The Abbie Diaries: The Complete Series

by Amelie Stephens

  Abbie’s Outings Has Been Temporarily Suspended. Please Check Back Soon For More Posts.

  13

  Abbie’s feet were probably blistered and bloody, but she couldn’t stop running. She had to go just a little bit farther. She couldn’t stop until Toby appeared. She couldn’t stop until he arrived for his Frisbee game and she could talk to him. He was late. And she was in shape and she was motivated, but in the end she was also human, and she couldn’t run forever. She fell panting to the ground and hissed as her knees took the brunt of the fall. Skin ripped and gravel dug in.

  “Ow!”

  Toby had kissed her in the office three days previous and then left and called out sick the next two days. She was left wanting more. Needing more. Craving more. And she was determined to get it. Maggie had talked her through what to do the night before.

  “Clearly he still has feelings for you that he doesn’t want to admit,” she told Abbie.

  “Well, what do I do about that?” Abbie asked.

  “Make him admit them, obviously,” Maggie rolled her eyes.

  “But how? He’s never going to speak to me again.”

  “Then you speak to him. And in person. Not online. No more online. I’ll sit on your hands. Confiscate your laptop. Cut your internet cord. Rip out the Wi-Fi card in your laptop, drop your phone in the toilet. Et cetera.”

  Abbie chuckled weakly. “Thanks, best friend for having my back. I can’t just show up wherever he is and attack him just because I know he wants it as badly as I do.”

  “Why not? Just look at the best and worst case scenarios here: The best is that you confront him, you fight, make up, get together, fall in love, get married, have babies, and live happily ever after.”

  “I like the sound of that.” Abbie sighed dreamily, already imagining her wedding gown and the perfect family they’d have together.

  “I’m not through. We still have to look at the worst case. You confront him. He laughs at you, turns you down, lets everyone you both know hear about it, maybe turns it into a funny story on the internet, and over all just embarrasses the shit out of you.” Maggie raised an eyebrow.

  “That definitely sounds worse.”

  “Well, deal with it. Because that’s what you did to him, and payback is a bitch. But my point is that the best that can happen is exactly what you want to happen and the worst that can happen is you guys even out the score between you. Either way, you should confront him. And let’s face it, the real result is probably going to be somewhere in between. ”

  Abby straightened in her seat as the words hit her. “I should find him.”

  “You should find him.” Maggie nodded wisely.

  “I will. I’m going to. I…I’ll do it right now! His ultimate league has a tournament in the morning, and since it’s right by where I run on Saturdays anyway, he won’t think anything at all about me being there. I’ll run until he arrives, and then I’ll make him talk to me! Thanks, Mags.” She impulsively hugged her best friend, who chuckled.

  “Anything for you, Gabby Abbie. Now go get your man!”

  Abbie had thought it was such a good idea at the time, but now she realized he’d have known she’d be at the park, and he would’ve skipped his game to avoid her. Wanting him so much was exhausting, and she was fed up with feeling tired.

  She looked up at the clouds, closed her eyes and waited until her legs solidified from their jello-y form so that she could go home. It would be a long, painful walk, but she deserved every single step of it.

  “Are you alright?”

  She opened her eyes to look at who was asking. It was a guy around her age. She happened to notice he was good looking, but it didn’t affect her at all. He didn’t compare to Toby.

  “I’m fine,” she told him, and watched as he shrugged his shoulders and took off at a jog along the path.

  She began idly finding shapes in the clouds, noting her discoveries out loud. “That one’s an angel. There’s a man. That looks like a turtle.”

  “Do you think?” a shadow covered her face and a deep voice laughed down at her. “It looks more like a crab to me.”

  She looked up, up, up at him. Even from her position lying down on the ground, she could see how tall he was. She couldn’t see his face because the sun glowed all around him. He seemed to realize that and bent down.

  Her breath caught and her throat went dry. And how had she never seen this man before? He was beautiful. Blond hair, hazel eyes, and dimples when he smiled. He was a veritable Adonis. He smiled at her as she sat staring at him like a kid who just met her idol for the first time. He looked up at the sky and pointed to the cloud she’d called a turtle.

  “See,” he said, “those look like claws to me.”

  “You must think I’m an idiot to be laying here talking to myself.” He lay down beside her on the grass and turned his head toward her to grin. Dimples popped up in his tanned cheeks again and her heart skipped a beat.

  “Why would I think that?” he asked. “I talk to myself all the time, and I don’t think I’m an idiot.”

  She smiled, and felt a little bit better about her day. “I’m Abbie,” she said softly and reached out her hand. He took it in his and chills ran up her arm just from this simple touch.

  He gripped her fingers with his own and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Abbie,” he murmured, “I’m Parker.”

  Going Out

  Book 2 in the Abbie Diaries Serial

  Amelie Stephens

  In going out with Parker, Abbie finds happiness once more. After the last blowout with Toby, work has been incredibly uncomfortable. Soon she's caught between two men, one who seems a little too perfect, the other who seems a little too quick to get bent out of shape.

  Falling in love is never easy, and finding out you've been played sucks. Abbie is determined to be the girl coming out on top. All's fair in love and war. Can she forgive them? Or does she have a plan to make them both pay?

  The Notorious M-E- Me

  Anonymous | April 18, 2015

  Don’t worry, guys, I have been getting all your emails. You don’t want me to leave you stranded. You need some dirt. You want to know the crazy mixed up situations I have gotten myself into lately. I get it. And I want to tell you all about it. But I won’t. Get your own dirt. I have become a demure lady who never kisses and tells [insert video of me biting down on my hand in an effort to keep my big mouth shut.] However, after much thinking, which mostly consisted of me thinking it was in my best interest to quit altogether and then me saying what was the fun in that, I have decided that I am going to keep up my antics, but just keep my dating life out of them.

  I realize that since you have all been following my drama from my pre-anon days (yes, I know that those only ended a couple of weeks ago, but I have really needed to talk to you guys, so the time felt like an eternity), I really cannot claim to be anonymous. However, I am going to be making a real concerted effort to keep everything about everyone else I meet as anonymous as possible and to keep private things between someone specific and me as private things between me and that someone – and not between me and that someone and you. Sorry! So I am embracing this new part of my life with as much fanfare as possible – which is not a lot considering the fact that fanfare and anonymity don’t usually go hand in hand.

  In other words, I am going to be writing the same shit as before, but this time, I’m not naming names … or occupations … or anything else that would give you any information that will later come and kick me in the ass. And I might not tell you much about whom I am dating, but I can still share with you all the other embarrassing, frustrating things I have going for me.

  OK, here is what has been going on in my life (though in a much tamer fashion) since my last post: I met someone. What? Huh? How? Who? I hear you all throwing those questions to your screens (which means when anyone who hears you talking to your computer tells you ‘they can’t hear you, you know,’ you can tell them they don’t know what the hell they are talking
about because I do hear you, I do), and I know what you are yelling now: whatever happened to … “shut up, dummies, don’t say his name, you’re going to blow my anonymity,” I yell back with my hand over your mouth. Forget about that person whose name you were about to so rudely mention. I have.

  I haven’t. There, I can admit it. But don’t tell him that. I assure you he would not appreciate it. A girl has to live, though, and she does not need to rely on any old man to accomplish that living. Which is why I decided to move on, and man oh man have I done it well.

  While it actually, physically pains me not to give you every graphic detail about Wesley (because I have been watching The Princess Bride on repeat for the past 24 hours, people. It’s called a pseudonym.), I won’t. I just want you to know that I am happy about everything that is happening, so you can be happy for me. And that is all you are getting about my dating life from now on.

  But you don’t come to my site to read happy things, now do you, my vultures? You rely on me to give you drama. While I have temporarily ridden my love life of drama, though, you’ll be happy to know that there is still a whole lot of drama going on. Namely with my roommate (well, one of my roommates). How is that for drama? Have I hooked you yet?

  It has been previously mentioned that one current tenant in my household is, to put it mildly, certifiably insane. I cannot tell you which one (she reads this, and I can’t risk exposure), but I will tell you that if she doesn’t quit stealing my cereal, I will likely be charged with murder.

  The roommate in question, whose name definitely is not Jo, has a bad habit of making a lot of noise first thing in the morning with a certain cleaning tool. OK, I’ll just tell you: she likes to vacuum. And she likes to vacuum everything – the sink, the tub, the walls. That’s weird isn’t it? Am I just not sanitary? Anyway, weird or not, she does this with my vacuum – and I am happy to share if it means that I do not have to do this horrible chore. Here is the thing, though:

  Last week, she woke me up – at six in the morning – to tell me that I needed to go right then to buy new bags because the current one was full and we were out. Cue me being very confused.

  “Why exactly am I buying these bags?” I asked her. She was lucky this was all I did. It was, after all, six in the morning and she was talking to me about vacuum bags.

  “Because you brought the vacuum. When you committed to that responsibility, you committed to supplying the bags as well.”

  “First of all, I did no such thing! Second, even if I did, it would be reneged by the fact that you overuse it. I couldn’t have possibly known that I would be in charge of a never-ending supply!” If my all caps do not clue you in, this was not said quietly or calmly.

  She took a deep breath as if I was the one being irrational, and she would have to be the adult.

  Finally, she told me, “Alright, if you do not feel financially capable of buying vacuum bags…”

  “It’s the principal, not the money!”

  “Please, don’t interrupt me when I’m talking.”

  “YOU INTERRUPT ME…”

  “I said don’t interrupt. If you don’t feel you can supply the bags, then I suppose it will be up to the rest of us to take on your responsibilities. You, however, should at least buy the next replacement.” (This is the actual way she talks, by the way. I sometimes wonder if she is a robot sent by someone who hates me, possibly one of the former stars of my blog, for the sole purpose of making my life hell.)

  “WHATEVER!”

  I was yelling so loudly I was turning red, and she never even raised her voice. There is nothing worse than fighting with an irrational person who is rational enough to keep their temper.

  I was sick of the conversation so I marched back into my room, slamming the door behind me.

  “Thanks,” a shrill voice rang from outside the door, “and get the replacements soon.”

  The pillow I threw at the door did not make me feel any better. What happened next, dear readers? Did I buy the bag; did I find an elaborate form of revenge to make my new arch enemy pay for her behavior? I can’t give it all up at once, people; I am, after all, a lady.

  Tune in next week and maybe we can go a little bit farther.

  See you soon,

  Anon

  14

  Abbie hovered over the publish button telling herself to just push it and get it over with. She hated this whole privacy thing. It wasn’t in her nature to not blab every detail of her life to perfect strangers – double negative intended. And yes, she could gossip about Jo all day long because she didn’t care anything about what Jo thought of her, but what she really wanted to talk about was Parker. And Toby. But mostly Parker, she told herself. She was through with Toby, after all.

  She hated that Toby had ruined a good thing. Now that she had so fully ostracized him – and since he wouldn’t even make eye contact with her at work, she couldn’t describe their relationship as anything but ostracized – she was afraid that she would do that to every other man that she dated ever again, and she couldn’t risk it. So as much as she hated it, she was not going to talk about Parker. Or Toby. But mostly Parker, she reminded herself, because there was not much to say any more about Toby, anyway.

  She held her breath, closed her eyes, and pushed submit. It was done. She was no longer a dating blogger. And she still hated that fact.

  Abbie threw on nice jeans and a cute top, put on a little make-up, and clipped back her hair. She loved that she didn’t need to dress up for her date. In fact, it wouldn’t even make sense to do so. Today was her first date with Parker, but they were not going to dinner and a movie. They were not going out for drinks. Her Parker was thinking outside of the box on this one.

  Since the day in the park, she had talked and/or texted with him almost every day, and he was, in a word, perfect. She had known he would be, though, on the day that they met.

  They had lain there in the grass, neither one caring anything about grass stains or other people staring at them as if they should not be there. All they cared about was each other. There was no awkward talk, no nervousness. It was like they knew each other and were meant for each other. It was, she thought, as if he was created just for her. And when he asked her out, she knew that, while she had never before believed in fate, it did exist, and she had just found hers. This had become clear because of how he had asked her.

  “Hey, have you ever heard of geocaching?” he had posed, and she had shaken her head no.

  “It’s this amazing thing, kind of like a scavenger hunt but better. Basically, what you do is take a GPS receiver, you can find an app on your phone to use, and it leads you to this hidden cache. They can be different, but they are mostly small containers and in it you find an object or objects. It can be sentimental or weird or boring – you don’t know what you get until you open it other than it is going to be small and have little monetary value – and some don’t have anything: it’s more of a ‘the journey is more important than the destination’ type thing. You sign and date that you were there, take an object if there, and replace it with something of equal or greater value. You return the cache to its hiding spot for someone else to find. There are a lot of them hidden all over the world, and it’s more about the hunt and the global connection than about actually finding the cache, but other than that the treasure is pretty much worthless, it is a giant treasure hunt. I thought maybe we could have a geocaching date and find treasure together.”

  At her look of disbelief, he blushed.

  “I, wow, that was lame. Sorry. And if you want to get drinks or something first, that is fine too. I just thought, you know, we could do something different.”

  “No. No. Thanks! That’s perfect. I’d love to…find treasure with you.”

  They grinned and exchanged numbers. And here it was two weeks later, and they were finally going on their first date. Parker was a doctor, and he worked night shifts and then day shifts as part of his residency program. And since he had been in a series of night shift se
ssions lately, he had not been able to set a date before this, but he had made up for it with his funny texts and intellectual comments. Plus, as she told Maggie over and over, he was a doctor.

  There was a knock on the door, and she looked at the time on her phone. Five minutes early. Impressive.

  She had used the time-honored trick of making the guy wait a while before she answered in the past, but not this time. She wasn’t playing games. She grabbed her purse and threw open the door.

  “Hey,” she said as he pulled her in for a hug.

  “Hey,” he grinned. “You’re ready to go on time. Isn’t that against girl code?” She liked that he felt comfortable teasing her already. Mega points.

  “Yes. And you are five minutes early. I figured with your schedule, you’d call me, say you got held up, and make me wait for you.”

  He looked her in the eyes before saying, “Not a chance. There was no way that I was going to make you wait one second,” he paused and looked to make sure she understood. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart sped up. She … “now that you’ve finally been lucky enough to find me.” He cracked up, and she hit him in the stomach.

  “You don’t lack for confidence, do you?” she asked him and tried not to think about how good that small touch had felt.

  “Should I?” he asked her, his arms resting on the door frame on either side of her head. She had to look up, way up, at him. He was grinning at her, and she had to hope her face wasn’t flushed, giving away what she was really thinking. Because she was thinking this man was too good to be true, and he had every right to be as cocky as he wanted. Instead, she rolled her eyes and ducked under his arms.

  “Come on,” she told him, grabbing his arm. “I’m ready to go on a treasure hunt.”

  “Wipe your feet before you leaf,” Parker said.