The Hot One

by Lauren Blakely

  He was clearly shocked to see me, and yet, he also seemed excited. Like he was gazing upon his favorite work of art. The way he stared at me almost made me think I was a regular attendee at his private one-man shows.

  And if that was the case, the man could eat his heart out.

  This time, I was going to have the words. All of them. All the hurt and sadness morphed into something beautiful and wholly necessary—the right words at the right time. “How’s the juggling working out for you now, Tyler?”

  As I ran past him, he uttered a strangled string of words. “Great. I kept it up.”

  “Evidently,” I said, locking my stare briefly with his pretty little girl.

  I looked away, and I thanked the lucky stars that I finally had all I needed to eject him from the driver’s seat of my fantasy life. Even as he called my name, I kept running.

  Leaving him far behind, where he belonged.

  If I had to go on a Tyler starvation diet, I’d sign up right then. Because no way, no how, was I getting off anymore to a man who’d fathered someone else’s baby.

  Good-bye, Tyler Nichols curse.

  It ended today.

  1

  Delaney

  * * *

  I sink into the wooden chair at the mint-green table at our favorite sidewalk café and turn to my two closest friends—dark-haired Penny and redheaded Nicole. Penny leashes her little dog, Shortcake, to the leg of her chair, while Nicole ties up her Irish setter mix, Ruby.

  “I can’t believe he has a kid,” I say, still in shock that Tyler had turned down the procreation path so quickly.

  Penny shakes her head, surprise registering in her eyes. “He’s so young to have one, too.”

  Nicole laughs as a busboy delivers a pitcher of water and four glasses. We’re regulars, and he knows our drill. Nicole thanks him as he pours. She offers a glass to her dog sprawled at her feet under the table. “Right,” Nicole says, her voice thick with sarcasm, as Ruby laps up the drink with loud slurps. “Because age has so much to do with his ability to deliver sperm to a waiting egg during one of the numerous times he let some loose from his body.”

  She’s right, of course, and now I want to know all the details. “I wonder if he met her right after me? The kid looked, what, six? Seven? And we split eight years ago. Do you think it happened right away? After college? Before he went to law school? He barely even waited after he split up with me,” I say, dragging a hand through my ponytail as the questions tumble free in a rush. “I haven’t seen him or talked to him since we split. I didn’t even know he was in Manhattan.”

  “And is he married now?” Penny asks. “I’m dying to know, since I saw the way he looked at you.”

  I latch on to her words. “How did he look at me?”

  She wiggles her eyebrows. “Like he liked your running shorts,” she says, in a salacious little whisper.

  “Like he wanted to take them off,” Nicole adds, with a wink.

  I wish their comments didn’t stir something inside me. Like my treasonous libido. I remind myself I can’t go there. I hold up both hands as stop signs. “He could be married, like Penny said.”

  “Did you see a ring on his finger?” she asks.

  “My X-ray vision is on the fritz these days,” I say, though I’m not sure how I can joke. A part of me is still embarrassed at the role he’s played in my nightlife. A part of me is furious, too. The man cast me aside clinically, claiming he needed to focus on law school, like I was simply a growth to slice off instead of a woman he wanted to find a way, come hell or high water, to stay with. Then, it turns out he found someone else and knocked her up. “Maybe the truth was he didn’t want to juggle me.” I swallow harshly. “Maybe I simply wasn’t the woman for him. Maybe I never meant to him what he meant to me.” I hate that my voice breaks the slightest bit. Tyler and I were in love. I shouldn’t feel a damn thing for him now, and I shouldn’t care that he’s created a life for himself that’s perfectly reasonable. Even though we had talked about a life together. We were hoping to have one after law school.

  I draw a deep breath, needing to find my lost zen. This is what I encourage my clients to do—focus on the things they can control. Let go of the stresses in their days and find their happy place.

  “We need to find out everything.” Penny jumps into her Nancy Drew role. She tucks her dark hair behind her ears and sits up straight. All-business Penny. “Let’s look him up on Facebook,” she says, counting off on one finger. “Find out who he married.” Another finger. “Figure out where he’s working.” One more. “And make voodoo dolls of him.”

  If they only knew I was the one who needed to be voodooed.

  “Look,” Nicole says, crossing her legs as she picks up a menu. “I know he looked at our girl like he wanted to have her for breakfast, but how about we order actual breakfast? How about we focus on eggs and coffee, instead of eggs and sperm? Besides, you love the eggs here, Delaney. You roll your eyes in happiness every time you eat them.”

  “Of course, she loves them,” Penny says. “They’re so good I’m convinced they’re hatched from magic chickens who lay enchanted eggs.”

  A chuckle bursts forth from my throat. I can’t help it.

  “You really do think they have magic yard birds out back?” Penny asks playfully, pointing to the swinging screen door of The Charming Breakfast Spot, as a waitress saunters inside.

  I nod. “Absolutely, a whole shed full of charmed creatures serving up food for us,” I say, since I don’t want to explain that this makes me think of my naughty nicknames for Tyler. His cock was magic and his tongue was beyond enchanted.

  “So, what do you say?” Penny continues. “Should we look him up?”

  Nicole answers before I can, gesturing at me like I’m exhibit A. “It’s not like she’s been pining away for him all this time.” She sets her green-eyed gaze on me. “You haven’t even mentioned him in ages. Who cares that he has a kid? Who cares if he’s married? You don’t care about him anymore.” She bangs a fist on the table to make her point. Her dog Ruby raises her snout in alarm and Nicole gently strokes the animal’s long nose as she talks. “You’ve moved on. So let’s focus on the opportunities in front of you. Like breakfast.”

  That’s Nicole for you. The woman never dwells on the past. She has a saying that exes are exes for a reason, and they should stay that way.

  “Or,” Penny suggests, “we could focus on breakfast and encouraging Delaney to date again.”

  Nicole beams at the mention of dating. “Yes, that too.”

  I shake my head. “Please. You know the last time I tried dating—it was a parade of mama’s boys, players, and far too many unsolicited dick pics, and I wasn’t even on a dating site.” I cringed at the memory of the collection of appendage imagery that appeared on my cell phone. “I can’t go there again.”

  “Nonsense. There are plenty of good men in the city.” Nicole slaps the menu on the table. “And plenty of men who have been trained not to send dick pics without permission.” She leans in closer and lowers her voice. “But admit it. A cock shot can be nice from the right man.”

  I roll my eyes. “Nicole, is that the topic of your next column? Nice Cock Shots and How to Score Them?”

  Nicole wiggles her eyebrows. “But of course. It’s a critical skill for the modern woman navigating the minefield of online dating.”

  Nicole writes a dating column, but it’s more like a humor column, and it runs on several prominent women-centric lifestyle sites. She covers key topics for today’s single ladies, from whether to go full bush, landing strip, or bare as a baby’s bottom, to how to pen the ideal breakup letter, especially one you don’t accidentally send from a secret ghost account you use to spy on the men you’re dating from the same online site. That happened to one of her readers, and Nicole guided the distraught woman to not only remedy the error but actually patch up with the guy.

  She’s a dating guru.

  Penny scoops her Chihuahua mix into her lap.
“Look, dating might be Crazylandia, but we can help you through it,” she offers. Penny’s happily engaged, and Nicole is single and just plain . . . happy.

  “What better day to get back in the saddle than when you see your college boyfriend?” Nicole adds.

  I roll my eyes. “Nicole, if only the world could be as cool and calm as you when it comes to exes.”

  She stabs her finger against the menu. “But you can. If you really cared about his situation, you’d have looked him up a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. You only mildly care because you saw him out of the blue.” She pats my hand. “Find the will to resist looking him up.”

  I furrow my brow. “In theory, that makes perfect sense. In reality, I’m all about expunging toxins from the body, and that man is some kind of toxin.”

  Nicole tosses her hair back and laughs. “Oh, you win.” She mimes rubbing a pair of shoulders. “Maybe you need to massage him out of your system, too.”

  “Let’s not go that far,” I say. Though I am a big believer in confronting the knots in your muscles, since I’m a massage therapist by trade. That mantra is also how I like to approach life—don’t avoid problems; work through them.

  “If you need to look him up before you start dating again, then by all means, let’s purge him.”

  Penny grabs her mobile device from her pocket, sets it on the table, and clicks on the Facebook app. She hovers her finger above her screen. “Are you ready to go down this rabbit hole, Delaney? You want to find out what he’s up to?”

  I nod. I need to know. I need to shut the door permanently on Tyler Nichols. Now that I’ve bumped into him, I want to get him out of my system once and for all.

  “Like a cleanse,” Penny mutters as she taps his name into the search bar.

  “Exactly. I’m going to the juice bar of Facebook to begin my detox,” I say, feeling strangely good about this plan. My girls are right. Time to move on. Time to try again.

  After a few quick searches, Penny looks up and declares, “Got him!”

  She turns the screen to me and I brace myself, expecting a mélange of casual shots of that gorgeous devil of a man.

  But his profile photo is . . . not him at all. It’s a cartoon cat shooting rainbows from his eyes into a bowl of cereal.

  I point, barely able to make words. “What the hell is that?”

  Curiosity seizes me, and I click on it, but there isn’t any info about the laser-eyed tabby. I toggle around his profile page for his relationship status.

  Single.

  I gulp, but then I remind myself he could be a single father. His status only proves he’s not with the mother of his child now. I click on a few more images, and quickly realization dawns on me. Against all my better judgment, I smile. I smirk. I grin. For some odd reason, I find myself ridiculously happy that I jumped to a big fat conclusion.

  “She’s his cousin’s kid,” I admit softly, the smile tugging my lips higher. Why does this fact make my shoulders feel light? Make a butterfly or two try to flutter around inside me?

  Penny claps. “Yes! That is great news!”

  Nicole gives her the evil eye. “Why are you clapping? Because he didn’t impregnate someone?” She grips my shoulders protectively. “That doesn’t mean we can let our girl ride that ride again.”

  I push aside that little flurry of happiness. Ignore it. Shove it back down. So what if he hangs out with his cousin’s kid? Doesn’t mean I should be all smiles and giggles. “That’s right. No rides will occur whatsoever,” I say, adopting a stern expression.

  Penny stares at Nicole, and my two best friends volley like tennis players. Apparently, I’m the tennis ball. Or rather, my love life is. “Why is that such a bad thing to get together with an ex? I reconnected with Gabriel,” Penny says, since her fiancé is a man she met ten years ago then lost touch with until they reunited recently.

  “Different,” Nicole says crisply. “You and Gabriel were star-crossed lovers, classic missed-connection style. You were destined to reconnect under the stars.” She turns to me and arches an eyebrow. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Tyler the reason you didn’t go to law school? Something about a debate competition?”

  The fresh, sharp memory of that last debate with him grapples me by the waist, yanking me to the ground. I’d made my choice shortly before then, but that competition was the nail in the coffin of law school for me.

  “Not really.” I wave off this moot discussion. “Guys, I’m not getting together with Tyler. That’s not even in the cards. I simply wanted to know if he was single, a father, or something else. Now I know, and it all helps with closure. I’m not even thinking about him anymore.”

  The waitress comes by and we order. When she leaves, I clasp my hands together resolutely. “Let’s do this. It’s time for me to start dating again.” If I’m ending this one-way thing my mind has had for Tyler, it’ll be far easier if I’m back in the saddle.

  Nicole thrusts her arms in the air. “Victory! And I have someone to start with right away. This guy I work with. His name is Trevor, and he’s kind of a hottie, and he’s also quite smart,” she says, then rattles off a list of traits, pointing out that Trevor and I have a lot in common. Penny chimes in with a suggestion that I go out with her fiancé’s business partner, and soon enough my girls are deeply enmeshed in matchmaking games.

  As they chat about my romantic fate, my phone buzzes, and I grab it. A Facebook message icon flashes on the screen. My heart beats faster, and it’s the oddest sensation. Like a wish against my better judgment.

  I swipe and discover a message from him.

  2

  Tyler

  * * *

  When you went out with someone for a year, spent nearly every night with them, attended college hockey games together, grabbed late-night snacks at Josiah Carberry’s, watched reruns of CSI under the covers, pelted each other with snowballs on the quad, and then fucked her in the dorms, in the showers, behind the stacks, in your car, in a cab, in your buddy’s dorm, under the covers after CSI, in her roommate’s closet, and once in the history lecture hall when you snuck in after hours, you get to know someone.

  And I don’t just mean physically. I don’t only know the roadmap of Delaney’s body. I know her. I know she loves her mom and her brother, fairy tales, and shoes, lilacs, and 90s hair bands, her nod to retro. Poison, Guns N’ Roses, and Aerosmith were her guilty pleasures. She used to joke about how she wanted to marry Axl Rose someday, especially since she loved his long hair. She’d say that as she ran a hand through my short hair.

  I know that she never met a vegetable she didn’t fall in love with, that she liked to argue—thoughtfully—with our history and poli-sci professors, that she was terrified of getting in trouble and always tried to please people, and that was because her father was rarely happy with her, nor with her mother. Which is why the dickhead walked out on them when she and her little brother were teenagers. But she also believes in the power to change, that true friends are worth their weight in diamonds, and that you can do anything you put your mind to.

  There’s something else I know about her, too. I once rocked her world.

  Look, I’m not being cocky, just honest. We were the night sky and the stars, loud thunder and crackling lightning, a Stratocaster and a kickass amp.

  Seeing her earlier today sparked all those memories, sent them rocketing back to the surface in seconds.

  That’s why when I drop Carly at her home a little later that morning, I give my niece a quick hug good-bye, and as she runs off to play with her mom and their dog, I make a beeline for the door. I need to track down Delaney and set the record straight. I don’t want her to think something about me, us, or the way we split that’s untrue.

  “In a mad rush to ditch me?”

  Clay strides across the hardwoods in the foyer of his Greenwich Village home. He’s my cousin, my mentor, and my business partner. Well, he’s the senior partner. I joined his firm a few years ago, and together we kick unholy ass as one
helluva pair of entertainment lawyers. Our client list is sick, and I’ve worked my ass off to nab some of the best ones.

  “Nah, just have some things to do,” I say, keeping it casual as I point toward the door.

  He strokes his chin, narrowing his brown eyes at me. “Yeah? Well, thanks for taking Carly to the park. She loves hanging out with you. Hope she didn’t cramp your single-man style,” he teases.

  He doesn’t know the half of it. But I could never fault that sweet girl for the misunderstanding that was clear in Delaney’s eyes. I wave off his comment. “Never. Your daughter is my style. Love her like crazy.”

  Clay claps me on the back. “Join the club. We have jackets.”

  I laugh, but I’m bouncing on the heels of my sneakers, ready to bolt. The need to find Delaney is like a buzzing in my brain saying do it now.

  “Had a little too much caffeine today?”

  “No. I saw Delaney, and I need to find her,” I say, because I’m not one to hide shit from my cousin.

  His mouth forms an O. “The one and only?”

  I nod. Clay knows the score. He’s well aware of what went down eight years ago, even though he wasn’t entirely on my side when I ended things. “How was that?”

  “Illuminating. You ever feel like something just hits you out of the blue? Bam.” I slam my palm against my forehead.

  “Like seeing your ex and regretting not being with her?” he asks, his tone full of the wisdom that happily married dudes seem to have.

  I bristle at that word. “I wouldn’t call it regret.” I’m thirty and single, and even if my last few hookups felt more meaningless than I would like, that doesn’t mean I’m experiencing the Great Remorse of 2017.

  More just like a need.

  A desire.

  A want.

  And I’m all about taking chances.

  “Yeah? What would you call this intense need to see the girl you were madly in love with in college?”