The Abbie Diaries: The Complete Series
Page 1
The Abbie Diaries Boxed Set
Amelie Stephens
Contents
Going Viral
copyright
From Abbie’s Blog…
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Recycled from October 12, 2013
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Abbie’s Amazing Date
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Going Out
The Notorious M-E- Me
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
My Life as a Normal: Part 2
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Insects, Lies and Dirty-Rotten Snakes
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
One Abbie, Two Assholes
Chapter 23
Going Steady
Abbie in Charge
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
And the winner is…
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
A Very Short Apology
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Long-Last Confessional
Chapter 33
About Amelie Stephens…
Going Viral
Book 1 in The Abbie Diaries Serial
Amelie Stephens
copyright
1st Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2015 © Amelie Stephens
Published by Love Kissed Books
http://lovekissedbooks.com
Cover by Love Kissed Books
© rh2010 – dollarphotoclub.com - Legs of a couple sitting at the restaurant
Thank you to my family. Without you, I'd be nothing.
From Abbie’s Blog…
The Office Eye Candy: Fun to Look at, Painful to Date
Abbie Baker | On March 21, 2015
If you had asked me a year ago just what I thought about office romances, I would have told you that nobody in their right mind would ever have one. Nothing good could happen from one, right? If you had asked me that a year ago, though, I would have taken inventory of all the men I worked with and would have come up with Nathan, 47, balding and wheezy; Derek, 59, a happily married father and grandfather; and Tyler, who while the right age, is gay. When you have the male coworkers I had then, it is easy to be judgmental about workplace romances.
When your elderly fellow employee retires and is replaced with a young, good-looking, single, straight guy, however, it becomes a whole lot easier to decide that nothing is just black or white. I am here to tell you, though, that your first instincts are correct: do not cross the line. Because if you do, you could end up right where I am now: loveless, mad, and with yet another reason to hate Mondays.
If you have been following the dating drama that is my life, you know that tonight was my much-anticipated date with Toby, my heart-stopping, next-cubicle neighbor. We bonded over a jammed printer, shared dismay when we thought the company was being closed, and laughed together in relief when we found out that we were only changing buildings. All in all, we were clearly destined for couple greatness.
In preparation for the big event, I was waxed, polished, and tweezed. I spent a week’s salary on a form-flattering outfit, and I spent an hour on my hair. But I didn’t mind. It was an investment in my future position as Mrs. Toby Lockland.
Is there someone you can sue when a fool-proof investment falls flat?
That’s right, ladies. Toby was an epic failure, and you guys are all going to reap the rewards of my humiliating ordeal.
It all began half an hour after the date started and ten minutes before Toby arrived to pick me up. If you are any good at math and deductions, you will realize that this means Toby was forty minutes late. And after that first half hour, I was mad.
Because I am a warm and forgiving person, though, I did not give up on Toby just yet. (And if you think Toby’s looks played a big role in this decision, you…are absolutely right, I hate to admit.) However, to use an expression that Toby might actually understand, this was strike one.
After he gave me a lame attempt at an excuse, I cut him off and told him it didn’t make any difference to me. I was easy-going, I told him. I am not at all easy-going, as you all know, but I certainly couldn’t tell him that on our first date.
After he finally picked me up, we went to The Lewis and Clark. Interesting fact: The Lewis and Clark is a restaurant named after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, two former explorers who led an expedition across the Louisiana Pur…excuse me? You know this already? You don’t find it that interesting? Then that makes two of us.
When I am eating at a place called The Lewis and Clark – especially when that place is right on the path of their expedition – I do not need you to tell me that it is named after the Lewis and Clark. I can figure that out on my own. Maybe you can get away with saying something like, “Interestingly enough, you would think this place was named after the explorers, but it was actually named after Mary Lewis and her partner Abigail Clark.” I still wouldn’t agree with you that this was interesting, but at least you’d be telling me something I didn’t know.
This was only the first thing that Toby condescendingly and boringly explained to me throughout the night. I also was given the beginner’s guide to baseball (and since my dad was a former pro player, as I tried to explain to him, I am way past the beginner level on this one). Then I received such interesting tidbits as the lifespan of a house fly (15 to 30 days) and the coldest temperature in Hawaii’s history (12 degrees). How did we get on such interesting topics, you ask? I don’t know; I am pretty sure I fell asleep after the salad.
I hate when guys feel the need to explain to me things that I already know and/or things that I care nothing about. Toby’s boring, arrogant personality was strike two.
Strike three happened after dinner, during the movie portion of our evening. He sat us in the very back of the theatre, and that should’ve been my first clue. However, his boring conversation had apparently lulled me into not thinking clearly because I didn’t even try to convince him to sit in the line of sight of the other viewers.
From the second the movie started, he was all over me, breathing down my neck, caressing my shoulder, all in all trying to cop a cheap feel. We all know that I am definitely not that easy! Hello! This was a first date. So I tried to push him away, but he just would not take the hint. Finally, he leaned in a whispered, “What’s wrong?”
I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I’ve just been dying to see this … “
And he said, and I quote, “Oh. Is that all? Don’t worry. I’ll buy it for you when it comes out on DVD.”
Strike three.
It’s a no-brainer that I am not going out with Toby again, but what I need to decide, dear readers, is how I am ever going to work with him again. Any advice? Leave me all your comments.
Until my next date,
Abbie
1
; Abbie woke up with a pounding headache, and the tipped over wine glass on the nightstand gave her a pretty good indication of just what had caused said headache. She groaned and checked the time on her phone – 6 am. It was way too early to be awake, especially when she drank too much the night before, but it was the second Saturday of the month, and that meant Jo was vacuuming.
Abbie rolled out of bed and dragged herself out of her bedroom, shoved past her least favorite roommate, and threw herself at the bottle of aspirin that sat on the counter.
Over the humming of the vacuum, Jo shouted, “So you had a really bad night last night, huh, Abs?”
Abbie just groaned. She wanted the noise to stop, but she knew from past arguments that OCD Josephine had to vacuum everything (including the walls) at exactly this time every other Saturday. Hangover or not, nobody should be awake at this time, let alone be cleaning.
Wallowing in her pain and annoyance almost made her miss the import of what Jo had just said. Almost, but not quite.
“What? How do you know anything about my night?”
Abbie sifted through the events leading to this morning. She remembered going out with Toby. She remembered being more upset than usual when the date had not gone well. It was not entirely Toby’s fault, she had to admit. It was just that she had built him up so much in her head that she had expected a fairy tale date. When she had a fairly dull date instead, she took it harder than she should. She came home, grabbed a bottle of Pinot, and drowned her sorrows without talking to anyone because the only one she would’ve talked to was Maggie, her best friend and other roommate. Since Maggie was staying with her boyfriend this weekend, there was nobody around to even have girl talk with the night before. Everything else was a drunken blur.
“Abbie, I know we don’t always get along, but we are roommates, you know. I support you. I read your blog. Not only did I read it, but I helped you out. I sent it.”
Jo kept rambling on about how great and helpful she was, but all Abbie heard was the ringing in her ears. Blog. Bad night. She couldn’t have. She didn’t.
Abbie ran as fast as she could get her body to move over to her laptop and pulled up her dating blog, Abbie’s Outings. It was here that she documented all of her bad dates, in painfully honest terms. After all, what was the harm in being honest? She would never see these men again.
Only she and Maggie had agreed that, other than discussing an upcoming date with someone she had a previous acquaintance with, Toby was not going to make this online diary. The reason for this was simple: what if he somehow found out? How would they be able to work together again? This was especially true if the date had not gone well. And it hadn’t.
She couldn’t have could she? She had! There it was plain as day, a written, published piece on the guy whose face she saw every time she looked up from her work computer. She would never be able to make eye contact with him again, which might mean she’d get a whole lot more work done than normal, but would be pretty terrible in every other respect.
“No, no, no,” she said as she shook her laptop – hoping against hope that she could shake out all the words she had said. Maybe nobody other than Jo had seen it. It was, after all, only six in the morning. She could un-publish it.
She went to take it down, and that’s when she saw the numbers: 100 comments, 200 likes, 25 shares. Never had she written a post more successful. She scrolled through the comments. It seemed to be a very divided group: the girls loved it and had similar war stories, the guys thought she was a bitch for everything she had said, and the trolls were, as always, advertising unrelated products. She took it down, but worried it was too late.
Why had this post received so much attention? It was no better or worse than anything else she had written. Suddenly Jo’s monologue began to make sense.
“Jo!” Abbie yelled. “Just how did you help me, again?”
Jo framed herself in the doorway.
“You’re a little slow today, Abs. I told you. I passed it on to a blogger friend of mine who shared it on her blog. She has 10,000 followers, so you really got the attention you deserved. You’ve been saying how you need more expos …”
This time when Abbie shoved her way past Jo into the bathroom, it was not the Aspirin she needed.
Maggie pushed Abbie’s hair from her forehead and forced her to eat some crackers.
“They’ll calm your stomach,” she urged. “It’ll make you better, I promise.”
“I don’t want to get better,” Abbie mumbled into her pillow. “I just want to die.”
Maggie didn’t reply. There was nothing she could say anyway, Abbie realized.
Maggie had rushed home after receiving an “EMERGENCY: WHAT HAVE I DONE!?! HELP!!!” text from Abbie and a call from Jo, who didn’t even try to keep Abbie from hearing, saying, “Your girl has gone crazy. You should probably do something about it.”
Maggie didn’t say much when Abbie told her what she had happened; she just pulled up the post and read it. The girls sat in silence for a while until Abbie worked up the nerve to ask her if it was as bad as she thought.
“It depends,” Maggie told her, “on whether or not he sees this. What are the chances that he’s going to read your blog?”
For half a second, Abbie relaxed, certain reading her dating blog was not the way Toby spent his free time. But then she remembered Ms. Rachel. Ms. Rachel, the office gossip, religiously read Abbie’s blog in order to report back all the gory details to the others in the office and to pretend to dole out wise, unsolicited advice.
“Now dear,” she would say, “you really need to take better care of the men you spend your time with. If you don’t make better decisions in your love life, you might be thirty and still single.”
There was no bribe, no blackmail big enough to steer Ms. Rachel from a good story. She wouldn’t even wait until Monday. Toby was guaranteed to have had a PDF version of the post (to ensure no broken links if the post was removed) emailed to his personal address that very morning.
“He will definitely have seen it. Is it as bad as I think?” she asked again.
Maggie rubbed Abbie’s back as she said honestly, “Worse.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Well, the first thing you should do is tell me how much of this is real.”
Abbie looked guilty. Maggie knew her too well.
“Some?”
Maggie raised her eyebrow.
“Well, I mean he was really late, though he did call me about 20 minutes before he was supposed to get there to tell me. All the stuff about him being boring was true. But you know that last part was all made up.”
“It wasn’t made up. It just didn’t happen to you.”
In fact, it had happened to Maggie. She had told the story earlier in the week as they sat discussing their worst dates. Maggie had told her the story of Mr. Handsy, as she called him, and Abbie had loved it.
“Please, please,” she had begged, “may I use it in the blog? I’ll give you full credit!”
“Don’t you put me in that thing,” Maggie had laughed, “but I will give you the story. When you are low on material, make up a date and use it. I promise I won’t tell.”
“Drunk Abbie is a horrible person,” Abbie whispered, ashamed of what she had done.
“I can’t argue with you this time, Sunshine,” Maggie told her. “But Sober Abbie is the one that is going to have to face the consequences come Monday. So let’s figure out what we are going to do to fix this.”
2
When Toby woke up on Saturday morning, he expected it to be a normal day. He’d get up, have some coffee, watch the highlights on ESPN, and probably talk to his roommate at some point about his date the night before. He would not go into depth about it. That wasn’t his style. The conversation would go more along these lines:
Parker: So?
Toby: So …
Parker: Come on, man. How’d it go?
Toby: All right.
Parker: Just all right?
Toby: Well, I think I made her mad because I was a little late. I went to Katie’s softball game after work, and it went into extra innings so I was behind schedule.
Parker: Did you tell her why you were late? Girls eat up that ‘loving big brother’ crap.
Toby: I didn’t want to get into that whole thing. I just told her something came up. Anyway, she said she was cool with it, but I don’t know. She didn’t really say much after that. Not the way she talks at work, anyway. I found myself just saying things to fill in the awkward silences. I didn’t even know what I was talking about half the time.
Parker: That sucks. Would you see her again?
Toby: I don’t know. I mean, I doubt it. The whole thing is just too weird with her sitting in the cubicle beside me every day. I probably shouldn’t have even asked her out in the first place.
And that is all that would ever be said on the subject.
This is probably exactly what would have happened that morning if Toby had not deviated from his routine slightly by checking his email right when he woke up.
From: Rachel Brown
To: Toby Lakeland
Subject: You Poor Dear
Oh Toby! I am so sorry! I’m sure that none of it is true, of course. We all know how she is … I just want you to know that I am going to be Team Toby all the way, and you just let me know if you need anything. How could she?
Your friend,
Ms. Rachel
Toby routinely ignored all messages to his personal account from Ms. Rachel, the catty old lady who worked the receptionist desk, but this was the first one that he had received that was not clearly a forwarded chain letter, dumb joke post, or otherwise mass-sent message, so curiosity got the better of him.