My Best Friend's Boyfriend

by Camilla Isley

  Maybe she should rethink her strategy—start with the heavy-handed numerical problems first, and research the philosophy of statistical analysis later. Yeah, okay. But why was David so blatantly ignoring her? And why was it bothering her if he did? Wasn’t it what she always asked of him, to leave her alone? Yeah, which he never did. So why start today?

  Careful not to be too obvious, Haley threw a side-peek at David. Contrary to her, he appeared very concentrated on his analysis and was still sorting through his data—manually. Could it be that David Williams wasn’t the issue? Maybe the nagging at Haley’s sides came from the poor way such a beautiful set of raw data was being handled. That must be it. She should show him how models were built, and move on with her homework.

  “You’re doing it all wrong,” Haley whispered.

  David turned toward her. “Excuse me?” he asked in an equally low voice.

  “Your model.” She pointed at his screen. “If you keep doing it like that, it’ll take you forever.”

  “I bet that was the point.”

  “Uh?”

  “My boss dumped this”—David tilted his head toward the laptop—“and five other models to build on me last night saying he needed them ready for Monday morning, but granting me the special privilege of working from home. So I suspect he wanted to make sure I spent every second of the weekend slaving over this.”

  “You have five more?”

  “Yep.”

  “If you keep going at that snail’s pace you’ll never finish.”

  “Thanks for the cheer up.” His signature mocking grin finally made an appearance. “Now I’d like to keep working if you don’t mind.”

  “I could show you how to make it a quick job,” Haley said. “You’d be done in no time.”

  David arched both his eyebrows in surprise. “And why would you do that?”

  “I can’t help myself when it comes to numbers,” Haley blabbed without thinking, opening her defenses up for an easy gibe. She’d served it to him on a silver platter.

  Haley watched a twinkle appear in his blue eyes, the phantom of the easy retort she was sure they were both thinking: You mean you can’t help yourself when it comes to me.

  She waited for him to rip away, but he didn’t. David only smiled, he turned his laptop toward her, and said, “Knock yourself out.”

  Haley shifted her butt into the chair next to him and avidly set her hands on the almost-virgin dataset. “To do a good job, you need to clean the data first. Then you can start elaborating them…”

  “And how do I do that?”

  Haley started lecturing him on everything that he was doing wrong, and David stoically took a notebook out of his bag and began to take notes on all his unforgivable model-building mistakes. He watched Haley sort through his first model in less than an hour, asking her to explain what she was doing step by step. And she did, enjoying both the work and the chance to show off her mathematical skills.

  Admiring her new model all shiny and pretty on David’s screen, Haley felt better than she had all week. With a big smile, she said, “And that’s how it’s done.”

  David low-whistled, careful not to make the sound too audible. “Thank you,” he said, his gaze more intense than ever.

  Despite herself, Haley blushed. “You’re welcome. Now I’d better get back to my own work.”

  She considered returning to her chair, but the gesture would look ridiculous at this point. So she simply pulled her laptop closer and resumed working on her homework questions. And in a weird way, David’s nearness stopped bothering her. Haley was still hyperaware of his presence next to her, of his unmistakable scent, but most of the uneasiness she usually felt in his presence had gone. Perhaps because for the first time since Christmas, he’d behaved like a normal person and not a psychopath. The library was a good influence on him.

  So Haley spent the rest of her Saturday working side by side with David, answering his questions whenever he hit a snafu in his model building, and even forgetting to eat lunch altogether. When an attendant came to tell them they were ten minutes past closing time already, she was utterly surprised. Even if it was already late afternoon, the sun, being late June, was still high in the sky and the room as luminous as in the morning. So nothing had alerted Haley of the passing of time.

  Outside, they stopped on the steps for an awkward goodbye. As long as they’d been cocooned in the protected environment of the library, it had seemed all fine and uncomplicated to sit next to David for an entire day working together. But now that they’d moved outside, Haley was second-guessing the choice she’d made to stay.

  “Hey, I’m starving,” David said, breaking the silence. “Want to grab a bite?”

  Now, going out to dinner with David was a definite no-no.

  “No, thanks.” Haley pulled at the strings of her backpack. “I have to go and call Scott,” she said, blurting out the first excuse that came to mind. Probably not even an excuse. She hadn’t checked her phone all day, library’s policies and all, and she really had to call Scott. Also, it was good to remind them both that even if he was thousands of miles away, Scott remained the huge pink elephant standing right next to them.

  A dark shadow clouded David’s features. “Sure,” he said, descending a step. “Well, I’d better get going. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Faster than she could say “Williams brothers,” he was hopping down the remaining steps and sprinting away.

  Haley sat on the edge of the porch with a sigh. Unhooking her backpack from one shoulder and rolling it from back to front, she fished her phone out of the small pocket at the base. She unlocked the black screen and saw five missed calls—all from Scott.

  Crap.

  After plugging in her headphones, she tapped his name.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Babe, where have you been? I’ve tried to call you so many times.” He sounded hurried.

  “Yeah, sorry. I’ve been at the library all day, doing homework. I even forgot to eat lunch, and I had my phone on silent.”

  Why was she leaving out the part where David had been there too?

  You know why.

  I’ve done nothing wrong, Haley argued with herself.

  Such a pretty little liar…

  “Haley, I’m sorry…” Scott said. “I had time to talk before, but I can’t now.”

  “Oh.” So the one time she could’ve had a real, longer-than-a-few-minutes conversation with her boyfriend, she’d spent the day—doing what, anyway?—with his brother and hadn’t checked her phone once. Haley wanted to kick herself. “Going somewhere?”

  “Yep. Dr. Allen’s assistant just called, he’s removing a brain tumor today, and I’m invited to watch the procedure.”

  “Will it last long?”

  “Hours, eight to ten.” So she wasn’t going to hear from him again today. “And the patient will be alert the entire time, isn’t it exciting?”

  How Scott could get so enthusiastic about spending ten hours watching one person crack another person’s skull open and fiddle with their brains—while the poor dude was awake—was out of Haley’s comprehension, but she tried to sound supportive all the same. “Wow, brain surgery… sounds thrilling.”

  “Um, listen, I really gotta bounce. Call you tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Love you.”

  “Me too.”

  The words had barely left Haley’s lips when the line clicked off. She was tempted to hurl her phone down the steps; it seemed so satisfactory when people did it in the movies. But in real life, it’d only leave her with no phone, or with a seriously damaged one, and she doubted broken technology would lift her mood. A stomach cramp reminded Haley of the skipped lunch. Better get home and order a pizza.

  Haley stood up, resenting the warm June sun caressing her face. Never had she hated a summer so much.

  Fifteen

  Haley

  The subconscious is a tri
cky mechanism, a gray area of the mind that allows individuals to lie to themselves. Haley’s most private thoughts must’ve been safely stored in that gray matter when she walked into the library the following Saturday. How else could she tell herself that she wasn’t hoping to catch David there again? That there was no particular reason she’d chosen today—exactly a week after she’d bumped into David—to return to the Loker Reading Room. That, on the contrary, she actively wished for him not to be there. And that when she spotted him seated in the same exact spot as the previous Saturday, it wasn’t relief she felt.

  Now, part of her suspected there was something fundamentally wrong—or if not outright wrong, at least dangerous in a playing-with-fire way—in her actions. But her subconscious still allowed her enough wiggle room for her to sincerely tell herself that it was okay. That there was nothing wrong with spending time with David. That she hadn’t been looking forward to the weekend since Monday. And that it was for personal hygiene reasons she’d showered that morning—and blow-dried her hair and put lip gloss on.

  “Hey,” she greeted him.

  Yeah, nothing wrong with spotting that same relief reflected in his eyes as soon as they set on hers.

  “Hey, Miss Robot.”

  Miss Robot. No more Sunshine, but not even Haley.

  Haley raised both her eyebrows. “I’m not Sunshine anymore?”

  “Miss Robot sounded more appropriate.”

  Haley half-smiled, half-grimaced, loving the nickname but hating that she did.

  “I hoped you’d show up,” David said, his smile so genuine that it almost shattered Haley’s fickle mind barriers. But David’s next comment made it okay to ignore the alarm bells. “I have a new modeling challenge for you.”

  They only shared a common interest in numbers and Excel spreadsheets. It was okay to hang out, nothing wrong with that.

  She sat on the chair next to him and asked, “Are you always supposed to work on weekends?”

  “It’s investment banking, they’re not famous for leisure working hours. And it’s your fault if I monumentally pissed off my boss.”

  “My fault, how?”

  Someone nearby coughed in a reproachful way, so David lowered his tone considerably when he said, “You had me deliver him a set of six perfectly built models.”

  “Wasn’t that the point?”

  “No, as it turns out.” David drew his brows close together in a mock-serious expression. “The point was for me to spend every waking hour of the weekend sweating cold, knowing I wouldn’t be able to complete the assignment. I should’ve pulled a couple of all-nighters, and then walked into the office on Monday looking like a properly humbled intern. My boss didn’t appreciate the swag…” David smirked.

  Yeah, Haley could just imagine the scene. David had swagger enough for ten interns.

  She ignored his smug expression and asked, “And you work at this lovely place… because?”

  “It’s where the best of the best work… it’s like joining the military and applying to be a Navy SEAL. The training is going to be a bitch, but if you survive, you’re part of an elite force.”

  “That saves lives and protects the country; you only want to swim in cash.”

  “It’s not about the money…” David pierced her with a stare. “…It’s about the challenge.”

  Haley couldn’t sustain that gaze and busied her hands with a stack of notes. “Anyway, is the new model punishment?”

  “Boss wanted to make sure I spent the whole weekend working this time. He doesn’t know I have a secret weapon.”

  “And what if I hadn’t shown up?”

  He held her gaze a moment longer than Haley was comfortable with. “But you did.”

  Right. Better to bring the conversation back on safer ground. “What’s the new model about?”

  “What do you know about the stock market, volatility, and risk management?” David challenged.

  Haley smiled and cracked her knuckles. “Show me the math.”

  ***

  Haley didn’t forget about lunch this time—at around midday, hunger bit at her. Still, she was undecided if she should say anything, as she was sure that if she mentioned taking a break for lunch, David would try to join her.

  So?

  Would sharing a sandwich be all that different from building a model together? Somehow it sounded more compromising—date-ish. But when her empty stomach let her know with an angry grumble that it couldn’t care less about her moral reserves, Haley asked, “I’m going out for a sandwich, care to join me?”

  David lifted a finger toward her, eyes still trained on the screen. “Give me fifteen minutes. I need to finish one thing first.”

  “O-kay.”

  Haley looked back at her own screen, off-putted. Not that she had expected David to fall at her feet with gratitude for a simple invite to lunch—well, actually, she had kind of expected it. He should consider himself lucky that after everything he’d done, she was still talking to him—helping him, even. Ungrateful little brat.

  Haley was about to put him in his place when his concentrated frown stopped her. He seemed oblivious to her mood shifts. In fact, he appeared so focused on his work that Haley relaxed. Making her wait wasn’t personal; Haley was the same when she was so caught up in programming—she didn’t see or feel anything else. Not hunger, and definitely not hurt feelings.

  Suppressing a sigh, she kept working on her program, throwing him side-glares from time to time—even if she understood the work-frenzy, she was still famished.

  A good twenty minutes later, David shut his laptop and they headed out. They grabbed two sandwiches from a kiosk and went to eat them seated at an outside table bathed in the warm July sun. It would’ve been almost too hot, if not for the cool breeze constantly blowing that made the temperature just perfect.

  “You’re staring,” David said, eyeing her over his half-eaten sandwich.

  True, Haley was staring. “Who are you?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him. “And what did you do with the real David?”

  “You’re looking at him.”

  “So if you know how to be a normal person, why do you usually act like a jerk?”

  “Pardon me?”

  Now that she’d started, Haley wasn’t about to back down. “Excluding today and last Saturday, you’ve always acted nasty around me.”

  “Sorry if I wasn’t a jolly good fellow while I had to watch you drool all over my brother.”

  Haley stopped her hands halfway to her mouth and lowered the sandwich. “Excuse me? You were a poster child for douche central right from the moment you opened the door of your room in Hawaii. I wasn’t even with Scott back then.”

  “I was flirting”—David batted his lashes jokingly while he smiled—“and you were giving me the cold shoulder.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Oh, pluhease.” He rolled his eyes theatrically. “You were already so much into my brother there was nothing I could’ve said to make you change your mind.”

  Ah, but there was something you could’ve said, Haley thought, and hoped her emotions wouldn’t show on her face.

  No such luck. David saw right through her, and when he spoke next, it was as if he’d read her mind. “Not that,” he said. “I wanted you to like me, not a fantasy we both had ages before at a summer dance.”

  “You still could’ve been nice,” Haley chided, praying she wasn’t blushing. Her cheeks flared up whenever she thought about the night of the masquerade. “And why tell me about the ball so much later, then?”

  David licked a smidgen of sauce off his fingers. “What can I say? I’m not perfect.”

  Haley scoffed. “Duh-uh.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You really hurt Madison, you know?”

  “Oh come ooon, I already told you Blondie was never that into me.”

  “Regardless of her feelings, you can’t expect to yell horrible thin
gs at a girl and not have her take them to heart—especially someone as sensitive as Madison.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” David scrunched the paper that had been holding his sandwich in a tight ball and hurled it at a nearby bin, his aim impeccable. “I was having a bad day, and I snapped.”

  Haley swallowed the last bit of her sandwich, then said, “It’s not me you should apologize to.”

  “In a way, I should, though.”

  Haley didn’t reply; she just kept watching him reproachfully. Her expression said: I’m listening.

  David dragged his chair closer to hers. “I’m sorry I acted like a jerk around you this whole time. It was only because I was angry at Scott for something that happened years ago—and because I was jealous. And I’m sorry I told you about us, about the kiss, the way I did…”

  Haley arched one eyebrow.

  “And, yes, I’m sorry I made it sound to Scott as if it had just happened. I thought he was going to get mad for a few hours and then get over it. I didn’t know he would move halfway across the country five minutes after I told him.”

  “But you’re not so sorry he’s gone.” Haley scowled.

  David’s eyes twinkled with mischief and he grinned. “No, I’m not a saint.”

  Haley wanted to keep glowering at him but found it hard. Her lips seemed to stubbornly want to curl up in a smile.

  Features contracted in a mask of innocence, David asked, “Am I forgiven?”

  “You’re on probation,” Haley conceded. Without giving him room to gloat, she got up, walking all the way to the garbage bin to throw away her trash, and added, “Let’s go back inside and finish our work.”

  “At your command, Miss Robot.”

  Haley made a point to press her lips tightly together and not smile. Damn, it was really hard to keep a grudge against the dude. Haley silently cursed herself for being so soft.