by Penny Reid
“No, I’m interested,” Melody said. It did sound like a way to make some friends, and it was always possible Lacey was actually being nice and not secretly plotting her public humiliation. “It sounds great, actually. Thank you.”
“Cool.” Lacey gave her the name and address of the yoga studio, and told her to meet her there five minutes before class so she could sign her in.
What the heck? Melody thought. How hard can it be to get pig’s blood out of yoga pants, anyway?
“You’ve done yoga before, right?” Lacey asked as Melody walked up to the yoga studio. In her cute patterned sports bra and matching capri tights, Lacey looked just like a Lululemon model. She even had the abs of a Lululemon model. Yay.
“Yep,” Melody said, trying not to feel self-conscious about her T-shirt and plain black yoga pants from Old Navy. “Totally done yoga before.”
Doing yoga in her living room along with DVDs counted, right? At least she had her own yoga mat, and knew her downward-facing dog from her triangle pose. Okay, so sometimes she got the warrior poses mixed up, but she figured she knew enough to fake her way through it.
“Have you been doing this class long?” Melody asked as she followed Lacey inside.
“Almost a year.” She bent over a clipboard sitting on the desk inside the door and reached for a pen. “Tessa’s an amazing instructor. You’re gonna love her. She’s gotten my mayurasana at least fifteen degrees higher.”
“Cool.” Melody nodded like she knew what that meant. “I only fall down on tree pose like half the time now.”
“You’re adorable,” Lacey said, smiling at her.
“Um…so, is this like a beginner class or intermediate?” Melody asked, eyeing the other women coming in. They all looked more or less like Lacey: abs of steel, Wonder Woman thighs, butts to die for. Melody was starting to worry she might be in for something worse than pig’s blood.
Lacey laughed. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Tessa.”
It wasn’t a beginner or an intermediate class, Melody quickly discovered. It was an advanced yoga class. Like, super-advanced. Superhuman, maybe. She refused to believe it was possible to contort yourself into those ridiculous positions without the benefit of actual superpowers.
Melody struggled her way through the warm-up, more or less managing to keep up, but once they moved on to the real practice, she was done for and ended up alternating between downward-facing dog and child’s pose for most of the class. Meanwhile, on the next mat over, Lacey moved smoothly and flawlessly through one gravity-defying pose after another like some sort of magical forest elf.
“Wow,” Melody said, stooping to roll up her mat when it was finally over. “That was some class.”
Lacey mopped the sweat from her face and grinned. “I hope you didn’t feel too left behind. You did really well for your first time.”
“Oh sure, I corpse-posed like a boss there at the end.”
Lacey laughed. “Hey, you hung in there longer than I did my first time.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” Lacey slung a sweaty arm around Melody’s shoulders and steered her toward the door. “Coffee’s my treat.”
The coffee part was pretty great. All the women with the Wonder Woman thighs were super welcoming and supportive of Melody’s novice efforts. But the biggest surprise was Lacey, who turned out to be friendly, sociable, and genuinely nice—so basically a completely different person from the one Melody had met last weekend.
She remembered Lacey saying there was some stuff going on with her and Jeremy, and she wondered if they’d had a fight that night, or if Lacey was always like that when she was around him. Not that it mattered. Melody was done with Jeremy Sauer.
She wouldn’t mind being friends with his girlfriend, though. She and Lacey had a lot more in common than Melody had expected. Lacey didn’t come from money like Jeremy and Drew—her father was a cop and her mother taught English at Los Angeles City College.
At the moment, Lacey was a bartender, and she’d worked part time to put herself through UCLA, so she was no stranger to minimum wage. She and Melody had a good time bonding over their shittiest shitty jobs.
“Definitely pizza delivery,” Lacey said. “After a while, the smell made me want to die. And I could never get it out of my car. I had to sell that thing—that’s how bad it was. To this day, I still can’t touch the stuff.”
Melody could top that easily. “You know those poor bastards dressed up like the Statue of Liberty who stand around on street corners during tax season?”
Lacey’s eyes went wide. “You didn’t.”
Melody nodded. “During high school. And everyone I went to school with would honk at me whenever they drove by, which they did a lot because the tax place was on a busy street near our school.”
“Oh my god, that’s the worst,” Lacey said, laughing.
“It totally was.”
“But hey, now you’ve got a big fancy corporate job.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it big or fancy. My desk is literally in a closet. And my mom has no understanding of what I do for a living. Every time I try to explain it, she just tunes out and then changes the subject—usually to how disappointed she is I’m not married yet.”
Lacey huffed out a humorless laugh. “Can’t win, I guess. My mom’s terrified I’m gonna marry Jeremy and turn into some lazy socialite. Not that my parents are wild about me bartending, either. They’d rather see me in law school, like my perfect sister.” She looked down at her hands as she twisted an engraved silver ring on her index finger. Her fingers were long and slender, but the nails were all bitten down to the quick, just like Jeremy’s.
“But do you like what you do?” Melody asked. “That’s all that matters.”
“It’s okay. The tips are pretty great where I am now, but it’s not the sort of thing you grow up dreaming about doing, you know?”
“I did,” Melody said.
Lacey snorted. “Sure.”
“I’m serious. My mom worked as a cocktail waitress to put herself through cosmetology school. I remember watching her hustle drinks and thinking the bartenders had it made. They had a special skill, you know? They weren’t just carrying around stuff other people made. For, like, two whole years when I was a kid, I totally wanted to be a bartender when I grew up. Until I got into computers.”
“That’s sweet.” Lacey smiled, then shook her head, looking wistful. “I don’t know, I keep thinking one day I’ll figure out what I want to do with my life. But I’m still waiting for inspiration to strike.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Tessa, the yoga instructor said, coming over to join them. She squeezed in beside Lacey and gave her a one-armed hug.
Tessa was lithe, tan, and relentlessly positive, in that way the best fitness instructors tended to be. Her blonde hair was braided loosely down her back with a few wavy tendrils falling around her face—the perfect beachy waves, just like all the hair products and beauty magazines promised but never delivered.
“She knows exactly what she wants to do,” Tessa said, giving Lacey an affectionate shake. “She’s just afraid to do it.”
“What do you want to do?” Melody asked.
Lacey shook her head at Tessa, blushing. “Stop.”
“She wants to go to the police academy like her father,” Tessa told Melody.
Melody was impressed. The physical requirements alone were intimidating, not to mention the whole carrying a gun and going after criminals of it all.
“Yeah, and there’s no way my dad will ever let that happen,” Lacey said bitterly. “Every time I mention it, he looks like he’s going to have a stroke.”
“You shouldn’t let that stop you,” Melody said. “If it’s really what you want, you can’t let anyone else talk you out of it.”
“That’s exactly what I keep telling her,” Tessa said, beaming at Melody. “You did great today, by the way. You’ve got a lot of potential.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Melody ducked her head shyly. “But thanks. I really enjoyed the class.”
“You’re coming back next week, right?” Lacey asked.
“Yeah,” Melody said, smiling. “I definitely am.”
Chapter 8
Life in LA started to settle into a routine, and Saturday yoga became a part of that routine.
After only a few weeks, Melody was already making some real, albeit incremental, progress. Tessa was an excellent teacher. She had a soothing, encouraging manner that made you believe you could do anything simply because she believed in you. She was one of those people who’d probably be calm and reassuring even in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. She’d be the character on The Walking Dead swinging a machete with the grace of a ballet dancer while doling out inspirational advice.
Lacey only made it to Saturday yoga about half the time, but she always came to coffee afterward when she did show up. Sometimes she’d be super chatty and friendly, and other days she seemed moody and withdrawn. Melody couldn’t help wondering if it had anything to do with Jeremy, but she was afraid to ask since Lacey almost never talked about him.
Melody hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Jeremy since the night of that disastrous dinner—which was fortuitous, considering they worked in the same building. Sauer Hewson was a big company, though, and it wasn’t like they moved in the same circles. He was way up on one of the executive levels, and Melody was down in the bowels of the IT department. They might as well be a world apart.
She still hadn’t managed to make any friends at work. It was a lot harder making friends in the real world than it had been in college. In college, you could make friends without even trying. There was a never-ending supply of people your own age you ran into all the time—in class, the residence hall, study lounges, computer labs, dining areas—and everyone always seemed open to making new friends.
The people she worked with now didn’t seem particularly interested in being friends. They already had friends, apparently. Or they had families. Not that they were unfriendly. They were friendly-ish, they just weren’t friends.
The women at yoga were friendlier, but they hadn’t crossed over to being friends, either. Melody wasn’t actually sure how you were supposed to cross that barrier in the real world. She chatted with the yoga ladies at coffee every week, but no one ever suggested doing anything else. There were no invitations to get together for dinner or go to a movie sometime. Everyone just drank their coffee, then went their separate ways until the next yoga class.
But things were fine. Work was fine. Los Angeles was fine. Her life was fine.
Things were so fine, the days blurred together. There was no changing of the seasons in Los Angeles, not like Boston, or even Florida, where she’d grown up. In Florida, there was a rainy season, a temperate season, and a hotter-than-the-seventh-circle-of-hell season. In LA, the weather always seemed more or less exactly the same, which made it easy to lose track of the days. Somehow, June came and went without Melody really noticing. She woke up one morning and it was July first, the one-year anniversary of Kieran’s death.
She tried to pretend she was fine. It was just a number. A meaningless, arbitrary anniversary, like President’s Day or National Pancake Day—only, you know, horrible. Nothing was any different than it had been the day before. It couldn’t possibly hurt any more than it had on any other day.
Only…it did. It hurt a lot more.
She almost called in sick, but the thought of sitting around her apartment alone all day was more daunting than sitting around at work trying to pretend there was nothing wrong. At least at work she’d have something to distract her.
So Melody went into the office and tried not to think about it. She’d finished re-imaging the servers and been assigned to a hardware audit, which meant going from office to office checking the serial numbers on all the computer equipment and making sure people had what they were supposed to have. It was more busywork, but at least it got her out of her dreary office and forced her to interact with other humans. She didn’t enjoy making small talk with strangers, but it kept her from thinking about Kieran and the hell she’d gone through on this date a year ago.
She worked straight through lunch and on past five o’clock. Unable to bear the thought of going home to her empty apartment, she kept working until the whole building had emptied out. Until she’d done all her work for the rest of the week, and some of next week, too—anything to keep busy.
Sometime after eight, it belatedly occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten all day. She didn’t feel hungry, but knew she should probably try to eat something. There was nothing in her apartment but depressing frozen dinners, so she thought she’d treat herself and stop somewhere on the way home. Maybe sushi.
The sushi in LA was amazing. You could go to any random hole-in-the-wall sushi place in some desperate-looking strip center and the sushi would be a thousand times better than anywhere back home.
Sushi would definitely cheer her up. She couldn’t believe she’d actually given it up, along with pretty much everything delicious in life, for eight whole months because Kieran had decided to go vegan—
Then she was thinking about Kieran and blinking back tears. Because Kieran was dead. It had been a whole year, and Kieran was still dead, and it still felt like her fault.
Melody grabbed her purse and ran out of the office, praying she didn’t run into anyone on the way. Fortunately, it was late enough that the only person she saw was the security guard in the lobby, who barely looked up from his sudoku as she hurried past.
She made it all the way to the relative privacy of her car and managed to get in and lock the doors before falling completely apart.
After Kieran died, Melody had cried herself to sleep every night for an entire month until she’d run out of tears. It still hurt as much as ever, but she hadn’t cried once since. Not even while watching the Fringe series finale, or the “Doomsday” episode of Doctor Who, or any of the things that usually made her reach for the Kleenex. It was like her tear glands had given up the ghost and retired from the crying business altogether.
But, now, a whole year’s worth of tears came all at once, like her body had been saving them up for one truly tremendous breakdown. Melody crossed her arms over the steering wheel, hunched forward in the driver’s seat, and sobbed uncontrollably.
She had no idea how long she’d been at it when a tap on the passenger-side window startled her.
Jerking upright, she saw Jeremy frowning at her through the window. Of course. Of all the people who could have happened by, it had to be him.
“Are you okay?” he shouted through the glass.
“Do I look okay?” she shouted back, swiping at her face.
“Not really.”
She dug around in her glovebox for a pack of tissues. “Please go away.”
“Melody, there’s no way I’m leaving you alone in a parking garage crying.” He tried the door handle, but it was locked. “Will you please let me in so we can talk?”
Why did he have to show up now, of all times? Why couldn’t he have kept walking instead of trying to be all chivalrous?
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said, and blew her nose.
“Fair enough. But if I have to keep shouting at you through the glass, security’s going to notice and it won’t just be me standing here trying to talk to you.”
Melody grudgingly hit the unlock button, and Jeremy folded himself into the passenger seat. “What happened?” he asked, twisting to face her. The top of his head nearly reached the ceiling of her little Fiat.
“Nothing.”
“That’s clearly a lie.”
She blew her nose again, choosing to remain silent.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” She folded her arms and stared straight ahead. What she wanted was for him to get out of her car and leave her alone.
“Do you want me to drive you home?”
“I can drive myself home as soon as you get
out of my car,” she said through clenched teeth.
She saw him shake his head out the corner of her eye. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re this upset. If you want to go home, I’ll drive you—or I’ll put you in a cab if you’d rather, but you’re not driving.” He waited. “Do you want to go home?”
She blew out a long breath and leaned back against the headrest. “Not really.”
“Did something happen at the office?”
She swiveled her head to glare at him. “I told you I don’t want to talk about it. If you can’t respect that, you can just get out.”
“Fine,” he said, putting up his hands in a pacifying gesture. “I won’t ask you any more questions.”
“Good.”
“Except one—”
“Jeremy—”
“It’s not what you think.”
Melody sighed loudly. “What?”
“Do you like ice cream?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Ice cream,” he repeated, absolutely serious. “Do you like it?”
“Of course I like ice cream. Who doesn’t like ice cream? What does that—”
“Get out and trade seats with me,” he said. “I’m taking you for ice cream.”
“What? No. Why?”
“Whenever my sister or I were upset, our dad would take us out for ice cream, and it always made us feel better.”
Melody lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “You honestly think ice cream is going to fix my problems?”
“No, but it will make you feel better.” Jeremy tilted his head, a smile curling at the corner of his mouth. “You know it will. Come on, get out so I can drive. I know this great place that’s only five minutes away.”
The thing was, now that he’d put the thought in her head, ice cream sounded pretty great. “Can you drive a stick?” she asked him doubtfully.
His expression turned disgruntled. “I’m offended you would even ask me that.”
“Sorry,” she said, opening the door and getting out. “Not everyone learned to drive in Maseratis and Lamborghinis, Mr. Playboy Billionaire.”