The Comeback Route

by Jamie Bennett

  “Why do you have a new number? What’s the matter?” she wrote back suspiciously.

  It took me forever to type on this phone, which didn’t have a real keyboard, but I managed to impress on her that I was fine, everything was fine, and I didn’t want her to spend another moment thinking about me. She was on her honeymoon! And then I trudged back to the apartment very slowly, practically dragging the groceries on the ground. Maybe they called me “Tough as Nails” in Texas but those bags were very heavy.

  “He makes you carry the groceries?” Del grumbled as he hurried down the building steps to help me.

  “Nico paid for them,” I defended him. He had, because I had grabbed a credit card from his wallet on the way out, which was totally permissible, because I had left a note of explanation and I did plan to return it. And lo and behold, Nico had been helping too while I was out, because there were cleaning people motoring through the apartment when I got up to it and the vomit was already gone from the floor. It was heavenly. I talked to them for a while as I wolfed down a sandwich and tried to stay out of the way. Nico and his agent were nowhere to be found so I was at my leisure to take another shower and get dressed again. This time I went for pajamas, because a wave of tiredness had practically swamped me. It had turned out that sleeping on a bus was not as easy or comfortable as a person might have thought.

  But Nico’s bed was plenty comfortable, especially with the new, fresh sheets that the cleaning people had put on it. I snuggled down right in the middle, wondering which side he liked to pick. I tended to spread myself out like a flying squirrel in bed, but I felt that we would be able to work out a compromise. I lay and thought about cuddling with him, curling around his big, warm body. Feeling the hard muscle under my hands, smelling that kind of outdoorsy scent he had. It made me want to smell him at that very moment, so I got up and took a sweatshirt out of his closet to put on. It wasn’t as good as the real Nico but I was damn cozy. I kept thinking about him and listening to the vacuum humming quietly in the other room, until my eyes closed and I conked right out.

  “Tatum.” A hand shook me. “Miss Smith, this is my room. You’re in my bed.”

  “I’ll move over,” I told Nico. I patted the space next to me blindly, not wanting to open my eyes. His couches sucked, but his bed seriously rocked.

  “No, you have to go.” Now the hands went under me, and dragged me through the sheets. Nico lifted me up and put me on my feet, and I stood, wobbling and yawning.

  “What time is it?” I asked, and yawned again.

  “Around six.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen to me. It’s ok for you to stay here for a while, but not in my bed. We’re not going to get together like that.”

  “Oh, please!” I told him. “You wish. I was just trying out your mattress.”

  “Uh huh.” He took his hands away.

  “Six, huh? Let’s have dinner, because I’m hungry again.” I stretched, bending backwards and shaking off the sleep. “Come on.” I wiggled as I walked down the hall, trying to wake up, and Nico followed me.

  “Can you cook?” he asked.

  “No. You?”

  “Nope,” he sighed.

  “We can figure it out together,” I assured him, and he put his hand on my shoulder again briefly.

  “As strange as it is, and as much as I may regret telling you this, I’m kind of glad you came,” he told me.

  I turned, smiling. “Me too.”

  “Can I have my credit card back?”

  I pulled the plastic out of the pocket of my PJ shorts. “Here’s your driver’s license, too.”

  Chapter 3

  Live your truth! Don’t let anyone tell you anything different from what you believe and close your mind to other opinions. Put your fingers in your ears and sing, if you need to. [Live Your Truth is also the title of my latest book, available now! Click here to purchase!]

  Yours in absolute certainty, Mysti

  “My nephew said your name was Sincerity.”

  “Sincerity is my middle name,” I explained.

  “He also said you were from Oregon. This all says Michigan. And that your middle name is Elizabeth, not Sincerity.” Aunt Lucy looked down at the stuff I had spread on her bakery counter: my résumé, driver’s license, passport, certificate of completion of the euchre dealers’ course, and a headshot. She picked that up and looked at it. “This is a good picture.”

  “Thank you. Salvador said you needed help in the mornings?” I asked. This was the Aunt Lucy that my cabdriver from the bus depot had directed me to call to talk about a job in her bakery. I had decided to chat in person instead, and had gotten up before Nico and driven over. It was in a neighborhood that wasn’t too far from our apartment in Brickell, but I had gotten lost several times. Mostly that was because Nico’s car was hard to drive. I couldn’t see over the dashboard that well or really reach the pedals with any great assurance.

  “I need help in the back, the early shift,” Salvador’s Aunt Lucy told me. “You would start by training for as long as it takes and then take over from Josefa and do it by yourself. She’s been here for fifteen years and she’s tired of the early mornings. Do you speak Spanish? She’s not great with English.”

  “I’m willing to learn. And I’m definitely a morning person,” I assured her. “Rise and shine. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning, and all that.” I inhaled deeply. It smelled wonderful, like sugar and pastries and bread. I was filling up with carbs just by breathing. And it was so old-fashioned and pretty, with all the pink cardboard boxes waiting to be filled with treats, the black and white floor, and pots of red geraniums in the window. I was going to love working at this bakery.

  “Three AM,” Lucy said.

  “What?”

  “Your shift will start at three AM. We open at seven.”

  I smiled at her. “Great. I’ll be here tomorrow bright and early.”

  She stuck her hand over the counter. “Welcome to El Asturiano bakery, Tatum Elizabeth Sincerity Smith.”

  And just like that, I had a job, my first one ever. Of course, I had done some stints volunteering that my high school had forced on us because we needed something to write on our college applications. I had been shipped off to California for boarding school, to a little agricultural town tucked in the mountains whose second major industry behind citrus and avocado trees was a bunch of private schools. I had been forced to volunteer on an organic farm, giving tours for tourists of the olive trees, the heirloom tomato garden, and the French lavender.

  It had actually been pretty fun, but it had also been fun to skip out and drive to Ventura to use our fake IDs. I hadn’t been the most reliable volunteer, but I was going to show up for this job at El Asturiano bakery. I was going to be the best baker in the business.

  “Nico?” I called when I came in through the elevator. He was watching TV, lying across some pillows on one of the terrible couches and half asleep. The night before, after we had put together a somewhat palatable meal, he had gone out.

  “I think that’s a bad idea,” I had told him as he looked for his keys. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to lie low the night after a near-arrest? God, I grew up with that as my guiding principle.”

  “Goodbye, Tatum,” he had answered, and left. But now he looked all tired and haggard again. I hadn’t heard him come in late, but I usually slept like the dead, and he had been passed out in his big bed when I had checked in the morning.

  I sat down. “Bad night?”

  “Your butt is on my legs.”

  “You take up the whole couch,” I pointed out. “Where was I supposed to sit?”

  “The other couch? A chair?” But he did get up, pulling out from underneath me. “I came in late, but I didn’t do anything newsworthy, if you were going to ask. I went to the beach and then just drove around, thinking.”

  “About what?”

  Nico didn’t answer that. “Where were you this morning?”

  “I got a job,” I said proudly. �
��I’m going to work at a bakery in a place called Little Havana. How long do you have to work before they pay you, usually?”

  “Maybe every two weeks. Didn’t you ask that?”

  No, I had forgotten. I had also forgotten to ask how much I was going to make, so I just shrugged.

  “Do you need money?” he asked.

  “Not at this exact moment, but getting paid pretty soon would be nice,” I said. “My dad cut off my credit cards. And he took everything but five hundred bucks out of my bank account, but I have a lot of extra organs I can sell.”

  “Talk to me before you sell any organs. You never know when you might need them,” Nico recommended. “What did you do that was so terrible that made your dad go to that extreme?”

  “I told you,” I said uneasily. “Classes, the car. He had given me a deadline to graduate and I wasn’t getting any closer to making that happen. I had a few parties, a few accidents. Stuff like that.”

  “Seems pretty cold, though, to cut you off with no warning.”

  “Oh, I had a few warnings. His lawyer sent me some letters and I got served papers.”

  “He sicced a lawyer and a process server on you?”

  “It was a bit of a tense situation,” I explained briefly. “Anyway, now I have a job. Do I look like a baker?” I stood so that Nico could see my outfit, tugging the bottom of my white coat so that it hung straight.

  “Very nice,” he answered. “Did you just happen to have that in your suitcase?”

  I nodded. “You never know when you might need a chef’s coat. I’ll go change so we can run. I have a whole list of things for us to discuss.”

  “That sounds fun,” he said flatly, but he did get up, and got dressed in workout gear. I thought running shirtless was a great idea for him but Nico declined when I suggested it.

  This time when we ran, I held on to his clothes so he had to go at a more reasonable speed—my speed. “The first thing we need to do is go out on the town,” I told him as we went on our route down his block.

  “No. My agent wants me to hibernate until I die. He hired a crisis management team and they’re saying the same thing, no more parties, no more clubs. But screw them, I can do what I want. Can you please stop pulling on my shirt?”

  I tightened my grip. “They’re partly wrong but so are you. You need to go out, but in a normal way. With a normal woman.”

  “Are you claiming to be a normal woman, now?” He laughed. “Do you remember when we first met? You told me that your name was Dixie and—”

  “I remember how you asked me out right away, because you were so fascinated by me!”

  “I seem to recall you telling me point blank that we were going out that night. I was laughing too hard to say no,” Nico corrected me.

  “Well, however it happened, we did go out and we had fun. And I thought you really liked me.”

  “We did have fun,” he agreed. We ran for a little while before he continued. “I always did like you, Tatum.”

  “You had a weird way of showing it. Like how you seemed to forget my number? And how you took up with other women?”

  “Tatum—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said firmly, and ran a little faster to show him up. Hell no. I slowed back down.

  “Relax, ok?” Nico said. “You want me to go out with you tonight. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “With me as your life coach, is what I mean. I want you to go out to show everyone that you have a perfectly normal life with a perfectly normal woman.”

  Nico was already laughing again. “Sorry, it’s the idea of you as a normal woman that’s setting me off. Please, continue. What are your other ideas?”

  I felt a little huffy, but this was one of my jobs, after all, this and the bakery, so I forged ahead. “Who do you know on the Cottonmouths’ roster?”

  He thought for a moment. “Uh, I went to college with one of the linemen. We weren’t friends, but I know him.”

  “Good. Get in touch and find out if he’s here for the off-season. Then schedule a workout with him and see if he can introduce you to some of the other guys.”

  “What, you want us to get our nails done together? I don’t want to make friends with them. I’m here to play football.”

  “Don’t be such a dick!” I said, and pinched some of his skin along with the shirt fabric I was holding.

  “Ow!” Nico exclaimed.

  “Please! I watched you play with a broken arm.” I pinched him again. “Listen to me because I’m right.”

  “Ok, coach, I’ll call Faris. Anything else?”

  “Make the reservation for tonight at a good place. Somewhere showy, where we’ll be noticed. Del recommended La Marcha in South Beach.”

  “Well, anywhere the doorman recommends. Don’t pinch! I’ll call Faris, I’ll make a reservation. Is that it?”

  “Shave off that beard. You’re going clean-cut.”

  “I don’t remember you being so bossy,” Nico complained.

  “After how you dropped off the face of the Earth when we were dating, consider yourself lucky that I talk to you at all,” I told him, and yanked hard on his shirt to slow him down so that I could run ahead.

  ∞

  “Tatum, come on,” Nico called through the door.

  “Yep,” I said, and added another coat of mascara and a light touch of blush, taking my time. I had gotten a little color on our run today but it looked good. I turned and studied myself in the back. I could check on all my angles, because this apartment had no shortage of mirrors. Yes, it was all good. “I’m ready,” I told Nico, and walked out into the bedroom where he was sitting on the edge of the mattress.

  “You shaved,” I said, and damn, he was smoking hot. So hot I almost said we should screw the dinner reservation and just strip down immediately, but he stood up.

  “Wasn’t shaving one of your orders?”

  “I recommended it, yes. I’m a life coach. I don’t order, I guide,” I explained.

  “Was it guiding when you were bruising my hip with your little pincer grip on our run?” He looked questioningly at my shoes as I walked toward him. “Are you going to be able to move much in those?”

  “I just walked five steps over to you, didn’t I? But yeah, that’s probably the limit. Can you carry me to the car?”

  “Take them off. They’re too high for you,” he said, and now who was ordering? I put on flats but brought the good shoes with me because they were definitely going back on my feet before we went into the restaurant.

  “Well?” I asked as we went down the elevator, and I raised my eyebrows, waiting.

  “You look fine,” Nico told me. “Was that what I was supposed to say?”

  “Beautiful or spectacular was what I was looking for. Fine? No.”

  “You look beautiful and spectacular. I’ll be the envy of every other man there. I’ll probably get into a fight or two over you,” he amended. We exited in the lobby and I waved hi to Del before we got in the other elevator to the parking garage.

  “You better not get in a fight!” I said as we walked into the garage. “This is your night to be on your best behavior.” I did love what those heels did for my vertical elevation, but jeez, being able to walk really was beneficial. I went right across to the car and Nico opened the passenger door for me before going around to the other side.

  “Miss Smith, did you drive my car?” He stared at the position of the seat, fairly close to the steering wheel and ceiling.

  “I only took it over to the bakery for my interview. And I parked very, very carefully,” I explained.

  “You can’t take this car. It’s too big for you and from everything you’ve said, you’re a terrible driver.” It took about 10 years for the seat to slowly move back into position so that Nico could fit into it. “Did you hear me? No more driving my car.”

  Back to the bus for me. “Fine, fine! I won’t drive it anymore without your written permission or whatever. By the way, the check engine li
ght came on.”

  Nico was shaking his head. “Don’t. Touch. My. Car,” he enunciated.

  “Got it, yes!” I wriggled in my seat angrily. Touchy, touchy. We skirmished a little on the way to the restaurant but eventually he settled down about the driving issue. I wouldn’t take his car again, I really wouldn’t, unless it was some kind of emergency. Or if I really wanted to go somewhere.

  I was pleased to see that there was a crowd in front of La Marcha, and even maybe a photographer. “Del did mention that this is where celebrities go. I wonder if we’ll see someone famous!” I said as we waited to get up to the valet.

  “You’re with someone famous,” Nico told me. He sounded irritated again.

  “I don’t mean you, I mean someone really a celebrity! You walk around in your underwear in front of me. It ruins the mystique.” But it certainly wasn’t hard on the eyes, not in any way.

  Nico went back to pouting and I changed my shoes. “Really? You have to wear those?” he asked, looking down at my feet.

  “If you constantly got asked if you’d like a kids’ menu, you’d wear high heels too!” I told him, and that made him smile, finally.

  “You don’t look anything like a kid tonight. You do look beautiful, Tatum.” This time, the words sounded sincere.

  “Thank you,” I said, and I meant that, too. I had been following Nico’s dating/hook-up behavior on social media and gossip blogs as he cut a swath through the female population of Miami-Dade County and areas north as well. I had to be in top form to go out with him, but I thought that these two days of running must have helped. My ass was sore, in any case.