Thirty-Two
When Peter and Josh returned from their date, they were so slobbering drunk that they didn’t notice Josie and Toby hanging out in the living room in their underwear. When they were out of sight, Toby leaned over and started nibbling on Josie’s neck. Giggling, she pushed him away. “They’ve been fighting,” Toby whispered as he rubbed his nose against her cheek.
Josie couldn’t help thinking that his comment was a little strange considering the mood he was trying to set again. “How can you tell?” she asked, trying to think of rainbows and unicorns instead of his lips on her ear.
“Because Josh never gets drunk, and Peter has a black eye.”
“Get your hand out of my camisole,” she said firmly as she smacked his arm. He drew back and sat away from her looking very much like a wounded puppy. “I want to talk about this.”
Toby sighed and disappointedly said, “Alright, but let’s go upstairs.” He took both of her hands and led her up to the soundproof theater.
“What’s going on?” she asked, curling up in his lap after he was comfortable in one of the front-row seats.
“I can’t tell you,” he said as he rubbed the sides of her legs. “I promised Josh that I wouldn’t tell anyone. What I will say that might give you an idea is that Peter is actually bisexual. Like…he’s not completely gay, there are some girls that he likes. But, I mean, Josh has always known that.”
“Well, thanks for defining ‘bisexual’ for me.” She shook her head and then set to pondering what he was trying to tell her. In her opinion, it shouldn’t matter if Josh had always known and she didn’t see how that could cause such a big problem.
“Never mind,” Toby said, picking up her hands and kissing them before holding them against his chest. “I love you, Josephine.”
Her face turned bright red at the sound of her full first name, something she was never called. “Do you really mean that, though? I mean, you started saying it so soon and all.”
“Of course I mean it,” he replied looking a little hurt. “Honestly, Butterfly, it was really love at first sight. I saw you and I just knew. It was hard for me not to blurt it out the minute I saw you. I remember literally biting my tongue to stop myself.” Josie was unsure of how to respond so it was silent for a while, until Toby cleared his throat. “Apparently you didn’t feel the same way.”
“No, I was terrified of you.”
Toby smiled and kissed her hands again. “Well, love is a scary thing.”
“You didn’t seem scared. Like, at all.”
“That’s because I was too distracted by your loveliness to be scared.”
Josie laughed because she didn’t know what else to do. She pulled her hands away from his and smoothed down the hair on top of his head. “You don’t think Josh and Peter will split up, do you?” she asked as she put her hands on the back of his neck.
He shook his head before displaying the longing expression that meant he wanted to be kissed. His girlfriend remained too troubled by the problems in another relationship to recognize his needs, so he vocalized them by simply saying, “Please?”
“Oh, sorry.” She leaned down and kissed him, and he put his hands in her hair so that she couldn’t sit back up. With Toby kissing her more passionately than she had ever been kissed, she was finally able to realize that the swelling feeling in her chest meant that the love in their relationship wasn’t one-sided and never had been. She had loved him all along and had been too afraid to admit it, even to herself, which wasn’t surprising considering how long it had taken her to accept that she had feelings for him at all. When he finally let go of her, she took a deep breath and said, “I love you, Toby.”
“What?” he asked with a disbelieving laugh. “It sounded like you said-”
“I love you, Toby.”
His beautiful smile spread slowly across his ecstatic face. “Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“I love you, too,” he said as his eyes started to gloss over with tears.
“Oh Lord, don’t cry!” she insisted, hitting him lightly on the arm.
“I’m not going to cry,” he said as he blinked rapidly. “My eye just has something in it.”
“Tears, maybe?”
“Not tears.”
Josie giggled and put her head on his shoulder. “Toby’s getting misty because I love him!”
To take the focus off of his emotional reaction, Toby started mercilessly tickling her, causing her to squirm around helplessly and scream for him to stop as her uncontrollable laughter filled the room. She had always hated to be tickled because she was extremely ticklish everywhere, but somehow she didn’t mind at all and every time she squealed for him to stop, she secretly hoped that he wouldn’t. They ended up on the floor, wrestling around until he pinned her down and his fingers abruptly stopped.
“I love you so much,” he said, panting with the effort of tormenting her. With their eyes locked, his stare was extremely intense before he leaned down and kissed her hard on the mouth. “And, baby, I know you think I’m crazy, but I want to marry you.”
She laid there for a second catching her breath before she simply replied, “That’s not crazy.”
He collapsed so that he was lying on top of her and put his head on her chest. “This is possibly the best day of my life so far.”
“Work aside, it’s been a pretty great day,” she agreed, petting his hair. “We should lay around in our underwear more often.”
“All the time,” he said in a quiet voice that meant he was preparing to go to sleep.
“Alright,” Josie said, shoving him off of her and sitting up, “time to go. I’m not about to let you fall asleep on top of me on the theater floor. It’s a smidge uncomfortable.”
He stood up looking positively scandalized and lied, “I wasn’t falling asleep.”
“Okay, Tiger,” she said with a roll of her eyes as he helped her to her feet. “You still haven’t told me what you want for Christmas, you know.”
“Yes, I did,” Toby said, knitting his eyebrows in confusion as he held the door for her.
She stepped into the hallway trying very hard to remember the morning before after-Thanksgiving shopping, the only time she had ever asked him what he wanted. “No, you didn’t, you said-”
“I said ‘I can’t think of anything that I need but don’t have. I mean, you’re already here. What else is there?’” he said, pushing her hair out of her face before leading the way to their bedroom. “Since you’re still here, I still don’t have an answer for you. What brings that up?”
“Maybe the fact that there are only three weeks until Christmas and I’m going shopping with my mom after work tomorrow,” she suggested.
“Shopping?” he asked incredulously, “Again? But you went the day after Thanksgiving.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, baby,” she said, patting his cheek before walking into their room and pouncing on the bed.
“You can’t go tomorrow,” he said, crawling onto the bed beside her and pulling the covers over both of them before putting his arms around her waist and burying his face in her shoulder. “I have the day off and you need to stay with me.”
She started scratching the back of his head and said, “Sorry. I promised I’d go with her. Leah’s coming home for Christmas after all, so Mother has to buy her a lot more stuff than she would if she was just mailing it.”
“Well…don’t go to work in the morning then and sleep in with me. We can get Benny to bring doughnuts by the house when he gets off, and then we can go to the movies and go to lunch or something, and just hang out all day until your mom gets off work.”
“I can’t just not go to work,” Josie said, taken aback by his apparent disregard for professionalism. “It’s irresponsible because first of all, some of my clients come to me for medical reasons, and secondly because if I just don’t show up I could lose my job.”
“You need to just quit all your jobs,” Toby said, sitting up and looking at her with a mischievous spark in his eyes. “We’ll both retire really early and stay home together all the time. We can go to lunch everyday and just…date all the time!”
“Are you insane?”
“Probably.”
Josie sighed, putting her fingers on her temples and trying to make sense of his madness. “We can’t just quit our jobs, Toby,” she reasoned, “We can’t live on Josh and Peter’s money, and it’s not like either of us have exactly been saving up for retirement. And, no offense, but you work at Olive Garden. I mean, it’s not exactly a career.”
“Baby, we’re set,” he said, gently pulling her hands away from her head and looking into her eyes. “I don’t really have to work as it is. I’m doing the whole waiter thing as something to keep me occupied in the daytime.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about money, Josie. I’ve never needed to work, I’ll never need to work, and neither do you, so why don’t we just go ahead and retire and be together all the time?”
“You really are out of your mind,” she said, shaking her head incredulously. “How on Earth do you have the money to support both of us forever if you’ve never actually had a real job? Not that it matters because I’m not about to retire at the age of 21.”
“My dad.”
Josie couldn’t believe what she was hearing because it seemed as though Toby was suggesting they become dependents of his parents. “What?” she asked, starting to get annoyed.
“Josie, my dad has been the president of Coca-Cola since before I was born,” he explained, taking one of her hands in both of his and stroking it as he spoke. “As soon as my mom had Josh and I, he set up trust funds in our names that have been available to us to spend since we turned eighteen, even though he still adds to it with every paycheck. That’s how Josh and Peter had the money to start The Lost Boys and keep it up, but I’ve never touched mine.”
She didn’t know how to respond. She realized for the first time that somehow she had never questioned how Josh and Peter had afforded such an elaborately designed store in such a high-rent mall if they had previously set up shop in a much less glamorous location. She had never once wondered how the three boys had managed to pay for the beautiful house they lived in or for a full-time maid who had been driving a brand new Mercedes Benz since her last pay-raise. “So,” she said, clearing her throat and trying not to look shell-shocked, “there’d really be enough money in there for us to both live on? I mean, are you sure?”
“Even if he stopped adding to it, we’d be set for life if we lived to be two hundred,” he assured her. When she continued to look skeptical, he added, “He’s put one million dollars in each of our accounts every year.”
“I’m going to vomit,” Josie said, getting out of bed carefully before hurrying into the nearest bathroom with just enough time to tie back her hair before a day’s worth of food came burning through her mouth. It was too much all at once. Toby was too much and his ideas were too much and his money was way too much. It made her feel like a horrible person, but she was beyond thrilled that her perfect and wonderful boyfriend had just gone from being a seven-dollar-an-hour waiter to being a multi-millionaire. Twenty-six million dollars that he had never spent a cent of would allow them both to leave the working world forever and spend their every waking moment in each other’s presence if they so desired. All the sudden, she could have anything she’d ever wanted and it was beyond the reach of her mind to fully grasp that concept. She became terrified then that this new information would completely change their relationship, but she resolved to do her best at acting like things were normal.
“Are you alright?” Toby asked as she walked back into the room with a wet cloth on her forehead.
She lay down immediately and was quiet for a while. “I’m fine,” she eventually said, “It’s just that…well, that was a lot to take all at once.”
He rubbed his hand across her stomach and she began to feel better right away. When she looked up, he was the same old Toby-the dork sucking strawberry ice cream off his finger to seduce her, the idiot who broke his leg doing a Tarzan impression, the total sucker who held back tears when she said she loved him. He was so sweet and so grounded that it was difficult to accept that he hadn’t made it all up to trick her into sticking around the house all the time. “What do you say, Josie?” he asked, his voice so low that he was almost whispering. “Stay home with me?”
“Let’s see how tomorrow goes.”
Josie couldn’t help thinking that his comment was a little strange considering the mood he was trying to set again. “How can you tell?” she asked, trying to think of rainbows and unicorns instead of his lips on her ear.
“Because Josh never gets drunk, and Peter has a black eye.”
“Get your hand out of my camisole,” she said firmly as she smacked his arm. He drew back and sat away from her looking very much like a wounded puppy. “I want to talk about this.”
Toby sighed and disappointedly said, “Alright, but let’s go upstairs.” He took both of her hands and led her up to the soundproof theater.
“What’s going on?” she asked, curling up in his lap after he was comfortable in one of the front-row seats.
“I can’t tell you,” he said as he rubbed the sides of her legs. “I promised Josh that I wouldn’t tell anyone. What I will say that might give you an idea is that Peter is actually bisexual. Like…he’s not completely gay, there are some girls that he likes. But, I mean, Josh has always known that.”
“Well, thanks for defining ‘bisexual’ for me.” She shook her head and then set to pondering what he was trying to tell her. In her opinion, it shouldn’t matter if Josh had always known and she didn’t see how that could cause such a big problem.
“Never mind,” Toby said, picking up her hands and kissing them before holding them against his chest. “I love you, Josephine.”
Her face turned bright red at the sound of her full first name, something she was never called. “Do you really mean that, though? I mean, you started saying it so soon and all.”
“Of course I mean it,” he replied looking a little hurt. “Honestly, Butterfly, it was really love at first sight. I saw you and I just knew. It was hard for me not to blurt it out the minute I saw you. I remember literally biting my tongue to stop myself.” Josie was unsure of how to respond so it was silent for a while, until Toby cleared his throat. “Apparently you didn’t feel the same way.”
“No, I was terrified of you.”
Toby smiled and kissed her hands again. “Well, love is a scary thing.”
“You didn’t seem scared. Like, at all.”
“That’s because I was too distracted by your loveliness to be scared.”
Josie laughed because she didn’t know what else to do. She pulled her hands away from his and smoothed down the hair on top of his head. “You don’t think Josh and Peter will split up, do you?” she asked as she put her hands on the back of his neck.
He shook his head before displaying the longing expression that meant he wanted to be kissed. His girlfriend remained too troubled by the problems in another relationship to recognize his needs, so he vocalized them by simply saying, “Please?”
“Oh, sorry.” She leaned down and kissed him, and he put his hands in her hair so that she couldn’t sit back up. With Toby kissing her more passionately than she had ever been kissed, she was finally able to realize that the swelling feeling in her chest meant that the love in their relationship wasn’t one-sided and never had been. She had loved him all along and had been too afraid to admit it, even to herself, which wasn’t surprising considering how long it had taken her to accept that she had feelings for him at all. When he finally let go of her, she took a deep breath and said, “I love you, Toby.”
“What?” he asked with a disbelieving laugh. “It sounded like you said-”
“I love you, Toby.”
His beautiful smile spread slowly across his ecstatic face. “Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“I love you, too,” he said as his eyes started to gloss over with tears.
“Oh Lord, don’t cry!” she insisted, hitting him lightly on the arm.
“I’m not going to cry,” he said as he blinked rapidly. “My eye just has something in it.”
“Tears, maybe?”
“Not tears.”
Josie giggled and put her head on his shoulder. “Toby’s getting misty because I love him!”
To take the focus off of his emotional reaction, Toby started mercilessly tickling her, causing her to squirm around helplessly and scream for him to stop as her uncontrollable laughter filled the room. She had always hated to be tickled because she was extremely ticklish everywhere, but somehow she didn’t mind at all and every time she squealed for him to stop, she secretly hoped that he wouldn’t. They ended up on the floor, wrestling around until he pinned her down and his fingers abruptly stopped.
“I love you so much,” he said, panting with the effort of tormenting her. With their eyes locked, his stare was extremely intense before he leaned down and kissed her hard on the mouth. “And, baby, I know you think I’m crazy, but I want to marry you.”
She laid there for a second catching her breath before she simply replied, “That’s not crazy.”
He collapsed so that he was lying on top of her and put his head on her chest. “This is possibly the best day of my life so far.”
“Work aside, it’s been a pretty great day,” she agreed, petting his hair. “We should lay around in our underwear more often.”
“All the time,” he said in a quiet voice that meant he was preparing to go to sleep.
“Alright,” Josie said, shoving him off of her and sitting up, “time to go. I’m not about to let you fall asleep on top of me on the theater floor. It’s a smidge uncomfortable.”
He stood up looking positively scandalized and lied, “I wasn’t falling asleep.”
“Okay, Tiger,” she said with a roll of her eyes as he helped her to her feet. “You still haven’t told me what you want for Christmas, you know.”
“Yes, I did,” Toby said, knitting his eyebrows in confusion as he held the door for her.
She stepped into the hallway trying very hard to remember the morning before after-Thanksgiving shopping, the only time she had ever asked him what he wanted. “No, you didn’t, you said-”
“I said ‘I can’t think of anything that I need but don’t have. I mean, you’re already here. What else is there?’” he said, pushing her hair out of her face before leading the way to their bedroom. “Since you’re still here, I still don’t have an answer for you. What brings that up?”
“Maybe the fact that there are only three weeks until Christmas and I’m going shopping with my mom after work tomorrow,” she suggested.
“Shopping?” he asked incredulously, “Again? But you went the day after Thanksgiving.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, baby,” she said, patting his cheek before walking into their room and pouncing on the bed.
“You can’t go tomorrow,” he said, crawling onto the bed beside her and pulling the covers over both of them before putting his arms around her waist and burying his face in her shoulder. “I have the day off and you need to stay with me.”
She started scratching the back of his head and said, “Sorry. I promised I’d go with her. Leah’s coming home for Christmas after all, so Mother has to buy her a lot more stuff than she would if she was just mailing it.”
“Well…don’t go to work in the morning then and sleep in with me. We can get Benny to bring doughnuts by the house when he gets off, and then we can go to the movies and go to lunch or something, and just hang out all day until your mom gets off work.”
“I can’t just not go to work,” Josie said, taken aback by his apparent disregard for professionalism. “It’s irresponsible because first of all, some of my clients come to me for medical reasons, and secondly because if I just don’t show up I could lose my job.”
“You need to just quit all your jobs,” Toby said, sitting up and looking at her with a mischievous spark in his eyes. “We’ll both retire really early and stay home together all the time. We can go to lunch everyday and just…date all the time!”
“Are you insane?”
“Probably.”
Josie sighed, putting her fingers on her temples and trying to make sense of his madness. “We can’t just quit our jobs, Toby,” she reasoned, “We can’t live on Josh and Peter’s money, and it’s not like either of us have exactly been saving up for retirement. And, no offense, but you work at Olive Garden. I mean, it’s not exactly a career.”
“Baby, we’re set,” he said, gently pulling her hands away from her head and looking into her eyes. “I don’t really have to work as it is. I’m doing the whole waiter thing as something to keep me occupied in the daytime.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about money, Josie. I’ve never needed to work, I’ll never need to work, and neither do you, so why don’t we just go ahead and retire and be together all the time?”
“You really are out of your mind,” she said, shaking her head incredulously. “How on Earth do you have the money to support both of us forever if you’ve never actually had a real job? Not that it matters because I’m not about to retire at the age of 21.”
“My dad.”
Josie couldn’t believe what she was hearing because it seemed as though Toby was suggesting they become dependents of his parents. “What?” she asked, starting to get annoyed.
“Josie, my dad has been the president of Coca-Cola since before I was born,” he explained, taking one of her hands in both of his and stroking it as he spoke. “As soon as my mom had Josh and I, he set up trust funds in our names that have been available to us to spend since we turned eighteen, even though he still adds to it with every paycheck. That’s how Josh and Peter had the money to start The Lost Boys and keep it up, but I’ve never touched mine.”
She didn’t know how to respond. She realized for the first time that somehow she had never questioned how Josh and Peter had afforded such an elaborately designed store in such a high-rent mall if they had previously set up shop in a much less glamorous location. She had never once wondered how the three boys had managed to pay for the beautiful house they lived in or for a full-time maid who had been driving a brand new Mercedes Benz since her last pay-raise. “So,” she said, clearing her throat and trying not to look shell-shocked, “there’d really be enough money in there for us to both live on? I mean, are you sure?”
“Even if he stopped adding to it, we’d be set for life if we lived to be two hundred,” he assured her. When she continued to look skeptical, he added, “He’s put one million dollars in each of our accounts every year.”
“I’m going to vomit,” Josie said, getting out of bed carefully before hurrying into the nearest bathroom with just enough time to tie back her hair before a day’s worth of food came burning through her mouth. It was too much all at once. Toby was too much and his ideas were too much and his money was way too much. It made her feel like a horrible person, but she was beyond thrilled that her perfect and wonderful boyfriend had just gone from being a seven-dollar-an-hour waiter to being a multi-millionaire. Twenty-six million dollars that he had never spent a cent of would allow them both to leave the working world forever and spend their every waking moment in each other’s presence if they so desired. All the sudden, she could have anything she’d ever wanted and it was beyond the reach of her mind to fully grasp that concept. She became terrified then that this new information would completely change their relationship, but she resolved to do her best at acting like things were normal.
“Are you alright?” Toby asked as she walked back into the room with a wet cloth on her forehead.
She lay down immediately and was quiet for a while. “I’m fine,” she eventually said, “It’s just that…well, that was a lot to take all at once.”
He rubbed his hand across her stomach and she began to feel better right away. When she looked up, he was the same old Toby-the dork sucking strawberry ice cream off his finger to seduce her, the idiot who broke his leg doing a Tarzan impression, the total sucker who held back tears when she said she loved him. He was so sweet and so grounded that it was difficult to accept that he hadn’t made it all up to trick her into sticking around the house all the time. “What do you say, Josie?” he asked, his voice so low that he was almost whispering. “Stay home with me?”
“Let’s see how tomorrow goes.”