Mixed Signals

by Diane Barnes

Bringing in photos of myself to show to my coworkers doesn’t sound like something I would do, especially because when my father retired I was new to the company. “I don’t remember.” I struggle to pull a nacho out of the pile because the melted cheese is causing all the chips to stick together.

  Ben pushes the plate closer to me. “Probably saw them on Facebook then.”

  Now I remember. Christian posted pictures from that night and tagged me and Nico. Nico had been elbowed in the face during a basketball game a few days before and had a black eye. He was mad my brother put the pictures on social media. “Oh yeah, Nico’s eye was messed up in that picture.”

  Ben shrugs. “Don’t remember.”

  “You remember my dress but not his mangled eye? There were close to two hundred comments on the picture and they were all about Nico’s face.”

  Ben starts to say something, but the waitress returns with our drinks, a beer for him and a glass of wine for me. As she places them in front of us, I notice a group of women at the bar are checking him out. “I think they’re into you,” I say, dipping my head in their direction.

  He turns toward them. One of them waves. He looks back at me. “She’s not bad,” he says. “Let’s find someone for you.” We both search the room. Even though we’re in a sports bar, there are definitely more women than men here, probably about four to one. “How about him?” he asks, pointing to a scraggly looking man with greasy blond hair and a long, unkempt beard. The guy’s shirt and pants are stained. “Filthy, just like you like them.”

  “Oh yeah, the dirtier, the better.”

  “I can get pretty dirty,” Ben says in a flirty tone.

  “Mmm,” I say, sipping my drink. “You are downright nasty in your color-coordinated outfits.”

  Ben looks around the room. “There isn’t anyone here who does it for you?”

  A bunch of high school boys to our right are shooting spitballs at each other, two old men to our left are staring up at the television, and a really cute boy about eight years old is having dinner with his mother in front of us. “Nope.”

  He leans across the table toward me. “Not even me?”

  I try to answer in a joking manner, but the look of fear that crossed my face may have already outed me. “Well, that goes without saying. Too bad you don’t plug it in at work.” I wink at him.

  “I’d make an exception for you.” He sloshes his beer around his glass. “Have you ever thought about us together?”

  My face burns as I remember Nico lowering me to the bed in the hotel room after the holiday party, Ben’s face popping into my mind, and how I pretended it was Ben in bed with me. He continues to stare at me like he expects an answer. “Nope.” If I could regularly hit notes that high, I might have a career as a lead soprano.

  My hand is splayed out on the table. He reaches across and covers it with his, slowly moving his finger back and forth over my wrist. My muscles tighten. “Not even when we were dancing together at the holiday party?” It’s a rhetorical question, the way he asks it.

  Maybe I should be truthful. Tell him that I fantasized about him. Take Ellie’s advice. Invite him back to my apartment. Make the fantasies reality and move on with my life. I take a deep breath in and slowly exhale. “Not even then.” I pull my hand out from under his.

  “I think you’re lying,” he says. “And I’m looking forward to dancing with you again at Renee’s party.”

  * * *

  In the middle of the night I get up for a glass of water. I make my way downstairs through my dark apartment. A loud thump comes from the kitchen. I freeze in the living room, holding my breath while my heart beats wildly in my chest. I stand that way for several seconds, listening, but there is no other sound. I continue on my way. The light above the stove is on, casting large shadows on the wall. There’s another thump. I quickly turn my head in its direction and jump, seeing what I think is a man sitting at the table. When the figure doesn’t move, I realize it’s not a person at all. It’s Nico’s jacket. I hear the noise again. This time I know it’s the ice maker. I let out the breath I was holding.

  Sipping my glass of water, I rest my hand on the back of Nico’s coat. The soft leather is cool to my touch. He was wearing this jacket the day I met him. We were sitting next to each other at a Red Sox game. I was there with my brother and sister-in-law, and Nico was with one of his friends. It was early in the season, so when the game started it was warm. By the eighth inning, the temperature had plummeted more than thirty degrees. Although I was wearing a sweatshirt, I was freezing and decided to take the train back to Newton.

  “You’re leaving with the score tied?” Nico asked. I knew enough about baseball and the Red Sox to have a conversation about the game, and we had spent most of the night talking. “I thought you were a real fan, not a pink hat.” That’s what he called people, women especially, who came to the game to socialize instead of watch it.

  “It’s freezing.”

  He slipped off his jacket and handed it to me. “I don’t want you to miss Big Papi’s walk-off.” He said it like he was absolutely certain David Ortiz would hit a game-winning home run. A few innings later, when he did, Nico pulled me into a tight embrace. After I agreed to have dinner with him the following night, he said I could wear his coat home. “This way I’m sure you won’t back out and I get to see you again,” he said. It wasn’t until we’d been dating for a year that I realized how much he loved this stupid jacket and what a risk he had taken by letting me leave with it.

  He’s coming back for it. He has to.

  Chapter 23

  Ellie’s been traveling for business, but today she is back in the office. At lunch, she asks me to walk to the sandwich shop around the corner so we can catch up. An inch of slush coats the sidewalk from the melting snow and ice, so we walk single file in the narrow road, stepping around deep puddles every few feet. Halfway there, she shouts something over her shoulder. The only word I can make out is Nico because a delivery truck rumbles by at the same time, making it impossible to hear.

  I wait until we reach the sub shop’s parking lot to speak. “What about Nico?” A cold gust of wind kicks up from seemingly nowhere, reminding me that in March and sometimes in April, winter likes to sucker punch us. Just when we think we’ve moved on to sunshine, blue skies, and warm temperatures, BAM! Bad weather returns.

  Ellie and I are side-by-side now. She grabs hold of my wrist with her gloved hand. “I saw the survey on the show’s website. It’s time to give back the ring and forget about Nico.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “You’re not trying hard enough.” She opens the door to the restaurant and waits for me to pass through. There’s a long line snaking from the front counter around the tables to the back wall. We take our place at the end. “Tomorrow night with Ben,” she says, “make it happen.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I admit, remembering the pink Victoria’s Secret bag dangling from Nico’s fingertips.

  “We know what the pros are. What are the cons?” she asks. It’s the same question she asks in most of our work meetings.

  “It could ruin our friendship.”

  “Or it could take it to the next level.”

  I tell her about the night at Donovan’s. How Ben was flirty and brought up our dancing together at the holiday party. “He said he was looking forward to doing it again.”

  “So, he’s definitely up for it,” she says. “You just have to show him that you are too.”

  “How am I going to do that?” I ask as we reach the counter.

  Before she places her order, she gives me a look similar to the one Mr. O’Brien often gives me that makes me feel like the stupidest person in the world.

  Once we’re seated with our food, she offers advice. “Be flirty. Make subtle innuendos. Touch him. Dance with him the way you did at the Christmas party.” Her suggestions remind me of the articles in Seventeen magazine that Rachel and I used to read out loud to each other when we were in our early teens. It
’s what we did all summer sitting by her pool.

  I bite into my veggie pocket. A nasty earthy flavor fills my mouth. Damn! I told them no mushrooms! I gulp down my soda to wash away the taste. “Isn’t it bad that I’d be using him to get over Nico?”

  Ellie laughs. “He won’t mind.”

  I inspect my sandwich for more fungus.

  “Just don’t expect more,” Ellie says.

  “What do you mean?”

  She puts down her chicken Caesar wrap. “Sleeping with him doesn’t mean the two of you will be in a relationship.” She picks up her sandwich again. “Don’t think of it as anything but a night of fun.”

  Rachel always teases me because I’ve never had sex outside a serious relationship. She says I should have been born before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Well, it’s time to prove that post-Nico Jillian is different. If I’m going to have a one-night stand, Ben’s the best person to have it with because we’re friends and I care about him.

  “I will think of it as nothing more than moving on from Nico,” I say.

  Chapter 24

  Late Saturday morning, I carry my overflowing laundry basket down the steep stairway to the basement. The musty smell hits me as soon as I hit the bottom step. I try not to breathe in the scent. Stupid, I realize, because it’s not like I can hold my breath the entire time I’m down here.

  The lights are on in the back corner where Mr. O’Brien let me set up my washing machine and dryer. For a second, I think I forgot to shut them off when I was here last, but then I see the old man hunched over his workbench.

  “Hello,” I yell while I’m still several feet away so that I don’t frighten him.

  Startled, he jumps and turns in my direction. “What are you doing sneaking up on me like that?”

  “Just came down to do my laundry.”

  “You scared me half to death,” he says. Several broken pieces from what looks like an old coffee mug are scattered on the workbench in front of him. He slides them around, trying to fit them together as though he’s doing a puzzle. The man hates to throw anything away, as evidenced by the stacks of plastic bins piled from the floor to the ceiling four rows deep along every grungy concrete wall of the cellar. Each of the containers is carefully labeled to identify its contents: Colleen’s artwork, Colleen’s baby pictures, 1996 Christmas cards, Playbills—That’s the one that gets me, because I can’t see the old man spending an evening in the theater.

  As I sort through my dirty clothes, tossing bras and panties into the washer, I occasionally glance over at Mr. O’Brien because I’m embarrassed to be handling them in front of him. He’s too busy rummaging through a drawer of his red tool chest to pay any attention to me though. He pulls out Elmer’s glue, rubber cement, a glue stick, Gorilla Glue wood adhesive, and finally clear epoxy, which apparently is what he’s looking for because he returns everything else to the drawer. He lowers his head toward the workbench and squirts the epoxy onto a thin wooden stick and then carefully transfers the adhesive to a broken piece of the mug. It seems like an awful lot of work to repair an old coffee cup.

  When I finish loading my dirty clothes into the machine, he’s still painstakingly gluing the pieces back together. “Goodbye,” I say quietly so that I don’t scare him again.

  He doesn’t even look up. I make my way toward the stairs but stop when I walk into a spiderweb stretching from a piece of lumber resting against the wall to the metal shelves housing more of Mr. O’Brien’s tools. I cringe as I brush it aside.

  Mr. O’Brien clears his throat. “Zac knocked it off the table this morning,” he says. “Caught him throwing it in the trash. Don’t even know why he had to touch it.” He looks up now, his blue eyes watering more than usual. “It was Carol’s. Drank her coffee from it every single morning.”

  Now I feel my eyes misting up as well. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?” he asks. “Zac’s the one who broke it.”

  I climb back up the stairs with my empty laundry basket. Somehow, it seems heavier than it did on the way down.

  * * *

  After my laundry is done, I spend the rest of the day getting ready for Renee’s party. I go to the nail salon around the corner from my apartment and get a French manicure and pedicure. From there, I drive across town to see Karen, my hairdresser, to have her style my hair because I can never get it to hold a curl the way she can.

  Karen was cutting my hair long before I ever met Nico. Her husband, Phil, is a huge sports fan who regularly listens to BS Morning Sports Talk, so she knows all about Nico’s and my split. She even sent an email to tell me how sorry she was. “I was so excited when I saw you on the books for a blow dry,” she says as soon as I walk in. “Does this mean you have a special date tonight?”

  How can I possibly explain what tonight is? “Kind of.”

  She hands me a cape and leads me to the sink for a wash. “So, who is he? How did you meet?”

  “I’ve known him for a long time,” I answer. “We work together.”

  “Ohhh, an office romance. How scandalous. Are you keeping it on the down low?”

  Jeez, I hadn’t thought about that. If Ben and I sleep together, I don’t want anyone at the office but Ellie knowing, especially not Renee, who gets her hair cut at this same salon. I better squelch this right now so that rumors don’t start. “It’s not really a romance. One of our other coworkers is celebrating her twenty-fifth anniversary by renewing her vows, and we’re going to the party together.”

  The water she’s spraying over my head is much too hot. I jerk upright.

  “Sorry,” she says. She adjusts the temperature and is quiet while she pumps the shampoo into her palm. “You must be into him if you’re getting your hair done though.”

  “We’re friends. I guess he’s my work husband.” I feel all the tension leaving my muscles as she massages my scalp with her fingertips.

  Jason, another hairdresser who’s washing one of his clients’ hair at the sink next to ours, chimes in. “Karen’s going to have you looking so hot when you leave here that your work husband will be asking for conjugal privileges tonight.”

  That’s exactly what I’m hoping for.

  Chapter 25

  Back at home, I have less than an hour to get dressed. Instead of picking underwear from my usual drawer, I go to the nightstand where I keep my special lingerie and select a red lacy brassiere and panty set that Nico gave me for Valentine’s Day last year. I swear I feel like a porn star whenever I wear them, which, okay, was just one time—the night Nico gave them to me, because he insisted I try them on. I look in the mirror now and admire myself in them. Not too bad. I fantasize about taking a selfie and firing it off to Nico. Going out with Ben tonight and look what I’m wearing. No doubt the picture would end up on BS Morning Talk Show’s website.

  I slip on a dress I took from Rachel. It’s short-sleeved and green, or as Ralph Lauren likes to call the color, malachite. When I tried it on earlier, I thought it made me look skinny because of the way it twists and gathers at the waist. Looking in the mirror now though, I decide it makes me look matronly. I take it off and instead put on the blue dress that I wore to my father’s retirement party.

  Just as I finish changing, the bell rings. Ben is twenty minutes early picking me up. My breath catches in my throat when I open the door and see him standing there. Dressed in a charcoal gray suit with a light blue shirt and solid dark blue tie, he’s holding a bouquet of flowers. He always looks handsome at work, but tonight on my front step, he is disturbingly good-looking.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to play it cool and ignoring the pounding in my chest.

  He stares at me, grinning through the storm door.

  Mr. O’Brien’s station wagon pulls into the driveway. I hurriedly usher Ben into the house before the old man gets out of his car. I don’t want to introduce them. When Nico and I first started going out, Mr. O’Brien would wait up for me. After a few dates, when it became clear Nico would be sticking ar
ound for a while, my landlord made a point of knocking on my door to introduce himself, stopping just short of asking Nico his intentions. Later Mr. O’Brien mentioned that Nico didn’t look him in the eye when the two shook hands, something my landlord apparently never got over.

  “Your hair. It’s different,” Ben says.

  Does he hate it? “Same hair I’ve always had.” I attempt to smile, but now I wonder if Karen overdid it with the curls.

  “It’s not usually curly,” he says. Damn. I should have styled it myself instead of shelling out forty bucks plus a tip. He grins. “It looks amazing.”

  That Karen! She knows exactly what she’s doing! Worth every penny!

  Ben eyes me appreciatively. “Did you wear that dress for me?” he asks in a low voice.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, you look really hot.” He steps toward me. I think he’s going to kiss me, but he hands me the flowers.

  “These make tonight seem like an official date,” I say, laughing to make it seem like I don’t really think it’s a date.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Ben asks with a cocky grin.

  I remember Ellie’s instructions to be flirty. “It can be anything you want.” I was going for coy. Judging from Ben’s confused expression, I didn’t pull it off. I should have made my voice breathy. I repeat it in my head that way. It definitely sounds more flirty. I decide to use a breathy voice the rest of the night.

  We stand awkwardly in the foyer, staring at each other. “How about a glass of wine before we go?” If I’m going to go through with what I have in mind tonight, I’ll need alcohol, lots of alcohol.

  With his hand on my lower back, Ben escorts me down the hall. “I have a good feeling about tonight,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  In the doorframe between my living room and kitchen, Ben comes to an abrupt stop. I follow his eyes right to Nico’s jacket, still hanging over the back of the chair. “You still have that?”

  “I just—” I just what? I’m just waiting for him to come back? “I haven’t had a chance to return it to him yet.”