring, or disappointing, or not enough, she didn’t know what she’d do.
So of course she didn’t respond. Who could blame her? She was barely holding it together.
But then, one morning when she was the only person working, the bell above the door jingled and Everett walked right in.
The second she saw him, the word “Oh” quietly left Teddy’s lips and floated out into the shop. At this point she’d met him in person twice, and she still couldn’t quite believe he was real. Real and right in front of her.
“I promise I’m not going to bother you if you say no,” Everett said in lieu of hello. “At this point you’ve run away from me twice, although I think that was situational and not because of me. And you didn’t respond to my email. And when I put it like that, actually it’s starting to sound like maybe I should get out of here and leave you the hell alone. I mean, that’s a lot of rejection, when I think about it.”
“No,” Teddy said.
“What?” Everett asked.
Teddy cleared her throat. “No, don’t leave.”
Everett smiled, and Teddy’s heart broke into a million