I Knew You'd Be Lovely by Alethea Black

Author:Alethea Black [Black, Alethea]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-88604-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Hannah emerged from the bedroom. She wanted to reward what she knew had been a magnanimous gesture by keeping her questions to a minimum.

Tom put his book facedown in his lap. “Still want to rent a skin flick?” he said.

She handed him the stack of letters, this one on top. “What are your thoughts on all this?”

“Isn’t it plain? I told you not to worry. She doesn’t even want a boyfriend. She talks of nothing but liberty. In fact, I get the feeling she might pitch for both teams.”

“Oh, really?” Hannah said. “And just how does one get a feeling like that?”

So it was on this day, after Tom let her read the letters, that Hannah had resolved to find a gift with as much shimmering complexity as Sydney’s words. The clock was ticking, and she could think of nothing.

She spent all Saturday morning brainstorming. There were only two days to go. She had succeeded in creating expectations of such superhuman heights that by the time Tom left to play basketball with some friends at 12:30, she felt quite unable to leave the house. It was all she could do to slap together some Christmas-cookie dough and stick it in the oven. Lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, she decided to play an exercise DVD to get her heart beating again.

Halfway through, the doorbell buzzed. Although she wasn’t expecting anyone, she was grateful for an interruption just as the routine was reaching its absurd zenith. Maybe a neighbor needed to borrow a measuring cup. She opened the door, jogging in place, only to discover a beautiful woman standing in the hallway with a package in her hands. A disturbingly beautiful woman.

“Hello,” the woman said. “Are you Hannah?”

“I am,” said Hannah, still jogging.

“I’m Sydney. I’m … friends with Tom.” Luckily, Hannah was cardiovascularly prepared for fight-or-flight. Sydney took a breath. “I hate to bother you like this, but I was back in town for the holidays, and I knew Tom’s birthday was Monday, and I … well, to be honest, I didn’t make it to the post office in time. I keep forgetting that in Boston, things actually close.”

Hannah stopped jogging. So this fresh-faced, long-legged thing was Sydney.

“I’m really sorry to bother you,” Sydney said. “I just wanted to drop this off.”

The package was wrapped in brown paper marked with a hurried address—in red ink, of course. Hannah put it on the counter and wiped her hands on the front of her yoga pants. She would greet her reckoning with as much dignity as she could muster, wearing spandex.

“Come on in,” she said.

She offered Sydney a chair, but before she herself sat down, she ran to silence the DVD player, where a bald man was shouting something about inner thighs much too loudly for an occasion like this. When she returned, she found Sydney glancing about the apartment.

“Tom’s out for the afternoon,” she said, deciding at the last minute to leave off the “I’m afraid” part.

“Yeah, no, I—”

“What’d you get him?” she asked, jerking her head toward the package.

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