by JA Huss
God. I want to melt right into him.
“Jesus, you smell like frosting.”
“Oh.” I laugh, twirling my hair in my fingers. “I picked up Stevie’s cake earlier. That must be why.”
“That’s not why,” he says, leaning in to kiss me again. “I think you’re just naturally delicious.”
I want to wrap my legs around his middle and kiss him forever. Never let him go. Just… wow. I might be falling in love with this man.
“So…” he says, pulling away. “Meeting the best friend? We’re there already, huh?”
“Does it bother you?” I ask. “Too much, too fast? Do you not want to go? You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, I just—“
“Hey,” he says, cutting me off. “I am thrilled that you asked me on a date.”
I smile. Nod. “It is a date, right?”
“Do you think it’s a date?”
“Do you not?”
“I do.”
“Then I guess it’s a date.”
I smile again. “And we’re… we’re kinda liking this, right?”
“Yeah. We’re kinda liking this,” he says, his hand dropping to my hip.
I bite my lip. “You’re going to love her. Zoey, I mean. She’s so cool. We’ve been BFF’s forever. And she’s going to love you back.”
“Well, good. Because my best friend can’t remember you.”
I laugh.
“So I guess after this”—he holds his hands out, palms up—“the only thing left is to meet the parents.”
Holy shit. We’re at the meet-the-parents stage. “I’d love to meet your parents,” I say.
“It’s just my mom. And I assure you, you wouldn’t. But I’d be happy to meet yours.”
“Yeah?” He nods. “Cool. My dad is really going to like you.”
“Yeah? Good.”
And then we just kinda stand there, staring stupidly at each other for a few moments.
Wow. This is real, I say to myself.
We have something real.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - ANDREW
“Oh, thank you,” says Eden’s friend, Zoey, accepting the gift I hand her.
“Of course. I remember what it was like to be one. Everybody treating you like you’re still a baby when all you wanna do is spread your wings and fly. It’s a kid-sized hang-glider by the way.”
Zoey nods at Eden. “He’s funny.”
“He tries,” I say. I look around at the cowboy motif Zoey has going for the party. “I like your place. Nice design eye. Who’s your decorator? Eden needs an upgrade.”
Eden giggles and now Zoey’s looking at us the way a single mom with a one-year-old looks at kid-less people who’ve only just started seeing each other. In other words: slight annoyance ringed with contempt.
“Make yourselves at home. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Do you have any ginger ale?” I ask.
“I have water, punch, and maybe some old breast milk in the back of the fridge.”
“Water’s great. Thanks.”
“Eden?”
“I’m good,” she says.
“Yeah,” says Zoey, walking away. “You look good.”
“I like her,” I say, kissing Eden on the head. “She seems kind of mean.”
“She’s not. She’s just... I mean, she’s raising a kid on her own without any help.”
“Where’s the dad?”
Eden gets quiet and then says, “Another time. OK?”
“Sure.” I nod. As we wander into the apartment, I nod and smile at all the people. Pretty much all of them have kids. That’s what I hear happens. You become friends with the parents you meet at pre-school or at the playground or wherever. I’ve never really given much thought to having kids myself. Not that I wouldn’t, just with my relationship history it’s always seemed like a far-fetched possibility. Not only would I never have wanted to have kids with the women I was with, they all would’ve been pretty mean mothers, I have a feeling.
I grew up with kind of a mean mom, so I know how much fun it isn’t. Not really fair. She wasn’t mean so much as not terribly present. And kind of judgmental. And a little snobby. And sorta rude. And, yeah, pretty mean.
It always just kinda glanced off me. I mean she wasn’t mean to me. Just most everybody else. But the thing I appreciated is that at least she was open about it. Usually with Southern women you get smiles to the front and daggers to the back. But my mom has always been good about stabbing people right in the eye. God love her.
It doesn’t take a lot of digging in my brain to realize that the women I’ve been with before now were some sort of version of my mom. Like I’ve always said about me and Pierce. Our Oedipal wounds run deep. It also doesn’t take a Carl Jung to figure out that’s why I’m so smitten with Eden. She is, in every way possible, the opposite of that.
She’s one of the only genuinely kind people I’ve met in my life. Not like Cheryl the leasing agent who’s “polite” and “nice.” Eden is a legitimately and deeply kind person.
I hope, hope, hope she hasn’t been lying to me and that I’m wrong about this Sexpert thing. Because with the women in my life before now, I at least knew that I was going to be disappointed right from the start. It would suck to feel this good, trust this much, and go in this hard to have the rug fucking pulled out.
But hell, I’ve chosen to stand dead in the middle of that carpet, so if and when it happens, it’s nobody’s fault but my own.
It’s so goddamn stupid anyway. If the magazine is failing, this Sexpert idea is not going to save it. The whole thing is now so far out of proportion to its actual value that it’s almost laughable.
Except.
It’s not to Pierce.
And it’s probably not to whoever this Sexpert girl is (please don’t be Eden, please don’t be Eden, please don’t be Eden...).
Jesus. If the government knew I was using their secret spying app to figure out the identity of a pair of talking boobies on the internet...
Like I said. Laughable.
Ha. Ha.
“Wow,” I say looking over at Zoey’s home computer setup. “That’s no joke.” She’s got a twenty-seven-inch screen, a stand-alone processing tower, and what looks like a supermicro personal cloud server.
“Oh, yeah, Zoey’s a nerd too,” says Eden.
“Clearly. Is she, like, a gamer? Because all that video game violence is gonna have a real deleterious effect on young master Stevie.” I glance over at baby Stevie in his cowboy hat, throwing Cheerios all over the place. “If it hasn’t already.”
“No, no.” Eden laughs. “She’s not a gamer. She’s a...”
She stops short and trails off.
“She’s what?”
“Nothing.”
“Eden? What? Is she ... a hacker? A day trader? Is she running a Ponzi scheme? What?”
“No. Nothing. She just. She does, like, web design and like... video production. And stuff.”
She takes a deep breath, bites her lip, and looks at me through the top rims of her glasses like she does when she’s nervous. And it strikes me that we’ve now spent enough time together that I can officially tell when she looks at me in a way that’s recognizable. I think it’s cool as hell that that’s happened so fast. But it makes me really uneasy that it seems to have a negative and surreptitious undertone.
And then a series of thoughts begin ricocheting around my brain the way they do when I’ve solved a problem or cracked a code. The same way they used to when I would stare at a canvas and suddenly what I wanted to create would just appear there in front of my eyes. Or the way I can stare at a pitch on a rock wall and suddenly see the route to the top.
Zoey is a web designer and does video production.
She likely understands how to maximize production values and mise en scène.
She’d also have the tools at her disposal to create content.
Eden would have reservations about telling me this stuff if she, in a
ny way, was engaged with her friend in the process of creating content that might run afoul of my current raison d’être with Pierce.
And speaking of Pierce, how is it that I’ve been around the guy again for less than a month and I’m already using a shitload of French phrases in my internal musings?
“Andrew?” Eden’s voice pulls me back.
“Yeah, sorry, what?”
“Is... Is everything...?”
“Oh. Oh, uh, yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. I just got distracted for a second.”
She gets a look of resignation on her face. “About what?”
“Nothing. Seriously, nothing. Hey, look at me.” She does. “OK. Honestly?” She nods. “I was just... You said video production and that started me thinking about videos and that started me thinking about Sexpert and Pierce and... That’s all.”
She lets out a long breath and looks at the ground.
“But,” I continue. “So what? We’ve already established that it’s not you, right?” She doesn’t say anything. “Right?” I ask, a little more forcefully. She looks up at me, makes eye contact and says...
“Right.”
I let out a breath. I’m not sure what feeling I’m letting out with it. “OK. So, y’know... It’s probably Myrtle, like Pierce thinks, and this week I’ll be able to do the voice test and tell him for sure.”
She nods a little. I can feel her getting hot. Physically. It’s radiating off her.
“Or, shit,” I say. “Who knows? Maybe Pierce will get over it by tomorrow and be on to some new folly. He’s like a dog with a bone, but when he finds a newer, bigger bone, he’ll drop the one he’s chomping down on. He’s mercurial.”
She shrugs. “Yeah.”
It’s awkward now and I know why and I don’t wanna know why and I wanna forget the whole thing has come up and just eat cake and enjoy a round of pin the tail on the whatever-the-fuck. I decide a reset is necessary.
“Hey.” I take her by the shoulders and give her a kiss on the forehead. “You wanna get out of here? Go... I dunno. Get our trucks oil changes? Or something?”
She grins and says, “Yeah,” in her small voice.
“Cool. Lemme just run to the restroom and we’ll jet. K?” She nods again. “Be right back,” I say, giving her another kiss. On the lips this time.
On my way to the bathroom I try not to think about all the things that want to weasel their way in. Instead I focus on not stepping on the kid toys that are all over the place and the kids who are also all over the place.
“’Scuse me. Is the restroom in there?” I ask the two tattooed moms playing with their kid in the hall. They’re making goo-goo ga-ga sounds and blowing bubbles on his tummy and stuff and he’s laughing.
“Yeah,” the one mom says.
“But we did just change him in there, so you may wanna wait,” says the other.
“Thanks for the heads up. I’ll see if I can handle it.”
I smile, they smile, and we all have a good titter over how filthy children are.
Walking into Zoey’s bedroom, I notice that the Old West design aesthetic may not just be for the party. Must be a Colorado thing. There’s wood paneling on the walls and the door to the bathroom isn’t a regular door. It’s a sliding barn door. As Cheryl the leasing agent might say, “How rustic.”
I slide the door to the bathroom open and...
I blink.
I look to the left.
I blink.
I look to the right.
I blink.
It’s not the bathroom.
It’s the closet.
Except it’s not just the closet.
It’s also the set for the Sexpert video channel.
It’s immediately recognizable.
OK.
OK.
OK.
Fuck!!
Fuck fucking fuck!
She fucking lied to me! She lied to me twice! She’s lying to me right now!
Fucking fucking fucking fuck!
OK. OK. It’s not the end of the world. Don’t blow it out of proportion. She’s scared because Pierce is crazy, and I totally get that and that’s justified and maybe now we can just talk about it and she can explain and it’ll all be fine.
Don’t get pissed. Don’t freak out.
Don’t overreact.
“I gotta go.”
Eden turns to look at me and the smile that was on her face disappears.
“What? Why?” she asks.
“I just... Work. Dev texted me and there’s a thing and... I gotta go in.”
“But—”
“Look, I gotta go, OK? I’ll call you.”
I start past her and she grabs my arm.
“Andrew, wait.”
I stop, take a breath and look at her. I know my eyes are cold, but I can’t help it. “Yeah?”
“Do you really have to go to work?”
I take a beat to look at her. I want to touch her. I want to kiss her. I want to stroke her cheek. But I don’t. Because I can’t. Like I said, the one thing you could always count on with my mom... At least when she stuck the blade in, she’d do it to your face.
“Do you?” she asks again. “Do you have to go to work?”
I close my eyes. I open them. “Yeah,” I say.
And with that I pull my arm free and take off to see if I can figure out any way to outrun this avalanche that’s now starting to come tumbling down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - EDEN
“So I should call him?” Zoey and I are talking in circles. We’ve been going back and forth about the merits and demerits of playing hard to get for the last five minutes as I walk to work.
“Well…” Zoey hesitates, trying to be thoughtful. Which I appreciate. Because I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happened on Saturday. “I don’t know, Eden. I mean… if he’s going to be a flake like this, should you bother with him?”
It’s a valid question. And as my best friend, Zoey is obligated to ask it. Because Andrew just left me at the party. I had to get a ride home from Zoey after everyone left. And then he didn’t return my calls or anything.
“But I like him so much,” I say.
“I know you do, babe. But he’s making you unhappy and you know he’s trying to out us. So maybe this is for the best? You did say he believes you’re not the Sexpert, right?”
“Yeah, but…”
“Then maybe you should leave well enough alone. I mean, if he calls you, that’s one thing. But don’t go to him. If he likes you he’ll get in touch. He already knows you like him. You weren’t the one being weird on Saturday.”
“That’s true,” I say, sighing heavily. “OK. Well, I’m walking into work, so…”
“OK,” she says. I know she’s making her BFF pouty face for me. And I appreciate that too. “Call me at lunch if you need to. I’m here all day.”
“Thanks,” I say, ending the call.
I just don’t understand what’s happening. We were at meet-the-parents stage on Saturday morning. He wanted to eat my frosting.
And that excuse was lame. Come on, work? On Saturday?
Except I think I used that same excuse on him.
And I was lying, see?
So what is going on?
Unless… unless he found out something about the Sexpert and—
“No,” I say out loud. I’m standing at the elevator now, so six people look over at me with curious glances.
I sigh again, then just look at my feet as we all pile in.
It takes like ten minutes to get up to the fiftieth floor, the elevator stops so often. It’s weird, because usually the view when I step out is enough to lift my mood. But this morning everything about this elevator ride is annoying.
“Happy Monday, Eden!” the girls call from the reception desk.
I force a smile, once again understanding why people hate it when I say that. “Happy Monday,” I say, passing them by.
“We got éclairs,” Sylvia says as I pass the printer.
“Go grab one before they’re gone, Eden!”
But not even dessert for breakfast can up my mood today.
I am heartsick. And I hate it.
I put my purse away, sit down, and log on to find out what fresh hell is waiting for me today.
“Eden!”
Well, there’s the Devil’s mistress now. “Yes, Gretchen?” I say, popping my head up over my cubicle partition to see her office.
“Get in here now.”
Shit. I make eye contact with Janet, who gives me an exaggerated eye roll, and then call back, “Coming!”
I grab my tablet and reluctantly make my way to Gretchen’s office. “What’s up?” I ask. My upbeat tone is totally fake, but who cares? It’s not like Gretchen gives a crap about my mood.
“What’s up?” she huffs. “Why did you disobey me?”
“Excuse me?” I ask, kinda bewildered because I don’t recall disobeying her, but mostly annoyed. Because it sounds like something a parent says to a child. “I don’t understand what you’re referring to, Gretchen. Please explain.”
She narrows her eyes at me, totally catching on to my passive-aggressive response. “You changed those articles. They are all about dessert now.”
“No,” I say, pushing my glasses up my nose. “I gave the bloggers some suggestions so they can maximize traffic. That’s all. I didn’t tell them to use it, I just provided them with options.”
There’s nothing Gretchen can say about this. Not really. Not without coming off as a total bitch. So she looks me up and down, like she’s studying my outfit.
I’m in the clear there. Because I’m back to my usual uniform of drab skirt and button-down shirt.
“Much better,” she says, nodding to my clothes. “You looked ridiculous on Friday. I was just trying to save you from humiliation.”
Do. Not. React.
That’s what I tell myself. I was, after all, passive-aggressive first, right? This is her earned retort. I should just say, “Mmmhmm,” bob my ponytail yes, and move on.
That’s what I should say.
“Well, I’m surprised you noticed me at all, Gretchen. Since you blatantly pretend I don’t even work here when you steal my ideas and present them to Pierce as your own.”
