Available to Chat

by Sutton, Jacy

  Mike nodded, turning away from her toward his office.

  “Are you going to do work? It’s almost one on New Year’s.”

  “Just a couple things.” Mike rubbed at his temple. “I want to clear off my desk. Start fresh next year.”

  Olivia watched him and considered calling after him but it felt like too much work. Instead, she walked to her bathroom to get ready to go to bed, alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE NEXT MORNING, Olivia felt well rested and was up long before anyone else stirred. Industriously, she planned to spend the morning writing, but Jake messaged.

  “Watching the parade?” he asked.

  “Yep. There goes Snoopy.”

  “Recovered from last night?”

  “Not too much to recover from. You?”

  “Recovered from going to bed at 10 p.m.,” he wrote. “Quiet night here. And now I’m the only one up.”

  “Me too.”

  “Thought about you last night when I went to bed.”

  “That happens to me a lot,” Olivia wrote.

  “I better not start anything with you this morning. I’ll probably be interrupted. I wouldn’t want to leave you all hot and bothered.”

  “No. We definitely wouldn’t want that.”

  “With no one to turn to,” Jake teased.

  “Except my handy sex toy.”

  “Olivia. You naughty girl. Really?”

  “Really,” she wrote.

  “You never told me.”

  “You never asked.”

  “I’m asking now.”

  “There was a party,” she began.

  “Ooh. La. La.”

  “It was a home party. Like Tupperware.”

  “What did you get?” he wrote, and she felt as though he was leaning right into the computer.

  “It’s a vibrator. It looks like, well, a bit like you would look if you were neon pink and had a butterfly attached.”

  “I’ve seen those,” he wrote.

  “Have you?”

  “I do get out of the house once in a while. Tell me more.”

  “It was a fun, crazy night. The woman who sold the toys was great. After she does her show-and-tell, she meets with everyone individually to take their order.”

  “Did you like her?” Jake asked.

  “I did. She was so easy to talk to. I don’t think I could have said anything that would have surprised her.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Yes, Jake.”

  “Do you think sometimes when she’s doing those.…”

  “Consultations?” Olivia wrote helpfully.

  “Yes. Those consultations. Think she ever?” His typing stopped.

  “What are you asking, Jake?” she wrote, knowing precisely where he was headed.

  “Does she ever show the woman how one of the toys works? Would you have let her show you, Liv?”

  She could feel his excitement. The fantasy of two attractive woman kissing, caressing.

  “She might, Jake. She did touch me gently.”

  “Tell me more.” His response popped up so quickly her thought paused imagining his expert, nimble fingers.

  “When I saw her again,” Olivia replied, “she told me the altruism of helping people turns her on.”

  “You saw her again?” he asked.

  “Yes. We were at lunch.”

  “Uh-huh,” he wrote.

  “She told me her latest boyfriend is eight years younger than her.”

  “Yes?” he wrote.

  “She said he just loves when she hosts parties, because she always comes back hot.”

  “I bet. All those women talking about what makes them feel good.”

  “Exactly. Her boyfriend calls them ‘fabulous fuck’ nights.”

  “They probably did after she was with you. Don’t you think, Liv?”

  Olivia heard Mike’s footsteps coming toward her. “I have to go, Jake,” she wrote, knowing today she was the one leaving him hot and bothered. “Later,” she typed, and then quickly she turned chat off.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  MARTI STOPPED BY UNANNOUNCED five minutes before Olivia needed to leave for work. Actually, Olivia should have left a minute or two ago if she wanted to be on time. Now, she was just shooting for not conspicuously late.

  “Good morning!” Marti breezed through the door without waiting for a response to her quick knock. She held a huge plastic bag nearly overflowing.

  “What in the world are you doing here at 8:15?” Olivia held the door open. “What are you even doing awake at this hour?”

  “I don’t sleep all day,” Marti said. “Anyway, be nice. I come bearing gifts.” She set the large bag down at Olivia’s feet.

  Olivia’s curiosity piqued. She opened the bag and pulled out a jet-black Spyder men’s ski jacket. “This is nice. What’s it for?”

  “Gary took up skiing. Did I tell you?”

  “No,” Olivia rifled through the bag and found matching pants.

  “Yep. He went to REI and outfitted himself entirely.”

  Olivia held up the ski pants that looked just-bought new, and Marti reached into the bag and found goggles. “Oakley,” she said, handing them to Olivia for inspection.

  “Nice. So why are all these riches in my entryway?”

  “That’s a story,” Marti said. “Give me a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you.”

  Olivia cocked her head. “I’m supposed to be at work.”

  “I said a cup of coffee, not brunch. C’mon.” Marti led the way to the kitchen, leaving the booty laying in a messy heap on the floor. “Gary was invited by the company’s accounting firm to go skiing last weekend. He’s never skied before, but you know him, why let that, or a complete lack of athleticism, stop him from pursuing a networking opportunity?”

  “No reason at all.” Olivia tested the coffeepot and found it still adequately warm.

  “So,” Marti continued, “he outfitted himself like a pro and hoped if he dressed the part, he’d be able to ski the part, too. Eschewing the bunny hill, he followed a couple of the younger execs onto the chair lift. So far, so good.”

  Olivia nodded in agreement.

  “He hopped off the chair lift, and this is where things got dicey.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Olivia said. She split the meager coffee supply in two and handed Marti a cup.

  “As always, Gary needed to check and recheck everything. So, standing at the peak of the hill, he bent down to release the binding and retighten it. Evidently, at that moment, a gorgeous young woman walked past in tight little ski pants. So, instead of watching the ski, guess what he watched?”

  “The tight little ski pants?”

  “You do know Gary,” Marti said. “He teetered off-balance and stepped totally out of the ski, pushing it forward down the slope. Gary grabbed for it, I guess, but he also decided to take one final look at that retreating derrière. And by the time he looked back at the ski…”

  “Sayonara ski?” Olivia asked.

  Marti nodded.

  “So what did he do?”

  “Walked down the entire slope carrying that other damn ski.” Marti took a loud sip of coffee.

  “So, one walk of shame and he’s done with the sport?”

  “There’s more,” Marti said.

  Olivia checked the clock as she listened, thinking she’d need to come up with a decent excuse in case she ran into Bob before she could get to her desk and turn on her computer.

  “It took him nearly an hour to get down,” Marti said. “Once he reached the chalet, he found his group sitting around the fireplace, his new ski perched against one of their chairs.”

  Olivia puckered her lips.

  “They greeted Gary by telling him his virgin ski had had a hell of a run. One of them had caught it on video during its solo descent. They’d already put it on Vine and shared it on the company’s Twitter page, tagging Gary as the invisible skier.”

  “Ouch,” Olivia said.

  “Yes. S
o when I got marching orders to clear all this stuff out, I thought of Daniel.” Marti finished the modest portion of coffee. “The other night, I noticed how small his coat was.”

  “When did you see Daniel?” Olivia asked Marti. And why didn’t I notice his coat was too small? she asked herself.

  “At the sledding hill on New Year’s.”

  “You were sledding?”

  “Of course not. We dropped Anna and her friend there. Gary and I went with his partner to the club. Did I tell you about the boat his partner bought? Yacht might be a better description.”

  “Marti. Focus,” Olivia said. “Daniel didn’t tell me he went sledding. I thought he went to a movie with Matt.”

  “Matt met Anna there. You know they’re dating, right? For about a month now,” she said, as though this news had been in the local paper.

  “Your Anna? But Matt’s three years older.”

  “Two. Anna’s a freshman. And she’s very mature for her age.”

  Olivia wondered if calling any fifteen-year-old mature was an oxymoron.

  “Why didn’t Daniel tell me he was going sledding?”

  Marti shrugged.

  “I’ll ask him when he gets home,” she said, more to herself than to Marti.

  “Olivia, let it be.”

  “What’s wrong with asking? Daniel always tells me what he’s doing.”

  “Then cut him some slack this time. Look, they were all home by midnight. Becca’s mom insisted on that. They weren’t drinking. They weren’t smoking pot. What’s the big deal?”

  “That’s my point. It’s not a big deal. So why didn’t he mention it?”

  “I don’t know. Because teenagers like secrets.” Marti stood and carried her empty cup to the sink.

  Olivia let out a small sound somewhere between a sigh and a hiss.

  Marti turned back and looked at her. “C’mon, Olivia. What’s a life lived without a few secrets?”

  Olivia had no answer for that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  OLIVIA UNTIED HER SCARF and pulled at the collar of her sweater. Even after years of swim meets, she always had trouble choosing what to wear inside the steamy, suffocating pool complexes. Today the heat seemed to be cranked up several notches higher than usual. She spotted Nancy walking in the door and waved to get her attention. Olivia folded her coat to make room on the bleacher bench as Nancy climbed the stairs.

  “Will I get to see Daniel swim?” Nancy slipped into the space beside her.

  Olivia told her about the relay he had coming up and recounted his successful freestyle race, and his less successful outing in the butterfly.

  When the boys’ meet was done, Liza would swim two events in the girls’ meet.

  “Where’s Mike?” Nancy asked.

  “He’s working on a project for the Consortium, that group he volunteers with.”

  “That’s not like him to miss a meet.”

  “I know. But he said he couldn’t get out of it.”

  “How are things going with you two?” Nancy asked.

  “Oh. You know. Same old, same old.”

  They each gave a half smile, although Olivia’s may have been closer to a quarter.

  Nancy patted her knee gently. “Have you spoken to Ruth again?”

  “I have.” Olivia’s voice suddenly filled with energy, like a double shot of espresso. She told Nancy about the edits Ruth had asked for and explained a few plot points. “I have you to thank. I can’t believe I might really get a book published.”

  “It’s your talent,” Nancy said.

  “Thank you, my friend.” Olivia picked up the roster sheet off the bench beside her to check Daniel’s race. There were still three heats in front of him. “So tell me about your love life.”

  “A bit like Daniel’s butterfly.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Olivia.

  “Last week was Roger.”

  “I suppose the fact you’re talking about him in the past tense is not a good sign.”

  “Ding. Ding. Ding,” Nancy said flatly. “We emailed for a few days. He seemed funny and smart. We had a long phone conversation one evening, and that went well. Then he asked me to dinner.”

  “Where did he take you?”

  “Where did we go, you mean?”

  “Dutch?”

  “Oh yes. He had the waitress split the bill and pointed out I’d had two glasses of wine.”

  “Ooh,” Olivia said, fanning herself with the roster. “What did he look like?”

  Nancy considered the question for a moment before answering. “In my mind, I still think I look the way I did when I was twenty. Then I’m on a date and the person across the table looks like he could be my father. It’s disconcerting. It always takes me a few minutes to recover.”

  “I know. It takes me a few minutes to recover every time I look in the mirror.”

  Nancy smiled. “He was attractive. We were getting along well. Talking about politics and books. I liked him. Then we started talking about our spouses. I told him about Dave and he told me about his ex-wife. He said she made a lot of money. Bigwig at Nordstrom, I guess. They don’t have any kids, and evidently her hobby was shopping.”

  “Nice hobby,” Olivia said.

  “Shoes in particular.”

  “Even better.”

  “One morning, she was out of town on a business trip, and he began thinking about all her shoes, and it started kind of eating at him. Not that they had any money problems, he made it clear. But he started to wonder how far her shoes would go through the house if he put them all end to end.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. One at a time. Toe to heel. He lined them up out of her closet, through the bedroom, across the hallway, down the stairs.”

  Olivia laughed.

  “Past the living room. Across the first floor office. Through the kitchen and then bumped them up right up to the garage door. So when she returned home that evening, after a full weekend of work, that was the first thing she saw.”

  “And how did that go over?”

  “She made an appointment with a divorce lawyer the next day,” Nancy said, her gold drop earrings catching the fluorescent light.

  “So, about what a reasonable person would expect.” Olivia laughed.

  “Worst thing for him was, he hadn’t quite calculated how much more money she was bringing in. It kind of cut into his lifestyle.”

  “But it’s not his salary you’re opposed to?”

  “Of course not,” Nancy said. “It’s that he still thinks it was an innocuous way to point out her overspending. He actually seemed to think it was quite brilliant.”

  “On the other hand,” Olivia said, “it wouldn’t be a problem for you since your shoes would only stretch across your bathroom and possibly halfway through your bedroom.”

  “If that,” Nancy laughed. “Maybe I should reconsider. Seriously, Olivia, aren’t you glad you don’t have to put up with first dates?”

  “I love first dates.”

  “No, you don’t. You love them in bubblegum romance movies. You’ve forgotten what they’re really like. All the awkward silences. Or the too-much-information first date. Think back to some real ones you went on.”

  Olivia tugged at her scarf again. “I suppose that’s part of the problem. I didn’t have too many. I met Mike when I was nineteen.”

  “No first date horror stories then.”

  “But no fairy tales either,” Olivia said. She looked down at her hands then, as though she were seeing something for the first time. “I did have one absolutely magical first date.”

  “Do tell.”

  “His name is Jake. And there was no awkward conversation. We talked for hours one night. He kept asking me questions and told me he wanted to know a hundred things about me. It was like I was the center of his world.”

  “Heady stuff.”

  “And every time I tried to ask him a question, he’d just say, ‘No. I want to know about you.’”

  “Sounds l
ike you liked him.”

  “I do.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I liked him that first night we met when I was in college, and I liked him again on the night we reconnected.”

  “When was that?”

  Olivia brought her palms together, gathering strength from the touch of her own warm skin, and said, “It just happened recently, Nancy. It’s a man I met, well reconnected with, online.”

  “You went on a date? Online?” Nancy scratched at the corner of her eye.

  Olivia gave a small nod.

  “You’re not actually supposed to do that when you’re married. Did you miss that part in the rulebook?”

  “I’m sort of making up my own rulebook,” Olivia said weakly.

  “Is something really going on?” Nancy dropped her chin and her eyes lost all their warmth.

  “I’m falling for him. We talk nearly every night. Sometimes till one or two in the morning. We discuss everything. Our lives. Our families. Our hopes.”

  “He has a family, too?”

  “Yes. He’s married with two kids.”

  “How old?”

  “They’re younger. Seventh and fourth grade.”

  “I know things with Mike haven’t been great. But, Olivia. An affair?”

  “Well.” She bit at her finger. “Online. Yes.”

  “Does Mike know?”

  “Sometimes I think he suspects, but he’s never said anything specifically.”

  “What do you know about his wife?” Nancy asked.

  “Not much. We don’t really discuss her.”

  Nancy didn’t speak.

  The silence felt suffocating. Olivia picked up the roster and folded it into eighths. “Nancy, do you know what I’d give to walk into my bedroom and want to rip someone’s shirt off rather than just think, it’s been a while, I suppose we should.”

  Nancy looked over at the pool. “Daniel’s relay is starting.”

  They watched in silence as Daniel prepared to dive in. The lead-off swimmer gave Daniel a small advantage. His teammates cheered him on, but Nancy and Olivia sat quietly. Daniel swam well, but the swimmer two lanes to his right pulled ahead. When the third swimmer on the team dove in, they were in second place, but he quickly fell behind, too. Olivia glanced at Daniel on the pool deck, looking disheartened. Fortunately, Daniel’s anchor caught the closer team. The young man was a strong swimmer and would likely contend for an individual race at state. He easily pulled the team back to second, but couldn’t quite make up the distance to first. Olivia knew Daniel would be fairly pleased with second place, but indifferent about his own performance. She watched him uncertainly as she and Nancy clapped when the team finished.