Who had seen inside her and wanted to stay a while.
She grabbed her phone out of her lap. Call it off, she texted Elisa. Tell him I couldn’t make it. Tell him horrible stomach flu.
What??? I can’t do that now.
Please.
Her phone buzzed. Elisa, of course. Haven picked up the phone and hurried out to the sidewalk, answered Elisa’s call with a swipe.
“He’s on his way!” said Elisa, without preliminaries. “Haven, come on. Buck up.”
“I don’t want to do this.” She was surprised at her own voice, flat and steely.
“Hav.”
“I gotta go. I gotta go find Mark.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “Haven, come on. Just stay put. Just do this for me. Just this one date. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
“Don’t try to talk me out of this, Lise. I’ve been an idiot. I’ve gotta go talk to him. Right now.”
Elisa made a sound Haven couldn’t interpret. And she didn’t care. It didn’t matter any more if Mark was the right or the wrong guy for her on her paper, or whether Elisa thought she was stark raving mad. She didn’t care if she looked crazy, if her hair was a nightmare, or if her makeup was streaked. Waving one hand she told Elisa, “I don’t care how hot this guy is. Or how expensive his clothes are. Or how good his job is. Or how sexy his car is. Or how good he is at making small talk. Or how nicely his tux fits. I know I chose all those guys so they wouldn’t reject me for being shallow. I know I broke up with them after one or two dates so they wouldn’t have a chance to reject me. But I’m done. I don’t want those guys anymore.”
“Hav?” Elisa murmured, her voice as gentle as a feather settling in the grass. “It’s okay, baby.”
“Mark,” said Haven, because she seemed to have used up all the words, and that was the only one that came out when she opened her mouth to speak again.
But Elisa seemed to understand. “Say it, Haven. You’ll feel better.”
Haven took a deep breath. Then forced it out through a throat tight with emotion. “I love him. I was sitting in there, and I realized I only want Mark. He might not want me any more. I was a jerk, but I have to try. I have to tell him. I have to give him a chance to see who I really am, and if it’s not enough for him—”
“It’s enough. It’s more than enough.”
That wasn’t Elisa’s voice. That was another, much deeper, very familiar voice, and it was coming from just above Haven. Slowly—so slowly, because she didn’t want to discover she was hallucinating or dreaming or otherwise fabricating him straight out of thin air—she lifted her head, and there he was.
Mark.
Standing there.
Wearing a very nice suit.
Smiling down at her.
“Oh,” said Haven. She blushed, because even though she’d meant every word she’d said, and even though she’d wanted him, passionately, to know it was all true, she would have presented it a little more...romantically...if she’d had time to think it through.