The Proposal Read online

  Want to come with? He sounded like one of his sixteen-year-old patients.

  “Great idea, I’m starving.” Nicole wiggled past the cameraman. “Chat with you guys later!” she called back to them, as she, Carlos, and Angie raced up the stairs.

  Hmmm, apparently, sounding like your sixteen-year-old patients was a way to not seem suspicious.

  They kept up the pretense on their way up the stairs, all saying things like “Wow, it’s been so long!” and “Fancy meeting you here!” and “I couldn’t believe my eyes that it was you!” over and over. When they finally got all the way up the stairs and inside, the three of them all leaned against the nearest wall and erupted with laughter.

  “Thank you guys SO MUCH for saving me,” Nicole said when she finally stopped laughing. “I was in the middle of trying to remember the martial arts moves I learned twenty years ago, but you rescued me without me having to knock someone down or, more likely, embarrass myself.”

  “You’re not saved yet,” Carlos said. He put his hand on her back and grabbed his sister by the arm. “We’ve got to get you out of this stadium. They’ll find you again if you stick around.”

  “Oh, I can find my own way out. I’m sure you want to get back to the game.” She stood up straight and smiled at them. “But thank you again, I really appreciate it.”

  He was about to say good-bye when he thought of something.

  “Did you drive here? Or was your . . . or did you get a ride?”

  She shrugged.

  “My ride seems to be long gone, but I’m sure there’s another way to get back to Silver Lake from here. Isn’t there a shuttle or something? Or I can get a ride. I have all of those apps.”

  He and Angie exchanged glances. He envisioned her waiting in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium for a ride and getting ambushed again. He bet Angie did, too.

  “Silver Lake is in our direction,” he said. “We can give you a ride back.” He could miss the rest of the game. It wasn’t like they were playing the Giants or anything.

  She raised her eyebrows at him and turned to Angela to shake her head.

  “No, seriously, that’s okay. You don’t have to give up the rest of the game for me; you don’t even know me. Plus, you two probably have better things to do than drive a stranger around Los Angeles.”

  Angela looked confused and then laughed.

  “Oh wait, did you think we were on a date? Ugh, no, he’s my brother. Trust me, I’d rather be driving you around L.A. than watching baseball with him.”

  Nicole looked at Carlos.

  “Are you sure? You really don’t have to.”

  He grinned and threw his arm around both women.

  “Call it my good deed for the week,” he said. “Come on, let’s go before those vultures follow you.”

  Chapter Two

  . . . . . . .

  Nik walked across the parking lot with Carlos and Angela. She was grateful the exodus from the game hadn’t started yet, so they didn’t have to wade through crowds of people. The few they did see gave her dirty looks. That’s right, she was the bitch who broke the pretty blond boy’s heart, live on the JumboTron.

  She shook her head. That really had happened. She had really been proposed to, and then abandoned, in front of the world.

  She could not believe Fisher had done that to her. Just that he’d proposed to her in the first place was shocking—she would have been certain neither of them thought their relationship was heading toward marriage. She didn’t think either of them wanted their relationship to head toward marriage. But not only did he do it, he did it in public. At a baseball game? Good God, she was furious at him.

  She also felt like a huge asshole. She’d just refused her boyfriend’s proposal in front of thousands of people. On his birthday. All of the people giving her dirty looks hated her for a good reason. She hadn’t meant to hurt Fisher! He was a perfectly nice, incredibly boring guy. She probably could have found a nicer way to respond to the proposal, but she was so stunned she couldn’t think straight. Plus, diplomacy had never been her strong point.

  Thank God she’d gotten rescued by the Wonder Twins here. She should probably be wary of getting in a car with two strangers who had picked her up at a baseball stadium at a low moment in her life, but she didn’t have the energy. She should especially be wary of this guy, who seemed way too attractive for his own good, with his tousled dark brown hair, big brown eyes, and that slight Saturday scruff on his cheeks. Normal Nik wouldn’t have trusted this guy for a second. Dazed by the JumboTron, Nik had told him where she lived. But at this point, she didn’t have the strength to do anything but be relieved she was no longer inside the stadium.

  “Thanks again for getting me out of there. I was just sitting there texting my girlfriends about this fiasco and trying to figure out how I was going to get home when the camera crew showed up. I still can’t believe any of this happened.”

  Carlos unlocked his car, one of the fancy red sports cars she was used to seeing around L.A. Ah, yes, of course the kind of guy who would almost knock down the cameraman and smile while he did it would have a red sports car. He opened the front passenger door for her. She shook her head.

  “Oh no, I can get in the back.”

  Angela laughed and opened the back door.

  “Don’t worry about it, Nikole. I think you deserve shotgun today.”

  “Nik.” She needed to make this one thing clear, even though she was only going to know these people for the length of the car ride to Silver Lake. “Everyone calls me Nik. My first name is Nikole, yes, but it’s Nikole with a K.”

  Angela looked at Nik for a long beat, her hand still on the open back door.

  “But didn’t the screen spell it . . .”

  “With a C? It sure did!”

  She got into the passenger seat and put her seatbelt on, and Angela slid into the seat behind her.

  “You do not mean to tell me he spelled your name wrong in his proposal?” Angela said.

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Only one of the many things that stunned me about this afternoon.” Her pocket buzzed. “Wait, hold that thought, I have to tell my friends my ride is taken care of.”

  She had forty-three new text messages.

  “Shit.”

  She clicked on her messages and let out a deep breath. Okay, thirty-three of the messages were from the group chat with her girlfriends, first their reactions to her initial texts about the proposal and then their increasingly agitated texts asking her where the hell she was when she stopped responding.

  Sorry sorry, camera crew was in my face, some strangers rescued me, getting a ride back to the eastside from them right now, long story. Meet me at the bar within the hour.

  She scrolled to her other new messages. Two were work related, she would deal with those after she’d recovered from the hangover she had every intention of having tomorrow morning. Oh my God, three were from people she knew who had been at Dodger Stadium that afternoon and had seen her on the JumboTron. There were more than eighteen million people in the greater Los Angeles area, she knew no more than a few hundred of them, max, and three of those had just HAPPENED to be at Dodger Stadium the one time in her life she was there, just so they could see the craziest thing that had ever happened to her? This was like some sort of sick joke.

  And the other five texts were from Fisher.

  You fucking bitch, I can’t believe

  She turned the phone off and dropped it in her pocket. So Fisher wasn’t a perfectly nice guy after all. She wasn’t even going to think about looking at those texts until she had at least two or three shots of bourbon in her.

  “Everything okay?” Carlos asked, glancing over from the driver’s seat.

  She laughed, even though none of this was really funny. Now she understood what hysterical laughter really meant.

  �
��As okay as anything can get today, I guess. Sorry for zoning out like that, I had a bunch of texts. My friends are very relieved that I got out of there in one piece.”

  “God, me, too,” Carlos said. “When we saw that camera crew coming for you, I was worried that you’d either punch them all and run or burst into tears.”

  “Believe me, I was contemplating both,” Nik said. “Unfortunately, I don’t exactly know how to land a punch, and I didn’t really want to get filmed crying on top of everything else.”

  He grinned at her, and she grinned back. It was refreshing to be around a guy who would joke with her like this after months of Fisher, who would only look at her blankly.

  “Where to?” Carlos asked. “Do you want us to drop you at home, or at a friend’s house, or . . . ?”

  She was glad that she’d already made plans to meet Courtney and Dana at the bar, otherwise Dazed-by-the-JumboTron Nik probably would have given the first guy she’d met in forever who had a sense of humor her home address.

  “There’s a bar on Sunset that has a bottle of bourbon with my name all over it. My friends are meeting me there to hopefully get me drunk enough so that I forget this day ever happened.”

  “I cannot believe he spelled your name wrong,” Angela muttered from the back seat.

  “To be fair to him, we’d only been dating for five months, maybe he just hadn’t absorbed that bit of knowledge about me yet.”

  “Wait, WHAT?” She’d thought that Angela was the loud one, but Carlos nearly shouted that. “You’d only been dating for five months, and he proposed? In public?”

  If she had to pick a strange man to rescue her, at least it was one who was outraged by the right things.

  “Exactly! We’d only been dating for five months, he proposed, in public. And I’m the bad guy for rejecting him on his birthday?”

  “You are not the bad guy,” Carlos said. “Trust me on this.”

  She was tempted to text Fisher back, curse him out from here to oblivion, and tell him what she really thought of his acting, but she restrained herself. Barely.

  Angela piped up from the back seat. “So, how long have you lived in L.A., Nik?”

  She was grateful for the opportunity to talk about something else.

  “For about six years, but I’ve lived in California most of my life. What about you guys?”

  “Born and raised on the Eastside,” Carlos said.

  “Don’t let my big brother over here act like he’s got Eastside cred; he’s been living on the Westside for years and just moved back, thank goodness.”

  “Thank goodness?” Carlos said. “This is the first I’ve heard of my little sister being thankful that I’m back on the Eastside. Thank goodness for what, so you can have someone to come over to your house and kill spiders for you in the middle of the night?”

  “Exactly!” Angela said. “That, and someone to build my IKEA furniture for me, and to dog sit for me when I go out of town.”

  Carlos somehow managed to roll his eyes while keeping both eyes on the road.

  “You don’t even have a dog!”

  “But I might! Someday!”

  The siblings’ friendly bickering kept her entertained for the rest of the ride to the bar. And more importantly, it kept her distracted enough so she didn’t text Fisher back.

  By the time they pulled up to the Sanctuary, the bar that she and her girlfriends had been coming to for almost as long as she’d lived in L.A., she’d even managed to laugh a few times at the stories that Carlos and Angela told about each other.

  “You guys are going to come in, right?” she asked them. “I owe you far more than a drink for what you did for me today, but we can start with that.”

  Carlos and Angela exchanged a quick glance. It was a look full of wordless communication, but she couldn’t tell whether it was “This woman seems crazy, let’s get the fuck out of here” or just “I was getting carsick in the back seat, let’s get a drink.”

  “Sure,” Carlos said. “I was about to get another beer anyway right when all the action started at the game.”

  She felt her shoulders relax as soon as the three of them walked inside the bar. The dark, cool interior was such a relief after the unrelenting bright sunlight that she’d been enduring all day. She pushed her sunglasses up to the top of her head, where they would undoubtedly get caught in her hair within minutes, and glanced toward the corner of the room. Her friends Courtney and Dana were right there, waiting for her in their favorite booth.

  “I made it,” she said as she walked up to them. “Where’s my drink?”

  “There.” Dana pointed behind her. She turned around, and the bartender, who had been pouring them drinks at least twice a week for the past four years, handed her a glass of bourbon with one big ice cube. That was fast. Granted, they were regulars there, but this was a record. Courtney and Dana must have told Pete that something was up.

  “Thanks, Pete. Get my friends here whatever they want, please? On me.”

  As Pete took their orders, she slid into the curved booth next to Courtney.

  “Hey,” Courtney said. “You okay?”

  She leaned her head against Courtney’s shoulder for the briefest of moments.

  “I’m fine. Just kind of shell-shocked at what just happened, I think.” She motioned for Carlos and Angela to join her in the booth.

  “Dana and Courtney, meet Carlos and Angela. They saved me in about a dozen different ways this afternoon, and I will owe them far more than my firstborn child. Carlos and Angela, these are my friends Dana and Courtney, who were about to come to Dodger Stadium and carry me away from that godforsaken place, so it turns out you saved them, too.”

  Just then, the bartender brought two more drinks to the table.

  “A toast!” Nik said when the drinks were on the table. “To friendship, both real and feigned.”

  They all clinked glasses, and Nik took a deep gulp of her bourbon.

  “Okay,” Courtney said. “We need details. What did that toast mean? He seriously proposed? For the record, I never liked Fisher. He was never nice to me—I don’t think fat Korean women were in his target demographic. Where is he now? Did he cry? Tell us everything.”

  Nik took a deep breath. She still couldn’t believe this had actually happened to her.

  Dana patted her on the shoulder and shook her head at Courtney.

  “Let her finish her drink first! You don’t have to tell us the story right now. Are you hungry? Should we get pizza? What kind should we get?”

  She definitely wasn’t drunk yet, but pizza sounded incredible right now.

  “Absolutely. Fisher hasn’t eaten carbs in like two years, so pizza sounds fantastic. I don’t care what’s on it as long as it includes pepperoni and lots of cheese.”

  Dana pulled out her phone and opened a delivery app.

  “Are you two in, too?” she asked Carlos and Angela. They both nodded.

  After a few clicks, Dana looked up from her phone.

  “Okay, it’s on its way here. Where were we?”

  She took another sip of her drink. Thank God for bourbon.

  “I don’t know where we were, but to tell the story backward, that toast was because these two pretended to be long-lost friends of mine to save me from a camera crew. God bless them.”

  “A camera crew?” Courtney stared at her, then at Carlos and Angela, Nik guessed to confirm she hadn’t lost her mind.

  “Yep.” Carlos nodded. “We were sitting a few rows behind Nik and saw the whole proposal happen. And then when we saw the camera crew walking toward her, we knew we had to do something.”

  “Where did you even come up with that idea? That was brilliant!” Dana said.

  He nodded and lifted his glass.

  “Thank you for that; I agree, it was brilliant.” He grinned at Nik, and despite he
rself, she grinned back at him. “But I have to admit, the credit all goes to our cousin Jessie. She told me a story once about a woman in a parking lot doing that to her when there was a creepy guy following her, and I guess it stuck with me.”

  Angela laughed.

  “I was going to let my brother take the credit for that idea, even though I knew he got it from Jessie. I’m just glad to know he pays attention to the women in his family.”

  Nik couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a man voluntarily give credit to a woman for an idea. That was one of the major reasons she’d gone freelance, all of the men talking over her and pretending they’d come up with her ideas, even when everyone had heard her say them out loud.

  “Oh, please,” Carlos said. “I pay probably too much attention to all of you.”

  Nik finished her drink, and within seconds another one showed up on the table in front of her.

  “Thanks, Pete,” she, Courtney, and Dana said in unison.

  “You three must tip very well,” Carlos said.

  They all laughed.

  “That, and Pete’s had a crush on Dana for at least two years,” Courtney said. Dana grinned and shrugged.

  “Okay, okay.” Nik took a sip of her new drink and set it down. “And now for my part of the story. Here is the most important thing: I had NO IDEA that anything like this was coming. I was racking my brain on the way here for where this came from, and I swear, I had no hints.”

  She’d actually started wondering within the last few weeks how much longer this Fisher thing would last. Not only did he bore her, but she didn’t really think he was all that interested in her, either. She didn’t look like the models his friends all dated, he didn’t even pretend to be interested in her work, and she found his laughable. A great recipe for a marriage!

  “Anyway. The game was whatever, fine, boring, sunny, et cetera. And then all of a sudden, Fisher told me to look at something. I thought it was some stupid baseball thing, so I looked at the field, but then he pointed toward the JumboTron. And up there, in twelve-foot-high letters, was something like ‘I love you, will you marry me?’”