“It's good. You weren't working with much, but it’s certainly better than anything I could have come up with.”
“Thanks.” More scraping forks. More silence.
No, scratch that, it was painfully awkward.
I got up to get myself a glass of water and thought about asking him whether he wanted one too.
“Maggie.”
“Toby.”
We said each other's names in unison. A few loaded silent seconds passed and nobody said anything. I walked back slowly to my seat.
“You first,” he said.
“No, you.”
He cleared his throat. “We’re about to spend who knows how much time up here together. I think it's better if we put everything on the table now just to make this as comfortable an experience as possible.”
He sounded so businesslike and formal, I wanted to laugh. I knew the way that he conducted himself under other circumstances so it was funny.
“Well, I feel like we said everything that needed to be said on that night,” I said.
“You do?”
“As two consenting adults, we had a one-night stand where we stated the terms of our engagement. That's in the past now and I don't think there is any reason for us to behave awkwardly with each other now.”
He paused and seemed to contemplate that.
“Okay, sounds good. We're friends, right?”
“Slow down there, we just happen to know the same group of people,” I said. He laughed at that, even though I meant it to be a little bit sassy.
“All right, we are friends of friends. No reason why we shouldn't be able to hang out for the next couple of days and wait this whole thing out.”
I sounded a lot more confident than I actually felt. There was a lot of baggage from that night and we had just made a pact n
ot to talk about it. What would talking it out do besides make it awkward on top of revealing all my secrets?
Missy better hurry up with that rescue.
7
Toby
That ended up being a lot less painful than I thought it would be. Maybe I wasn't giving Maggie enough credit. I had slept with the woman, sure, but that didn't mean I knew her. She was straightforward and she said what she meant. She wasn't going to let what happened between us turn this into an awkward situation. I appreciated that. To be honest, though, I was more worried about my own actions than hers.
Dinner went by pretty smoothly after our talk. She told me that she had been on the phone with Missy and that she had told her that she and Easton were arranging for us to be rescued. Perfect. That meant this wasn't going to last very long. One night here, two at the most.
I was surprised at how slowly I was taking this. This was the kind of opportunity that people wished for. Being stuck somewhere with a person that they were wildly attracted to? That should have been my idea of heaven, but Maggie and I had just gotten on each other's good sides, no need to rush it. I was still very, very attracted to her, but I was more interested in whatever semblance of friendship that we had just agreed on having.
I helped her with the dishes and tidying up after we ate. I wasn't very hungry, but the meal was surprisingly good given the limited supplies we had to work with. I generally ate meals that other people prepared for me, but this was a little different. Usually, those people cooked for me because I was paying them. Life in New York seemed so far away from all of this. I wondered what it would be like adjusting.
“What are you doing now? Are you going back upstairs?” she asked me.
“What are you doing?”
“I don't know. I was thinking maybe I'd watch a little TV.”