#1 Love

by T Gephart

  She sighed, and while I couldn’t see the look she was wearing, it was no doubt the very same I’d been on the receiving end of when she wanted me to concede. It was like her super power. Just a head tilt to the side, and a well-placed “Maya” and poof, the feeling of disappointment engulfed me so much I’d agree to whatever.

  I sure hoped it was a skill I’d inherited, would come in handy when I came up against a jury.

  “Just call him. Have one conversation with him and then if you don’t want to talk to him again I’ll drop it. Do this for me.”

  And there it was.

  The final nail being hammered into my indecisive coffin.

  Do this for me.

  Seriously—a superpower. What ministers were able to do with scriptures and sermons, Anna Zaveri could manage with four little words.

  “Shit.” I cursed inwardly and outwardly. “Fine, I will call him, but if he even seems the slightest bit weirded-out by the fact some blast from the past is burning up his phone line, I’m tossing you under the bus.”

  Or pretend to be a wrong number.

  National survey.

  Shit.

  Mom laughed, her objective achieved as she tried to sound innocent. “Baby, you would do that to your own mother?”

  “Yes, yes I would,” I responded, sounding convincing even though I probably wouldn’t. “Just promise me you will not tell Kate, and the two of you don’t get involved in some shady intervention. Alex and I were friends, Mom, but a lot of time has passed. I’m sure he has a roster full of friends now, and I’m not really needed.”

  It was how it should be.

  We served a purpose, but that time was over. And now I had a small—but carefully curated—group of people I would easily walk through fire for, who also had my back. It was just too bad they were all going to be on the east coast.

  But going back to California was just something I needed to do. It felt right, even if it meant starting over.

  “I promise you, sweetheart, you will get no interference from me.” Her voice was sincere and I believed her. And if there was one thing more reliable than Anna’s powers of persuasion, it was her bond to a promise. She hadn’t broken one yet.

  “Well, I better finish packing, I have an early flight.”

  “I love you, baby. And in case I haven’t told you enough, I am so proud of you.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’ll see you soon.”

  TRANSCONTINENTAL FLIGHTS WERE THE WORST.

  It didn’t matter how many times I’d flown from Connecticut to Nevada, every single time it was misery with a side order of chronic fatigue. And flying to Los Angeles was no different.

  But for the first time since I’d been playing tag with the coastline, I didn’t immediately want to shower, go to bed and give myself a day to adjust. Instead, I was buzzing, bouncing off the plane like a woman on a tampon commercial. So full of positivity and radiance that I was concerned it might be manic induced. For both of us—me and the tampon girl. No one was that happy to be bleeding out of her vagina, I didn’t care how upbeat you were.

  Capitalizing on my mood—or trying to do as much as possible before I crashed and burned—I’d picked up the keys to my apartment and unpacked my suitcases. I’d traveled light, electing to get rid of most of my college-life acquired furniture and was looking forward to starting fresh with a clean slate.

  A clean slate.

  How desperately I’d wanted that the last time I had been in L.A.

  “You sure I can’t help you out with something?” My landlord knocked on the door, checking in after seeing my underwhelming amount of luggage and lack of furnishings.

  She seemed sweet, even with the Elmo-red hair that stained her scalp. Leathery skin hinted she’d spent a little too much time baking in the sun, only hidden by the housedress that looked from the 1950’s she’d poured herself into. Creepy. “I can give you a foldout cot, maybe a chair and a table until you get on your feet?”

  “Thank you, but I’m fine,” I assured her, looking around the empty space. “The delivery truck for my bed should be arriving this afternoon, and if not, I’ll camp on the floor for a night. I’ll have everything else set up in a day or two.”

  “Well, if you need anything, I’m on the ground floor.” Her leathery forehead receded into that bright red hair. “Welcome to Primrose Apartments.” And with a curt nod, she shut the door and left me alone in my new home.

  Wow.

  It hadn’t seemed real until that moment, looking around and seeing the sun still peeking through my living room window. And suddenly I felt emotional, like the cork had just been released from my bottle and all the feelings bubbled to the surface. My eyes watered as I glanced around the empty room.

  Next week I would be walking into a new job and starting a whole new chapter, and I was excited for all of it.

  Using the time I had productively—still waiting for the comedown—I caught a cab to the store and picked up a few basic supplies. I even managed to sneak out to the mall and grabbed a set of sheets, a few pillows, and a comforter, making it back just as my new bed arrived.

  Lucky for everyone concerned, my apartment was only on the second floor. With no elevator, I had already been up and down the stairs a few times so it was nice to get the bed set up in my bedroom and collapse on top of it the minute the deliveryman had left.

  And that was when it happened.

  All the energy and euphoria leeched out of me like a virus and robbed me of consciousness. My body fell into a dreamless slumber Sleeping Beauty would be jealous of as I snuggled under my new comforter on the sheetless mattress. Pretty sure the plastic was still on the pillows too, but I didn’t care. I was gone.

  When I finally woke up from my nap/coma, it was dark outside. With no lamps or nightstands yet, I reached around on the floor to locate my phone, hoping I hadn’t run the battery flat.

  “Shit.” I blinded myself with the brightness of my screen as I brought it to my face. It was only eleven o’clock but it felt like two in the morning. Of course, it was two a.m. in my old home, which was why I felt like a zombie despite my nap.

  Apart from the fatigue—my tampon girl advertisement cheer missing in action—I was acutely aware of another part of my body giving me the middle finger. My stomach growled, announcing its displeasure at skipping dinner and threatening to cannibalize itself if I didn’t feed it pronto.

  So, with not much to work with in my old-mother-Hubbard cupboards, I managed to order some Chinese food before they closed, avoiding the dreaded fate of convenience store burritos which would have been Plan B.

  I showered while waiting for my food, pretending that some H2O and strawberry-scented body wash was going to make me feel less of a corpse. It was only once I was dressed in my pajamas and sucking down lemon chicken and fried rice that normal Maya seemed to return.

  Or so I thought.

  Because normal Maya would not have picked up the phone and flicked through contacts, finding the number that had been sent by her mother a day earlier. Bored by the lack of television, light, or basically anything gifted to us by the modern century could be the only excuse. Even so, if normal Maya was still running the show, she would have given those digits a cursory glance, and then called one of her friends, Jackie or Lisa even though it was ridiculously late where they were. But instead of being normal Maya—because that would have been too easy—she decided to be abnormal Maya, deciding that the right time to call a man you hadn’t spoken to in like ten years was almost midnight.

  Oh, and she didn’t even have alcohol to blame, so her only argument would be stupidity.

  And yet . . . She dialed.

  Shit.

  Oh, I also needed to stop talking about myself in the third person because I was starting to weird myself out.

  I heard the phone ring as I swore under my breath. “Hang up, hang up,” I chanted out loud, trying to convince my hand to do what clearly my brain wasn’t capable of.

  There was a click, my bre
ath held as a voice answered. “Hello?”

  “Hang up.” The reflexive chant stuck on repeat as I tried to recover. “Shit. I mean, hello.”

  It was a disaster, like my mouth, hand, and brain were all on separate pilgrimages, and every single one of them intent on ruining my life.

  “So, which is it?” he asked, his voice cool despite the hot mess he was clearly talking to. “You want me to hang up, swear or say hello?”

  Say it’s the wrong number.

  Tell him you are calling to find out his views on recycling.

  Ask if he’s welcomed Jesus into his life.

  “Ummm . . . hi?” Fuck you, mouth. “Hi,” I said again, without the indecision and hopefully not sounding like a candidate for a lobotomy.

  “Hey yourself,” he chuckled, with all the finesse I didn’t possess. “You want to keep going with the greetings or should we graduate to whole sentences?”

  My heart squeezed, the charming sarcastic voice I’d remembered from all those years ago was almost identical, except perhaps more manly. And even though I’d been given the number from my mother—who had gotten it from his—there was no denying that the man on the other end of the phone was Alex Larsson.

  “Sentences are so overrated,” I volleyed back, hoping I had a chance at salvaging the conversation. “I was thinking we grunt syllables and see if we can’t communicate on a higher level.”

  “Maya?” The hiss of surprise threw me off guard, not expecting him to guess who I was so soon.

  So much for not weirding him out.

  “Surprise.” I waved my hands in the air even though he wasn’t around to see them.

  “Maya Zaveri?” he asked again, making me ponder how many other weird Mayas he knew who called him in the middle of the night.

  “Aww, you remember me. Hope that is a good thing and not because you’re still emotionally scarred from when I flushed your Ninja Turtle down the toilet.”

  Who the hell was I right now? My hand flew to my mouth, not convinced the voice that had spoken had been mine.

  “Jesus. Christ. I can’t believe it’s really you.” He breathed out, the confidence he’d had when he answered slightly rattled as he continued. “I haven’t spoken to you since—”

  “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t what I’d intended to say, the apology surprising me as I blew out a breath. “I’m sorry it’s been so long.”

  And whatever my intention had been, it had been superseded by my thoughts, my mouth saying exactly what I was thinking.

  I was sorry.

  Even if the circumstances hadn’t been my doing, I could have found a way to stay in contact.

  Email, phone calls—anything, but I didn’t.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry too.” His apology surprising me more than my own.

  “What are you sorry for?”

  He barked out a laugh. “Because I was a dick and didn’t call you either. You know communication works both ways. I knew you were living in Nevada; you didn’t move to Mars.”

  I hadn’t considered him reaching out to me, assuming his family hated mine for what my father had done. Or assuming we were cut from the same cloth and therefore untrustworthy. It was the reason I had never even tried to find him, happier to live in oblivion than the reality of possible rejection.

  A silence fell between us, years of unsaid words hanging in the air just waiting to open a Pandora’s box of emotions. And I wasn’t sure how many of them I could deal with in my jet-lagged state.

  “Well, that got more serious than I intended.” I laughed, my chest feeling heavy as I desperately tried to change the subject. “How did you know it was me?”

  “Are you kidding? You tried to create your own language when we were seven, convinced that if we could communicate with grunts no one else would know what we were talking about.” It sounded like he was smiling.

  Which made me smile. “Well, we couldn’t take over the world if everyone knew what we were going to do. Eric would have tried to stop us, Roman would have tried to usurp our power and Jordon would have created a flow chart detailing how impossible it would have been.”

  “And Dave, Nick and Ben were too busy playing computer games to be of any value to us,” he added, remembering my original argument.

  I chuckled. “Amateurs.”

  “So is that why you’re calling me? You looking to take over the world?” I heard the curiosity in his voice, probably wondering why I’d picked that exact moment to pick up the phone and say hello.

  “Umm yes, if you can write it in for Thursday that would be good.”

  “Thursday? But it’s,” there was a pause. “But it just clicked over to Tuesday morning. You’re going to sit on these plans for domination for a whole two days?”

  “I have to buy furniture or I won’t have a table to unfurl my plans upon.” I laughed.

  God, it was so easy to talk to him. Even after all that time, it was like picking up exactly where we’d left off. I felt like a kid again, completely and utterly devoid of worry.

  “Where are you living now?” he asked, breaking from our little walk down memory lane.

  I took a breath and held it before finally letting go. “Here.”

  “Here, as in California?”

  “Los Angeles. I flew in today. Well, yesterday,” I corrected myself, the day melting into tomorrow already. “I’ve moved back.”

  Talking to me on the phone from an undisclosed location was one thing; being told I was back in town was something entirely different. And while I hoped our happy reminiscing would continue, I genuinely didn’t know how he’d react.

  Did he want to see me?

  Did I want to see him?

  Was there too much water under the bridge?

  Too many questions for a Tuesday morning when my brain was still in another time zone.

  “Well then.” He pushed out a breath and I had no idea whether it was annoyance or happiness. “Lucky for you, I’ll let you use my table.”

  What?

  That told me nothing as to where he sat on the issue of being happy I was back. “Huh?”

  “My table, Maya. For our plans of world domination. No reason to wait until Thursday when I have a perfectly good table lying around. You have a car, or do you want me to come get you?”

  My eyes flew down to my pink and white bunny sleep shorts and tank top and I immediately started to panic. “Errr, it’s the middle of the night.”

  It was a feeble response but all I had, his invitation throwing me completely off guard.

  “Not now, wiseass.” He laughed, the sound zipping up my spine and making my skin pebble. That laugh, even if I’d been gone a hundred years I’d have known it and him in an instant, able to pick it out of a lineup from a million other laughs. “Let’s say seven o’clock?”

  “Alex.” His name felt so weird in my mouth after years of not saying it. “You don’t have to do this.”

  Of course I was curious, who wouldn’t be? While fame had guaranteed I’d seen dozens of pictures of his three brothers—and boy, had time been good to them—I hadn’t even dared to search for him online.

  Not even once.

  It would have been too hard. To see him and know that everything had changed. Instead I chose ignorance.

  But I wasn’t a charity case either, and the last thing I wanted was for him to see me out of some sense of obligation.

  “You’re right, I don’t. But when have you ever known me to do anything I didn’t want?”

  Well, I wasn’t about to argue with that.

  “Okay, seven sounds good. Text me your address and I’ll see you then.”

  “Maya.” His usual cockiness missing from his voice. “I’m really glad you called.”

  “Yeah, me too. Goodbye, see you tomorrow.”

  “Today,” he corrected me. “See you today. Don’t be turning up on Wednesday and wasting twenty-four hours of scheming time.”

  Annnnnnnd the cockiness was back.

  “Right, today. Bye.”<
br />
  Awesome, nothing like jumping headfirst into the unknown.

  Shit.

  AFTER CURSING MYSELF OUT A few hundred times and overanalyzing to the point of insanity, I eventually fell back asleep. And while I didn’t feel great when I woke up—I seriously needed to make up my bed so I didn’t feel like I was sleeping in a Serta showroom—my moments of stupidity were minimal.

  I washed my sheets in the laundry room on the ground floor, trying to let mundane tasks quell the butterflies in my belly. Besides, I had no time to think about my evening, too busy heading to the mall and buying home wares so my apartment didn’t look like it had been robbed. A lamp was the first thing I bought, along with a matching nightstand and dresser. I did some serious damage to my credit card at Target, it was a wonder I didn’t get a call from the fraud department. Pretty sure I was also going to need to sell a kidney to cover the bill, but I’d deal with that next month.

  It wasn’t until five that realization set in.

  “Hello, traitor,” Jackie answered, her voice laced with venom even though I knew she didn’t mean it.

  We’d gone through law school together, vowing to be badass attorneys and even better friends. But in what seemed to be my MO, I had left her behind. While her job offer had taken her to New York City with our other friend Lisa, I had defected back to the west.

  “You attending Shopping Anonymous meetings yet? I heard they give you the number when you buy your first pair of Manolos.” I laughed, happy just to hear her voice.

  She snorted. “Ha, more to the point, have you bought a pair of boobs to go with your microbrew and avocados?”

  “My boobs are still my own, Jenny from the Block.”

  “Well, Gwen Stefani, you’ll be happy to know the only meetings I’m attending are the ones for my new co-op. Oh, and I think someone is peeing in our elevator.”

  I laughed out loud, unpacking the many boxes and bags I had bought while I spoke to her. I needed to multi task, too worried if I stopped and thought about seeing Alex I’d possibly freak out.

  “God, it’s good to hear your voice.”