It's Only Temporary

Epilogue (Part One)

Epilogue - Part One

One year later...

Penny stood in front of the stove stirring a saucepan slowly, with a dreamy smile on her face. She had her cell phone balanced on the counter beside her with the recipe displayed, but she was already past the tricky part - the part where the main ingredients had to be combined with exactly the right timing. Too fast and the sauce would curdle. Too slow and it would never come together. But get the timing perfect, and the combination turned into something truly delicious. Her smile deepened with satisfaction as the smell of home-cooked gravy filled the room.

She wouldn't bother telling anyone that she'd messed up the recipe twice before the current batch that brewed on the stovetop before her. She got it right in the end. The gravy still needed to thicken a bit more, but she could tell she was on the right track. From here on, it was just a matter of slow simmering.

Penny glanced at the clock out of the corner of her eye. Almost time. David should be home from work any minute now. Then they would have an hour to themselves to get things ready before their guests arrived.

Tonight was Penny's first time co-hosting a big dinner party with David - the grown-up kind that involved multiple courses, and eating off fine china instead of paper plates. She couldn't help but feel a quick fluttering in the pit of her stomach. Not that she was really nervous. She could do this, and David would help. It was more a sense of anticipation at this point. She couldn't wait until they all sat down at the table and she took her place of honor at David's side.

She still wasn't quite sure about the guest list. It would certainly be an eclectic mix. She'd met all of David's hoity-toity friends by now, but she couldn't say she knew many of them well. Except for Leo, of course. She usually found it easy to talk to Leo, but even that might prove more complicated tonight. Leo had invited along a date, the woman he'd been seeing for the past few months. Some hotshot female prosecutor from the U.S. attorney's office. David's whole face had frozen with panic when he first heard her name. He'd started babbling incoherently about some unwritten guy code. "You don't date women who splashed cranberry juice your best friend's shirt. Come on, that's rule number one!"

Penny still hadn't stopped teasing him about it. Even now, she had to bite her lip to suppress a giggle as she slowly stirred the sauce. "Well David, that's happens when you've dated every unattached female on the entire island of Manhattan. . . ."

Things might get a little awkward there, but that wasn't even the part that worried Penny the most. How would David's thirty-something friends get along with her younger crew? Would they all ignore each other? What would they even talk about? Yachting? The respective merits of parking your yacht in Hoboken versus Brooklyn?

She'd been up late last night worrying about it, but David had reassured her from his side of the bed. "They'll talk about you," he'd said. "They're all coming tomorrow to celebrate you."

He'd traced his finger along her cheek as he said it. Penny felt a flush of warmth, and she knew it wasn't just the heat coming from the stove. It was the way he looked at her as he drew her closer to him in the bed. More than desire . . . or even love. It was admiration, she realized. He was proud of her, proud to be associated with her in a way he hadn't been before. He'd been looking at her that way for a while now - ever since the med school acceptance letters started rolling in.

She'd worried that the two years off would make her look like a less-than-promising candidate, but her new MCAT scores had helped. She'd ended up scoring two points higher than the first time she took the test. Yale had still declined to re-admit her, but Johns Hopkins had said yes. Probably the best med school in the country after Harvard, and Penny hadn't missed the way David's eyebrows rose when she told him she got in.