Emma smiled. “That’d be great.”
Jo caught the smirk on Avery’s face as she turned away, but she tried not to think about it too much.
Together in Jo’s car once more, there was no semblance of awkward tension. Instead, Emma launched into a play-by-play of the game of tag she’d played with half the team after ice cream. She talked about Ethan getting hit by the ball, about how Dani wanted to play catcher but her parents were worried about misread pitches, foul balls, and backswings. She was so enthusiastic. Jo couldn’t do anything but let her talk the whole ride.
Jo didn’t consider that it might be a bad idea to be seen personally dropping Emma off at her apartment until Emma directed her onto her street.
“I’m the third building on the right,” Emma said.
Jo went tense then, trying to look for paparazzi but not look like she was doing it.
Emma noticed anyway. “Oh, right,” she said, like she’d also just remembered this wasn’t the best idea. “But, like, I think they’ve lost interest. They were around after our ‘breakup’ and all. But once I wasn’t sobbing or dressed like a slob who’d just had her heart broken, I think they gave up.”
Jo hadn’t been certain they’d even found where Emma lived. She wasn’t sure what to make of the nonchalant way Emma brushed the idea off. How often had they been here?
“Okay,” Jo said as she put on her blinker and pulled over at the steps to Emma’s building.
“Thanks for driving me, boss,” Emma said. “And for telling me I had to come.”
Jo chuckled.
“It was great.” Emma smiled so big that Jo couldn’t see anything else. “Sorry not sorry I stole your cherry.”
Jo raised her eyebrows, and Emma’s face went bright red.
“I mean—you know what I mean!”
Jo laughed. “I do,” she said. “This was fun.”
Emma ducked her head. “Yeah, it was. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She looked over at Jo, almost through her lashes, before opening her door and heading for her apartment. Jo waited until she was inside before pulling away.
14
JO
Jo still had the picture of her and Emma in the top right drawer of her desk. The original picture. The two of them on the red carpet at the SAG Awards, fancy dresses and shining jewelry and those smiles, bright and focused only on each other. Emma had smiled at her like that after the baseball game, too. Jo had had the picture in her drawer for almost eight months now. She didn’t look at it often, but sometimes...
Jo looked at the picture and understood, a little, why people saw something there.
There hadn’t seemed to be any paparazzi outside of Emma’s apartment, nor any parents selling photos from the baseball game to the tabloids. There were no articles about the two of them, no rumors since everyone decided they’d broken up. It was good. Jo never expected it to take so long, but she was glad they’d finally died down. She wondered if denying it might have been the better route, in the end, if damage had already been done to Emma’s reputation, even when she never deserved it. There wasn’t much to be done about that now.
Jo was pulled from her thoughts when Emma knocked on her office door Monday morning. Her jaw was set.
“Do you have a minute?”
“Of course, come in.”
Emma closed the door behind her. Jo sat up straighter.
Emma came to stand in front of her desk. She stood tall, feet firmly planted, like she needed to be in a power pose to say whatever she was going to say.
“I want you to release a statement,” she said. “Not with my name, but explaining why you didn’t offer Barry an episode to direct.”
“Are you sure?” Jo said. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” Emma said. “I talked with my rabbi. I have to do something. I know it might not work—people won’t believe it or they’ll believe it and it won’t matter. But I have to try.”