Shit. No wonder he had been so upset. This was not Hailey at her best. It would take a lot of explaining to convince anyone who happened to read any of these texts why they weren’t quite as awful as they sounded. I pulled out of the MacDonald’s, trying to avoid the worst of the broken liquor bottles in the parking lot as I trundled toward the exit.
I was pissed at Hailey the whole drive home. I put on my throbbing gym music and turned it up way too high and just raged. I didn’t even approach reasonableness until I pulled back into my garage. She was my best friend. She’d had no idea that her texts hadn’t been going to me. She was being insulting and weirdly narrow minded, even for her, and I was irked that she thought I was so inexperienced and naïve that my opinion on a guy I had spent a lot of time with and she had talked to once was meaningless. As though how to deal with the other half of the human race was some deep secret that the elders didn’t hand down to you until you had banged the same dude a couple dozen times.
I knew her, and I knew she had the best of intentions, but everyone knew that best intentions weren’t Heaven’s building material of choice.
And on top of all the guilt from overexposing all of this information about Dieter, the being pissed at Hailey for not being able to open her mind like a fraction of an inch, and being angry with Dieter for reading my private correspondence anyway, I was also torn between being really upset about this whole mess and just a little relieved.
Hailey was right about at least one thing: I did let guys go for being inconvenient and this whole…vulnerable, sad, traumatized thing was damn inconvenient.
I needed time. I turned my damn phone completely off. I went to yoga. I got a latte. I came home. When I turned my phone back on a few hours later I had four more texts from Hailey. I ignored them all and just called her.
“Hey, Roxanne,” she said. If her tone had been anything other than put-upon and a little expectant, I might not have lost my temper. But I did.
“Dieter had my phone all day and saw all those terrible things you texted me about him!” I barked, hating the way my voice sounded. “Like something as fucking stupid as liking lacy underwear makes him some kind of bloodlusting, crazy, manipulative pervert all of a sudden. Did you totally forget that you were the one that was pushing me to ask him out back when he just had a girly job?!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! He read your texts? What the hell?”
“No!” Needing to explain this deflated me for a second. “We have the exact same phone. He took mine by accident.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!” I snapped. “They are exactly the same damn phone. They were sitting right next to each other and the home screens are so similar that I didn’t realize that I had his phone until I tried to call you and your number wasn’t there.”
“Still—why was he reading your texts?”
I gave her a brief recap of what had happened at the Art Institute and the ‘can’t be humiliated or shamed in front of people issue’.
“So seriously, I can barely blame him for needing to look at what other horrible things might have been said once you started sending him a list of nasty hypotheticals.”
Hailey was quiet for a moment. “You really like this guy don’t you? You’re jumping to his defense, and you actually care what he thinks. You’re even mad at me about him.”
“Yes,” I said. Then everything she’d just said settled a little more. “I’m mad at you on my behalf too. Just because I’m not engaged doesn’t mean I’m wandering around in a hopeless fog, doomed to never understand men or love or relationships.”
Another pause. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. I’m going to call him. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Are you still mad at me?” She asked.
I sighed. “Yeah. Hailey. I really am. You pushed for this, then changed your mind when he didn’t turn out to be everything you thought he should be, and some of the things you said were just… mean-spirited and ignorant. I need to be mad at you for a little while.”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded upset, but I had too many people upset with me right now, and at least Hailey actually had it coming. She could just feel bad for a little while.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I told her before we hung up.
I texted Dieter to see if he was off work. I didn’t get an answer back, so I did some dishes. When I still didn’t have a reply after everything was washed and dried and put away I tried calling. He didn’t pick up.
I tidied up my desk and tried to watch some TV. Buffy. But I couldn’t concentrate. I tried to get some work done, but couldn’t concentrate on that either. I told myself that I wasn’t talking to Hailey because I needed some space away from her crap. Dieter deserved that same space away from me too. I stopped calling him and tried to keep myself from stewing on the whole thing. I finally talked myself into getting some sleep, but didn’t sleep well.
By morning I was so agitated I decided to forgive Hailey because I needed to talk to her about this whole thing. I couldn’t just keep spinning my wheels by myself.
Chapter Twelve
It was the next day. Still no contact from Dieter whatsoever. Hailey, Noah and I were all out to brunch. My phone was perched next to my silverware, within easy reach if Dieter did just happen to call after three days of radio silence. Noah and Hailey were making me walk them through everything step by step.
Hailey was offering her opinion as a generally more empathetic person than I was, (though the last few days had proven that there were odd limitations on the qualification). Noah was offering his opinion as our resident man-folk.
I told them about the Art Institute and the freak out after we’d gotten caught in the bathroom. I told them about how, given the facts that I’d assembled about Jocelyn, I had concerns about how subby he was with me.
Noah put his fingers in his ears and I gave Hailey a detailed description of sleeping with Dieter. Hailey patted Noah on the arm when I was done to let him know he could listen again and I told them all about staying up all night talking.
When I’d finally finished and was cutting up bites of my now cold waffle, Hailey and Noah exchanged one of their Uber-Couple-Mind-Meld glances. This one meant. “Are you going to tell her, or should I?”
I wanted to get mad at them for being so damn smug, but I had asked for their help.
Noah apparently won their little silent debate. He turned to look at me with a very gentle smile on his face.
“Okay. I’m just going to point something that I noticed out here, because I think you missed it. Dieter told you about this harmless little underwear kink.” He gave Hailey a look that seemed oddly pedantic coming from Noah. “He told you all this really serious stuff that made huge impacts on him. His family, his friends, some of his lowest moments… he really opened up to you.”
“And?”
“And you told him what you think about books, and movies and your younger sister’s bad decisions. He was really vulnerable to you in a lot of ways and you didn’t reciprocate.”
I let that sink in. “So, you’re trying to say that our long night of talking only counted for him and that I’m… removed and uninvolved.”
“Not exactly,” Noah said. “But if I had told a girl friggin’ everything and she didn’t reply in kind and then she told a girlfriend all of the gritty details, and I was already the kind of guy who had been burned really hard for trusting people…” Noah shrugged. “I might decide that girl was more trouble than she was worth and just stop calling.”
My throat tightened and I felt my eyes get a little misty. I took a sip from my coffee mug to cover it.
“Well,” I said, heaving out a deep breath. “I guess that’s just a taste of my own medicine then.”
I grabbed my phone off the table and dipped into my purse.
“Don’t throw in the towel yet though,” Hailey urged. “He’s mad, but it’s not like anything’s been officially broken off yet. We’ll all just… put ou
r thinking caps on.”
“Not right now, guys.” They both pushed it, but I was tired and I’d been obsessing about this for two days. I was just sick to death of the whole thing. I needed a break.
The three of us awkwardly finished our breakfast, and went our separate ways.
I went home and tried to work. I got less done than I wanted, but it wasn’t a full-scale waste the way it had been before. I did try calling Dieter again, and felt something a lot like a stab to the heart when the ring cut out after half a tone and I knew I’d been declined.
I did some laundry.
And as I was going through my wardrobe, putting away some of my heavier winter things, I saw the nightie that Dieter had picked out for me, hanging, still unused in my closet because I hadn’t been willing to be exposed and vulnerable in it.
And that’s when the light bulb went off.
****
“This is a terrible, terrible, plan,” Hailey said for the millionth time. “And that’s coming from me.”
It was a terrible plan. We were sitting outside the mall in my car. We were taking turns watching the food court through binoculars and under my long, but not nearly warm enough spring coat, I was wearing nothing but a short purple nightie with totally visible matching panties and high heels.
The terrible plan depended on a ton of variables that we just could not control:
1. That we didn’t get picked up for suspicious loitering
2. That we didn’t get picked up for soliciting
3. Dieter actually took his break somewhere that we could see him, or at all
4. Dieter accepted this as an apology and as a willingness to be vulnerable in a way that I realized that I never showed anyone
5. I didn’t get arrested for indecent exposure
“I know it’s not exactly D-day, but this is your penance for your part in this whole mess, so shut up and recon.”
Hailey gave me a mocking solute and lifted the binoculars back up. After a while she chuckled. “Roxanne. Doing something crazy for a guy. I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Well. Everyone’s got to go crazy sometime.” I sighed. Shivered. Thought about all the ways that this could go wrong and tried to make a list of anything I could say that might still sound convincing when preceded by “Hello, Officer.”
Hailey’s phone rang. I could see on the screen that it was Noah. He was staked out in the little atrium area where Dieter had been getting coffee the last time I’d seen him.
Hailey picked the phone up and my heart started to pound as I heard Noah announce “The Eagle has landed. The Eagle has landed.”
We hadn’t actually set up a code, but that’s just what Noah was like, and it was pretty clear what he meant.
I turned they key in the ignition and hurried as legally as I could toward the mall entrance closer to their location. There had been a great deal of debate about the most logical stakeout location for all of us, and I had finally convinced them both of our current arrangement by pointing out many times that I needed a dramatic walk up and that I couldn’t just sit around in my spring jacket and underwear at the coffee place for a couple hours.
I parked and shrugged out of my coat so quickly that I nearly dislodged a boob in the process.
“Alright. Time to rock and roll.”
It was sleeting. Not ideal weather for a plan that did not involve pants. But desperate times and all that.
It was impossible to feel heroic doing that weird hoppity run that you have to do while you’re trying to move quickly in heels, especially when an unnecessary amount of your butt cheeks are hanging out, but I did feel strangely… strong.
Did I ditch out of relationships easier than every single girl I knew? Yes. Could I be cold and utilitarian sometimes? Maybe.
But here I was, with numb ankles, walking into a public place in the most revealing thing I owned, to prove that I believed in love and chemistry just as much as everyone else, and that I was just as willing to take a chance on something that I believed could become great as I was willing to bail on something that wasn’t good enough. In the terrible RomCom of my life, this was my big dramatic moment.
I got a lot of looks as I rushed through the crowd inside the entryway, but I just kept moving until I saw Dieter sitting at the same little table I had seen him at before.
He saw the nightie before he saw me. I could tell by the way his eyes bugged out. Like a cartoon character’s. They narrowed a little bit when they made it all the way up to my face, but not by much.
I went up to him doing the best I could to strut in four-inch heels that I’d only worn once. I pulled out the empty chair in front of him at the teeny café table and tried to ignore Noah, who was sitting behind Dieter and very carefully not looking at me.
“I’d really like you to give me another chance,” I said to Dieter. His jaw, which had been hanging open, shut.
“I’m… why the lingerie?”
“I made you feel exposed. Now I’m exposed. And asking for another opportunity.”
He stared for a moment. Then crossed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “I’m not sure.”
“Look.” I set my hands over his, where they were crossed over each other on the tabletop. “I know you feel like me telling Hailey everything crossed a line. And I’m sorry. But you said it yourself—you liked that we trusted each other that much. And she’s really not malicious. And neither am I. She is honest and overprotective, and maybe I am too. I was never trying to hurt or humiliate you. I really like you. I want to be the kind of person that you can trust. I’m really hoping you’ll take all of this as an apology.”
Dieter stared at me. Stunned.
Behind him, Noah put a hand over his mouth, and in a badly disguised voice, bellowed “Kiss her!”
It was a stupid, terrible cliché. But it caught. The two high school girls who had been presumably tweeting the whole spectacle from the line for coffee started chanting it. The baristas joined in. People started coming to the front of the stores.
Dieter flushed red. I could feel my own cheeks burning.
He leaned forward and kissed me. A cheer went up.
I was thrilled on the stupid grin on his face when he pulled back. “Come on. Let me walk you to your car before security shows up.”
“Okay.”
We booked back through the thickening crowd, back out to the parking lot, stopping when we reached the side of my car. Hailey opened my door and handed me my coat quickly and efficiently, as though this were some sort of totally fucked up relay race.
I slipped it on gleefully.
“I’d… I’d love to give this another try,” Dieter said. “I think I just… overreacted.”
“I get that.”
“And I never should have read your texts.”
“No. You shouldn’t have. But I understand why you did.”
He kissed me again. “I missed you.”
“Yeah. You too.”
He fiddled with his phone in his pocket for a moment. “So… I get off work in two hours. Dinner?”
“Yeah. I could pick up some Thai and you could come over to my place?”
“Do you… do you mind maybe wearing that?”
I chuckled and shivered again. Only partially from the spring chill this time. “You wanna pick yourself out something to match?”
“It’s a date.”
He pulled me into his arms and kissed me again. Unable to resist, I kicked my heel up behind me.
One more RomCom cliché for the road.
The End
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