Unsuitable Men

by Forrester, Nia

  And then she caught herself. She and Brendan—to the extent that there even was a ‘she and Brendan’ anymore—were a long sight away from being anything like the now well-oiled machine that was Shawn and Riley.

  “Ready to go?”

  Riley emerged from the bedroom dressed in a tan shirt and jeans with sandals and a beautiful soft brown leather bag that Tracy knew right away Shawn had probably bought her. It looked too plush, too luxurious to be anything her friend would purchase on her own. Riley paused to kiss the top of Cullen’s head and the bicep of the arm Shawn was using to hold him.

  In the elevator, she let out a deep, heartfelt sigh.

  “Sometimes I just cannot wait to get away from them.” And then she laughed at the look on Tracy’s face. “What? You think it’s sunshine and blue skies all the time? Oh girl, just you wait.”

  “I’ve been waiting a long time,” Tracy said wryly.

  “Don’t get me started,” Riley said. “I’m beginning to doubt that you want what you say you want.”

  “What does that mean?” Tracy looked at her.

  “It means you screwed up. You leave the best thing you’ve had going for years to date some dotcom millionaire who probably thinks of you as just another pretty little toy he can buy?”

  Tracy said nothing. It was true. She knew it was true. But she hadn’t really left Brendan, he’d let her go.

  “Riley, he wasn’t exactly blockading the door to stop me, either.”

  “Why should he, Tracy? You told him you planned to date someone else!”

  “We weren’t exclusive.”

  “Oh my god! Not with that old line again. What are you? In high school? You need him to give you a promise ring? According to you, you slept at his place practically every night and you saw him just about every day? What more did you need?” Riley demanded.

  Whoa. So clearly Shawn was not the only one who was more than a little pissed with her.

  “Well, he’ll be back in New York next week, and I still have a key, so . . .”

  Riley stepped off the elevator and Tracy followed.

  “Walking or driving?” Riley asked.

  “Walking.”

  They stepped out into the street and headed south.

  “It’s too late,” Riley said.

  “What’s too late?” Tracy asked.

  “With Brendan. It’s too late,” Riley said. “I overheard Shawn on the phone. I’m not certain but I think Meghan went out there.”

  Tracy stopped walking and turned to face Riley, her heart in her mouth. “No. I don’t believe that. He’s not interested in her anymore.”

  Riley shrugged and touched Tracy’s arm. “Well maybe I heard wrong.” But it was obvious from her face that she didn’t think so and was only trying to make Tracy feel better.

  “Tell me exactly what you think you heard,” Tracy demanded.

  “Sure. But could we do that while walking? Because I’m starving.”

  Tracy could barely contain herself until they were in the Tea and Crumpets Café and Riley had ordered her breakfast. The idea of Brendan with Meghan had her stomach in a painful, tight knot.

  “So what did you hear?” she asked again as soon as the waiter left.

  “Not much, honestly. I heard Shawn say her name and then it was a couple moments later, I heard him ask something like, ‘when did she get there?’ or something along those lines. That was all.”

  “But it was enough to make you think she was there with him in California.”

  “Yes.”

  The waiter returned with water. Tracy took a sip of hers right away.

  “I’ll just call him when he’s back in town. He’ll . . .”

  “Why?” Riley asked baldly.

  “What?” Tracy looked at her.

  “Why’re you calling him?” Riley asked, looking at her. There was a tightness about her mouth, more than a hint of disapproval, Tracy thought.

  “I want to see him, Riley!”

  “Yes, I get that. But where are you going with that, is what I mean. You want to see him, but do you want to be with him? Or do you want to be with Dotcom Man?”

  “You know I don’t want to be with Jason Miller,” Tracy said.

  “And yet you’re dating him. So I guess I don’t get it,” Riley said, barely keeping the irritation out of her voice.

  “I’m not sure where things can go with someone like Brendan, that’s all. His lifestyle . . .”

  “What lifestyle? You mean the lifestyle where he comes home to you every night, treats you like a queen and indulges all your crazy behavior as though it’s cute. That lifestyle?”

  Tracy swallowed. Nothing about what Riley said was untrue.

  “Tracy, you know I love you, but maybe you should just leave him be. If you’re so concerned about this lifestyle thing, whatever the hell that means, and Meghan really cares about him . . . I mean, she told me . . .”

  “Wait. You’ve been talking to her about Brendan?” Tracy demanded.

  “No,” Riley said slowly. “Awhile back, she called me about Brendan. Seems he pretty much cooled things off for no reason and she was confused.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “As far as I knew, it had nothing to do with you. I didn’t even know then that you and Brendan were involved.”

  “But you knew I . . .”

  “Knew you what Tracy? Liked to have him on a string in case one day you decided to give him a shot? Yes, you’re right. That I did know. I guess I just didn’t think it was relevant to him having an actual relationship with a really nice woman who genuinely cares about him.”

  Tracy felt as though she’d been slapped. She leaned back in her seat and opened her mouth to respond when the waiter returned, this time with their coffees. She watched as Riley prepared her espresso, adding milk and sweetener.

  “I genuinely care about him,” Tracy finally said, her voice quiet. And when Riley said nothing she shook her head. “You don’t think I’m good enough for him.”

  “No,” Riley said looking up right away. “I don’t think that Tracy.”

  “I can hear a ‘but’ in there.”

  “It’s just that, on the one hand you’re spouting off all this nonsense about which men are and aren’t suitable partners, and then on the other, you let yourself get used by a parade of men who think of you as . . . less than nothing.”

  Tracy looked away. She had never gotten around to telling Riley about the night of the Lounge Two-Twelve opening, but knew that her friend was speaking more generally, more historically. She had let herself get used by men who made her feel like nothing. And the one man who hadn’t made her feel that way was the one she’d pushed away.

  “You know I don’t know how to do this,” Tracy said. “I’m just trying to figure it out, Riley. Same as everyone else.”

  “Brendan’s not the guy you use to figure your shit out. Brendan’s the guy you hope you get once you have figured your shit out.”

  “It didn’t take you very long, did it?”

  Brendan rolled over and flipped on the lamp next to his bed, fumbling in the dark for a moment because of the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. He hated hotels; particularly hotels that he checked into late at night while exhausted. He always woke up sometime around three a.m. looking to use the bathroom and stubbed his toe on something.

  This time, it was his phone that had awoken him, and he grabbed it more to stop the annoying ringtone than because he was interested in speaking to anyone at—he checked the clock—four-ten in the morning.

  “Hello?” he croaked.

  “You’ve been gone three weeks. Three weeks. And already Meghan’s back on the scene. But of course, you never did say she was off the scene, so I guess . . .”

  “Tracy?”

  “Yes!” she hissed at him.

  “What time is it there, Tracy?”

  “It’s a little past seven, why?”

  “So what time does that make it here in California?” Bren
dan asked.

  There was a moment’s pause while she absorbed what he was saying. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, ‘oh’.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Brendan settled back against the pillow, rubbing his eyes and yawning. Anyone else and he would have hung up on them already.

  “Now what was it you wanted to say?” he asked after a moment.

  “Riley told me that Meghan was out there with you.”

  “Riley’s mistaken.”

  “So she isn’t there?”

  “No.”

  “Was she there?”

  “Hold up. I’m still stuck on trying to figure out why you think I should have to answer any of these questions at all, let alone answer them at dawn.”

  “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “But you were the one who got angry with me, remember? Just because I was honest about being asked out by someone . . .”

  “No. Not about you being asked out,” Brendan corrected her. “About you wanting to say ‘yes’. That’s the goddamned difference.”

  “You never said you didn’t want me to go out with other men.”

  Brendan looked at the phone incredulously. “Oh, that’s something I have to say?”

  “I’d like it if you did,” Tracy said, her voice barely audible.

  “And if I did, you wouldn’t go out on the date?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Tracy,” Brendan sighed. “I’m exhausted . . .”

  “You didn’t answer me. Was Meghan there?”

  “Yes.”

  Brendan listened to the silence for awhile. He didn’t need to see her face or even hear her voice to know she was pissed. It made him feel good to know she was angry and jealous about Meghan. In fact, it just might make his whole fucking day.

  “How about you?” he asked. “You go on your date with ol’ boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then I guess I’m even more confused about why you’re making this crazy phone call,” Brendan said.

  “Because it was very hurtful to hear that you saw Meghan, that’s why. And for the record, it was also hurtful the way you treated me that night when I told you about being asked out.”

  Hurtful. For Tracy to admit that something had hurt her was nothing less than a breakthrough. Sure she was jealous and irrational, but “hurt” was a new introduction to their relationship lexicon. It gave him hope in a strange way.

  “I was hurt too,” he said. “So I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . .” The image of himself wrenching out of her, denying her pleasure because he was in pain, flashed across his mind, and not for the first time he felt a stab of remorse. “I shouldn’t have treated you that way.”

  “Are you back together with Meghan?” Tracy asked, ignoring his apology.

  “No. And I was never with Meghan. Not in the way you mean it.”

  “I need . . .” she stopped abruptly.

  “What do you need?”

  She said nothing for a long time. Brendan had no doubt that the answer to that question eluded her. Tracy didn’t know what she needed. She thought she knew that he was bad for her, that much he was aware of. But he was also aware that she couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Tracy was the kind of woman who had to come to her own realizations, no matter how long and arduous a process that might be. The question was how long he was willing to hang in there and wait for her to do that.

  One thing he did know was that it had been a shitty three weeks. Being away from her was one thing; being away from her and having to entertain the likelihood that she was with someone else was a whole new level of discomfort altogether, and one that he would be more than happy to put an end to right now. But this was not his move to make, it would have to be all hers.

  “Tracy, what do you need?” he asked again. “I’m about to go back to sleep.”

  “I need for you to not to see her anymore,” she said finally.

  Brendan couldn’t help himself. He smiled.

  “While you get to run around town with anybody the hell you want? Not a chance, Tracy.”

  “Okay then, ‘bye.”

  And that quickly, she hung up. The entire conversation had taken less than fifteen minutes but Brendan marveled at how much if changed the texture of his upcoming day, hell, his upcoming week. The ups and downs of being with Tracy were a little tough to get accustomed to and sometimes it seemed nothing short of insane, but there was no denying that for whatever reason, he wasn’t exactly clamoring to get off the ride.

  Chapter Twelve

  “If you go, I’m not sure there’s any way for us to move forward.”

  If he lived to be a hundred, Brendan would never understand women who issued ultimatums. There was no surer way to get a man looking at the front door than to give him a false choice, meant to blackmail him into choosing you. Had that strategy ever worked for anyone? He seriously doubted it.

  “It’s a funeral, Meghan.”

  “For a man who you just admitted you’d never met.”

  “For the father of a very good friend.”

  “Is that what she is now? A very good friend?”

  Brendan tried to contain his impatience, wondering why he was even entertaining her questions. It wasn’t like him to go back to a relationship that had played out already. And he hadn’t. Not really. When he was in California Meghan had called him because she was doing an audit near L.A. and wanted to know whether he was interested in getting together for dinner. And he agreed because he couldn’t think of a good reason not to. But he’d been puzzled, wondering how she even knew he was on the West Coast. Turned out she’d gotten Shawn at the club and he told her.

  His first mistake was accepting the invitation to drinks, but the bigger mistake was accepting an invitation to go back to her room with her. Maybe he’d been thinking that it would be a definite step in getting Tracy out of his system, or maybe he was just horny. He couldn’t even remember now what dumb rationale he’d come up with. But he’d gone back to the room with her, and from there, things had progressed: more dinners and drinks when he came back to New York, a couple nights at her place.

  And now she thought she owned him. Where before she had been relaxed and permissive, Meghan had become suspicious and clingy, even though the only understanding they had at this point was a series of dates that—at least as far as Brendan was concerned—amounted to no more than that.

  “Maybe it’s time we talked about this ‘moving forward’ stuff, Meghan,” Brendan said, massaging his temple while holding the phone in the crook of his neck.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure I can give you what you seem to need,” he said.

  “Which would be what, in your estimation?”

  That was another thing. She’d turned sarcastic on him as well.

  At first, all these changes seemed like what he deserved under the circumstances. From her perspective, one minute they were going hot and heavy and the next he’d fallen off the face of the earth and was seeing someone else; someone who had tried to humiliate her at a party, no less. So Brendan felt like he owed her something for that, and had patiently absorbed her obvious frustration with him for the past month.

  But now this was going too far. When Riley told him Tracy’s father had died, there was no question that he had to go to the funeral. He’d been in her family’s home, sat down to dinner with her mother. He could send a wreath, sure, but it didn’t seem like enough, not after what he and Tracy had been to each other, however ill-defined.

  And it didn’t hurt that he would get to see her either, he admitted to himself.

  When he got back from the West Coast a part of him had fantasized that he would open the door to his apartment and she would be there. Like some kind of stupid-ass romantic comedy like the ones she used to force him to watch with her on Sunday mornings. But she wasn’t there, and what’s more, there was food in his refrigerator going bad that he had to toss out, which only reminded him of her more.

>   Turning his thoughts back to the conversation at hand, he took a deep breath.

  “Meghan,” he said now. “I’m pretty sure you know what’s going on . . .”

  “But maybe I need the benefit of hearing you say it,” she told him, her voice bitter. “Unlike last time, I want things to be crystal clear.”

  He’d never said it. Not to anyone.

  “I love Tracy,” Brendan told her matter-of-factly.

  The words, said aloud, felt like a weight off his shoulders. The only thing that could possibly feel better right now would be saying the words to her. But regardless of whether or not he went to her father’s funeral, Brendan knew Tracy wasn’t ready to hear them. So for now, they would have to be his burden alone.

  But still, he would find a flight and go to Atlanta this weekend for her father’s funeral. Just because they hadn’t been in contact in six weeks didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned about her. And though she hadn’t come out and told him as much, he sensed that Tracy’s relationship with her mother was strained so as many friendly faces as possible couldn’t hurt. Riley was flying down and leaving Cullen with Shawn so there would be someone to act as a buffer if it came to that.

  “Well, there’s no arguing with love, is there?” Meghan said on the other end of the line.

  Brendan gave a short laugh. Who was she telling? No matter how you looked at it, Tracy didn’t make sense for him. But that didn’t matter: the heart wanted what the heart wanted.

  “Meghan, I’m sorry I couldn’t . . .”

  “You were always a gentleman, Brendan,” she said sounding weary all of a sudden. “You have nothing to be sorry for . . .”

  And just when he was starting to think how cool she was being about this, she had to go and add something more.

  “. . . but I can guarantee you, if you get together with that woman, she’ll give you plenty to be sorry for.”

  And then she hung up. In a way, that last comment was a gift, because it gave him license to stop feeling guilty. He had been a little less than a gentleman in the way he’d treated her before, but the piece of mean-spirited advice there at the end had pretty much evened out the scorecard as far as he was concerned.