She wanted to say that he didn’t have the right to an opinion on the situation. But everyone else was watching, waiting for her to answer. “I wouldn’t. But Michael is going to cave—I can tell. And I can’t send him into the shark tank alone.” She waved her arms around the room, filled with neatly stacked boxes. “Especially not after he just stayed up all night helping me do this.” She could feel herself hardening, her jaw locking. Good. Steely resolve was better than weepy uncertainty. She could do this. Move. Sleep. Get up and go to the goddamned white party. By Sunday night, it would all be over, and she would have fully launched herself into the next chapter of her life—Amy Morrison, Single City Girl.
“Well, I think we should come with you.” When everyone looked at Danny, he shrugged and added a defensive, “What? If she can’t get out of the party, I think we should all go with her. We’ll be her bodyguards. Or backup dancers. Or whatever.”
“Yes,” Dax said, still looking at her with a bizarre intensity that bordered on anger.
“Great idea,” Jack said.
“What do we need to know?” Cassie asked. “Time? Address?”
“Dress code?” Danny added.
Amy opened her mouth to demure, to insist that they had done enough already. But then she closed it. Looking around at the little circle, she was suffused with a sense of gratitude. This is what friends did for one another. There was also the part where it would be hilarious to show up with four guests whose pedigrees hadn’t been personally vetted by her mother. So why not let them? She thought for a moment about whether there was a way to finagle it so Danny and Jack and Cassie came, but not Dax. But that hadn’t really worked when she’d told him to stay away today, had it? She could endure one more day of Dax if she had to. She sighed. “Well, here’s the thing. It’s a white party.”
“Well, I guess that counts me out, then,” Dax said. The grin he flashed was in such marked contrast to his previous intensity that it unsettled her a bit.
“Not white people—though there will be that, in spades. White clothes.”
“Like the gays!” Danny said. “The Miami white parties are legendary.”
“I wish. Not like the gays—then we might actually have fun. Like the Hamptons. Apparently there’s some big party in the Hamptons every year where all the rich people get together and wear white.” It sounded so stupid and affected when she explained it. “My parents are nothing if not social climbers. So they started this thing when we were kids. It’s always the last Sunday morning before the Labor Day long weekend—they couldn’t do it Labor Day weekend, of course, because their actual rich friends were always away at their cottages. The idea is this party your last chance to wear white for the year.”
“Huh?” Danny said.
“You know how you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day?”
“No, I do not know. Who the hell came up with that? And if that’s a rule, how do you explain the phrase ‘winter white’?”
Amy shrugged. “Anyway, if you want to come, you have to wear white.” A rogue image popped into her mind of her friends crashing the party en masse in a rainbow of obnoxious colors. “Or don’t! I’m just so thankful that you’d do this for me. I’ll text everyone the address.”
“I’m not doing this for you,” Danny said, refilling her Dixie cup with champagne and not even bothering to add any juice. “I’ve never been to a social-climbing, Hamptons-wannabe, straight-people white party. A person doesn’t turn down an invitation like that.”
Dax stood. “Well, I’d better go home and start pressing my suit.”
“You don’t have to come.”
He didn’t answer, just said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “You’ll want the driveway free for when the truck gets here, so I should get the car loaded and take off.”
She hadn’t gotten up, so he looked down at her as he spoke. Dax was always so all-consuming. When he was around, it was hard to pay attention to anyone else. But as she sat on the floor and looked up at him, he literally filled her field of vision with his commanding dark persona. She felt his presence deeply.
She also felt the impending loss of him leaving. It took the form of a little finger of panic working its way around her throat. She’d told him not to come today. Now she didn’t want him to leave. And that was dangerous—and fruitless.
So she just got up, walked him to the door, and said, “Thanks for all your help today.”
Then she watched him drive away into the bright afternoon with her stuff in the back of his car.