A little heads-up would have been nice.

I started unpacking the poms, trying to fluff them back up. They most definitely had been squished and it killed me to think about all the time I’d spent making them look nice only to have them end up being lopsided and flat.

My despair must have been showing on my face, because Delia said, “Don’t worry. We’ll fix this.”

The three of us sat on the floor doing just that, getting little shreds of tissue paper all over the place. I felt bad for making a mess, especially considering how nice everything else looked. “Someone’s going to need to sweep this up.”

“Isn’t that what you’re into now?” Delia asked.

“I thought this cleaning thing would get easier. Or that I’d like it more,” I confessed. “But neither one of those things has happened. I feel like fairy tale princesses have been lying to me for years now. Especially Snow White. She tried to make it seem like going from being a princess to a glorified maid was fun. It’s not.”

“You’re forgetting that those princesses had all those woodland creatures to help them out. Cleaning definitely might be more fun if tiny animals did most of it,” Delia reminded me.

“You know the moral of the Snow White story,” Shay said.

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Don’t eat poison apples?”

“No. Do housework and maybe wind up with a prince. Speaking of handsome people you live with . . . how have things been going with you lately? I feel like we haven’t talked in forever.”

While she had specifically referenced Tyler, I kind of wanted to work my way up to it. “My mom summoned me. And I told her not to do it anymore and I wasn’t ever getting back together with Brad. She threatened me.” And I’d been expecting her wrath to fall down on me in some way ever since. I wasn’t sure whether the silence meant that she’d backed off, or if she just hadn’t come up with a good enough way to punish me yet.

“Good for you! Look at you with your adamantium-covered ovaries, standing up to your mother. I am impressed. And glad that she didn’t turn you into stone,” Shay said.

“Thanks. Also, I kissed Tyler.”

Shay shrieked while Delia just frowned at me and asked, “Why do you do that? Hold on to these things and not tell us? You should call us right after it’s happened! If not during.”

There was no way I would have called them during. Nothing could have gotten me to stop kissing him. Other than, you know, him stopping kissing me. “It was the night we ran into Brad at that club.”

Shay grinned. “And you told him about your terrible ex-boyfriend and then Tyler kissed you because he felt obligated to show you what it’s like when a real man does it.”

“No. He was a little drunk and trying to make me feel better about myself.”

“He can make me feel better about myself anytime he wants,” Shay responded, then threw up her hands. “See? This is why you need to carpe date this guy already. He should not be running around single. It’s dangerous for womankind.”

I shook my head. “I can’t date him as he hasn’t asked me out.”

“No, he’s only kissed you.”

“While he was drunk.”

“Which could happen again,” she retorted.

“The kissing or the drunkenness?”

She waggled her eyebrows at me. “Both.”

I laughed and then Delia said, “I think Madison should ask Santa to put Tyler under the tree as her present this year.”

Shay disagreed. “Mrs. Claus is the one she needs to hit up for that wish. She gets it.”

“You guys, he doesn’t want to date me. He asked me to forget about the kiss and move on from it. It was a mistake and we got carried away.”

“Hm,” Shay grunted. “Some men don’t know what’s good for them.”

“So now I’m the kale of the dating world?” I asked. I was on the verge of telling them all about how I’d wrecked his couch and then told him all the bad things I’d done to his possessions and that I didn’t know anything about cleaning, when I noticed rustling whispers and murmurs. I turned to see what the commotion was about.

It was about Tyler.

Who walked into the gym wearing a tool belt, holding a ladder with one hand and a drill in the other.

Shay gasped. “I don’t know what he’s here to fix, but mine just broke.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Again, I find myself siding with Shay here,” Delia said. “Maybe just make out with him a little more. Let him take the edge off.”

I glared at her.

“What?” she said defensively. “He looks like he’s a great kisser.”

“I bet he’s taken off more edges than a carpenter.” Shay nodded fervently.

They were going to humiliate me in front of him. Absolutely mortify me. I could feel it.

It was then that I noticed Mrs. Adams trailing after him, like a duckling falling in line after its mother. I was sure nobody in the room blamed her for following him.

Before he could speak, she said, “Hello, again. I’m so glad you made it.”

I wanted to say, I made it, too, but I needed to behave.

Then she launched into a boring explanation of the false ceiling hanging above us (filled with balloons that would drop at the end of the party) and said that we could attach the poms to it.

“We’ll take care of it,” he said.

“I have every confidence that you will!” she said, flirtatiously waving her fingers at us before she left.

He turned to face me and I was about to introduce my friends, when he said, “Hi, Shay. Nice to see you again.” I shouldn’t have been impressed that he’d remembered her name, but I was. It had taken Brad three months to remember Shay’s name without me prompting him.

She greeted him in return and then introduced him to Delia, who looked a little starstruck.

Then Shay announced, “Okay! So we’re going to go hang up these cotton-ball strings. Over there. And leave you guys. Here.”

While she didn’t say, Alone, she might as well have. I didn’t know what they thought might happen. We already spent tons of time alone together. It wasn’t like this one incident at a dance was going to suddenly make him figure out that he couldn’t live without me.

I looked over his shoulder as they walked away and they were both making faces at me. Shay mouthed, Go for it! And while I couldn’t figure out what Delia was saying, it was a long sentence that probably involved respecting our feelings and each other, and she looked very enthusiastic about it.

Tyler started to turn around, presumably to see the craziness I was staring at, and it made my two friends scatter in opposite directions.

I gestured at him. “So, what’s with the accessories?”

He looked down at his tool belt. “I did some construction work in college to help pay for school and I still had this stuff in storage down in the basement. I thought it might help. Don’t you think it makes me look like I know what I’m doing?”

“It does kind of make you look like you should be hosting your own HGTV show.” What he really looked like was the hottest man alive, but I couldn’t tell him that. “Shall we?”