“So, I haven’t really been the best friend to you for the last few months,” he said.
“Oh, right, that conversation we have been trying to have for days, which Josh has done everything short of tap-dance naked across the lobby to prevent.”
He snorted and bopped me on the side of the head gently with a couch cushion. “I’m serious. I have been . . .”
While he struggled to find words to describe our situation over the past couple months, I supplied, “Distant, occasionally cold, emotionally unreliable, just a tad douchey . . . I can keep going.”
“Gah, I wish that was less accurate,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I have been distant and aloof, but there was a reason, I promise. I was trying to—” He groaned. “This sounds so stupid now that I’m saying it out loud. I was trying to get you out of my system, like detox.”
“So I’m toxic in this scenario? Because in terms of pillow talk, I would say telling a gal ‘You’re like crystal meth’ is not the way to go.”
“No, and that was the problem. You’re not toxic. You’re too damn good, and smart, and funny, and gorgeous. And you were with Darrell, and no matter what anyone said, you just didn’t seem able to shake him loose. I didn’t think you were ever going to be free from him, or know if you really wanted to be. I wanted to tell you how I felt, but I was so afraid that you wouldn’t feel the same way, and then I’d have ruined our friendship and I’d still have to watch you date Darrell. So I kept quiet and I watched, until I just decided that I couldn’t watch anymore. Otherwise, I was going to be alone, pining for you, instead of having some sort of life for myself. I wanted to start a life with someone, have a real relationship, maybe even get married. I decided that it would be better to back away, to let go of you, because not having you at all was better than watching you let Darrell hurt you over and over again. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I just couldn’t be so close to you anymore.”
“But that still meant you lost our friendship.”
He grimaced. “It wasn’t a particularly well-thought-out plan. I’ll admit that a small part of me was a little angry with you, angry that you let someone treat you like that, angry that you couldn’t see that I cared about you. To be honest, it was one of the few truly irrational, emotional decisions I’ve made. Also there were some other factors that we’ll get to in a moment.
“You didn’t make it easy for me. I had to spend less time with you, to focus on other things at work. It sucked, but I got through it, one day, and the next, and the next, until I could see you and not want to tell you every little detail of my day. After a while, it was easier and I could talk to you a little bit, joke with you a little. And then, of course, you’d say something about Darrell and remind me all over again why I needed the distance in the first place.”
“I can’t decide if I’m proud of you, or angry, or hurt, or if I just want to poke you in the eye,” I told him.
He nodded. “Those all seem like reasonable responses. But why didn’t you mention breaking things off with Darrell for weeks? If I’d known . . . things might have gone very differently.”
“Well, I made the Sadie ‘I told you so’ issues pretty clear,” I said. “And I just didn’t want to go into some long, office-wide postmortem of how sad and pathetic my personal life was.”
Charlie chewed that over for a moment. “Sadie would have used flow charts and dioramas to prove her points.”
“And possibly sock puppets,” I agreed. “Josh would have to be evacuated from the office.”
“There are still some things we need to talk about.”
“I don’t know if I can take any more true confessions right now, Charlie,” I told him, stroking his hair back from his face. “I’m still sort of reeling from the crystal meth comparison.”
“You made the crystal meth comparison!” he exclaimed, chuckling. “Okay, for now, I’ll say I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you—about how I felt, about the detox, everything. If it makes you feel any better, the last few months have sucked.”
“How badly?” I asked, none-too-subtly egging him on to expound on his misery. “Did you write epic poetry about it?”
“If it, in fact, exists—which I am not saying it does—it will never see the light of day,” he vowed.
“I am not saying I’m okay with this,” I told him, “but I accept your apology for right now . . . if you show me that poetry.”
“That will never happen.”
“Then you remain unforgiven.”
“I am willing to risk it.”
I didn’t necessarily want to leave Fort Kelsey, but even our coworkers had their limits in terms of not reporting missing people to the authorities. I figured we were pushing it.
We decided I would leave first, staggering his joining the group by fifteen or twenty minutes so it wasn’t completely obvious we’d been shacked up all day. Besides, Charlie wanted to pack up the fort and the snack debris. It was only right, he protested, since I’d spent so much time setting up the surprise for him.
I stopped at the rec room door to straighten my clothes one last time and pull my thick hair back into a ponytail. “I don’t look like a woman who’s spent the last three hours romping naked in a pillow fort, do I?”
Charlie scanned me over and frowned. “Wait . . . you have a kiss,” he said, leaning forward and brushing his lips over the corner of my mouth. “Right there.”
I dropped my forehead against his shoulder, shaking with how hard I was trying to hold back a laugh. “Oh, that was so lame and embarrassingly effective.”
“That’s actually the Bennett family motto, ‘Lame and embarrassingly effective,’ ” he said, his tone cheeky. “I’ll see you downstairs.”
I nodded loopily, giving him one last kiss before darting out into the cold hallway. As I wandered in my goofy, slightly bowlegged state toward the lobby, I wasn’t sure which was harder to process: the fact that I’d really just done that with Charlie, or that he was willing to do fort housework. Sex with Charlie was so much better than I’d hoped for, so much better than what I’d experienced with . . . other parties. And he was trying to take care of me, or at least keep me from taking care of him. He hadn’t made excuses about “having stuff to do” and immediately run for the hills. He wasn’t asking me to make him a sandwich. There was every indication that he would like to continue seeing me . . . or at least my breasts.
I snuck around several corners and down some stairs before arriving at Sandra’s office, where I’d set up a charging station for our phones at her desk, using the “magic lamp.” My phone should be charged and would need to be moved to make room for the next on the rotation. I was slated after Charlie’s slot, according to the careful schedule Sadie had drawn up.
Gina was standing there at the desk, hovering over her own pink crystal–coated phone, smirking. Shit.
“Gina,” I said stiffly, moving toward the charging station. My phone was nowhere to be seen. “Where is my phone?”
“Oh, I must have dropped it when I took it off the charger.” Gina sniffed.
“What?”
“Oh, yeah, hours ago. I jumped ahead of you on the rotation. I work for the commissioner, Kelsey. My calls take priority. I just came back to check my voice mails.”
So she’d used the time I’d spent distracted in the naked pillow fort to screw me out of phone charging. Clever little bitch.
Plucking my phone from the floor, I seriously contemplated whether it would be going too far to unleash Protocol: Icarus on Gina. She looked at her phone, looked at me, made a “sucks for you” face, then looked back at her phone.
I may have sprained something in my face trying to hold in a combination eye roll/jaw clench/grimace. But on the third phone-face-phone cycle, I finally demanded, “What?!”
“Oh, nothing.” She sighed, scrolling across her screen. “I just feel bad for you.”
r /> “Okay.” I was not about to bite that particular bait. I plugged the charger into my phone and turned toward the door.
“It’s just that, I was checking my news feed and I saw Charlie changed his Facebook relationship status to ‘It’s complicated.’ I’ve seen the way you look at him. I know that has to hurt your feelings,” she said, handing me her phone, where she had Charlie’s wall on the screen. Sure enough, he’d changed his relationship status on the day we drove to the lodge. If my time calculations were correct, he’d changed his relationship status while we were driving to the lodge. What the hell did that mean?
“I guess things are getting ‘complicated’ with that gorgeous blonde in all his photos.” Gina told me. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Kelsey?” she drawled, dragging her finger across the screen to show me Charlie’s profile. I looked away.
“No, I wouldn’t know anything about Charlie’s profile. I don’t have a Facebook account,” I reminded her. And by not having an account, it seemed that I’d missed a pretty important part of Charlie’s life, a development that definitely would have prevented me from engaging in naked pillow fort activities.
“Yeah, well, if you did, you’d see how hung up he is on this chick. Why are the good ones always taken?”
“It’s funny how you’ve never mentioned it before,” I noted.
“Well, you know, we don’t get a chance to talk, just us girls, very often,” she simpered. “It’s even funnier how Charlie never mentioned it. I guess some guys just don’t like to talk about their personal lives at work, huh?”
Gina sashayed out of the office, and as she made her dramatic exit she threw one last triumphant look over her shoulder, as if to say “Check and mate.” I rolled my eyes.
I was not going to buy into this. I was not going to turn into some crazy, jealous, hypersensitive girlfriend when I hadn’t even been labeled a girlfriend yet. I was going to walk out with my sanity and dignity intact. I was going to be a lady. I was going to be Sadie.
Charlie’s phone was charged. As I picked it up, my thumb slipped across power button on the side of the unit. And apparently Charlie’s model had a hair-trigger power button. The phone came to life and a string of chimes noting new messages began pinging like crazy.
“What sort of genius doesn’t put a code lock on his phone?” I muttered. The chimes kept ringing as the texts began streaming across the top of the screen.
I tried not to look. I really did. But the word “sweetie” caught my eye and I couldn’t help it.
Hey, sweetie, thanks for the flowers. Glad to know you’re okay. Talk soon.
Sweetie? Flowers? From a contact listed as “Laura”? What the?
I racked my brain, trying to remember whether Charlie had ever mentioned someone named Laura. A sister, a cousin, a classmate he had strictly platonic feelings for—anyone he would send flowers for nonsexy reasons. I thumbed over Charlie’s text message folder and stared in horror as message after message from Laura scrolled by.
We still on for the visit next weekend? Looking forward to the play.
Wearing something blue to Neal and Kate’s wedding. Your arm candy is ready and waiting.
Really enjoyed myself the other night, can’t wait to see you again.
What the hell was this? Was Charlie dating someone? Had he slept with me while he was dating someone else? In all his confessions of feelings and detox, he’d failed to mention that he was dating someone seriously enough to send her flowers and visit her on weekends? The texts were dated nearly a month before, except for the last three, which were from the day before. The dreaded flower message, then, Hey, you’ve gone off the grid. Are you OK? and Haven’t heard from you in a few days. Getting worried. Call me?
Of course, any girl would worry if her boyfriend suddenly went missing from the digital world. An icy flush crept through my chest and I couldn’t seem to draw a full breath. “Just put it down,” I told myself. “Put it down before you read something you can’t take back.”
Hands shaking, I put the phone down on the desk. “Put down the phone, walk away, tell Charlie his phone is charged, and give him time to explain the texts.”
I stepped away. “Right. Good job. Go Team Kelsey. Now, take another step and walk out the door.”
I took a deep breath and turned around, getting as far as the doorjamb. I wrapped my fingers around the door frame and braced myself, as if some neurotic tornado inside the room was going to suck me back in. And I remembered the first day we arrived, and the pleased little smile on his face while he received texts.
“Right.” I practically launched myself back across the room and grabbed the phone. I opened his text folder and opened the text stream marked “Laura.” I scrolled past the texts I’d already read and saw that this particular thread started months before.
The texts were flirty, but still appropriate. The sort of thing you sent to someone you liked but didn’t trust enough to sext. I guessed they didn’t get to see each other very much because there were a lot of “Thinking of you”s and “Sorry I missed your call”s.
This was a relationship with potential, something that was growing. A familiar, cold sinking sensation gripped my chest. Disappointment, despair, depression. The three sucky Ds I associated with another sucky D, Darrell. I would not end up in another situation like that. I would not end up in another empty, half-assed relationship with someone who had one foot out the door. I just couldn’t.
I opened Charlie’s Facebook profile on his phone and checked his Friends list for girls named Laura.
“Nope, nope, nope.” I dropped the phone and stepped away from the desk. I wasn’t going to do this to myself. I had been down this road before with Darrell. Knowing more about the girl Charlie was seeing would not make me feel better. It would not make me feel morally superior or give me closure.
And yet, some bizarre, self-destructive urge had me picking up the phone again and clicking on the little picture icon next to Laura’s name, enlarging her photo—
“Aw, sonofabitch!” I exclaimed.
Laura was gorgeous. Perfect, Neutrogena-clear skin, Crest-white smile, Pantene-smooth golden corn silk hair. She covered the full complement of beauty commercials intended to make women feel terrible about themselves. Not to mention she had one of those perfectly structured faces that mathematicians use to prove that men are attracted to symmetry.
I opened the photo folder on Charlie’s Facebook profile (right next to the “It’s Complicated” status) and scrolled through the photos of him tagged with Laura. They looked happy together, a little stiff, but happy. They were having fun, smiling cheesily for the camera over glasses of wine at a bar, at some formal event where Charlie was wearing a sharp black suit and a blue tie, at some science museum with dinosaur bones in the background.
Charlie had been dating a Swedish milkmaid. Charlie was on the verge of a “complicated” relationship with said milkmaid. That’s what he wanted to tell me before, that he was dating someone else. After he’d slept with me, he was going to tell me that he had a girlfriend.
I closed the Facebook profile and stared at the phone in my hand like it was an incendiary device.
10
In Which I Officially Hate Everything
Rage.
White-hot, follicle-singeing, supernova rage fueled my progress down the hall and up the stairs toward the room that Charlie and I had just christened. I didn’t remember walking back past any of my coworkers. I didn’t remember having coherent thoughts or a plan. I only remembered my mother’s words to me on the phone the day before, “When men feel neglected, they stray.” And I wanted to scream. Charlie had strayed, all right, but he had used me to do the straying.
I threw the rec room door open to find him meticulously folding blankets. He offered me one of those lopsided grins, and I swear I felt my heart crack inside my chest.
“Hey there, I’m thinking for the next fort, we should do more of an Arabian Nights theme,” he said, gesturing at the pile of blankets and pillows.
“Awesome,” I picked up one of the scavenged pillows and swung it wide, smacking Charlie in the face.
“Ow!” he cried, toppling over the table.
“Laura sent you a bunch of texts. She sounds like a nice girl; you should get back to her.” I tossed his phone at him, and he caught it in one hand. He glanced down at his screen and confusion skittered across his features. “And don’t even start with me about looking through your phone. Maybe it wasn’t the most trusting gesture ever, but don’t try to turn it around so somehow that’s worse than you and your dickery.”
“Kelsey, wait.”
“No, what the hell is wrong with you?” I exclaimed. “What about me makes you think I would be okay with sleeping with you while you’re dating someone else? You know! You know what I’ve been through, Charlie! I thought you were better than this! I thought you were different!”
“Kelsey, I tried to tell you earlier, but you cut me off.” Before I could whack him again with the pillow, Charlie caught me by the elbows and tried to drag me close to him. “I have been seeing someone. In fact, I dated a few girls in the last few months.”
“Why couldn’t you tell me that?”
“I did tell you, I wanted to find someone to build a life with,” he said. “I wanted to have a relationship, get married, settle down. And that was never going to happen with you, not as long as you let Darrell cling to you like a barnacle. So I started seeing someone else. Laura’s a nice girl. She’s an old friend from school. You would like her, but I’m sure you know that now that you’ve read the texts from her.”
“Oh, don’t play Mr. Wronged Party on His High Horse now because I ‘invaded your privacy.’ You don’t know—”
“No, I do know. I know that right now, you’re acting off the script you’ve built in your head for dealing with that asshole. Stop treating me like him, Kelsey. And don’t tell me I don’t know what you’ve been through, because I’m the one who has watched you get run down over and over again. I’m the one who had to watch you get hurt.”