How to Fail at Flirting

by Denise Williams

  Her brows lifted, surprise curling her expression. “You’re the woman from the hotel, aren’t you?”

  I stammered inside my head, trying to think of how to answer. Why, yes. I’m the one you heard screaming through the walls while your soon-to-be-ex-husband repeatedly went to town on me.

  “I see. How nice. Well, then, I’ll leave you to your . . .” She paused, her gaze slipping back to Jake’s hand on my shoulder, which tightened. “Breakfast.”

  She spoke again before I could think of something to interject. “We’ll have dinner soon, Jacob. See you at the office, Eric.” She waved and turned on her heel. “It was nice to meet you, Nora.”

  What the hell just happened?

  The table was silent as Gretchen walked away. Tyson’s expression darkened, Eric rolled his eyes, and Jake took a long sip from his water glass muttering something incoherent under his breath.

  “Well,” Eric said with a heavy exhale in my direction. “Now you’ve met Gretchen.”

  “She seems . . .” I tried to think of the right words, glancing up at Jake, whose expression gave nothing away. Turns out I didn’t have to.

  “Like a self-important nightmare,” Tyson finished.

  I cracked a small smile. Yeah. As much as I avoided demeaning other women, that fit.

  “Change of subject,” Eric demanded, then asked, “What do you do, Naya? Jake said something about teaching?”

  Tyson’s gaze moved back to me, not interrogating, but I still felt he was cautiously gathering information, like a protective older brother. No wonder, if that woman was Jake’s ex.

  “I’m a professor; I specialize in math education, particularly how technology can enhance math education for students whose first language isn’t English. What about you?”

  Tyson’s face instantly softened, and his eyes brightened. “I’m a teacher—”

  Eric cut him off. “His fourth graders love him.”

  Jake looked down at me. “Your big research project is with fourth graders, isn’t it?” It almost felt like Jake was bragging about my work, and it warmed me through and through. “You’d be into the project, Tys. Tell them about it, Naya.” He and Eric listened intently as Tyson and I talked about teaching and learning math, and I felt more at home at this table by the minute.

  “How long are you in town? Has it been very hard living so far apart?” Eric asked, plucking a piece of fruit from his plate, his sensible egg white omelet already decimated.

  My order of chicken and waffles was less sensible, but delicious. I was stuffed.

  “I’m leaving early on Monday morning. Quick trip,” I responded, ignoring his question about long-distance relationships.

  “We’re going to the office so I can give her the grand tour,” Jake added.

  “The woman flies across the country to see you and you take her to work?” Eric gave Jake a deadpan expression, and Tyson raised an eyebrow.

  I’d wanted to see his office and where he spent so much of his time. Like me, Jake had shared that his office often felt like home. We’d Skyped several times when he was working late, and I’d entertained myself with more than one fantasy about pushing the neatly stacked folders off his big desk and taking a break from work together. “All my idea,” I chimed in.

  “If that’s true, you may have found your perfect woman,” Eric mused.

  Thirty-two

  Like it did almost every night, the tone warbled to indicate our video call was connecting, and Jake’s face flashed across my screen.

  “Hey, you.”

  I stretched out on my couch with my laptop on my knees, and my heart did a funny dance at the sound of his voice. “Where are you tonight?”

  Jake traveled so often, I usually didn’t know where he was on a given day. I wondered how people had families with jobs like his. I bet he would be one of those dads who returned from every trip with something for the kids and me. Whoa, where am I going with this?

  “Have you ever been to Tempe?” He sounded tired, and his white dress shirt was rumpled.

  “I can’t say I have. Tell me about Tempe.”

  “It’s hot,” he sighed. “I arrived this morning to meet with a prospective client, and it was over a hundred degrees already.” He sat back on the bed in his hotel room, loosening a sage green tie and undoing his top buttons, his hands scraping the five-o’clock shadow covering his jaw.

  My boyfriend is sexy. Even though it had been a month since my trip to North Carolina, the term “boyfriend” still felt strange, like a word in a foreign language.

  Jake had made one more weekend trip to Chicago, and we’d managed to escape my apartment long enough to watch Fourth of July fireworks. It had been three weeks since I’d seen him, and I missed the way his breath felt against the back of my neck when we fell asleep. I was beginning to feel listless, looking for ways to fill my time outside of work. I started volunteering, Felicia and I worked out with Wes once a week, which was fun, and I’d enrolled in one of his self-defense seminars, but it wasn’t enough to take my mind off missing Jake, worrying about my job, and avoiding contact with Davis, who I hadn’t run into again, but who was periodically texting.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “I may have to ask you to bail me out of jail,” he grumbled.

  “Why are you flirting with the law?” I carried the laptop into my bedroom and settled on the bed.

  “Gretchen won’t let up. I’m ready to just give in to whatever she wants, so she loses her excuse to call me.” He sighed and leaned back.

  My jaw clenched at the mention of his ex. I wasn’t a jealous person, but I’d searched for Jake’s wife online in a moment of weakness and immediately regretted it. In addition to being the perfect physical specimen I’d encountered at the diner, Gretchen Vanderkin-Shaw was also, apparently, brilliant. A magna cum laude graduate, a law degree from an Ivy League school, and a partner in a law firm by thirty-five, she also had a philanthropy record that probably rivaled Jake’s. She’d been honored for her work to build pipelines for women of color practicing law, and in any other circumstance, I might have been excited to meet her. In this reality, she was basically the exact person I least wanted my boyfriend to be married to. Though, ideally, your boyfriend isn’t married at all.

  “What happened?”

  “She’s been going on and on about us being on the same page about our split.” He raised his fingers to make air quotes. His speech got faster as his frustration rose. “I don’t want to have dinner. I don’t want to talk to her.”

  “That sucks,” I answered honestly, but something felt off. It took a lot to rile Jake.

  He shook his head the way he did when he wanted to move on from a topic. He never wanted to talk about Gretchen. His expression flashed exasperation for a moment before resignation took over. “Is it weird to talk to you about this? I feel like this is dangerous territory.”

  I adopted a soft tone, trying to infuse some humor. “If I end the call in a fit of rage, you’ll know for next time.”

  His lips tipped up in a grin. “I bet you’re cute in a fit of rage. Do you stomp your feet and pound your fists?”

  “No, since I’m not seven. I would eviscerate you with my razor-sharp tongue, though.”

  “Sounds sexy.” He smiled boyishly.

  “Well, tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  Jake groaned. The screen froze for a second, the image of him running his fingers through his hair still visible. “Meeting isn’t out of line. I’m probably being a jerk avoiding her calls. It’s just that she keeps pushing boundaries.”

  My hackles went up. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s always flirting with me, touching my arm, or referencing old inside jokes like we’re still together.”

  I remembered her demeanor in the café and eavesdropping on them at t
he hotel, and a flash of possessiveness tore through me. I wondered if he ever missed her. I knew he’d never be unfaithful to me, but I couldn’t blame him for thinking of her. She probably never needed to google how to flirt. I nodded, unsure what words would come out if I spoke.

  “She just keeps right on acting like we’ll be getting back together. Like this isn’t real.” His brows furrowed, and he was continually rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean, she was the one who cheated on me. I’m trying not to be a dick, but c’mon.”

  Would you still be happily married now if she hadn’t cheated? It was the question wedged in my mind.

  “This is weird,” he added, probably taking some meaning from my silence. “I shouldn’t have said anything. We don’t need to talk about our exes.”

  “It’s on your mind. We should talk about things on our minds.” I fought the grimace of my own hypocrisy, not mentioning or even hinting at my own past and Davis’s reappearance.

  He stepped out of the frame on my screen. “I’m still here, just want to change,” he said from off-screen.

  “I’m sorry you have to deal with it, and that someone broke your heart like that.”

  “Well, kind of.” His voice carried across the room before he returned in just his boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Getting comfortable on the bed, he put on his reading glasses. I loved how cute he was in them even though he grumbled that needing them made him feel old.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know if she broke my heart, exactly.” Jake squinted and shook his head. He looked like a flustered puppy, but I schooled my expression.

  “I hated that she cheated—I was embarrassed. Hurt and angry, and I felt betrayed, but I wasn’t heartbroken.”

  “How does that work?”

  “I told you I was a late bloomer?”

  “Sure.” I examined Jake’s face as he blew out a breath slowly.

  “When I was younger, I practically took up residence in the friend zone. No one ever wanted to date me, plus I’d usually been too unsure to ask anyone out. My confidence took some hits.”

  I leaned back against my pillows and nodded.

  “Anyway, I met Gretchen after I got my MBA, and she was pretty and smart and interested in me. We were compatible and got along. We were both involved in the community, and we wanted the same things. She seemed like a woman I should be in love with, but there was just never that spark. But things were fine, and I told myself I didn’t need fireworks, that maybe that didn’t even exist in real life. I assumed that getting along would be enough.” He knitted his brow and glanced off the screen.

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “It was. For a while.” He worried his lower lip with his front teeth. “In retrospect, I didn’t love her, not as much as I needed to, not like I should have. That’s how I rationalized working long hours and not taking the time to talk to her about real things. I’m man enough to admit that.” Jake rolled his shoulders and glanced up at the ceiling. “When we were together it wasn’t fun. After a while, we didn’t laugh and intimacy became a task, like emptying the dishwasher or doing laundry. She pulled away. I pulled away. I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I walked in on her and the neighbor. When I’m with you, I feel so connected, like it’s just you and me in the world. It was never like that with her.”

  Jake scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “At the time, all I could think was I still wasn’t good enough.” His voice trailed off, and his shoulders slumped. “I was feeling sorry for myself, but I was in a dark place before I met you.”

  My heart broke for him. “What Eric and Tyson said at brunch; it makes more sense now.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They were looking out for you. They wanted to make sure I was for real.”

  “You’re so for real.” Jake pulled his lips to one side, and I wished I could reach through the screen to kiss him. “I’m not sure I’ve ever actually shared all of that with anyone. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed.” I tucked my hair behind both ears. “What happened? Did you try to work it out, or . . .”

  He released a slow breath. “She wanted to. Said we should go to counseling.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  He brought his elbows toward each other, his hands shifting to the back of his neck. “I didn’t see the point. I couldn’t envision ever trusting her again. At that point, I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone, you know?”

  I did know. Not for the first time, I wondered if it might be time to tell Jake the truth about my past.

  “We’d been fighting a lot about starting a family,” he explained. “It had always been a someday thing, and all of a sudden that changed to a never thing for her. She said she was too deep into her career to risk it by having kids. I didn’t expect her to give up her career, though. I offered to stay home or cut back my hours, or that we could look into adopting an older child, but she got to a point where she refused to even discuss it.

  “Anyway, after that, she said if I agreed to staying married, to forgiving her, she’d give in on having kids, even though she didn’t want them, like that was something she could just barter.”

  His expression was rigid, a deep crease visible between his eyebrows.

  “That hurt more than the cheating, her thinking about a child, our child, in such a transactional way. For me, it was a sign we didn’t really know each other, so I told her that was it for me. After that, it was amicable, I guess.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  His face relaxed, the crease disappearing, and he shrugged, dropping his arms to his side. “It was for the best, in the end.” He scrubbed his hand over his jaw before speaking again. “Do you want kids someday?”

  I should have anticipated the question, but it caught me off guard. “I think so. Not . . . yet, but someday. My job is pretty demanding right now.” But I might not have it for long, as you know.

  His expression remained the same, but did I see his eyebrows dip, just a fraction of an inch? He was intently looking at my face, and I glanced off-screen. We’d been careful, always using condoms, but an accidental pregnancy was not something I could handle.

  To do: Research birth control options.

  I changed the subject, uncomfortable with the nervous energy rising in my stomach. “So, Tempe today and Boston Thursday?”

  “Then, to see you.” He smiled, breaking the tension. “Not that I don’t love staying in bed with you, but do you want to do something with your friends when I’m there?”

  Deep down, I was afraid they wouldn’t see all the special things in him I saw. I was a little afraid they might see things I was missing, the way they might have with Davis if I’d let them spend more time together. Early on, after meeting Davis a couple of times, Felicia questioned what I saw in him, and after that, I made excuses for them to not be together. Felicia grew increasingly suspicious, and eventually, I stopped seeing her or Aaron at all. By that point, I knew they’d figure it out, so I withdrew. Eight months pregnant with the twins, my best friend barged into my apartment a few weeks after Davis and I broke up. His campaign to destroy me at work was in full swing, and I was on the verge of quitting when she demanded I come clean, and then held me while I cried like we’d never been apart. I was falling hard for Jake, and if Felicia told me she didn’t trust him, I didn’t know what I’d do.

  “Maybe,” I said, noncommittal. “Let’s play it by ear.”

  “I can’t wait to—”

  My phone rang on the bedside table, cutting him off. I picked it up to silence the ringer when I saw the name. “Sorry, hold on, it’s Joe.” Jake nodded and waited for me. It was odd for Joe to be calling at all, let alone this late.

  “Hi, Joe. What’s up?” The feminine sob on the other end of the line was a definite sign this was not Joe.

&nbs
p; “Naya? It’s Elaine.” His wife’s voice was shaky.

  “Elaine, what’s wrong?”

  “Joe had a heart attack three days ago. He’s recovering from bypass surgery, and they’re cautiously optimistic, but can you come to the hospital tomorrow? He’s beside himself about something related to work. He’s been asking for you.”

  My heart rate slowed incrementally. “Of course. I’ll be there.” Elaine gave me the information, and we hung up with a plan for me to visit in the morning, my mind still trying to cobble together an image of Joe—sturdy, grumpy, tough-love Joe—lying in a hospital bed.

  “Are you okay?” Jake asked, his eyes meeting mine through the computer screen.

  “Joe had a heart attack.” My voice felt distant, as if disconnected from my body. I shook my head, willing my thoughts to come back together. “He wants to talk to me about work.”

  “Something going on?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Thirty-three

  Joe looked so small under the fluorescent lighting, with monitors beeping and tubes running to and from his body. “It’s gotta be you, Naya.” He’d waved away my questions, and I’d sat and let him talk about work, because he’d said it relaxed him.

  “So, will you take my place?” Joe wanted me to replace him on the president’s advisory committee that would be a sounding board for Jake and his team.

  Warning! flashed in my head in big neon lights.

  “Joe . . . you know I shouldn’t.” I waffled between bringing up Jake or not with Joe in this condition, but I couldn’t let him push for this without all the facts. “I’m still seeing that guy, the consultant. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Nay,” he croaked, attempting to straighten in his bed before realizing he couldn’t. “You’re the most ethical person I know. I’m not worried about this.”

  “It would still look bad. I think someone more senior should represent us, Joe. This isn’t like the reception. This is making big decisions, and I don’t have tenure yet. What about Anita? She loves this stuff.”