Don’t Say Goodbye
by Bridget Essex
“Don’t Say Goodbye”
© Bridget Essex 2014
Rose and Star Press
Smashwords Edition
First Edition
All rights reserved
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Synopsis:
What if you fell for the most impossible woman: your best friend’s girlfriend?
Maxine “Max” Hallwell has spent her entire life making the safe, responsible decisions. It’s not that she never had dreams, but while her childhood best friend, Joanna, risked everything to start her own delivery business, Max went to work at a call center. Now, their fortieth birthdays are fast approaching, and Joanna is rich, high-powered and happy. And Max is miserable.
When Joanna introduces Max to her new girlfriend, Fiona—a stunning, charismatic cake decorator Jo met at a businesswomen’s dinner—Max is nothing but happy for her. After all, Fiona is the woman of Joanna’s dreams. Fiona’s so wonderful, in fact, that she encourages Max to finally open her own business, and offers to help her get it off the ground. That Max is deeply attracted to Fiona means nothing. Max has been best friends with Joanna too long; she’d never hurt her.
But one night, everything changes when Fiona admits her feelings for Max. And Max is left with an impossible decision: be true to her best friend…or the woman who’s woken her heart.
Please note: This book was previously published for a short amount of time in 2013, as Don’t Say Goodbye by Judy Morgan. This was when Bridget Essex thought she’d separate her paranormal and contemporary writing by creating a pen name for her contemporary romance. It was unpublished, edited further and is now being published again under Bridget’s actual name.
Chapter 1: Unexpected Moment
Sometimes, when the workday was particularly God-awful, Maxine would think about what, exactly, had gotten her to this place in life: the manager of a call center. Aside from those guys who drive the sewage trucks and that poor older gentleman who had to clean up the mall bathrooms, she figured that her job was probably one of the most unlikable in the world. She sat at a drab, gray desk in the center of a sea of drab, gray desks, and when her employees were tired of being screamed at by the people who—rightfully—were unhappy at being disturbed during dinner to be sold to, they transferred the yelling people to her.
Today had been particularly God-awful, so Max was currently massaging her temples and wondering what she’d drink for dinner. Wine, she’d decided, after the fourteenth expletive that the current man on the phone had called her. Sometimes, when the calls were really bad, Max liked to count the expletives. It gave her something to focus on besides dinner. And bed. Ah, soft, soothing bed and its flannel sheets that perfectly matched her soft green walls.
“…And you can take your subscriptions and shove them up your…”
The man was still yelling. Max glanced down at her notepad and the big “7:00” she’d scrawled on it and circled with the red pen after getting the voicemail message from her best friend. Joanna had sounded so excited in said voicemail that she’d repeated the time for dinner twice, probably just so Max was in no danger of forgetting.
Drat--that was right. Max sighed and massaged her temples again, this time a little more vigorously. Tonight, she couldn’t go home and drink herself into a lovely, numbing stupor. She’d promised Jo that she’d go out to dinner with her so that Jo could introduce Max to her new girlfriend.
Jo had been so excited about dinner. There was no way that Max could cancel. She placed her elbows on her desk and shoved a few wisps of brown hair behind her ear around her headset. And there’d be no time to go home and change—she’d have to go right to dinner in her office clothes. There wasn’t anything particularly bad about her office clothes. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a gray sweater with a red scarf tied at her neck. Her outfit was just…boring. Ah, well. So she’d be a little boring. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The other end of the phone was now dead. The man had apparently gotten tired of yelling. Max took off her headset and ran her hands through her hair, leaning back in her chair and stretching.
“Hey, Max!” said Sam. He paused in his saunter past her cubicle and leaned against the cubicle half-wall, arms folded in front of him as he grinned with mischief. Max liked Sam—they’d both started as managers of different departments around the same time, and they’d developed the beginnings of their friendship by passing notes back and forth to each other in the managerial meetings sometimes. Sam drew pretty good caricatures of their head boss, Tom State, usually involving horns.
Sam was one of Max’s only friends at Wellworth Marketing Center. The turnover rate of employment there was so staggeringly bad that the minute Max made friends with a new hire was also pretty much the same minute that they decided call center work was not for them. Max had heard stories of call centers that could keep employees. Wellworth Marketing Center was just not one of those places.
“Hi, Sam,” she said, doodling a spiral beneath her circled “7:00” on the notepad. She dropped her pen against the paper and stretched overhead again. “Hey, are you heading to the break room? Wanna get me a coke?” She opened her desk drawer and withdrew her coin purse, the one that was covered in green sequins and gold sequined dollar signs. It was the tackiest thing she owned, a Christmas gift from her brother-in-law who didn’t like her, and she’d hoped that by storing her loose change in it, it would keep her from using it and getting junk food and high-fructose corn syrup filled beverages. It hadn’t worked yet.
“This one’s on me, Max. I just got another sales bonus,” he said, winking a bright blue eye at her.
“At this rate, you’re going to become Budley’s manager,” she grinned, invoking the head boss’s name as she tossed the coin purse back into the drawer and shut it with a click. “Congrats, that’s great news,” she said, and meant it.
“Anyway,” he said, wheedling out the word as he rocked onto the backs of his heels, “I was wondering if you wanted to come to the bar with me after work,” he said, pushing off from the wall and angling his body in the general direction of the break room. “That way we could celebrate in style. Beer style. And we can watch for babes together.” He hooked his thumbs in his jeans’ belt loops and grinned again. “Be my drinking buddy?”
Max rolled her eyes, suppressing a smile. Babe watching. Right. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry…I wish I could,” she said, wrinkling her nose, and this time not meaning a word of it, “but I’m meeting Jo for dinner tonight,” she muttered, glancing at her watch and blinking. Wow…for the first time in her life, time had actually flown this afternoon. It was already six thirty…time to punch out. Max clicked through on her computer’s screen to “log off,” and then she stood, grinning a little at Sam. “It’s an important dinner, too. Jo’s got a new girl, and I’m going to dinner to meet her for the first time.”
“How is it that that woman is luckier than you and me combined?” Sam shook his head, shoving his hands into his jean pockets. “Some people really do have all the luck.”
“Yeah, I guess…but what about Rita? You were pretty set on Rita last week.” Max slid her denim jacket off the back of her chair and shrugged into it as Sam sighed.
“I mean, I was, but then there was that whole weird c
ult-ish thing about the diet, and that kind of turned me off.”
Max blinked. “You didn’t like the fact that she was gluten-intolerant? Sam that’s not a cult thing…that’s a genuine medical thing.” She hefted her purse off the ground and checked the front flap for her cell phone.
“I like noodles too much,” said Sam with a shrug as he started down the corridor. “Hey, have fun tonight! Tell Jo I said hi!” Sam had come to Max’s apartment-warming party a few years ago, and had hit it off with Jo. Unsurprisingly, they were now friends, too--but Jo just had that way with people. She was warmly friendly with everyone, and somehow also knew everyone. She was the kind of person who was probably friends with her mailman.
“I will. And give Rita another chance, seriously,” Max called after him. “She was really nice!”
“If you say so!” He waved at her over the top of the cubicles, and then ducked into the break room, the door sliding shut behind him.
“Jerk,” she said with a chuckle as she slid her hands into her jacket pockets and started out of the building.
Whenever Max hit the front concrete steps of the building, pushing through the wide double swinging doors, it’s as if a weight that had settled on her sometime in the morning was lifted by a crane and taken off of her shoulders. She never really noticed it when it began to first settle on her. She’d be half-way through the day and she would just suddenly realize it was there, this heavy, almost unbearable press that would make her shoulders bow forward and taking deep breaths a little bit more difficult than usual. Usually she could ignore it and continue on with her day. But some days—like this day—it was harder.
Max took a deep breath of the cool night air and sighed, lifting up her eyes to look past the street lamps, out into the black of the night. It was too bright in Boston for many stars, but she knew they were out there. Pushing her hands deeper into her pockets and ducking down her nose into her coat’s collar for warmth, she trotted down the sidewalk, toward the parking garage and her car.
The beat up Ford Escort was covered with a slick of sparkling frost as she turned the key in the door and let herself in, rubbing her hands together to keep warm. When the snows started to come each winter, they were always pretty harsh in the beginning because of the air coming off the ocean, if the weatherman was to be believed. It was abysmally cold that day, and when Max breathed out again, it fogged the inside of the windshield. She turned up the defroster and rubbed her hands against the steering wheel.
Jo wanted her to meet them for dinner at the Malibu, a cute little diner down on Beacon Street, which was only about ten minutes from work if the traffic was going to play nice today.
But it was one of those days, so traffic didn’t play nice at all. There was an accident on the way she would normally have taken to the Malibu, so Max had to take the detour and sit in the unmoving traffic for forty-five minutes. What would have been that easy ten minute drive crawled along and gradually turned into an hour as Max tapped on the wheel with her index finger and turned up her classic rock station very loudly.
She texted Jo with a simple “Traffic. I’ll be a little late,” and then she sang along to the music. Max loved singing along in the car. She could be as loud and out of tune as she wanted to be, and singing along to songs about life being a highway and the good old days of rock and roll always put her in a better mood. By the time she parked around the corner from the Malibu and despite all of the terrible traffic, she was actually in high spirits.
She combed through her long, lanky brown hair with her fingers and put it up in a nicer ponytail, and she reapplied her mascara. She didn’t normally wear makeup, but she’d put on mascara this morning, and she’d tossed the tube of it in her purse, so why the heck not put on more, she’d thought.
Meeting Jo’s date was a big deal, after all. Jo went on a lot of dates. Jo was just…like that. She was charming and funny and she had the confidence of a world leader, so of course the ladies were attracted to her, and she ended up going on quite a few dates with quite a few different women. So for her to actually call up Max and ask her to meet this date, the woman that Jo has just met last week…Jo must be serious. And a serious Jo? That hadn’t happened since Alexandra, five years ago. And Alex had broken Jo’s heart.
So Max got out of the car, locking it behind her, and tugged down on her jacket, running her hand through her ponytail as she stared up at the half-lit sign for the Malibu. If the sign was to be believed, it was really called the “M li u.” They hadn’t changed the sign’s bulbs since Jo and Max had started going to the diner about twenty years ago, when the word had been complete and readable. After all, they didn’t need to change the bulbs—the regulars at the Malibu knew it for the good, greasy food and the great diner coffee, and the cute retro booths that Jo and Max always liked so much, and with or without the sign properly lit, the place was pretty much always packed.
Jo was in their usual booth at the back of the diner, and Max waved to her from the doorway when she walked in. Jo slid out of the booth, stood and grinned at her, her hip jutting out a little to the side at a cocky angle. Jo had obviously gone all out for dinner. She was wearing her close-cropped black hair swept a little to the side, which made her look mischievous. Her leather jacket was hung up on the little hook between booths, and her navy blue plaid button down shirt had actually been ironed. Or, knowing Jo, it was made out of that kind of fabric that didn’t need ironing.
Either way, she looked good, her wide, infectious grin widening even further as Max trotted over to her and enveloped her shorter best friend in a quick, tight hug. Jo hugged back just as tightly, and then, with her arm snaked around the small of Max’s back, Jo flopped Max around so that the booth was in front of the two of them.
“Max, I want you to meet my new girlfriend,” said Jo triumphantly, the buttons on her plaid shirt now in danger of bursting, her chest was puffed up so much with pride. “Fiona, this is Max—my best friend in all this world, and a great lady. Max, this is Fiona.”
Max’s breath caught in her throat as she took the woman’s hand. Time seemed to slow down, and the air crackled between them.
Time slowed down…and stood still.
When Max had woken up, the day had stretched before her as it always did. Get up, eat breakfast, drive to work, get to work. Work. Go home. Go to sleep. There was nothing in it that had marked this span of twenty-four hours as anything other than utterly ordinary or normal or as dull as usual. But as Max looked at this woman, as time stood still, Max’s heartbeat thundering in her chest, she knew that somehow, unexpectedly, things had changed. The day was no longer normal.
She hadn’t been expecting this.
Fiona had bright red hair, what looked like very curly bright red hair, held by a lot of bobby pins and clips to her head. Her bright green eyes sparkled as she smiled and took Max’s hand. The corners of her mouth turned up impishly…she had the kind of smile that if you saw it across the room, you wouldn’t even realize that you were smiling, too, but then you would be. She was wearing a plunging blue v-neck sweater that showed a great deal of gorgeous, curving chest, and tight black pants, and as Max took Fiona’s smooth, soft hand in her own, as Fiona’s fingers closed around Max’s palm, and Fiona shook her hand gently up and down, Max swallowed.
Fiona was beautiful. That much was obvious. But as her bright green eyes sparkled, as their hands curved up and down as Max and Fiona shook, there was something more to her, Max knew. So much more. Fiona seemed, in that first glance, the kind of woman who was perfect for Jo--bright, energetic, positive, with the kind of courage and tenacity that can move mountains. The kind of woman who would make Jo really, really happy.
And the kind of woman that Max would have given her right arm to meet first.
Jo and Max had always joked that they were attracted to the same kinds of women. It was sheer coincidence that the best of friends had both grown up and realized they were lesbians (for a very misguided week in their twenties, they’d even tried
dating one another. It was a miserable failure.).
They both knew the kind of women they liked, a list that had never altered across the many years. Warm. Funny. Dynamic, charismatic, forward, vivacious…as Max woodenly sat down in the booth across from Jo and Fiona, Jo protectively putting her arm around Fiona’s shoulders, Max felt the blood drain from her face. They’d both dated women that the other had said, without a doubt, was their type.
But it had never been…quite like this.
Max had never been a “love at first sight” kind of person. She didn’t even really believe in it. Obviously, there would be attraction, but love? That was the kind of stuff you saw in the movies. It didn’t really exist in real life. But for the first time, Max crossed her legs, took the napkin off the table and nervously began to fiddle with it in her lap. There was a very disconcerting feeling going on in her heart. It was not altogether unpleasant…just very unnerving and unexpected.
Her life had never, ever felt like it was a scene from a movie. Until this moment.
Her heart was flip-flopping as she stared across the table at Fiona. She was staring at Fiona, she realized, a teensy bit like a crazy person. So she cleared her throat and started to blink again.
It had just been a long day at work. Yeah. That had to be it.
“I’m so glad you could make dinner,” sighed Jo happily, squeezing Fiona’s shoulders, but grinning widely at Max as she said it. “It was super short notice, I know, but I just had to have you meet Fiona…we have a real connection, and it was very important to me that you meet her,” said Jo, leaning back in her booth.
Fiona glanced sidelong at Jo and chuckled a little, rubbing Jo’s jeans-clad thigh with a palm and cocking her head at Max. “She never shuts up about you—it’s obvious you’re very important to her,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning upwards as Jo groaned and ducked her head with a chuckle. “You guys have been friends since you were kids, right?”
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