Walking Dick

by Candi Heart

  “...were terrified that they didn’t show up in time, but what could we do? Braxton has this horrible habit of setting things up last minute, but Matt and I couldn’t miss it, no matter how sudden it was. To be honest, I was afraid we were going to have to go in there cold. Anyway, if you can find a way to rush those notes to the hotel, it would be great. We’ve got ‘til tomorrow morning, so if you can do it today, we’d have at least tonight to review them.”

  “Yeah.” I rubbed my eyes in exhaustion but pushed stiffly to my feet. “There’s a Fed-Ex drop-box in town. With any luck, I can get them there in time. If you can just send me the address—”

  “You are a dear, dear girl!” Louisa gushed. The frigid ice queen was gone, and suddenly, she sounded as if I was some kind of fairy godmother, solved all her life’s problems. “Then again, I didn’t expect anything less.”

  “Huh?” I said, completely confused.

  “Matt is so colorful in his descriptions. I guess that’s why he’s such a great writer. How did he put it?” She paused for a moment, then continued, “That’s right! He said you’re ‘the girl next door, with a smile that glows and lights up the entire room’.”

  I laughed and blushed, but I wasn’t ready to accept a compliment that I wasn’t sure was meant for me. “He must have been talking about Steph, his girlfriend.”

  “I doubt it. As far as I know, he’s never immortalized that one in the pages of his novels.”

  “His novels?” I said, confused and flattered at the same time.

  “Sure. Let me read something he wrote...” There was a sound of rustling of pages, and then she returned to the phone and narrated, “Let’s see... Here it is! ‘She’s attractive, highly feminine, easy to talk to, and makes me laugh, so shy she seems invisible at times. That perplexes me, because she’s beyond gorgeous, and even when she tries to hide, she shines. She’s down to Earth, laidback, low maintenance, and super friendly. Where has this woman been all my life? How have I missed such a shiny pearl?’”

  “A pearl, huh?” I said with a grin, the irony not at all lost on me. “Whoever she is, she sounds like a great character.”

  “I’m sure she’s you, dear.”

  I stopped in my tracks, blinking sleepily at a row of wilted Post-Its. “I’m not sure what to say to that. I’m sure he was talking about someone else.”

  “Never you mind,” she retorted, unable to hide the smile in her voice.

  A loud rush of noise and voices echoed in the room behind her. Clearly, the camp in California had come alive, and she was in a sudden rush to get off the phone.

  “Please just Fed-Ex that package as quickly as you can. I’ll have the man at the front desk text you the address, and I’ll make sure Matt has money to reimburse you for the shipment.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” I lied, sneakily Googling shipping rates as I spoke to her and trying to calculate if it meant giving up an afternoon cup of coffee.

  “Well, aren’t you a sweetheart? An absolute pearl! Rest assured I’ll tell Matt who swooped in like an angel to save our hides!”

  “Oh, no, please don’t!” I said quickly. “You can just—”

  The line went dead, cutting me off midsentence.

  My eyes snapped shut in dismay as I lowered the phone slowly away from my ear. “Uh... keep that to yourself,” I finished, to no avail.

  Perfect. Just perfect.

  Not only was the Fed-Ex box still there, but there was actually an agent attending it. The disgruntled man in the purple uniform was not at all happy to be there; from the sound of things, he’d been duped into staying late by a vengeful boss determined to punish him for something. Nevertheless, he accepted the envelope with the same sleepless stare I was having trouble shaking myself. After charging me almost eighty dollars, he declared, “Yeah, we’ll get it to LA on time.”

  With a sigh, I handed him four twenties and shuffled back out to my car. If only Matt could see me now, I thought, imagining his adorable laugh. Not only was I back in those slippers he claimed to love so much, but I’d added pajamas and a bathrobe as well.

  By the time I got back home, it was nearing one a.m. It really wasn’t all that late for a night owl like me, but given the fact that I’d spent most of the night before running from the police through a forest, followed by a trip into the bottle with Nate, I was getting woefully behind. I felt like I had jetlag, and I hadn’t even been on a jet.

  I stripped off my robe, kicked off my slippers, and fell onto my mattress, face first. Dick instinctively settled himself beside me as I yanked up the covers, then groped for the light.

  The second the room went dark, I slipped out of consciousness, tumbling and spinning into the Land of Dreams. Even as I dozed off, I still wondered if Louisa’s suspicions were true, if Matt had truly felt me deserving of being forever inked into his pages. A pearl... flaws and all.

  Chapter 32

  THE NEXT DAY, I SLEPT in until almost eleven, and I probably would have kept hitting the snooze button for a whole lot longer if Nate hadn’t shown up to stop me. He was as chipper as ever, one of those sickeningly perky morning people, and something about that annoyed me greatly.

  After consuming what had to be almost a gallon of coffee, the two of us wandered in a slow circle around the entire neighborhood, putting up fliers to advertise my open house. Talking thoughtfully, we stapled our papers to every stationary thing we could find, pausing every half-hour or so to refuel ourselves with even more caffeine.

  I sighed. “I think she was drunk. I saw a bottle of wine on the table. Because I know she would never leave those curtains open when she was having an affair. Any neighbor could’ve seen it.”

  “See what happens when you get wasted? You just don’t care and just go with the feelings that are coursing through you like a tidal wave.”

  “She wasn’t careful at all. She could end up pregnant or get some kind of disease. Matt deserves better than her.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Nate said for the millionth time as he plastered the last of the posters on a phone pole, then collapsed beside me on a bench near the park. “Who would cheat on a guy who looks like that? I mean, just on a physical level, how is it even possible?”

  I shook my head and gazed wordlessly at the trees, at the secret little clearing where the two of us had come so close to making our beautiful mistake.

  “She’s mad at him for making her move,” I said.

  To say Nate was surprised by the story of Steph’s late-night visitor would have been a rather massive understatement. When I told him about it, his jaw fell open, his hands flew up, and his eyes practically bugged out of his head, making him look like some dumbstruck cartoon. Unlike me, he was obsessed with guessing the identity of the mystery man beneath her. In fact, as we walked up and down the relatively busy city streets, Nate silently went through a roster of all the possible qualifiers in his head.

  As for me, I honestly couldn’t care less. Somehow, for some reason I couldn’t explain, I’d developed a strange sort of numbness about the whole thing, a depressed resignation that made me want to simply shut down. I didn’t want to know who Steph was cheating with; the point was that she was cheating, on Matt, of all people, and that was enough to turn my stomach. She was a cheat, deserving of the title on my lip gloss sticker, having the time of her life. Meanwhile, her beautiful, neglected boyfriend and I had given up everything to be the better people, to take the high road. We had walked away to spare her feelings, all while she was feeling some other man inside her during a drunken romp, and that made me sick.

  “You really like him, don’t you?” Nate asked softly.

  I glanced over in surprise and realized my best buddy had been watching me for a long time. An embarrassed flush colored my cheeks, and I darted my eyes quickly away from the park, even though I knew I stood no chance of fooling Nate. “What does it matter now?” I said briskly, wiping my hands on my jeans. “It’s over.”

  “It matters because it’s ho
w you feel, Aly!” he exclaimed, refusing to let me off the hook. “It’s about how both of you feel. Notice I’m not speaking in past tense here. Yes, it does matter... and no, it isn’t over.”

  “I know, but I... Look, I just can’t be the person who rats out his girlfriend,” I insisted. “I can’t be that person.”

  “You’re not the rat,” Nate said. “She is. When the Matt’s away, the rat will play.”

  “Yeah, but even if she is cheating, he’s not just gonna walk away from the girl who moved 3,000 miles just so he could pursue his career. I guess I really don’t have any option but to just make like Frozen and let it go.”

  “I couldn’t disagree more,” Nate countered fiercely. “Aly, if you care about him at all—which I know you do—you can’t just let him blindly play house with a skinny skank who’s on her back behind his. It’s not right! Heck, you should have recorded it. It’d serve her bony ass right for not bothering to shut those ugly curtains she picked out!”

  “No, I could never do that. He’d be devastated if he saw that. But I did take a few snaps. And no, you can’t see them. Anyway, it’s really none of my business,” I replied. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few months, it’s that I need to stop inserting myself into someone else’s relationship. They’re both adults, and she’s not that clever. He’ll figure it out eventually, and he’ll do what he needs to do, whatever that is.”

  “Hopefully, he’ll realize he needs to do you,” Nate said matter-of-factly.

  “Nate!”

  He shrugged. “Look, that tramp may not be that clever, but we both know she’s devious! She waited ‘til he was out of town before she invited her lover over, but what about all those so-called runs she takes all the time? Runs to where? And who is she running to? Aly, Matt seems like a good guy, but good guys are often blind to bad girls, because they can’t believe anyone would be so nasty to them. There’s a chance Matt could never find out. You need to tell him since you saw it with your own eyes. And you got photos to back you up!”

  “Don’t you think that will come off as... a little self-serving?” I fired back, trying to fight off the tears that insisted on welling in my eyes. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t just go to the airport and shout when he steps off the plane, ‘Hey! Glad you’re back. Oh, and good news... Your longtime girlfriend is cheating on you. Now we can cheat too!’”

  Nate dropped his eyes to the ground and pawed at a clump of grass with his shoe. “Well, I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but—”

  “Then how would you put it?” I dropped my head into my hands, and my long hair spilled down the sides of my face. “Nate, if you accidentally discovered your neighbor having an affair, would you march next door and tell her husband?”

  His face screwed up in a frown. “First off, that would be rather disgusting. Mrs. Mallack is about 100 years old, so—”

  “I’m serious.”

  After a soft sigh, he hung his head. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  I lifted a hand in half-hearted triumph, but he wasn’t finished.

  “This isn’t the same thing, though,” he said. Then, exhibiting an uncharacteristic touch of tenderness, he reached over and took my hand. “I’m not in love with Mr. Mallack the way you’re in love with Matt.”

  The words hung frozen between us for a moment.

  Finally, I tilted my head and peered over at him with a little frown on my face.

  “You know what I mean,” Nate amended, wearing a bemused exasperation. “This isn’t some random couple you just stumbled across. This dirty little secret has something to do with you personally, whether you like it or not.”

  The walls of my stomach tightened with dread as I realized he could be on to something.

  “Look, my old neighbor is five times more ancient than Betty White. An affair would probably send her into coronary arrest, not to mention that I doubt there’s enough Viagra on the planet to keep Mr. Mallack perked up long enough to cheat. But you? You’re in love with Matt, Aly, and you’ve never even told him.”

  I swatted his arm. “Nate! Must you be so... direct all the time?”

  “Girl, I’m just telling it like it is,” he continued. “Given everything that’s happened, I think we both know perfectly well that Matt cares about you. Hell, maybe the guy really does love you. I can see it in his gorgeous eyes.”

  In that moment, the tears I’d been fighting finally spilled over, painting my cheeks with streaks of despair. “That just makes it so much worse,” I said, sobbing softly and holding my face in my hands. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, I don’t feel like I can tell him, but I don’t want to lose him either. On top of that, I don’t want him to get hurt when he discovers it on his own. I’m just... stuck.”

  The bench shifted with a creak, and the next thing I knew, Nate had gathered me into his arms. As much as I liked to give him an earful, the man could be sweet when he wanted to. Also, as much as he resisted the notion, he gave pretty awesome hugs.

  “You have to tell him,” my friend urged gently, smoothing back waves of my hair, “and not just because you love him. Beneath all that, I know you care about this guy as a friend, as a person. You can’t let someone you care about go on living a lie. That’s just not who you are.”

  Another gasping sob tore out of me as I buried my face in his chest and proceeded to quietly cry.

  “Isn’t love supposed to take a long time to develop?”

  “Not if it’s the right person.”

  I knew Nate was right, my guru of wisdom once again. No matter how much I wished for a simpler solution, one that wouldn’t force me to singlehandedly tear two people apart, I had to let Matt know what I now knew for myself. The only trouble was that I just didn’t know if I had it in me to tell him, especially not with so much else going on in my life.

  “The open house is tomorrow,” I mumbled, pushing shakily upright as I tried to pull myself together. “I don’t think I can—”

  “It doesn’t have to be tomorrow.” Nate shook his head in easy dismissal. “Talk to him the next day or maybe the day after that. It’s gotta be done, but you need to do this at your own pace, take some time to think about what you’ll say.”

  I pulled in another shaky breath and nodded quickly as Nate smiled and squeezed my hand.

  “Hey, it’s not like the little hussy doesn’t have it coming, right?”

  “Right!”

  The two of us dissolved into watery laughter, leaning against each other as we collapsed back against the park bench. As hard as the whole thing was, one thing I’d learned from Matt was that it was always helpful to have a plan in place. Also, as much as I wanted to run away and hide, at least I had one person with me; Nate was always there for me, and I knew he always would be.

  Chapter 33

  NATE STUCK WITH ME for the next hour or so, and while I appreciated his help and his company, I knew he was probably just babysitting me, trying to make sure I wouldn’t change my mind and hightail it off to Canada. He even personally escorted me back to my house.

  The second I stepped inside, I fell back against the front door and gave an exhausted sigh as I let my things drop in a heap on the floor right beside me. The last two days felt like an eternity, and the next day wasn’t going to be any calmer with the open house looming. It was my last-ditch, reaching-for-the-stars effort to raise enough funds to get my fledgling business off the ground and, most of all, off the government’s radar. If I failed to do so, my awesome little office would end up in someone else’s hands, and I was certain Mr. Preaker would be standing on my doorstep with that creepy, smug little grin on his face, a face I never wanted to see again.

  Dick bounded up to me with a burst of energy I couldn’t possibly comprehend.

  I sank to my knees to pet him. “Who’s a good boy?” A tired smile spread up the side of my face as I rubbed my forehead against his fur. “You ready for an early dinner?”

  He barked once in confirmation and shadowed me do
wn the hall, all the way to the kitchen.

  Any encounters with the refrigerator used to be my downfall, but that was not the case anymore. I had developed a love affair of my own, with healthy foods I never thought I’d enjoy. I loved raspberries, asparagus, almonds, oatmeal, salads, yogurt, and cottage cheese. I even ate salmon, chicken, and beef, the lean and grass-fed kind from the butcher’s counter, rather than the deep-fried kind I used to get from various fast-food drive-thrus, always answering, “Yes,” to questions like, “Do you want to supersize it?” and, “Do you want fries with that?” All that supersizing had supersized me in the past, and I wasn’t about to do that again. Finding nutritious, real foods I enjoyed really helped me stay on the right path.

  Just as I swung the fridge door open, I heard a sudden knock on my door. “Nate?” I called, heading back up the hall. “Gosh, what’d you forget now? I swear, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t...” I trailed off in complete astonishment when I flung the door open and saw Matt Porter standing there.

  In any world where sense prevailed, I would have been terrified to see him. My doing-it-at-my-own-pace plan was instantly squashed, because there he was, staring me right in the face. I should have been mortified to see him, given that the last time we saw each other, my skirt was practically around my neck. I should have been thoroughly depressed, given the circumstances of our parting. However, for some reason, when I saw him standing there, all I could do was smile, beaming at him like some empty-headed jack-o-lantern. My skin warmed just at the sight of him, replacing my cold stupor with a radiant flush as I asked, “What on Earth are you doing here? Don’t you have an important meeting today?”

  He hugged me and even picked me up as if I weighed less than the air itself. It was exactly like a scene out of the movies, romantic and mushy but flattering and wonderful at the same time, something no one had ever done for me. I would have found it corny if it was someone else’s story, but I loved being spun around in the strong, powerful arms of that gorgeous storyteller. It was exhilarating, magical, and intimate, like a long-awaited reunion. Matt made me feel special and left me utterly smitten, completely breathless when he softly set me down.