All too quickly, I thought of Jack and how crappy his shift at work was going to be tonight. Maybe he was even assisting with whatever collision or obstacle created the miles’ long standstill jam. It was painfully obvious that no matter what I did, or didn’t do, Jack had infiltrated my subconscious and I was going to be stuck thinking of him until I saw him again. Which seemed like it might be tomorrow night. He had back-to-back shifts tonight and the next morning. I had Cuddly Creation waiting for my fabulous presence tomorrow morning as well. If he wasn’t too tired, maybe we could try a real date? Something?
I sneered at the road ahead of me, loathing this wondering, this ugly vulnerability of being with someone new. The breaking-in phase, the determining if this is still a good idea stage of dating. Jack and I were dating, weren’t we? We’d started kind of strong in the intercourse department and didn’t really visit much of the getting-to-know-you areas. No. That wasn’t right. We’d tiptoed around our attraction all weekend. I sure as hell had refrained from acting on my lust for him. Besides, we did already know each other.
“And what we know, we like. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Yet in the microbubble of self-reflection and intense pondering that a solo car ride demanded of a person, doubts flooded in faster than my own mental wiper blades could keep up with.
So it was no surprise I didn’t even go home. No, no. I was not one of those women. I never have nor ever would track my significant other down and pop in at work. Workplace pop-ins? The worst. Given that coworkers were the people you spent the majority of your conscious week with, they were family away from family. Inserting a boyfriend into a pseudo-family setting—always the potential for awkwardness.
Instead of heading home and intensifying this second-guessing torture in the solitude of my apartment, I went to Carly’s.
She was home and already done with both dinner and assisting Violet with her homework. Two saves in one sweep. I couldn’t handle Carly’s uber health nut kicks and had run out of nice yet totally unbelievable excuses months ago. Sorry, I’m…allergic to eggplant noodles in sodium-free, nonfat, tomato sauce. Oh, and the Brussels sprouts too, yep. Gives me the hives every time… And arriving after homework time? Someone sure was looking out for me up there. The last time I’d been there to help Violet with her math homework, Carly and I spent two hours arguing what the fucking variable in the equation actually meant, a fight that she ended by instating a silent treatment. I’d stormed out of there yelling conditions of the Pythagorean formula, and to this day I think we scarred Violet from ever looking forward to Algebra and Geometry assignments. Wait ’til you get to Calc and Trig, kid. Total mind games await ya.
Violet was also conveniently coloring some art project in her room, giving her mom and me uninterrupted girl time once I’d given the little girl her hug and asked how her weekend was.
“He was there,” I said once Carly poured us copious amounts of wine. Funny how the sugar and liquid carbs in our glasses were permitted in her funky stringent diet. Like I was going to be a spoilsport.
“Him who? And where?” She choked on her first sip. “That fucker who broke up with you still came to the wedding?”
Wait. Oh right. The viral break-upper. I shook my head. “The model.” She didn’t catch up, squinting her eyes and tipping her head to the side. “The naked model.”
“He was where?”
Deep inside me. Over me. Under me. Across from me. “He was the groomsman I was paired with.”
“At the wedding.”
I huffed. “Where else do you find groomsmen? Yes. At Bev’s wedding.”
Clearly the wine—or actual sugar—was clouding her ability to follow. It was a hell of a coincidence too. “Wait, wait. What?”
I explained how Jack was the model, how he got stuck posing nude, and that we’d hit it off at the wedding. I didn’t elaborate on the sex, but I made sure she got the gist while keeping it PG and mostly in code so that if Violet was eavesdropping, I wouldn’t be a scandalous aunt instead of the cool one. Once she was legal and way older I’d share my naughty experiences with her—if and when she asked. I was all about education. Knowledge was power, yo. If I could tell her how I almost got my braces stuck in pubic hair when giving head for the first time, maybe she could learn from my mistakes and be wiser.
“You and the nude model.” Carly gave me her diva face. The one she pulled out as a weapon to let her daughter know she wasn’t getting her way. Also the bitch, you don’t fool me smirk reserved for me.
“I swear.”
She shook her head. “You got any pictures with him?”
My insistence fell an inch. “The wedding planner wouldn’t let us use our phones. And I got there late, anyway.”
“’Course.”
“Then my phone was dead. Really. The first night, I crashed in his place when he tried to explain baseball to me.”
Carly rolled her eyes. “Ugh. That’s even more boring than watching golf.”
“Amen. But I fell asleep there and never charged my phone. It was dead the entire day of the wedding. And then that night…we were kinda busy. Then today, we were, well…”
“Still busy?”
I nodded. Carly crossed her arms and adopted her not-fooling-me face.
It was slightly childish that I had to prove Jack to her; that he existed and we’d hit it off. But not being able to show her evidence of it burned a little opening in my already overthinking mind. I hadn’t even taken one picture of us together. Just sex, talking, and more sex. It wasn’t a figment of my imagination, but I didn’t even have one little tangible memento to sigh at and clutch to my chest when I miss him most. Like I had since we parted ways. Which was agonizing me more with every minute that passed that he didn’t text or call.
Stop. I’m not that woman. It was like Noah’s Ark was going to be ordered to be built soon, it was raining that hard. He had to be busy with work.
But… Bev might have some pictures of us. I’d definitely be in the two hundred ninety-three pictures of the bridal party the photographer snapped. “Oh!” I reached for my phone but stopped. “Uh… You could go online and look. At her wedding hashtag.”
Her jaw dropped. “A wedding hash—”
Nodding again, I shoved her device at her. “Yeah. She was that over the top. There’s gotta be some pics of us in the background if the official pics aren’t up yet.” As she unlocked her phone and waved her fingers over the keyboard, I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m still… I’m, uh, not going to ever go back on social media.” Not anytime soon, at least.
She patted my knee as she scrolled rapidly and then slowly.
“Oh…”
I craned closer to see and she stood and walked away, her sights glued to the screen.
“Oh…wow.”
Smiling, I took a smug sip of glass.
“Your hair looks like shit.”
I deadpanned as I swallowed. “They thought it would stay up.”
Carly snorted and then stopped pacing. “Oh…wow.”
“Yes. I know. It’s a rabid bird’s nest on a good day.”
“No. He’s…goddamn if he doesn’t look even sexier in a tux.”
Grinning again, I nodded, even though her back was to me. By the hunch of her shoulders, she was zooming in digitally and by bringing the screen to her nose.
“Jesus Christ. You guys were making out during their first dance?”
I strode to her and finally snatched the phone away. Yep. There we were. Me pulling Jack’s face to mine and him grabbing my ass to hold me up to him. Just seeing our first kiss moment made me instantly hotter.
“I gotta say, I knew it,” she claimed.
“That we’d reunite at Bev’s wedding?”
She let me scroll through the images people had posted as she picked up her glass again. With a sigh, she plopped back to the couch we’d vacated. “No. But that only reinforces the cosmic inevitability of it. I mean, what were the odds?”
True, that.
“I knew it as soon as you two spotted each other in the studio. Spontaneous connection.”
I glanced at her, brows raised. My bestie here used to devotedly ascribe to the sage advice of horoscopes and all that psychic BS. She’d lost her faith in the astrological and cosmic wise ones—a revolving list of words probably computed by a frigging computer app—when the wisdom for Libras did not warn her that her ex was, in fact, an asshole and would not be changing his ways. Yet she had that faraway, sage kind of stare like Bilbo had when he reminisced his great adventure with the dwarves.
“Really.”
She nodded and took a sip before saying, “Strongest case of insta-lust I’d ever witnessed.”
“No, not insta-lust. Insta—” Oooo. Okay. Love? Could I jump that far ahead yet? “Inst-attraction and profound fondness.”
Her smirking lips irritated me.
“We talked.”
“About which positions were best?”
“He tried to lecture me on baseball. We small-talked about our families. For almost a half hour we explained how Peter Jackson could have at least included—”
“You did not.”
“We did.”
“Lexi, babe. You have to understand, most normal people don’t share quite the same”—she rolled her hand like reeling in words—“obsession with Tolkien as you do.”
I tossed her phone back to her, tired of hunting for pics of Jack with me and wishing I could see him in the flesh. Clothed or bare. “Jack does.”
“No way.”
“He’s going on a week-long tour of the sites in New Zealand where they filmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy.”
Carly blinked slowly. “Then damn. If you’ve found some chump who might not care at naming your firstborn Aragorn or something, you better hang on to him.” A grunt left her lips. “You’re going to be one of those couples, aren’t you?”
A stupid smile curved at the rim of my wine glass. Bev had said nearly the same thing. So they couldn’t appreciate the marvel of the Middle Earth. But it did please me something fierce that my two closest friends immediately foresaw Jack and me as a solid pair for the future.
“Well, when do I meet him to grant him approval to be your man?” Carly laughed a couple of times. “Damn, it’s going to be hard to forget about seeing him naked first.”
Good question, Carls. When indeed. I refused to Velcro myself to him. A boyfriend was an arbitrary part of me, not my sole purpose in life. But dammit, I did miss him and couldn’t wait to see him again. Still, I didn’t have an answer for my best friend, and I feared the chance of facing the possibility of never if he was playing me.
Eighteen
Lexi
When, Carly had asked. When could she officially meet Jack? Didn’t seem like anytime soon when I dragged my ass into Cuddly Creation to open the store for a new week of stuffing toys.
He hadn’t called or texted all night, and every time I hovered my thumb over dialing him as I lay in bed, I cringed. I’d probably come across as too needy. Too lonely? Too something, in this day and age of everyone seeming too weak or faulty for the slightest flaw. Or I’d catch him at an awful moment like when he was corralling a drunk driver into the back of the cruiser or when he was heroically saving young children from the backseat of a minivan in a quadruple pile-up in the night’s worst thunderstorm.
So I coached myself to trust him. In us. If he didn’t contact me like he’d promised he would, there had to be a good reason. Had to be. I couldn’t be that idiotic with men. No woman could be. Jack would be different. I wouldn’t need a reason to Google local convents to check myself in. I wouldn’t. Optimism, oh where art thou? Gimme a little help here.
He’d explained that after his shift last night, he was hopping on a plane to his freaking awesome trip. So a week of distance was already expected. But a week of nothing? Ouch and burn. Even if he was across the world from me, phones still worked, didn’t they? And I’d diligently kept mine on after realizing I could forget about charging it when I was in Jack’s presence.
I broke it down in my mind. He had to work that night in crappy conditions. Too busy and stressed to pack last minute. Understood. Then flying early this morning and maybe too rushed or preoccupied to call. That was a given too. But once it was almost the end of the day at the store and my phone hadn’t buzzed at all, I started to really wonder. He’d already have arrived in New Zealand. And I even calculated a couple extra hours for a nap or to charge his phone. Yes, I Googled on the desktop how long a flight could take to the island.
He’d had chances to contact me.
But I was not becoming the clinger. I refused.
When Carly showed up at the door after I’d locked up the closet office and was about to head home, my pissy worried mood faded at the sight of my best friend. The fact she was holding a bag from the neighboring cupcake place, plus a to-go bag of Mexican, brightened my mood, too.
“What the hell is up with your phone?”
I frowned and flicked off the lights.
“It is slow, but, nothing. You brought me dinner?”
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “You stood me up for dinner, which I ordered for takeout when you wouldn’t answer my texts or calls. Figured you were either in the hospital or here.”
“Wha-aaat?” I pointed out the door and finished locking up. Out of the store, I got my phone out. On. Charged. And lonely with no contact from anyone all day.
“And it’s the divorce anniversary. Violet’s at my mom’s so I thought we’d get trashed and crash.”
Crap. I forgot the date. And she’d mentioned it when I was over last night. “Sorry I forgot.”
“Hey, you’re in la la land thinking of a new lover.” She shrugged and smirked. “So what’s the deal with your phone? Says the number no longer exists.”
Well, fuck. Maybe Jack had tried to contact me.
We made it to my apartment and Carly didn’t even seem perturbed when I used her phone to call my provider’s customer service. I hadn’t tried to call anyone all day—and very firmly resisted getting a hold of Jack since he left me at the Barton Lodge—otherwise, I might have been clued in to my unreachable status.
Of course, I had to have a phone issue on the night and day I waited for a call.
For the next hour, I was stuck on hold and snacked on tacos and Carly consumed the majority of wine. Again, how those sugars didn’t count…life’s mystery.
Near the loss and absolute destruction of the last teeny threadbare wire of my patience, I finally got a hold of the correct representative who could inform me they’d removed my account from my number.
So, it seemed, they’d broken up with me as a result of a douchebag personal trainer breaking up with me.
Since my cell number was listed at some time in my profile, countless calls and texts flooded the spam filter. Not only was my personal information too readily available for the masses out there, the post was marked for deletion for a violation of terms of service in the community. So there, viral post breaker-upper.
Troll activity triggered the powers that be in the social media kingdom, and I was deleted—phone number wise. I hadn’t ever thought it would be possible to be dumped via a provider like that, but I was actually a little impressed and grateful. No need to wish for Russian hackers to remove the stupid post now.
However, my number. It was the number I gave Jack. The digits he may or may not have used to speak to me or listen to my melodious, sweet voice before he flew off.
According to the seemingly exhausted rep explaining my situation, there was no way on earth to deduce whether or not Jack could have contacted me, nor did said representative possibly give a rat’s ass. My instructions were to go to the provider store to have a new number inserted into my device. He might have implied to avoid idiots who’d diss trolling activity on me too.
Smartass. But true. Lessons learned and all that.
Come the next morning, I asked Traci to ho
ld down the fort of stuffed toys while I tended to my phone and the new number. Not like she couldn’t handle the zero customers in the store we had for the opening hour of the day. Even better, I didn’t have to go far as my cell provider had a store in the same mall. It was one of the two occasions I could ever adore working in a mall. The first being, of course, the cupcake supplier right next to my store.
As I waited in the cell phone place for the techie kid to jig up my new number and restore my reach to the little world I know, I hardly flinched when she asked me if I was the #youredumped girl.
Old news, chickadee. Old news. New news? I’d be calling my new guy as soon as you give me the phone back. Screw who calls who after a date or hook-up. I’d been deprived of the number that I thought I had. So, modified rules for a modified situation.
Or not.
She explained why as I’d stood there, mentally singing Jack, I’ve got your number, eight-six-sev—
“You’ll need to upload your contact list and reinstall your apps, but here ya go.”
“’Kay. Thanks.” And they weren’t even charging me for the new number crap because I hadn’t approved it as a customer. Only… “What?”
She sighed like I’d asked her to recite a fifty line poem about typewriters. “You’ll need to upload your contact list and—”
“Shouldn’t it have transferred automatically? My list?” As in, the data where I stored Jack’s number?
She leaned an elbow on the counter and sank her chin into her palm. For crap’s sake, it was nine AM. Rough night? My employees might have the stupidest titles in the land, but they at least had some customer service training. I’d know. I had to provide it.
In short, she explained that since my old phone number was deactivated before I’d inputted Jack’s, it wasn’t connected to my account. Cloud. Bucket. Whatever the hell cyber things stored numbers in. Jack’s wasn’t there. I knew it had a two and a one in it but even with my hatred of mathematics, I was banking a big fail and magically making a real phone number like a binary line.
Across From You Page 15
