Her write-up appeared on the Brogan’s Point Facebook page the next day. Will would have been surprised if he’d stumbled onto it accidentally—on the rare occasions he visited Facebook, he didn’t make a habit of checking out the Brogan’s Point page. But Brianna had texted him from her office around noon and told him to check it out.
It cheered him, not so much because he cared about the history of the fish market or the Ocean Bluff Inn, but because he cared about Brianna. This was terrific publicity for her Town Hall proposal. That she was too classy to fight dirty with Davenport was just one more reason Will admired her.
He’d needed cheering up. He’d received a dispiriting email from Craig that morning—probably sent last night, since Craig was with Gaurav at Pacific Dynamic out in Seattle, three hours behind the East Coast. But last night Will had been too busy making love with Brianna to bother to check his email. After she’d left his mother’s house—much too early again, but that seemed to be her habit—he’d caught up on his emails while he ate breakfast.
He didn’t think Craig intended to bum him out. To be sure, Craig sounded as if he was trying to be enthusiastic about the project Pacific Dynamic had assigned him and Gaurav to oversee. It was that Pacific Dynamic had assigned them that Will found…well, not quite depressing, but close.
When Will, Craig, and Gaurav had started out, they’d been three naïve, fearless friends with the ink still wet on their college diplomas. No one had assigned them anything. They’d had an idea, a workable concept, a product they’d believed in. They’d scrimped and scrounged and scraped by. They’d toiled through the weekends and pulled all-nighters. They’d had faith in what they were creating. It was theirs.
Their faith hadn’t been misplaced. Pacific Dynamic had paid a hell of a lot of money to purchase their patents and their talent. The venture capital firm had been thrilled. Will and his partners had been even more thrilled. No more sleeping on lumpy futons and buying half-price bread a week past its sell-by date. No more sixteen-hour work days and hand-outs from their parents. They were rich.
Will knew that accepting the position at Pacific Dynamic would mean he’d have to design the software products Pacific Dynamic wanted him to design. That was why the company would be paying him the genuinely big bucks. Taking the job meant getting a steady, much-too-generous salary, having a staff working for him, and renting an overpriced apartment in a building where beautiful women hung out in the mail room. But it also meant doing what Pacific Dynamic wanted him to do.
If he told his new supervisors at Pacific Dynamic that they should try a deep blue sea martini or a Dark-and-Stormy, would they taste it or simply order him to get back to work? They weren’t his mother, of course, but his mother had never been one to humor him. She did what she felt driven to do, and she’d raised Will to be the same way.
Was he driven to join a massive West-Coast conglomerate and follow orders? Or was he feeling negative about Pacific Dynamic because Brianna was in his life now?
He couldn’t rearrange all his plans just because of her. As wonderful as she was, he and she had known each other a ridiculously short time. Sure, she was smart and creative, ambitious but ethical. Sure, she had an interesting career. Sure, she was amazing in bed. Just thinking about how amazing she was aroused him uncomfortably, even though he was sitting at the kitchen table, a bowl of soggy corn flakes beside his right hand and his cell phone, with Craig’s email still glowing on the screen, beside his left. Not a romantic setting—but merely thinking about Brianna could make any setting romantic.
He didn’t want her because she was all that. He wanted her because… He couldn’t escape the belief that the two of them together were so much more than each of them separately. In their case, one plus one equaled infinity.
His computer science professors would have laughed at that equation. But it was true. It took two, like the song said—but for him and Brianna, two was the universe. It was everything.
And he was turning into some sort of emotional sap, if he could think that.
The phone at his elbow rang, startling him out of his ruminations. He lifted it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Will? It’s Ed Nolan.”
“Hi, Ed.”
“I thought about what you and your friend Brianna suggested, and I’ve come up with a list of ten songs. How does that sound?”
Will shook his head. “It sounds like seven songs too many. The jukebox plays three songs for a quarter. We have to pretend that you put a quarter in it and it’ll play three specific songs.”
“Oh.” Ed sounded disappointed. “The thing is, I couldn’t narrow it down. All these songs could work to soften your mother up. I don’t know if one would work better than another.”
“Email me the list,” Will said. “Maybe I can pick the three best songs.”
“Okay.” He hesitated, then added, “I got her a really pretty ring. I know she’s not much for fancy jewelry, but I think she’ll like this ring.”
“She likes you,” Will assured him. “If you give her a ring, she’s going to love it.” He hoped that was true.
After ending the call, he settled back in his chair, sipped his coffee, reread Craig’s email, and wondered how irritated he should be about it. Craig wasn’t trying to discourage Will from joining him in Seattle. He was trying to include Will in the scene out there, making him feel like part of it even though he was three thousand miles away.
He didn’t want to feel like part of a culture where someone else determined what should be done and issued commands for Will to obey. As far as he was concerned, conception and design were the fun parts. Pacific Dynamic had hired him, Craig, and Gaurav as a creative team to figure out cool new products for the company and then to develop those products. Not to develop other people’s products.
Maybe he was being greedy. Maybe he would have to go through a period of making other people’s ideas come to life before he’d be allowed to make his own ideas come to life.
His phone pinged, alerting him to the arrival of an email. He opened it and read Ed’s list:
Elvis—Love Me Tender
Dixie Cups—Chapel of Love
Joe Cocker—You Are So Beautiful
Captain and Tennille—Love Will Keep Us Together
Billy Joel—Just the Way You Are
Stevie Wonder—Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours
Queen—You’re My Best Friend
Cheap Trick—I Want You to Want Me
Four Tops—Baby, I Need Your Loving
Gerry Rafferty—Right Down the Line
Cripes Will hadn’t even heard of half these songs. Elvis, of course. The Billy Joel song was played at just about every wedding he’d ever attended. The Queen song, yeah—he’d seen the movie about Freddie Mercury and listened to a lot of Queen music afterward. But what the hell was Captain and Tennille? And Right Down the Line didn’t sound like the title of a love song.
He’d have to listen to them all to figure out which might have the best effect on his mother. But he wouldn’t listen to them alone. He’d listen to them with Brianna. The whole song thing had been her idea. He could handle the technology, but he needed her input on the artistic part of the plan.
***
Brianna sat at Will’s kitchen table, scanning the sheet of paper on which Will had printed out the list his mother’s boyfriend had sent him. He stood at the counter, chopping vegetables for a stir-fry, his labor illuminated by a small light fixture above the sink. She felt a little guilty about not helping him prepare dinner, but he’d insisted that her help narrowing down the list was far more important. “Do you know any of these songs?”
“Sure, a few of them,” she said.
“I know a few of them, too, but not well enough to judge them.”
“I might be able to judge the songs,” Brianna said, “but I can’t judge how your mother might respond to them. I don’t really know her.”
“I’ll handle that end of things. You can handle the esthetics.”
She grinned. Will seemed to be viewing this strategy like the computer scientist he was, dividing up the tasks as if they actually could be divided.
She couldn’t imagine Rollie asking for her input and insights. True, she’d been kind of an apprentice of sorts, and he’d been her mentor. She’d been instructed to listen and learn from him. When he’d asked her opinion on anything, often as not he’d tell her why that opinion was wrong. She remembered the times they’d argued over a design feature. “It has to look beautiful,” he’d insisted, and she’d countered, “It has to be livable.” After working with him on a few projects, she was left to conclude that he had never vacuumed a floor. If he had, he wouldn’t keep designing floor plans with so many unnecessary stairs in them.
But he’d been her boss and she’d deferred to him, reluctantly agreeing that his designs with all those sunken rooms and elevated ledges were beautiful. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, she believed, and if the beholder was responsible for keeping the place clean, some of his designs weren’t that beautiful at all.
He hadn’t been terribly interested in her viewpoints, anyway. He, after all, had been the master, the wise elder. She had been his pupil, his underling.
That clearly wasn’t the way Will worked. She felt like an equal partner in this wedding proposal venture, even if she wasn’t. He knew his mother and Ed Nolan. Brianna was a newcomer to the entire situation—and yet Will seemed to believe her views on the matter were every bit as valuable as his.
He dished the stir-fry and rice onto two plates, opened a bottle of wine, and settled across from her at the table. “Let’s listen to these songs and see what we think,” he said, tapping on his phone to access music files. “Music to dine by,” he added with a flourish.
Elvis’s voice warbled from his phone, slow and impassioned. They listened to the song as they ate. Brianna interrupted the song only to tell Will how delicious the stir-fry was.
“Back when I was broke, I couldn’t afford fresh vegetables that often,” he told her. “When I could, I could stretch them farther by cutting up them up and mixing them with tofu. This—” he gestured at her plate with his fork “—is the deluxe edition, complete with pieces of chicken.”
The song ended. He gave her a questioning look. “Romantic,” she evaluated the song. “Kind of schmaltzy. Does your mother respond well to schmaltz?”
“Not really.” He drew an X with a pencil beside that song. “Next up: ‘Chapel of Love.’ You ever hear of the Dixie Cups?”
“Paper cups for drinking water,” she said as he located the song on his phone. “And ice-cream. We used to get Dixie cups of ice-cream with our school lunches sometimes.”
“Half chocolate, half vanilla,” Will reminisced. He tapped his phone once more, and a cheerful song began, women singing about getting married. “That one’s fun,” Brianna said. “It’s a happy song. I like it.”
“I think it would make my mother smile,” Will said. He didn’t ink an X after that one.
They continued through the list, eating, listening, talking, sharing memories. They decided that the Billy Joel and Joe Cocker songs, while beautiful, were too sentimental for Will’s mother—“She is definitely not a schmaltzy person,” he insisted. Will vetoed Cheap Trick a few measures into the song: “This would give her a headache, plus she’d think it was, well, cheap.”
Brianna loved the Four Tops song, with its sweeping chorus and the chord modulations. “I took piano lessons for five years. I know this stuff,” she informed Will.
“My piano teacher didn’t teach me anything about chord modulations,” he said. “Then again, she might have, and I just wasn’t paying attention. This song is too sad, though. The singer sounds lonely and desperate.”
“Ed is lonely and desperate,” she pointed out.
“Maybe, but he wouldn’t want Mom to think of him that way.” He wrote an X next to that song.
“‘You’re My Best Friend’ is great,” she said.
“It’s not romantic,” Will argued.
Brianna shook her head. “It’s very romantic. Every woman wants to feel like her lover is her best friend. Not her bestie, not her BFF, but her true, real best friend. And the words! You make me live! That is so romantic!”
Will grinned. Brianna realized she might be revealing more of herself than he’d expected, but so what? Maybe things would never have worked out with Rollie because she had never imagined that they could be best friends.
Or maybe things would never have worked out with Rollie because he was a first-class jerk.
“Okay,” Will conceded. “‘You’re My Best Friend’ stays on the list.”
Their food was long gone, and they were lingering over a final glass of wine when Will played the last song, one neither of them were familiar with. “Right Down the Line.” They sat silently, sipping their wine and listening as the singer explained, in a sweetly unadorned voice, how much he depended on his woman, how he had no doubt, he’d never leave, she was his Northern Star. “It’s been you, woman, right down the line,” he sang.
The song left Brianna stunned. There was not an ounce of schmaltz in it, but so much quiet passion. From the time she’d spent talking to Ed Nolan with Will at the tavern, she could imagine him speaking every word of the song to Will’s mother. She could practically imagine him singing it.
“That’s the one,” she finally said.
“If my mother doesn’t say yes after hearing that one, she doesn’t deserve Ed,” Will agreed.
Brianna craned her neck to view the list. “So we’ve got ‘Chapel of Love, ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered,’ ‘You’re My Best Friend,” and ‘Right Down the Line.’”
“I’d pick ‘Chapel of Love’ over ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered,’” Will said. “It gets right to the point. Ed’s proposing marriage.”
“Plus it’s women singing,” Brianna noted. “It’s the only song on the list with women singing. We’ve got to have at least one song from the female perspective.”
Will grinned again. “Yes, ma’am.”
“So, what happens next?” she asked. “Other than my washing the dishes, since you did all the cooking.”
“We’ll wash the dishes together. Then we’ll make a mix tape of these three songs. Then we’ll figure out a time I can sneak the cordless speakers behind the jukebox, and a time Ed can come in, pretend to put a coin in the slot, and propose. Some time when the bar is quiet.”
“Things seem pretty quiet there in mid-afternoon,” she said. Not that she was a regular, but by now, she’d been to the Faulk Street Tavern enough times to have a sense of the business’s ebb and flow.
“Late morning might be even better. She’s usually there by eleven a.m., doing set-ups. The place doesn’t open for business until noon. Let me find out what morning will work for Ed. How about you? Is any morning good for you?”
Brianna took a moment to collect herself. Did Will actually want her present for the grand proposal? It wasn’t as if she were part of the family.
He must have read her mind. “The music was your idea,” he reminded her. “You’ve got to be there.”
Yes, but it was his mother, and his future step-father. She wasn’t part of the family.
At her hesitation, he added, “I can’t do this alone. It takes two, baby.”
That he said the words in the exact rhythm of the song made her laugh—and that made her say, “Okay. I’ll be there. Figure out what morning Ed wants to do it, and I’ll arrange my schedule.”