The Girlfriend Stage

by Janci Patterson

  Wouldn’t he?

  “What? Why would you do that?” Gabby’s practically shouting, and I can picture her, leaning forward all intensely on the couch, pointing a Dorito at where I would normally be sitting there next to her.

  “Isn’t that, like, the responsible thing to do?” It feels like it is, but being responsible has never really been my forte.

  “Maybe, if you were actually choosing between two guys. But that’s not what’s happening here.”

  I pause. “It isn’t?”

  “This entire time, you’ve been either gushing about Josh or worried about how he’s feeling. You haven’t done either of those about Shane. You don’t care about Shane.”

  “I care about Shane,” I say defensively. But I know what she means.

  “Not like you do about Josh. Josh is the one you actually want to be with. You’re just scared of that, so you’re using Shane as an excuse not to get serious.”

  Damn. She’s right. I know she’s right. I knew it before I even called her, on some level.

  I let out a shaky breath. “So what do I do?”

  “Well, first, drop any stupid ideas about not having sex with Josh. You’re totally crazy about him, and, dude, the guy drove out to Wyoming for you, is putting up with your family, loves your snort-laugh, and is sleeping on an air mattress in your dad’s storage room. He deserves at least a little action.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, okay. Probably more than a little.” And I’m certainly not opposed to that. “But what about being his . . . you know.”

  I trail off. I can’t even seem to say the word “girlfriend” any more. God, am I messed up.

  She sighs. “I know you don’t do serious. I know you’re scared, even though I’m not sure I totally get why. And I’m not saying you should commit to anything you’re not ready for. But I’ve heard you talk about lots of the guys you’ve dated. Lots and lots of guys—”

  “God, you make it sound like I personally sponsor fleet week or something.”

  “My point is, I’ve never heard you talk about a guy like this. Not even close. You’re already in this, Anna-Marie. And Josh sounds perfect for you. Like the kind of guy worth taking a chance on.”

  My throat feels like it’s closing up. He is the kind of guy worth that.

  But I’m not sure I’m the kind of girl capable of it, no matter how much I may want to.

  I think of Tanya, who knows about my dad’s past, who is scared—wisely—he’ll hurt her like he’s hurt so many others before. I think it’s worth the risk, she said.

  Is she right? Is anything worth that risk?

  But then I think of how it felt to have Josh hold me and talk me down from my tears, how it felt hearing him admit to geeky thing after geeky thing, how it feels to laugh with him and kiss him and . . . well, everything with him.

  “Okay,” I say, though I’m not really sure what I’m agreeing to. “Thanks, Gabby.” I pause, as another fear, another kind of sadness, hits me. “When you move out . . . we’re still going to talk like this, right? And hang out a ton?”

  “We’d better. Or I’m just going to have to move back in with you and bring Will with me. And then you can say goodbye to your precious mango shampoo.”

  “Good. And Gabby, I’m really sorry about Felix.”

  “Me too,” she says.

  We talk for a few more minutes and then hang up. And though I’m still not sure what to do about all my fears and issues, I have at least figured out one thing.

  I grab a bag of some things and walk to the storage room and open the door. Josh is sitting on the air mattress with his back against a five-foot stack of number ten cans of beans and flour. He’s wearing a plain white t-shirt and pair of plaid flannel pajama pants, and scrolling through something on his phone. He looks up in surprise when I enter, and then gives me a tentative smile.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say back. I lean against the door frame in a casually sexy pose and smile. “Don’t get too comfortable here. You’re sleeping with me tonight.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Yeah? Won’t your aunt freak out if she finds me in your bed?”

  I grin at him. “Probably. But we’re not sleeping there, either. I have a better idea.”

  Fourteen

  Anna-Marie

  We get in Josh’s Porsche with the two sleeping bags I’ve requisitioned and some pillows, and I direct Josh to a spot about ten minutes outside of town. There’s some trees and brush to walk through from where we park the car, but not much, and we end up in a large clearing ringed with mostly pine trees. In the day, you can see the mountains in the distance to the west. In the dark, though, it’s like this perfect circle from which to view a sight that’s way better than anything nature provides in LA (Josh’s naked ass in the shower being a lone notable exception).

  Josh lets out a low whistle as he takes in the vast night sky. Not that this same night sky can’t be seen from, say, my house—Everett doesn’t exactly offer much light pollution—but there’s something magical about this place, like you emerge from trees into a dome of millions of stars.

  “Pretty nice, huh?” It makes me happy that he feels that same kind of magic here that I do.

  “God. Yes.”

  “It’s the only thing I miss about Wyoming, most of the time.”

  He looks at me, and. I wonder if he’s thinking about whether or not Shane is the thing I miss occasionally. But Gabby was right, I don’t have feelings for Shane, at least not beyond general friendship and shared history. I wonder if Josh will believe me if I tell him that.

  I’m about to when I see him about to trip over a rock. I swing the flashlight beam downward and grab his hand. “Careful,” I say.

  “Yeah, I’m clearly not an outdoorsman.”

  I smile. “I’m not either. But I think we can manage to stay alive out here for one night, at least. We might need to stay pretty close to each other, though. For safety.”

  He squeezes my hand. “I think I can handle that.”

  Me too.

  I find us a spot near the center of the clearing, someplace with enough room to stretch out both sleeping bags side by side and not have any rocks jabbing us in the back. I’m happy to see we’re alone in the clearing—I had a back-up place in mind in case we happened upon other campers, or god forbid, another Boy Scout troop, but it’s just Josh and me and all the stars, and though it’s not as cold as last night, it’s chilly enough out that we’ll definitely want to help heat each other up. I zip the sleeping bags together so they form one bigger bag, and we crawl inside. I turn off the flashlight, and he puts out his arm, and I curl up into his side, my head resting on his shoulder, while his fingers gently stroke my waist, just under my t-shirt.

  We both stare up at the stars for a long moment, breathing in the clear night air and each other. A few shooting stars streak across our view, and it’s beautiful—meteor showers are common this time of year in Wyoming, but they never stop being awesome.

  I just want to enjoy this with him without the shadow of our spat hanging over us.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “About earlier, at the grocery store.”

  “About the nightmares I’m going to have from seeing Lily debase a raw sausage? Because that wasn’t your fault.”

  I laugh. “Well, yeah, I’m definitely sorry about that. For both our sakes. But . . . you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do,” he says, his tone more serious. “And I’m sorry, too. I don’t want you to think I don’t believe in your talent. Because I do. You’re incredible.” He squeezes me closer. “I just worry about you putting too much pressure on yourself.”

  I sigh. “That may be something I have a tendency of doing. And I probably let my parents goad me on too much.” I roll to the side and look up at him. “But when I told my dad you were the best, I didn’t me
an to make you think I needed you to be the best agent ever, or that I doubt your skills, or that—”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” he says, and I realize I had started babbling. He frowns. “I wasn’t really upset about that.” He pauses, then lets out a small breath. “I think it was really about Shane.”

  He looks down, then back up, like he’s forcing himself to meet my eyes, and my heart constricts. I’m hurting him, and I can’t seem to stop it.

  But I want to, desperately.

  I reach over and grab his free hand, entwining my fingers with his. “I don’t want to be with Shane. I didn’t really want to be with him before, I just—I think I was afraid of what I was feeling for you. Like, um. How much I was feeling for you.”

  I’m afraid now, saying even that much. I don’t do this, I don’t talk about my feelings with guys, because I don’t generally have feelings for guys. Never like this.

  His eyebrows draw together, his thumb rubbing gently over my knuckle. “Yeah?” he says, cautiously. I’m not sure whether he’s having a hard time believing me, or whether he’s just afraid to do so.

  I nod. “I don’t do this, normally. You know, feelings and commitment, it’s all—it scares the hell out of me. And Shane . . . he doesn’t scare me like you do.” Josh flinches, and I know I’m screwing this up and oh my god, I wish I had a scriptwriter right now, because no matter how terrible my Southern Heat dialogue can be, Maeve would surely handle this better than Anna-Marie is.

  “I scare you,” Josh says.

  “How I feel about you scares me,” I say quickly. Maybe I should just have Gabby tell him how I feel about him; she doesn’t seem to have any problems getting the point across. “Because I want to be with you, and I’m . . . terrified. And Shane—it’s not like that with him. His band is talking about moving to LA, and probably he was just trying to reconnect so he’d have a place to land—one I have no intention of giving him, by the way.” Josh doesn’t look comforted by this revelation, and I can hardly blame him. “The point is, I don’t have feelings for him, not anymore, and that makes him safe.”

  He studies me, and even in the dark, with our sight adjusted to the light of the moon and stars, I can see his face, the slight downturn to his lips. And even though he’s holding me, and our faces are mere inches apart, there’s this distance I can’t seem to get across.

  Maybe because I’m too scared to.

  “What exactly are you afraid of?” Josh asks, after a long moment.

  I could bring up any number of tabloid reports of bitter Hollywood breakups—hell, Watterpless’s public meltdown was just this week. But it’s more than Hollywood and what the industry does to relationships.

  It’s what relationships do to relationships.

  “I’m afraid it will end badly. I’m afraid one day you’ll find someone else, and you’ll leave me for her. Or just cheat on me with her, but either way, this thing that was so great will have become nothing but bitterness and resentment and pain, and I . . .” I pull in a ragged breath. “I decided at some point that I didn’t ever want that. I never wanted to be my mom, or any of my stepmoms. And the thought of something like that happening with you, of losing you that way—” Hot tears prick at the corners of my eyes, and I try to blink them away, looking down at our bodies curled up next to one another.

  And maybe I’m just imagining it, just desperately wishing for it, but I think I feel that distance between us shrink, even though neither of us actually moves closer.

  “It is just what happened with your dad?” He runs his hand through the ends of my hair, his fingers gentle along my back. “Not that that isn’t enough to give someone a jaded view of relationships, but . . .” He trails off.

  I shrug. “I guess it was my dad, and then it felt like everything confirmed it, you know? Joe and Patrice are still married, but it’s not like I think they’re actually happy. I don’t know if Shane ever technically cheated on me, but he would flirt so much with other girls, and there were always rumors—and really, we broke up enough whenever he wanted to sleep with someone else that it didn’t take long to see a pattern there.” I roll my eyes, remembering some of our more ridiculous fights. “And then there was this guy, Reid.”

  Josh’s fingers freeze on my back, and I hope I’m not giving him even more reason to feel insecure—though god, how could a guy like Josh Rios be insecure about me?—but he needs to know how deeply messed up I am.

  He deserves to know.

  “A while after Shane and I broke up for good, I was working at this bar over in Riverton, and I met Reid. We dated for about three months, but we weren’t serious, even though he kept wanting to be. But I already had, you know . . . issues with that kind of thing.”

  I say that last part lightly, but Josh doesn’t smile. Probably because it’s not funny, not even a little bit. And what happened next is even less so.

  “But he was a good guy, or at least I thought he was. And then I found out he was married.”

  Josh’s eyes widen. “Oh god. I’m sorry, Anna-Marie. That’s—ugh.”

  “Yeah. It was the worst. I mean, I liked him, but that wasn’t the bad part. It was knowing that I’d become the other woman, you know? It wasn’t my fault. I get that. But he’d used me, and he’d betrayed his wife, and god, I was just done. I packed up my stuff and drove out to LA the next day.” I smile then, but it’s a bitter one. “I’d thought about trying to be an actress—I’d loved being in plays and musicals in high school—but I guess I have Reid being a total dick to thank for pushing me into actually doing it.”

  “You do want to be an actress, though, yeah? Because you’re great at it.”

  My smile becomes more genuine. “I love it. Like an insane amount.”

  And now his lips twitch into a smile, too. “Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about my job, too.”

  I want to end all the serious talk right there and ease into joking and laughing and kissing and making love here under the stars, but something compels me further.

  “It doesn’t help, though,” I say. “Being in the industry. Seeing people use each other and hurt each other, and it’s all so public and . . . and here’s the thing. I get that I’m good-looking. I get that I’m good at what I do. But there are a thousand other gorgeous girls who could also do my job, and I can’t ever forget that.” There’s a lump building in my throat, and I clear it. “And I guess that’s what scares me the most in relationships, too. That I’m replaceable.” I feel a rogue tear drop down my cheek and I brush it away, angry and embarrassed.

  I’ve always thought of myself as strong, as resilient and brave. But it turns out I’m just an insecure mess. And I don’t think I can blame this on Wyoming.

  Josh’s expression softens, and he leans in and kisses the top of my head, pressing me closer against him, and I just breathe in the scent of his neck, feel his pulse against my cheek.

  He pulls back, just enough to look me in the eyes. “You are not replaceable. There’s only one Anna-Marie Halsey. Trust me. I’ve spent years looking.” He lets out a breath. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but you’re it.”

  My heart swells in my chest, warmth flooding through me, even as my own pulse picks up. Because I can tell he doesn’t mean what he was looking for in a client, or a girl to have great casual sex with.

  “And I know you’re scared,” he says. “I get that. But I’m not going to cheat on you. I wouldn’t do that. I’ve had girlfriends before—I dated my college girlfriend for over two years—and I never cheated on them, and I wasn’t even in love with them, not like—”

  My breath catches, and he stops, as if he just realized what he said. Or implied, I suppose.

  He cringes. “Can we pretend I didn’t say that?”

  I can’t. More surprisingly, I don’t want to. “Not like me?”

  He closes his eyes. “Yeah. Not like you.” Then he looks at me aga
in, and I think he might be as terrified as I am. “You don’t have to say it back—it’s okay. But it’s true. I’m in love with you.”

  I’ve had guys say those words to me—and some guys who I think actually may have meant it, or at least thought they did. But I’ve never felt so lightning-struck by those words before—like I can feel the current of them coursing through my veins, lighting up every part of me.

  “How do you know?” My voice is barely above a whisper.

  He shrugs one shoulder. “I was already falling in love with you before this, but . . . it was the lobster joke. That was when I knew. Like how you laughed and it was like . . .” He shakes his head, then smiles. “It was like you get me. I knew you were what I’ve been looking for, maybe my whole life.”

  I feel like I should be hardcore panicking, but strangely, something else is happening. It’s like my body is exhaling, slowly, sinking into the unexpected bliss of this realization:

  Josh is in love with me.

  He’s in love with me.

  And maybe I can’t say it back, because I have no idea how you just know something like that and I’m not sure my panic wouldn’t flare so much that I’d have some kind of love­­-admission-induced stroke.

  But I can do something else. I lean in and bring my lips to his and press my body fully against his and work my hand under the cotton of his t-shirt, along the muscles of his back and—

  And something’s off.

  He’s kissing me back, and his body is giving some pretty definite signals that he wants to rip my clothes off as badly I want him to. But there’s a hesitance to his movements, an uncertainty that I’ve never felt before from him in all the (many many) times we’ve been together.

  I pull back. “There’s something wrong still, isn’t there?” Now the panic is creeping in, tugging at my nerves. Whispering to me that he may be in love with me, but that doesn’t make me any less of a commitment-phobe and a romantic disaster waiting to happen. It doesn’t mean he can put up with that for very long.