Wishful Thinking Read online

“Yes, ma’am, I do.” Josh shot Phil a bemused glance and she returned it with a hesitant smile. It was wonderful how quickly her family seemed to be taking to her best friend but she wondered how Josh would feel after spending a whole evening with them. Even more, she wondered what she was going to tell Christian.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Yes, I know it’s important to you but spending time with my family is important to me.” Phil hunched over her cell phone, standing on the large, wrap-around porch that encircled the lavender mansion on States Street. Christian was even angrier than she’d expected him to be and she was still getting used to being able to stand up for herself. This was turning out to be a difficult conversation.

  “You’ve known about this for months, Phil.” Christian’s voice was impatient. “You know how important it is for me to go in there looking successful and make a good impression. How can I do that without you there to support me?”

  She felt a lump rising in her throat. “What about when I need support, Christian? I asked you to come to my office beach party months ago when you would have had plenty of time to get the day off and you completely blew me off.”

  “We went over that already. We decided that my missing a productive day of work to make an appearance at your beach party wasn’t a good use of my time. Remember?” Christian sounded frustrated.

  “No, we didn’t decide—you decided.” She heard the quiver in her voice and tried to control it. “You said you didn’t want to go and that was the end of it. Well now I’m telling you I don’t want to go to your party either. You can go by yourself and tell everyone I’m sick.”

  “That is not acceptable.” She could almost hear the frown in Christian’s voice. “What’s gotten into you, Phil? You used to be so easy going and now all of a sudden you’re constantly emotional.” His voice rose an octave. “My God, you’re not pregnant, are you?”

  “I don’t see how I could be,” Phil said acidly. “I can’t even remember the last time we made love.”

  “C’mon, babe.” Christian sounded uneasy now—uneasy but relieved. “You know I’ve just been tired from working these long hours. Now why don’t you be a good girl and come on back to the apartment to change? If you leave now we can still make it in plenty of time for cocktails.”

  “Christian, I’m sorry.” Phil made her voice as firm as she could. “But I said no and I meant it. It wouldn’t do us any good to be together tonight anyway—we’d just fight the whole evening. I’m going to stay here and have a family dinner with my nana and my sisters.” She didn’t mention Josh and it gave her a little twinge of guilt to keep that piece of information from her fiancé. But it wasn’t like they were running away together—they were just having dinner at her grandmother’s house.

  “I can’t believe this!” He sounded genuinely bewildered. “What happened to my sweet little fiancé who never caused any trouble?”

  “She’s gone—for good, I hope,” Phil told him. “And by causing trouble I suppose you mean standing up for myself and not jumping every time you say to?”

  “You can call it what you want, Phil but you’ve changed and not for the better,” her fiancé said darkly. “I was hoping that maybe you were just starting your cycle or something this morning but now…I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you shot down my dream this morning—did you ever consider that?” she said, giving in to her anger. “Maybe it has to do with you wanting me to stay home and play Leave it to Beaver while you do the big macho corporate man thing.”

  “Christ,” she heard Christian mutter. “Not this again! Look, Phil, you and I both know this isn’t the time to discuss that issue.”

  “Well when is the time?” Phil demanded. She was squeezing the phone so tightly she could hear the plastic casing creak. “I’ve been waiting for over a year to talk about this and you give me fifteen minutes this morning. Fifteen minutes of your valuable time in which you tell me that I’ve been working for the last four years for nothing because you never intended to hold up your end of our bargain in the first place. Tell me, Christian, how am I supposed to feel about that?”

  “You want to go to law school? You want to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of having the easy life I offered you?” Christian exploded on the other end of the phone. “Fine. You can go to law school. We’ll get married tomorrow if you want and you can apply to any school in the area. Will that make you happy?”

  “I didn’t give up a school in this area to be with you, Christian,” she said quietly. “I gave up Stanford. And I did it because I loved you. I thought you loved me too.”

  Christian sighed deeply and she could almost see him massaging his temples with one hand, the way he always did when he was tense. “Babe, I never said I didn’t love you. But you’re making things damn hard on me here.”

  “How?” Phil demanded. “By asking you to live up to your end of the bargain? By asking you to believe in me the way I believed in you? Christian, you have no idea what kind of day I’ve had. I got into it with my boss this morning and now I have to go to a HR review tomorrow. I…I don’t even know if I’ll have a job when it’s all said and done.”

  “You what?” Christian’s voice was ragged. “Phil, I know you hate that job but we can’t afford for you to stop working just yet. I mean that is the ultimate goal—to just have you stay home and take care of the house and kids whenever they come along—but we’re not there yet.”

  “Whose goal is that?” Phil asked through numb lips. “Yours? Because it certainly isn’t mine. Don’t you even want to know what happened? Don’t you want to hear my side of it?”

  “Your side, your boss’s side—it doesn’t matter, Phil. What matters is you hold onto your job just a little while longer.”

  Phil felt like crying. “You really don’t get it, do you Christian? You have no idea what he did to me—what he said. And you don’t care, either.”

  “Babe, I don’t know what you want from me and I don’t have time for this right now.” His voice was flat. “Now are you coming to the party or aren’t you?”

  “If I said yes, that I would come to your party tonight, would you consider coming to my office beach party the day after tomorrow?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “I already said no to that Phil. You know my answer isn’t going to change.”

  “Fine.” Phil took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “I’m not willing to change my answer either, Christian. But I think you should know that I feel like our relationship has hit a dead end and I…I don’t know where to go from here. What you said to me today hurt and right now I don’t know if I can forgive you for that.”

  “So that’s what this is really all about.” Christian took a deep breath and his voice was suddenly soft and coaxing. “Okay, I’m sorry if what I said hurt you, Philly-babe—I truly am. I was just trying to spare you pain on down the line. But please don’t punish me like this. I need you by my side tonight. Come be with me. Please?”

  His pleading tone almost melted her but Phil knew she had to be strong. This was no longer about her fiancé’s office party—it had become a matter of principle. “I can’t, Christian,” she said, trying to push back the tears that threatened to choke her voice. “I just…I can’t be with you tonight. I need some time to think. Some space. I feel like you and I are going in two separate directions.”

  “I’m going in the same direction I always was.” Christian just sounded tired now. “You’re the one who jumped the tracks, Phil. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you lately but I wish to God you’d get whatever it is resolved and get back to your normal self.”

  “I may resolve some of it,” she said, thinking of her desire to get her fairy godmother to reverse the disastrous birthday wish. “But I’m not going to go back to being a doormat. I’ve put my life on hold long enough and I deserve to make some progress instead of always treading water.”

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