Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger

by Beth Harbison

  “Should I make an appointment for Monday?” Sigma asked, me. “Or is it okay just to come midafternoon sometime?”

  I returned my attention to her. “That should be fine,” I said. “If you want to call and confirm on your way in, that might be better still, just to make sure you don’t have to wait.”

  “Okeydoke!” She looked me in the eye. “Thank you so much.” Then she hooked her arm through Chris’s.

  “You’re welcome.”

  They started to walk toward the door and she waved, fluttering her fingers. “Thanks a bunch! See you then!”

  I smiled. “Yup, see you then!”

  They left, the door thudded closed behind them, and I turned to Glenn. “Are you insane?”

  He didn’t blush, but he should have. “I know, I know, it was just really important. This might even be the very one, the very one, I had myself as a kid. It’s got a dent in the exact same place in Barry’s nose. This could be mine.”

  That was too easy. I wasn’t going to take it. “I bet there was a bully in every single school some hapless kid was willing to take a Barry Manilow lunch box to, who was willing—no, eager—to dent Barry’s nose. I seriously doubt your old lunch box has been traveling around from one person to another until you could finally reclaim it.”

  “You never know.”

  “See? This is how ridiculously romantic you are when it comes to stories that are not my own. You can even make up a fated story about a lunch box. This,” I said, then leaned toward him for emphasis, “this is exactly what’s wrong with love.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is.”

  He frowned. “Having a bad day?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. My day is fine. I’m just being realistic, that’s all.”

  He looked dubious. “Did you follow my instructions from this morning?”

  “I tried.”

  “And?”

  “No luck. I don’t think the water pressure in my shower is good enough.”

  “You tried to use the shower for that?”

  “It was all I had!”

  “You don’t have a rabbit or something?”

  “No!”

  For a moment he looked surprised by my outburst, then he cracked up. “I’d say you protest too much, but I believe you. Honey, you need a rabbit. The shower will never do. Otherwise you’re stuck with”—he grabbed my hand and held it up between us—“this asshole. And you can do better than that.”

  I felt my face grow warm. Every time I thought I was used to what Glenn could dish out, he’d come up with something new and even more awkward. “Can we not talk about this?”

  “Sure. What do you want to talk about instead? The lesbians?”

  I rolled my eyes. Obviously he was on a theme and he wasn’t going to let go easily. So I bit. “What lesbians?”

  “The ones that just left.” He gestured at the door.

  “There were no lesbians in here. Has eBay addled your mind?”

  He gaped at me. “There were no lesbians in here.”

  “None.”

  “You didn’t just have a lesbian couple here.”

  I looked him dead in the eye, trying to find some sign of either kidding or sudden onset dementia. “No, Glenn, I didn’t. What, have you suddenly gone straight and started having Girls Gone Wild fantasies?”

  He looked at me the way I knew I had just looked at him. “Sigma and what’s her name, the ones that just left.”

  “His name is Chris,” I said incredulously. Maybe he wasn’t crazy. Maybe it was just his eyesight. After all, Chris had said exactly one word and his voice was neither high nor low, so I guess if you were looking at a blurred figure, his slight frame might have passed for female.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Glenn asked.

  This was crazy. “No, are you?”

  “You’re being completely serious.”

  “I can’t do this all day, Glenn.”

  “That was two women, Quinn.” He was looking at me as if he still wasn’t sure if I was pulling his leg. “Please, God, tell me you didn’t refer to one of them as him or he or sir or anything like that.”

  Was it possible he was serious?

  Was it even slightly possible he was right?

  I tried to think. Had I? Could Chris be a woman? Could I be that wrong? Was that even possible?

  He didn’t wait for my answer, just continued his tear. “They even said they’re getting married in New York, didn’t they?”

  “So?”

  “Duh! It’s legal there, remember?”

  What was? Pot? What was he talking about? “Legal?” I repeated like an idiot.

  “Gay marriage, dumbass!”

  My complete reorganization of thoughts was interrupted by the bells on the door, then completely erased by the sight of Burke striding in. I met his eyes, and his mouth flickered into the briefest hint of a smile, then back. “Dottie instructed me to bring you this.” He held up a coin.

  “What is it?” I asked, taking it. “Oh, sixpence.”

  “She owed you sixpence?” Burke asked with a spontaneous laugh. “What year is this? Wait, what country is this?”

  “Sixpence is supposed to be lucky on your wedding day,” I explained, then handed it back to him, a little too aware of the still-lingering irony. “But tell her she’s supposed to put it in her shoe.”

  “She said you’d know what to do with it.”

  “I do. Tell her to put it in her shoe.”

  “But she told me to give it to you.”

  “So you can’t give it back?”

  He smiled. I loved it. “You know how she gets.”

  “Fine.” I held out my hand. “I’ll tell her to put it in her shoe when I see her.”

  He drew back. “Well, hang on, I don’t want you to lose it if you’re not sewing it into something.”

  “It’s a coin! What could I be sewing it into?”

  “You know…,” Glenn said. I’d forgotten he was there and felt a moment of intrusion, as if he’d walked in on a private moment, until he added, “I think I’m just going to meander on out of here.”

  Go go go.

  “Oh, hey, man.” Burke stopped him and held out his hand. “I’m sorry. We were … Good to see you, Glenn, how’ve you been?”

  “Great.” Glenn’s voice was a bit butcher than usual. Suddenly the room had more testosterone in it. Believe me, that almost never happened. “Yourself?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  I took a moment to actually feel bad that Burke “couldn’t complain” about his life.

  I was really a ghoul.

  “I’m trying to think when the last time I saw you was,” Burke said, and his face assumed the position of thoughtful, one of many expressions of his I knew and remembered all too well. “All I can picture is you on the football field, but I know we’ve seen each other since then. I just can’t think where it was.”

  “Don Hoffman’s funeral.”

  “That’s right. Man, that was, what, six years ago or something now. Sad day.”

  “Enviable turnout, though.”

  Burke tipped his hand from side to side. “Yeah, if you don’t mind going six feet under afterwards.”

  They laughed.

  It was a moment of ease, the likes of which I hadn’t shared with Burke in a very long time.

  And now I was managing to somehow feel betrayed that two people who owed me nothing, certainly no explanations or accounts of their activities, had done something I hadn’t known about in which they’d seen each other.

  That it was a funeral showed just how selfish this situation had turned me. Or maybe I was to begin with. I mean, seriously, only a monster gets jealous of the guest of honor at a funeral.

  They made small talk for a moment, then Glenn—perhaps feeling the heat of my gaze on him—bowed out. “I’ve got to get back to the shop. Candy’s in there alone and she’s a numbskull. Still doesn’t know Maytag from Gorgonzola Dolce.” He shook his head like
this was a problem everyone could relate to.

  Cheese idiots.

  “Good to see you, man,” Burke said, and they did a manly high-five sort of thing I’d never witnessed Glenn doing before.

  I guess old habits, even those of hiding who you really are, die hard.

  “Good to see you, Burke,” he said, then, to me, “Ciao, bella.” He lifted a brow, the subtle equivalent of a wink, then went out the door, leaving Burke and me alone.

  Chapter 17

  And that left us alone together.

  Again.

  It was my mind that had a problem with that, of course, not my heart or the visceral reactions of my body. I knew I shouldn’t want to be alone with him. Hell, I knew it would have been wise to stop Glenn from leaving or to even call him back, but the sad fact was being around him was like a drug.

  Maybe he was an addiction.

  Maybe he always had been.

  “What brings you here?” I asked, hoping he couldn’t actually hear or, worse, see my heart pounding like an alien trying to burst out from under my shirt.

  I had to admit, he looked more than a little self-conscious this time himself. Already we’d had too many “coincidental” encounters, we both knew it. We were being set up, but we were allowing it.

  Was it attraction that kept drawing us together, or the need for genuine closure? I suppose either could have brought peace of mind, and that’s what I really needed.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Dottie did her own measurements and thought I should bring them to you. She said to tell you again how sorry she is for the inconvenience of having you come all the way out for nothing.” For a moment it looked like he might add to that, but he didn’t.

  I took the paper and looked at it. Then frowned. “These don’t make sense. Are they … centimeters? But, no, that wouldn’t translate either. I’m not sure what—”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a ruse,” he said, stopping me from too much unnecessary puzzling. “She’s not a very good liar, so when she told me you needed to get these measurements or she’d have no wedding dress and it would be all my fault for being a selfish boy, I was pretty sure she was up to something.” He gave a laugh.

  “Ah.” I nodded. “And this way I’ll have to go back out to the farm and measure, almost certainly when you’re there.”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “So what does she think is going to happen now?” I asked tentatively. I knew what should happen now. I should thank him for the fake measurements and send him on his way, foiling Dottie’s interference and hopefully keeping myself sane in the process.

  But I didn’t. I waited to see what his move would be.

  I’d just listen to what he had to say. Make a decision from there. Obviously I’d been pretty vehement about this when talking to Glenn, and myself, for that matter, but I was willing to try to be flexible. Maybe that was the cosmic good in my going to that miserable Short Stops meeting. It gave me a clear picture of what was out there if I really went all out and tried to date. Match.com, eHarmony, Short Stops, all of those organized matchmakers would be the go-tos, at least to start, and the prospect was daunting.

  “Do you want to sit down?” I asked Burke, indicating the fussy white chairs I had set up in front of the dressing room.

  “No, that’s okay. I won’t take much of your time.”

  This wasn’t beginning the way I expected.

  “Look, Quinn, I’m really sorry about what happened the other night. When I kissed you.”

  Sorry?

  “Sorry?”

  He gave a quick smile. Just a lightning flash of that smile I loved so much, but it was enough to take my breath away. “Okay, not entirely sorry. Obviously I enjoyed it. But…”

  I frowned. My face felt frozen. Suddenly I wasn’t sure what to do with my mouth. My expression. My hands. I was suspended in a weird limbo. “But…?”

  “Well, you know.” He fixed his eyes on me. Eyes I’d never forgotten. Eyes I’d hoped I’d never see again. “You and I have always had a draw to each other. When I saw you at my grandmother’s, it was kind of like all the time that had passed disappeared.”

  I nodded, mute.

  “So when I walked out to your car with you,” he went on, and I could tell by the way he shifted his weight from one side to the other that he was getting uncomfortable, “I didn’t even think before kissing you.”

  “There wasn’t a lot of thought on my part either.”

  “Until you pointed out we shouldn’t be doing it.”

  Had I? I guess I had. “It was all so unexpected,” I said, which could have meant anything. And didn’t mean anything. I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was that standing there like a wide-eyed plastic doll wasn’t going to buy me anything but an indelible memory in his brain of me looking like an idiot.

  He laughed softly. “I wasn’t expecting to see you there at all.”

  “I wasn’t either.” Suddenly I felt like I had to defend myself, to make it clear that I hadn’t been in on anything.

  “Oh, yeah, that was very clear from the expression on your face.”

  I was relieved. “I was never very good at hiding my feelings.”

  “Especially not when you were feeling abject horror.”

  “Well, that’s an overstatement.”

  He tilted his head.

  “Okay,” I corrected, and tried to figure out what to do with my hands, finally settling on simply crossing my arms in front of me. Which undoubtedly looked schoolmarmish. “Maybe there was some shock there. You and I had a pretty emotionally volatile relationship at the best of times. Obviously the last time we saw each other, it wasn’t as strangers at a community yard sale, so, yes, I think a lot of emotions came to the surface when I saw you.”

  “For me too,” he said, and I was glad to hear it.

  “And I tried to stop it because I thought it could be dangerous to dive into free-floating emotion like that.”

  He gave a nod. “I agree. At that moment, I didn’t, I wasn’t listening to my head.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t resist.”

  “Me neither.” I never could. I wouldn’t be able to right now if he came to me.

  “That was always our pattern.”

  “Undeniably.”

  “But there’s a reason we’re not together anymore, obviously. Our patterns didn’t really work out for us. So it’s foolish to give in to a physical impulse like that when there is the potential for so much damage when the house of cards falls down.”

  All at once I hated this conversation. This relationship was no longer up to me. It hadn’t been since I’d nixed it ten years ago. I’d blathered on and on to Glenn about it as if it were my choice and I didn’t know what to do.… How arrogant of me.

  This was more evidence of how out of touch I had become. My rut expanded to include memory as well, in that I had forgotten that someone who had been out of my life for ten years might have moved on in ways that left zero room for me.

  I’d forgotten that people who weren’t looking at the same old scenery day after day might not be living in the same old past-is-present-is-future day after day.

  I had forgotten that someone whom I remembered so well might have all but forgotten me.

  In fact, in this me-me-me pool I’d been swimming in, it hadn’t even occurred to me—until this very moment—that maybe Burke had not only had other relationships in the ensuing years since our breakup (having slept with his brother, I couldn’t criticize him for that!), but maybe he had one right now.

  That was probably it. He had a girlfriend. Or someone he was interested in. Or something that made this more “complicated” for him than it was for me.

  Or—please, no—maybe he knew about Frank and me. It had only been the two nights, but that didn’t make it go away. Worse, there was still tension between Frank and me, maybe Burke felt that. And how could I argue with it if he did?

  Then again, maybe he hadn’t noticed an
ything. Maybe this was all about him just wanting to get away from me and from the mistake of an impulsive kiss.

  I wanted to ask, but couldn’t bring myself to. I knew that leaping to conclusions was always Bad Policy, but there was no sense in cranking open a few cans of worms.

  And I knew this feeling, this disconcerted things-aren’t-quite-right feeling that, so many times, had preceded an unwinnable argument between us. Granted, it had been a long time, but I knew this feeling as well as if I’d had it yesterday. I’d get pouty, wishing for reassurance, but there was an armor of self-protection that would prevent any progress from being made, no matter what anyone said.

  In short, if we talked about this now, he couldn’t say anything to make me feel better, but I could say a lot of things to make myself feel worse. It was preferable for me to sleep on it, give it some time, figure out exactly what I wanted and then how to say it, and then—maybe—he and I could have a discussion.

  “We definitely don’t want to find ourselves under a house of cards,” I said, hoping to sound agreeable. Mature, even. “Look, Burke, we’re both adults now. We don’t need to talk this to death. We have a history, we can’t deny it, but we’ve both moved on. Nothing more to it than that, really, is there?”

  “Nope. Doesn’t need to be anything more to it than that.” Was it my imagination, or did he look relieved?

  Fortified by the fear that he did, I went on. “We’re bound to run into each other more in the time leading up to, and including, the wedding—”

  He scoffed. “If there is one.”

  “What do you mean? Of course there’s going to be a wedding. Why wouldn’t there be? They’re so happy!”

  “Just because two people are happily anticipating a wedding, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to happen.” He looked at me significantly for a moment, but before I could say anything—and what could I say?—he went on. “There’s something about that guy I don’t trust. We’ll see if he’s really in this to marry Gran.”

  I was flummoxed. “I can’t believe you even wonder that. He adores her.”

  “I hope so. But I’m afraid he adores her money even more.”