Abby_Donovan: Since we’ve been talking Witness Protection, how about Goodnight Uncle Junior?
MarkBaynard: Goodnight Carmela
Abby_Donovan: Goodnight Tony
MarkBaynard: Goodnight Meadow
Abby_Donovan: Goodnight Silvio
MarkBaynard: Goodnight Adriana
Abby_Donovan: Goodnight Big … um … Goodnight Salvatore
MarkBaynard: Goodnight Tweetheart …
“Goodnight, Tweetheart,” Abby whispered, putting her Mac-Book to sleep with a stroke of her fingertip.
Her hands lingered over the keyboard. Despite the smoky warmth of Steve Tyrell’s voice crooning “For All We Know” from her iPod dock speakers, she suddenly felt very alone. How could Mark be halfway across the world when she would have sworn he’d been in this room with her only seconds ago?
She dragged her gaze away from the computer screen to gaze out the window. While she had been tweeting, the clouds that had been hanging over the city since early that morning had finally decided to deliver on their promise of rain. On Fifth Avenue far below, brightly colored umbrellas were springing open like something out of a child’s pop-up book. Twilight was still hours away, but the cabbies had flicked on their headlights, bathing the slick streets converging on Grand Army Plaza in a shimmering wash of silver. On the far side of the plaza, the wind tossed the tender green leaves crowning the park’s ancient oaks.
In spite of the melancholy gloom of the afternoon, Abby could almost feel the seductive warmth of the sun against her face. Could almost see herself standing on a stone terrace with vineyards stretched out below her as far as the eye could see. Could almost smell the ripening grapes hanging lush and heavy on the vines.
She turned, her floral sundress rippling around her ankles, only to find a man standing at the edge of the terrace. Though his face was in shadow, she somehow knew he was smiling and that his smile held the unspoken promise that she would never again be as lonely as she had been before she turned to find him standing there.
Willow Tum-Tum bounded into her lap, jerking Abby out of her ridiculous daydream. Sighing, she stroked her fingers through Willow’s thick, soft ruff, coaxing an adoring purr from the cat’s throat. If she didn’t rein in her imagination soon, she was going to have to turn her hand to writing the romance novels she secretly loved to read in the bathtub.
She should have never let herself be drawn into this situation. Wasn’t social media notorious for establishing a sense of false intimacy? How else to explain the way she’d been blurting out intimate details about her life, her career, and her past to a man she’d never met, a man she probably never would meet?
She wouldn’t have dared tell her editor about the fear that paralyzed her every time she sat down at her computer to finish Chapter Five of her new book. And no one, not even her best friend, knew how adrift she’d felt since her father died.
Her dad had always been her biggest cheerleader. He might have played the role of big, tough army guy for his troops, but he never missed a chance to help her with her homework or braid her hair before bedtime. If she was in a school play, he was always front and center in the first row of the auditorium, beaming with pride as she lisped out her lines or pirouetted across the stage dressed as Pocahontas or a Thanksgiving pumpkin.
She still remembered calling him late one night when she was writing her book and tearfully telling him she was having trouble with a scene because the heroine’s dad in the book was dying and she couldn’t bear to write a dead dad scene.
He had thought about it for a minute, then said, “That’s okay, honey. Go ahead and finish me off. Everybody’s gotta go sometime.”
After Time Out of Mind had been published, he had loaded down his car trunk with boxes of books and tried to sell a copy to everybody he met. His easygoing charm and pride in his only daughter’s accomplishments were so irresistible that he usually ended up selling two.
She picked up the framed photo sitting on the corner of her desk. It was a grainy Polaroid she had taken of her parents in happier times when they probably weren’t much older than she was now. They were standing on Carolina Beach against a backdrop of sand and sea. Her dad had one burly arm draped over her mother’s shoulders. He was grinning at the camera like a mischievous nine-year-old while her mother laughed up at him, her eyes hidden by a pair of oversize sunglasses and her long brown hair dancing in the wind. The hint of sadness that usually haunted her smile had vanished, if only for the instant it had taken for Abby to freeze that moment in time.
Abby hadn’t realized until after her dad’s death that there were hardly any pictures of the three of them together. One of them had always been holding the camera. She gently returned the photo to its place, her smile a wistful echo of her mother’s.
She supposed this was what came of pouring your heart out to a total stranger. Mooning over old photos while listening to the lonely wail of a saxophone, two cats your only company.
She closed the screen of her laptop with a decisive click. Bantering and “flirting” with Mark through Direct Messages had seemed harmless enough, but making a date to take their relationship to the next level felt more than a little disingenuous.
She glanced at her Far Side desk calendar. It was only Monday. She had four days to decide whether or not she was going to make an appearance at the appointed time or stand up her cyberdate in favor of a real man, one who might be able to offer her more than just words on a screen.
She had four days to forget all about Mark Baynard.
Chapter Five
I met a man online.”
Abby’s announcement might not have been so dramatic if it hadn’t been gasped out in what sounded like her dying breath. Fortunately her friend Margo was accustomed to her wheezing so she didn’t whip out her BlackBerry and start dialing 911 or leap off her own treadmill and go running for the gym defibrillator.
Using the towel draped around her neck to wipe the sweat from her eyes, Abby glanced down at the treadmill’s digital readout. She groaned, finding it hard to believe she’d only been slogging along for seventeen minutes when it felt more like seventeen hours. She much preferred taking a long, leisurely stroll in the park or Partying Off the Pounds while Richard Simmons shouted that she was born to be a star. She had always hated to run unless something was chasing her—preferably a hungry bear.
She shot Margo a resentful glance. Margo had the long, lean muscles and regal posture of an Amazonian queen. She ran with her head straight up, her cocoa-colored eyes fixed on some invisible kingdom she had yet to conquer.
Margo didn’t even sweat. She gleamed.
If Abby didn’t love her so much, she would have hated her.
“So I met a man online,” she repeated. “I know that probably sounds pathetic.”
“Not coming from a budding agoraphobic,” Margo replied. Although her pace was twice as fast as Abby’s and her beautifully toned arms were pumping like a pair of well-oiled pistons, she was still perfectly capable of carrying on a normal conversation, placing a stock order on the headset of her BlackBerry, or singing the opening aria from La Traviata. “Unless you’re into those guys who deliver Chinese food, where else would you meet a man? You hardly ever leave your apartment except to go to Starbucks and visit your mom in the nursing home.”
“Hey! I get out! I met you at the gym here today, didn’t I?”
“And how many times have you turned me down for lunch in the past three months?”
“I told you I was sorry about that. I’ve been extremely busy lately.”
Margo cocked one perfectly waxed eyebrow in her direction, her expression more compassionate than snide. “Doing what? Finishing your book?”
Abby felt her throat begin to close up as it did whenever anyone mentioned her work in progress. Or her work not in progress. “I’ll have you know that I just may be on the verge of my biggest creative breakthrough yet.”
“On what? The title page? The dedication?”
“
Well, it certainly won’t be dedicated to you this time,” Abby muttered under her breath.
“Look, sugar,” Margo drawled, making Abby wince. The sweeter and thicker Margo’s Atlanta accent got, the more dangerous she became. She’d been known to make the grown men in her brokerage firm cry simply by sliding a “God love you” or a “bless your little heart” into their annual performance reviews. “I don’t mean to be so hard on you, but I’m afraid you’re only a few takeout orders away from becoming some crazy cat lady who stays triple dead-bolted in her apartment twenty-four hours a day and bakes poisoned cookies for the children in her building.”
“I believe you have to have more than two cats to qualify as a crazy cat lady,” Abby replied stiffly. “Forty-two is optimal. And you know I’m a rotten cook so the poisoning will probably be ruled accidental. Besides, if I don’t turn something in to my publisher soon, I won’t have an apartment. I’ll be pushing a shopping cart full of all my worldly belongings—and my cats—around the park.”
Margo snorted. “The mayor won’t even let you get away with that these days. That’s just going to earn you a one-way bus ticket to Boca Raton.”
“Sadly enough, that’s starting to sound like a perfectly good option. I’ve heard Boca Raton is lovely this time of year.”
Margo slowed her pace to match Abby’s—a sign that she’d begun her cool down. “So just exactly where did you find this guy—www.EscapedConvicts.com?”
“I met him on Twitter,” Abby reluctantly admitted.
“Well, that bodes well for a long-term relationship. At least if he dumps you he can do it in one hundred forty characters or less, which is so much better than on a Post-it note.”
“Is this a bad time to remind you that we met while speed dating?” Abby asked, referring to the dreaded urban game of musical chairs that involved answering a matchmaking cattle call, then spending three to eight minutes interviewing a potential lifetime mate before moving on to the next prospect.
It was only after she and Margo had drawn their numbers and ended up sitting across a table from each other at a crowded bar in Soho that they had realized it was a gay speed dating service. They had sat gazing awkwardly at each other for over a minute before Abby had blurted out, “I’m afraid I’m not gay. But if I was, I’m sure I’d find you very attractive.”
“I’m not gay, either,” Margo had confessed, dissolving in husky ripples of laughter. “But if I was, you sure as hell wouldn’t be my type. I’d want one of those butch chicks with the tattoos and the mullet.”
They’d spent the next eight minutes comparing dating horror stories. When the bell rang, signaling that their time was up, they’d ducked out a fire exit and spent half the night at the Back Fence in Greenwich Village listening to jazz and drinking chocolate martinis.
“Based on how we met,” Abby said, “our relationship should have only lasted for about seven and a half minutes instead of three years.”
“Just what do you know about this guy?”
“His name is Mark … I think,” she added under her breath. “He’s on sabbatical from his job as a college professor. His first marriage ended badly, possibly from adultery—hers, not his. He knows a lot about pop culture and classic TV. Oh, and he doesn’t get along with his mom.”
“Perfect. He’s unemployed, divorced, has mommy issues, and can beat you at Trivial Pursuit because he has nothing better to do all day than sit around and watch TV. I hate to be the one to point this out, but he doesn’t exactly sound like a candidate for Mr. Right. Or even Mr. Right Now. Maybe you should consider EscapedConvicts.com after all. You might be able to find some guy with a job, even if it’s only working in the prison laundry.”
Abby could feel her temper rising. “ ‘On sabbatical’ is not the same thing as unemployed. He’s also funny and smart and he makes me laugh—something I haven’t felt a whole hell of a lot like doing lately. And I know the Internet can create this false sense of intimacy, but it’s still the weirdest thing. It’s like I can tell him things I can’t tell anybody else. Things I can’t even tell—”
“Your best friend?” Margo interjected wryly.
Abby blew out a sheepish sigh. “He even asked me out on a date for this Friday.”
“Oooh … a tweet-up?” Margo pursed her glossy red lips, actually looking intrigued. “In a public place, I hope … with nine-one-one programmed into your speed dial.”
“Well … it’s not exactly a real date. I’m supposed to meet him on Twitter Friday night at seven o’clock. He’s sort of … well … in Italy right now.”
That confession forced Margo to do the unthinkable. She turned off her treadmill. Before the full forty-five minutes of her workout was over. As the rubber belt slowed to a halt, Abby briefly considered leaping off of her own machine while it was still running and making a desperate dash for the women’s locker room. But she knew she wouldn’t make it past the row of ellipticals before Margo would be on her like a cheetah on a lame gazelle.
Margo stepped off the treadmill and made a brief show of toweling the nonexistent sweat from her throat and chest, no doubt to make Abby feel marginally better about the steady stream of perspiration still trickling between her own breasts. “Honey, I know you haven’t dated a lot of guys since you and Dean broke up, but could you have possibly chosen a more inaccessible man? The only way this guy could be less attainable was if he was still married. Which, for all you know, bless your little heart, he is.”
Abby cringed. If Margo followed up her “bless your little heart” with a “God love you,” Abby was going to end up bleeding to death all over the floor of the gym.
“Look—Dean dumped me over a year ago. Don’t you think it’s time I dipped my toe back into the metaphorical pool?”
“Dean might have turned out to be a cheating scumbag, but at least he was real. This guy is like the Old Spice guy but without the towel and horse. He’s nothing but a fantasy. An empty Armani suit you can fill with whoever you want him to be.”
“Hugh Jackman,” Abby murmured, slowing her own pace to a lethargic walk. “Or Samwise Gamgee.”
“What?”
Abby shook her head. “Nothing.” She sighed, having run out of irrational arguments to counter her friend’s perfectly logical concerns. “I haven’t even decided whether or not I’m going to show up on Friday night. Maybe I should just let the whole thing drop before it gets out of hand and he wants to start naked Skyping or something.”
“Or having tweetsex.”
Abby frowned. “Is it even possible to have sex in a hundred and forty characters or less?”
Margo rolled her eyes. “If you’d dated some of the men I have, you’d know it’s possible to have sex in one hundred forty seconds or less.”
“Ah, speed sex instead of speed dating.” Abby turned off her own treadmill and joined Margo on the floor. “I wish I could introduce the two of you. I think he’d like you.”
Margo slung one lean, sculpted arm around Abby’s shoulder as they made their way toward the women’s locker room. “Just tell him I’m your obligatory sassy but wise African-American best friend and I’ll drop-kick his ass to the moon if he breaks your heart.”
“Should I tell him your name is Chantal or Bon Qui Qui? ‘Margo’ is a little too vanilla, don’t you think?”
“Just tell him I’m Oprah to your Gayle.”
“Hey, you got to be Oprah last week! It’s your turn to be Gayle to my Oprah.”
“You can call me whatever you like as long as they get Beyoncé to play me when they make a movie of your life.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of Kathy Griffin.”
Margo slanted her an evil look, her embrace tightening into a choke hold. “Do it and I’ll drop-kick your lily-white ass to the moon.”
“You’re right, God love your little heart. On second thought, maybe RuPaul will be available.” Shrugging off her friend’s arm, Abby ducked through the locker room door just in time to avoid the deadly snap of Marg
o’s gym towel.
Her eyes glued to the Direct Message column on her Tweet-deck, Abby took another nervous sip from the glass of chardonnay perched on the desk next to her MacBook. Given how rapidly it was disappearing, she should have kept the bottle within reach instead of tucking it back in the fridge.
She’d never felt quite so ridiculous. Not even when wearing a bunny costume and reading badly rhymed poetry to a squirming herd of preschoolers.
There was no reason for the frantic fluttering of the butterflies in her stomach. It wasn’t as if she was waiting for a knock on the door or even for the phone to ring. Yet she felt every bit as edgy as she had when waiting for Brad Wooten to pick her up for the junior prom. He had arrived right on time, posed for a few obligatory Polaroids, whisked her off to the prom in his Eddie Bauer Limited Edition Ford Explorer, then dumped her during the second verse of Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” after his pep squad ex-girlfriend whispered in his ear that she wanted him back.
The two of them had celebrated their reunion by slipping away for a quickie in the backseat of that same Ford Explorer while Abby found a pay phone and called her dad to come and get her. She’d managed to gulp back her tears until her father had pulled his battered Toyota into the back of the high school parking lot where they had agreed to meet, pushed open the car door from inside, and said, “Come on, baby. Let’s go home.”
She glanced at the digital clock in the corner of her computer screen. 6:56 p.m. A mere three seconds had ticked away since she’d last checked it. Considering how close she’d come to chickening out of their “date,” it would be ironic if Mark was the one to stand her up. He’d probably found some voluptuous dark-eyed Italian beauty straight out of a Fellini film to help him crush some grapes between his toes and forgot all about her.
Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the screen only made Abby feel sillier. She’d actually traded her coffee-stained sweats for a black silk blouse and a pair of neatly creased linen slacks. She’d loosed her wavy mass of curls from their obligatory scrunchie, applied a touch of peach gloss to her lips, and dabbed a little Obsession behind each ear.
Goodnight Tweetheart Page 5
