by Gia Riley
Chandler
“You’re wearing those shoes?” Hollis asks as I put my coat on by the front door.
“What’s wrong with boots?” I question.
“It’s just so cliché.”
“I have other shoes, if that’s what you’re worried about. Boots just remind me of home, and right now, I kind of need that.”
His eyes soften. “Then, I think they’re a perfect choice.”
He doesn’t, but I appreciate him pretending like he does.
As soon as the door closes behind us, he leans in. His breath tickles my ear, and I stop moving.
“Those aren’t boots, Chandler,” he whispers. “They’re shitkickers.”
He then moves a comfortable distance away from me, and I can’t help but laugh.
“They’re comfortable,” I tell him. “And they’re not the kind of boots you wear on a farm. Do you have any idea what these boots go for?”
He shrugs and then glances at his sneakers. They’re name-brand, not at all cheap, but they’re still nowhere near the cost of good cowboy boots.
“I’ll stick to my Adidas and leave the boots to you, country girl.”
Country girl. I knew this accent would get me a nickname in no time.
We round the corner and run into Fisher at the trash chute where he’s getting rid of more empty pizza boxes. I’m still not sure how he needed that much pizza. There’s no way he could have fit that many people inside of his apartment. This is New York, a place that’s known for its small square footage.
“Does he ever wear a shirt?” I ask Hollis.
Hollis rolls his eyes, and I remember I commented about his bare chest this morning, too.
“Either you really like clothes, Chandler, or they don’t make guys like us in the South.”
“Both,” is all I get out before Fisher gives me a once-over, just like he did last night. I’ve never met anyone like these two guys; that’s for sure.
“Hot date?” Fisher asks.
Hollis looks at me and smiles. “Obviously. Look at her.”
I blush.
“Hollis is just showing me around, so I don’t get lost, going to work tomorrow.”
“Call it whatever you want,” Fisher says.
There’s nothing to call it. What we’re doing doesn’t need a label. It’s nothing. It can’t be. Not when I still have these lingering feelings for Wirth.
I glance at my phone, checking to see if Wirth has messaged me yet. I’m more than a little disappointed when I see that he hasn’t. If he’s expecting me to make another move, he’s going to be waiting awhile. I already initiated a kiss.
“Ready, babe?” Hollis asks.
Fisher gives me a look that screams, I knew it!
“This isn’t a date, Hollis.”
Fisher laughs on his walk toward his apartment, and just before he closes the door behind him, he yells, “Rejected!”
Hollis isn’t fazed, but he’s quiet on the walk down the block. And, when we enter a place called 5 Napkin Burger, I think I might have found a little piece of heaven.
We’re seated at a table by the window, and Hollis snatches the menu out of my hand. “Are you allergic to anything?” he asks. “Any weird diets?”
I give him an odd look, and he tells me, “I already ordered for you, Chandler. Just making sure you can eat it.”
“I’m only allergic to shrimp, but how did you order? We just sat down.”
“I have a friend who works in the kitchen. I texted him when we left the apartment.”
“So, you bring a lot of girls here?” I question.
He smirks. “I knew you cared.”
“Hollis, I’m just asking.”
“I told you, I’m single, Chandler.” He tries to say my name with a Southern accent, and it’s pathetic.
“Yes, but you didn’t say anything about dating,” I remind him.
“So, this is a date.”
I rest my head on the table, lightly banging my forehead against the wood. Hollis is exhausting, and he’s the king of twisting my words around to his own benefit.
When I lift my head, two steaming plates of chicken and waffles are placed in front of us.
“I love chicken and waffles,” I whisper, shocked that he ordered something I’d have ordered for myself.
“A little piece of home,” he says softly.
Little fireworks go off inside my stomach. Here I am, wondering when Wirth is going to message me, and all the while, Hollis is trying to slide in between us—unknowingly, of course.
Hollis might not have made the best impression last night, and he’s still been a bit of a pain in the ass this morning, but I quickly decide that Hollis is going to be one of my best friends—if not the best.
We eat quickly, and he’s a gentleman, paying for the entire meal and then showing me the way to the theater. He doesn’t even laugh when I take pictures of signs and landmarks so that I remember.
All he says is, “It gets easier.”
By the time we get back to the apartment, my feet are killing me. I knew I was in for a lot of walking when I moved to New York, but I didn’t realize how much I’d relied on my car until I no longer had one.
“Wishing you wore sneakers?” he asks when I kick off my boots and groan.
“I might have to go shopping,” I admit. “But thank you for showing me around. I hope I can remember everything.”
“Don’t worry. Everyone in the building is cool, hence why Fisher had so much damn pizza, so you’ll see lots of familiar faces coming and going. And, if you’re lost, just look up. Everyone’ll assume you’re a tourist.”
I laugh because I know I did that at least ten times today. It’s hard not to. With everything jammed so close together, the only place to advertise is up.
“There’s still a lot to show you though. And we’ll definitely tackle the subway another day.”
“I rode it once before,” I tell him. “When I was here for auditions.”
“How’d that go?”
“Well, in the span of a fifteen-minute ride, I witnessed a woman humping the support pole. Someone threw money at her, and she didn’t even care. She just slid down to the nasty floor and picked it up. Then, I turned my head to the left and watched a man chug hot sauce like it was a bottle of water. He used whiskey as a chaser. Then, he coughed, and a little bit of sauce came out of his nose right before he threw up all over the place. The woman next to me gagged from the smell, and I thought she was next. All of our immune systems had been compromised, so I gave her one of my Wet Ones.”
“What the hell is a Wet One?” Hollis asks.
“That’s your first question after all of that?”
“It just sounds dirty,” he says.
Of course it does. He’s a guy.
I unzip my purse and pull out the pack of Wet Ones I always carry with me. “These are Wet Ones. You can have a pack.”
He curls his lip and looks less than thrilled. “Not nearly as fun as I hoped. Lemon?”
“Yes, it smells nice.”
Some people don’t leave home without tissues or their favorite lipstick. For me, it’s sanitizer wipes. My biggest worry back home was stepping in dog shit. Everyone in town had a dog, and I’d stepped in it one too many times. Sometimes, it was horseshit though, depending on what was going on in town, but it didn’t really matter where it came from after it was all over your shoe.
Hollis sets the wipes on the counter and grabs two bottles of water out of the fridge. On his way back to the living room, he stops and grabs a piece of paper off the table.
“Saw this coming,” he says.
“What is it?”
“Apparently, Tom’s moving in with his new fiancée, so it looks like we’ll be getting a new roommate.”
“A girl?”
“Fuck, that would be awesome,” he says.
I take a water out of his hand and walk toward my bedroom, so I can change into some sweats.
“You’re still my fir
st choice, Chandler. Don’t be sad,” he yells as I walk into my bedroom.
“Noted!” I yell back.
I’m just sliding a leg into my pants when I hear the front door open. A couple of curse words are strung together to form a colorful sentence, and I assume Tom came back for some of his stuff.
I’d like to meet him, but I know Tom and Hollis probably have a lot to talk about. I just hope he plans on paying his portion of the rent for the month because I can’t afford any extra right now. Not when I still have so much I need to buy.
I’d like to check in with Jansen while I wait for them to hash it out, but I left my purse on the couch. I’m debating on grabbing it when I hear Tom ask, “Whose purse is this?”
“Our new roommate,” Hollis tells him. “As of late last night. Or early this morning, depending on how you look at it.”
“Is our new roommate a cross-dresser?”
Hollis barks out a laugh and says, “No. But she’s fucking adorable.”
My cheeks flame crimson. Hollis hasn’t hidden his feelings since I got here. While we were out, he bought me food, and as he showed me around, his hand brushed my knuckles more than a few times. I swear, if I had given him half an inch, he’d have held my hand as we walked down the street.
“Is she here?” Tom asks. “I want to meet her.”
I guess that’s my cue, but I pretend I haven’t been listening to their conversation and wait for Hollis to walk down the hall to get me.
As soon as he sees me, he knows I heard every word. The embarrassment is written all over my face. I think he might be blushing too. But I trail behind him, not saying a word about it. And, when I look up, my eyes crash into those familiar blues again. Only this time, it’s not on the computer screen. He’s in my living room.
“What the hell?” Wirth says. “What’s going on?”
“You’re not Tom,” I whisper.
Wirth’s mouth hangs open. He can barely close it to speak. “What are you doing here, Chandler?”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again. The kiss we’d shared on the plane was a one-time thing, a New Year’s Eve tradition that I drunkenly fulfilled. But, seeing Wirth in my living room—our living room from the sounds of it—I feel like I’m thirty-five thousand feet in the air again.
“I should ask you the same thing. How do you keep finding me?”
Wirth runs his fingers through his hair and glances at Hollis. Hollis is stock-still, barely breathing. He looks as shocked as I feel.
“I live here,” Wirth says. “This is my apartment.”
“What?”
Wirth didn’t have to kiss me back on the plane, and he didn’t have to hunt me down on social media. He certainly doesn’t have to look at me the way he is right now. But he did. And he is. And I can still feel his hand on the back of my neck, pulling me closer, his nails lightly scratching my scalp when he threaded his fingertips through my hair.
I want all of those things and more. So much more. But, when the room tilts and the walls close in on me, I think I might be hallucinating or about to faint. This can’t be happening.
Wirth
Chandler’s standing in my living room, completely shocked to see me. All this time, I’ve been trying to figure out the perfect things to say to her, and she’s been in my apartment.
Am I just as shocked? Yes.
Am I nervous? Absolutely.
There’s no telling how this is gonna go.
She hasn’t taken her eyes off of me though, and I take that as a good sign. Judging by the way she’s twisting the hem of her sweater between her fingers, she’s close to freaking out. I get it. We went from strangers to whatever this is in a matter of hours.
“This is crazy, Wirth,” she says, breaking the silence. “What’s happening?”
Hollis takes a step closer to Chandler, and I don’t like it. But she glances at him and smiles. She even lets go of her sweater. I have no idea why he’s able to calm her so easily.
I saw how worked up she was on the plane, and it took a lot of talking to get her to relax. But all he did was glance at her, and I realize that can only mean one thing. Maybe they have history, too.
“You two know each other?” Hollis asks.
We both nod, neither of us giving him more than that. I think we’re both too weirded out about the universe bringing us together again for the third time. What started at a bar in Nashville has traveled all the way to New York City. If I believed in ghosts, I’d think Mom was lurking, trying to set me up from heaven.
“I wasn’t sure I’d see you again,” I tell her.
She protectively crosses her arms over her chest. “Me neither. When you let me walk away, I thought that was it.”
I don’t have an explanation to give her. Every part of me wanted to get her number. I just didn’t think she’d want to give it to me. I couldn’t face more rejection. Not after what had gone down in Nashville.
“I’m an idiot, Chandler.”
A smile lights up her face, and that glow punches me hard in the stomach.
“You are,” she agrees.
“When I friend-requested you last night, I never imagined I’d see you in person.”
“You friend-requested her?” Hollis questions. “You hate social media.”
“He did. But he’s been taking forever to say something,” she says as the smile slips from her face.
“How did you two meet?”
“On a plane,” I tell him.
“At a bar,” she says. “Well, that’s where I first saw him. We didn’t actually have a conversation though.”
We’re giving Hollis whiplash. He has no idea what to believe, and from the looks of it, he’s getting annoyed. He has feelings for Chandler. I see it written all over his face. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. The thing with Chandler is, you don’t need a lot of time to feel something. From the second she opens her mouth, it’s like talking to someone you’ve known your whole life. She’s just the kind of girl you want to be around.
“Can you give me a little more than that?” Hollis asks.
Chandler gives me a look that screams, Please explain, so I do. “We shared a flight, Hollis. My seat was next to hers. And, apparently, she had seen me perform in Nashville a couple of days before that. So, she knew who I was as soon as she saw me.”
Hollis glances back and forth between me and Chandler. “If that’s all it was, then why are you two looking at each other like that?”
I have no fucking idea why she’s looking at me. I’m nothing special. But she is. And that’s why there’s no other place I’d rather look.
Hollis puts his arm around Chandler, and though she leans into him, she doesn’t wrap her arm around his back. She just stands there with her arms at her sides.
“What’s this about?” I ask the both of them. Maybe I’m not the only one she’s connected with.
“We had a date this morning. I took her for brunch and showed her around. It was pretty amazing,” he explains.
Looking up at Hollis, Chandler softly says, “It wasn’t a date.”
Thank fuck for that.
But there’s something I need to know. My next question is directed toward Chandler, not Hollis. “Did you kiss him?”
With wide eyes, she says, “Of course not. Believe it or not, I don’t go around kissing everyone.”
“Only me?”
She instinctively licks her lips, like she’s reliving the moment we shared, and Hollis removes his arm from her shoulders.
“I take it, you two have,” he says. “That’s why you’re eye-fucking each other.”
When I don’t deny it, Hollis turns and walks away. His closing door snaps Chandler out of a daze.
“Shit,” she says. “He’s been so nice to me. I have to go talk to him.”
I’m not ready for her to leave. Not when I just got here. There’s still so much we need to talk about, like what she’s doing here.
“Wait,” I whisper.
She looks over her shoulder, and though she wants to make things right with Hollis, she wants to stay here and talk to me, too.
“Do you like him?” I ask her.
“Of course I do. He’s funny. We had a good time today.”
That’s not what I was asking. She knows it, too.
“Do you like him?” I ask her again, this time stressing one key word.
“Not like that,” she says.
Once I have confirmation, I reach for her hand, pulling her closer.
“What are you doing, Wirth?”
“What I should have done at the airport,” I tell her. “Now, come here.”
She swallows and tries to hide behind a veil of blonde hair. “You can’t kiss me again,” she whispers.
“I didn’t kiss you. You kissed me,” I remind her.
“But you kissed me back.”
“I know.”
I’m not ready for a new relationship. Not ready for a girl to cloud my judgment again. But there’s nothing I can do about the impression Chandler left on me. When we kissed on the plane, it felt good—better than anything I’d shared with Shannon.
“I’m still confused about why you’re here,” she says. “Tom only decided to move out today.”
“Tom’s the one I rented my room to while I was gone, so I wouldn’t lose it entirely. I spoke to him on my way here, and he told me he was moving out, so it was way simpler than I’d thought it’d be.”
“I haven’t met him,” she says. “Hollis told me he got engaged last night.”
“So I hear. Pretty perfect timing.”
Perfect timing. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever said that.
Nashville wasn’t perfect timing. Everything that went down with Shannon wasn’t either. Yet, when it comes to Chandler, I always seem to be in the right place at the right time. That kind of Karma is terrifying.
“So, you’re staying?” Chandler asks.
“I’m staying.”
In the room right next to hers. Our headboards share a wall unless she’s moved things around.
Looking down at our joined hands, she chews on her lip. I give her a second, and when she’s ready, she looks at me again.
“Were you really going to message me, Wirth?”
“As soon as I figured out what to say.”