by Hilary Dartt
“Paul had an overtime deal he had to do,” Josie said, “and I called and begged Derek to let Summer come for just an hour or two.”
“He wasn’t happy about me skipping out on family day,” Summer said. “But I put in a movie and the kids went into zombie mode. That helped a bit.”
“Well, thanks for coming over,” Delaney said. “Nothing like friends, wine, chocolate and junk food to mend a broken heart.”
“We brought a movie, too,” Summer said, holding up a copy of “Thelma and Louise.”
Delaney couldn’t stop it this time: she began crying in earnest. Her body shook with sobs. She sat down at the table, put her head down on her arms and kept on crying. For a full second, no one spoke. Delaney would have found the situation entertaining if she weren’t in the midst of a full crying jag. Then Summer and Josie seemed to break out of their collective trance. They rubbed Delaney’s back and stroked her hair.
“Men are scum,” Josie said.
“Yeah,” Summer added. “Total scum.”
“He wasn’t that great anyway,” Josie said. “I mean, he was always wearing a worn-out t-shirt.”
“Yeah,” Summer said slowly. “And boots. Does he think he’s a cowboy, or something?”
Delaney wailed. “That’s what made him so sexy!”
She could feel her friends exchanging a glance and a shrug. They changed direction.
“You don’t need a man right now, anyway,” Summer said. “You need to concentrate on your new job.”
“New jobs take a lot of concentration,” Josie agreed. Delaney could feel her nodding.
“You’re doing that thing,” Delaney said. She sniffled as she moved away from them and filled a bowl with popcorn. “You’re nodding, which means you don’t really believe what you’re saying. You’re nodding so we’ll nod, too, and then maybe what you say will be true.”
She wiped her nose. Summer walked into the living room and put the movie in the DVD player. “All right, D,” she said. “That’s enough. We didn’t come here to watch you pout, we came here to help you feel better. And the only way that’s going to happen is if we eat this junk food, drink the wine and watch the movie.”
“But they die at the end,” Delaney shouted. “They commit suicide! That is so not healing!”
Josie sniggered, but stopped short when Summer shot daggers at her.
“It’s about friendship, D,” she said. “Now bring your popcorn and come sit on the couch. Josie, get the wine flowing.”
Delaney and Josie obeyed. As the previews played, the three of them settled onto the couch.
“Don’t you guys think I should call Jake?” Delaney asked. “I mean, just to get some closure?”
“Men are scum,” Josie said again. “You just need to let him go.”
Summer nodded. “I thought he was really great, too, Dee, but we were wrong. Josie and I agreed we need to be much more guarded when it comes to your heart. You looked so happy with him, and he with you, that we thought you could go full-out. Full throttle. Whatever you want to call it. But we realized we jumped the gun.”
“But it just doesn’t seem right,” Delaney said. “I mean, he wouldn’t just show up at the rodeo dance with another girl, knowing I was going to be there, if there wasn’t some explanation.”
“Or, he would,” Josie said. “Maybe it was his way of breaking it off because it was getting too serious. He thought he wouldn’t have to actually have the conversation with you if you caught him with another woman.”
“That stings.”
“I repeat: men are scum. How many times do I have to say it?”
“But I have to know why,” Delaney said. Her voice bordered on whiny, but she didn’t care. “There has to be a reason.”
Summer put a hand on Delaney’s. “People can’t always give a reason, Dee. You know I believe everything happens for a reason, but it’s usually a reason defined by the Universe.”
Josie stifled a giggle. Delaney rolled her eyes.
“Dee, we think the Universe is telling you that you should never talk to him again,” Josie said. “And we accept responsibility for selecting a scumbag.”
Summer nodded. “The Dating Intervention resumes this Thursday. Take a break for a few days.”
She motioned to the table. “Have some wine. Eat some junk food. Watch the movie.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“How was your weekend, Doc?” Doctor Kat asked, even as she pored over a complicated-looking financial spreadsheet at her desk, using a bright green John Deere ruler to go through the numbers.
“How was your weekend?” Delaney asked.
“Real good.” She paused and looked up from her spreadsheet. “Real good. How was your weekend, Doc?”
“Seriously?” Delaney said.
A long pause, then Doctor Kat spun her chair around to face Delaney’s, and slapped her wide hands on her thighs. “Yep. Seriously.”
She leaned forward, looked into Delaney’s eyes and repeated each word slowly. “How. Was. Your. Weekend?”
Delaney rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Yes, you do.” She turned back to her desk, picked up the ruler.
“No, I don’t. By the way, I need to get a new phone today.”
Doctor Kat’s body froze. “New phone?”
Delaney rolled her eyes again.
“Yep. New phone. I lost mine Saturday night.”
“Rodeo dance?”
This was the second time Delaney’s new boss knew something about Delaney’s life she didn’t have any reason to know. A few weeks ago, she’d known when Delaney and Jake went out … and now she knew Delaney had gone to the rodeo dance.
“How’d you know?”
Doctor Kat turned around again and regarded Delaney over the tops of her reading glasses, eyebrows raised. In a very snooty voice, she answered, “I guess you don’t know Jake as well as you thought you did, Doc Collins. But if you’re so riled up about him that your weekend was shit, may I strongly suggest you go get that new phone now and call him on it.”
“I’m never speaking to him again!” Delaney said. Then, after a pause, she said, “Wait. How do you know this is about Jake? How do you always know what’s going on?”
“I repeat: go get yourself a new phone, woman. See you in thirty.”
“But I don’t want to know!” Delaney said, knowing even as she spoke that this wasn’t really an appropriate conversation to be having with her boss. But wasn’t it Doctor Kat who’d brought up bars and drinking during their first interview? “I don’t want to know where I fell short, what I said wrong. I don’t want to know if I walked around with a toilet seat cover hanging out the back of my skirt!”
It was a lie, of course. She did want to know. Desperately.
“Not funny,” Delaney said when she saw the humor hovering around her boss’s mouth.
“It is, actually, to see you so wound up.”
Delaney didn’t answer.
“Well, get to it. You have an hour until your first patient. Get out of here. Go get your new phone.”
Delaney got up and stomped out of the office. She thought she heard Doctor Kat snicker, but she ignored it.
***
The phone store squatted at the opposite end of town, a low stucco building next to a nail salon. Somebody apparently had a tough time deciding what color to paint the building and decided on a bland non-color that blended in with the dead grass on the hillside behind it. Of course. Because everyone wants to look at a dead-grass colored building.
What did Doctor Kat mean when she said Delaney didn’t know Jake as well as she thought she did? Did she know something Delaney didn’t know?
The idea of calling Jake horrified her. Mortified, more like. Something in the deep recesses of her mind told her she should call him. But what was she supposed to say? It had only been thirty-six hours, but for the past few weeks they hadn’t gone more than thirty-six minutes without talking or texting.
&
nbsp; Delaney pulled into a narrow parking spot and rubbed her hands over her face, hoping to do something about the blotchiness she’d caused by crying while belting out sappy love songs with the easy listening station. She dragged herself out of the car and blinked as her eyes adjusted to the cavelike lighting of the store.
“Wow. You look like death.”
She recognized the voice instantly. Mitchell. Why did he keep popping up everywhere? He was like that stupid gnome that showed up in everybody’s vacation pictures. Only not nearly as cute.
“Thanks,” Delaney said.
“Are you okay?”
Why hadn’t she ever noticed the hair sprouting from his nose? Or maybe he’d trimmed it the few times they’d dated.
“I’m fine,” she snapped, then she softened and added, “Thanks.”
“What do you need?”
“I didn’t know you worked here. I thought you were a waiter.”
His eyes darted to the left, then back to meet hers. “Just started.”
She glanced at his nametag. Mitch. Team member for 4 years.
When she looked at his face again, he shrugged. “Off and on. Just started back up again.”
Why did she have to choose such scum? Working at the cell phone place was one thing, but lying about it? She had serious doubts about his claim that he finished law school. And to think, she’d slept with him. Why euphemize? She’d had intercourse with him. Scum. Liar.
Had Jake lied to her? No, he hadn’t. Doctor Kat said to call him, but Summer and Josie told her not to. They said it was over. Although she didn’t blame the girls (they didn’t really know Jake like she did – or like she thought she did – and he’d definitely been too close for comfort with that girl at the rodeo dance), she wanted closure. Or did she? What if she confronted him and he said something like, “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Delaney, I’m taking you off the roster.” Or, what if he kisses me senseless and tells me everything’s perfectly fine? She could practically feel his lips, his sexy stubble, his hands on her face.
“Delaney?”
Mitchell.
“Hm. Okay. Well, I need a new phone. I lost mine.”
“Do you want the same phone you had? I’m pretty sure we have it in stock.”
He remembers which phone I had.
“Sure.”
She watched him walk back to the stock room and for the first time noticed the bald spot and comb-over. Why didn’t she see it before? It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it usually knocked a couple points off the rubric.
Was she having a transformation? Finally? Had The Dating Intervention removed the veritable and apparently semi-permanent beer goggles she’d sported for the past several years? Not that she was drinking all the time. But the concept was the same.
Was she finally seeing things as they really were? Or had she become more critical than ever? Or, drumroll, please, was she just finally learning to listen to her intuition?
“Delaney?”
She didn’t answer.
“Everything okay?” he simpered, all concern.
“Yes,” she said brightly. “It’s great!”
A few minutes later, having noticed Mitchell’s clammy hands and his irritating habit of scratching his nose at the end of every sentence, Delaney walked out of the store with her new phone.
The internal debate continued as she got in the car. Doctor Kat had given her an hour, and only half of that had passed. She had plenty of time to call Jake. Or maybe she should just stop by. His face would tell the real story.
He’d shown her the hockey movie. Didn’t that mean something?
She had to know.
She slammed the car into reverse, backed up wildly and hit the light pole between the parking lot and the sidewalk.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
Instead of getting out to survey the damage (it was done, anyway, wasn’t it?), she cranked up the radio to blast Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and drove straight downtown, where she parked, tires screeching, along the curb below Jake’s apartment building.
***
Most of downtown Juniper’s shops opened at ten or eleven, so it was still quiet. Nevertheless, a few people craned their necks when they heard Delaney’s car pull up at the curb in front of Jake’s apartment building. Not to be deterred from her mission, she got out, slammed the car door and marched the half-block to the alley. When she began to stomp toward the metal staircase leading up to Jake’s front door, though, she stopped mid-stride.
The girl, the lanky, silky, model-pretty girl who’d been giggling so heartily with Jake at the rodeo dance, was coming down the stairs. In pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt. Was it Brittany? In a split-second, Delaney noticed the girl still looked pretty – no, hot – even in her pajamas. The girl noticed Delaney, too, and she paused at the bottom of the stairs.
It wasn’t a full halt like Delaney’s, but a contemplative break in her graceful descent. Like she was comfortable. Confident. Worse, her perfect mouth was spreading into a smirk. One with some classified information behind it.
Delaney measured her options carefully. Should she turn around, get back in her car and drive off a cliff like Thelma and Louise? Should she drive back to work and act like she’d never been here? Should she walk up to the dream girl and confront her? Punch her in the face? Or march right up the stairs and have a word with the man himself, who was probably just now lounging naked in bed waiting for his lover to return from a coffee run?
Before she could decide, the girl spoke. “Delaney, right?”
I could still run.
But then she imagined the girl going back up to the apartment, sliding between the sheets with Jake and murmuring that she’d just seen Delaney outside.
Delaney nodded and noticed her mouth was hanging open.
“Finally! I’m just going for some coffee, want to join me?”
I knew it! A coffee run!
Delaney shook her head, snapped out of it. “No, thank you. I really don’t want any coffee.”
But now what? Delaney searched her mind frantically for a scathing line about leaving the apartment in pajamas, or sex hair at the coffee shop. But she came up dry.
“Okay, then,” the girl said. “Well, Jakey’s upstairs. Still in bed. You know how he is. But I’m sure he’d love to see you. Goodness knows he’s been talking about you nonstop.”
She pulled her hair over one shoulder and began braiding it.
How old is this girl? Has she even graduated high school? Delaney’s mind snapped back to what the girl had just said: “Jake’s been talking about you nonstop.”
“He has?”
The girl rolled her eyes with what Delaney could tell was mock exasperation. “God, yes. Can’t get him to shut up about you, frankly. It’s so nice to finally put a face to the name. I mean, usually, he doesn’t say anything about the women he’s dating.”
Delaney felt her jaw drop open again. Before she had the chance to think of anything clever to say (or to ask, like “Are there lots of other women?”) she heard Jake’s voice.
“Jenny! Who are you talking to now? I need my coffee, woman!”
She couldn’t quite see Jake from where she stood, but Delaney could picture him: bare feet, pajama pants and naked, chiseled torso. It took almost every ounce of her self-restraint to keep from pushing past this skinny Jenny girl and running up the stairs to touch his skin. Then she remembered she still hadn’t solved the mystery of whom, exactly, this skinny Jenny girl was.
“I’m just chatting with your girlfriend, Jakey,” Jenny said in a cheerful voice. “She just stopped by for some – well, what did you stop by for?”
Again, Delaney stared at her, at a loss for words. “I, uh –”
“Say no more,” Jenny said.
“She stopped by for some morning nookie, Jakey.”
Delaney’s eyes met the girl’s, which were sparkling with mischief. From his spot at the top of the stairs, Jake laughed. The sound made Delaney wea
k with desire. Then, Jenny laughed, too, and the pieces started to click into place.
How had she not noticed this girl had the Rhoades eyes? The laugh – a sound like a wind chime – was almost identical.
“You’re one of Jake’s sisters.”
Jenny stopped laughing. Jake laughed louder.
“You mean, he didn’t tell you I was his sister?”
Delaney shook her head, speechless. Jenny looked quite amused, and Delaney felt like a complete idiot for not having figured out the connection sooner. Of course. Of course! They had the same honey-colored skin, the same straw-colored hair. At the rodeo dance, he acted affectionate, not flirtatious.
Delaney heard Jake making his way down the stairs. The heat rose in her face. Of course it was his sister. Her intuition had been right. He did care about her. He wouldn’t just show up at the rodeo dance with someone else, especially knowing she was going to be there.
Then he was in front of her, exactly as she’d imagined him a few moments earlier, only even more delicious-looking. Bare feet, pajama pants low on his hips and his gorgeous stomach. She felt a little bit of drool at the corner of her mouth, and wiped it off with the back of her hand.
Jenny and Jake stood facing Delaney, side by side. Arms crossed, blue eyes delighted. Jenny elbowed Jake. He winced.
“Delaney, this is my sister, Caboose.”
She elbowed him again.
“I mean, Jenny. She’s the youngest, so –”
“—So they all insist on calling me Caboose. But seriously, it’s really nice to meet you. I caught a glimpse of you at the rodeo dance but then you disappeared. We texted you Sunday morning, but when you didn’t answer, Jake said you must be busy. I told him to keep texting but he didn’t want to. He said he didn’t want to bug you, but I could tell he was getting nervous.”
“Was not,” Jake said. For the first time, Delaney wondered what Jake must have been thinking, not hearing from her all weekend. Even now, his eyes were searching hers, and she had to admit, he looked a bit wary.
“Were too,” Jenny said. “But anyway, I’ll let you two chat. I’m going to get coffee. Want anything, Delaney?” Delaney shook her head, and Jenny said, “Okay. Back in ten. Nice to meet you, Delaney.”