by Lisa Levine
No messages.
Shit.
Ivy was mad at me. I could just tell and rightly so; she had every reason to be. I had put her in an uncomfortable situation on a double date that she didn’t even want to go on, and then the guy I set her up with tried to dry-hump her on a barstool in the middle of a crowded nightclub.
Ugh, how was I ever going to make this up to her?
As much as my brain was twisted around thoughts of guilt and regret and trying to come up with some epic-level apology to Ivy, there was something else that occupied the forefront of my mind. The things that the bartender had said stuck with me.
I was sure that he was wrong. Not only did I know for a fact that Ivy and I were only friends and that Ivy never thought of me in any other way than that of a close best friend, he certainly couldn’t have gotten any other impression based off of last night. Last night was a complete shitshow, and if anything, Ivy was more angry than smitten with me. Whatever the bartender thought he had picked up on, he was wrong. Although, he was right about the way that I had looked at Ivy in that dress. That one I had to give him credit for, and it was a pretty astute observation for a bartender to make in a nightclub crowded with overly sexualized and intoxicated people.
When I saw her come to the door at her apartment in that dress, I literally couldn’t think straight or even breathe for that matter. All I could do was look at how stunningly beautiful she was. It took every last bit of restraint that I had to hold myself back when she reached to tuck my shirt into my pants. I didn’t even mean to grab her wrist; it was a completely innate and involuntary reaction. If she had known that grabbing her wrist was only the first movement that my body was trying to make, it would have shocked her even more. I felt like I couldn’t control myself; my heart was racing, my breathing was labored, and I had been trying not to let the shaking in my muscles show. I’d never had that sort of reaction toward anyone before, especially not Ivy.
In all honesty, if Max hadn’t barreled his way in through her apartment door, I didn’t think I would have been able to move without something else happening. It had completely disarmed me, which was probably another reason that I had launched into drinking way too much at the club. I couldn’t have feelings for Ivy; she was my best friend.
Speaking of which, I needed to check-in on her.
“Hey,” I texted. I could already feel my anxiety levels rising as I pressed send.
I really hoped that she wasn’t furious with me. The bartender was right; I should have been looking out for her more instead of dancing with Heather and all of the other random girls at the club. Most of them had known who I was, and all of them had wanted to go home with me; they always did. I had wanted to watch over Ivy and stay by her side all night, which I thought was the beginning of the problem. I had wanted to be with her too much, and it made me swing the other way entirely.
Come on; please answer.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m really, really sorry about last night.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she answered. “How did it go with Heather?”
Shit.
I knew I shouldn’t have brought Heather home with me. I didn’t even really like her.
“She’s not the one,” I answered. “Guess we’ll have to try another double date.”
As soon as I hit send, I realized that my attempt at lightening things with a bad joke was a horrible idea. There was nothing funny about what had happened last night at all.
“I’m sorry,” I texted again quickly. “That was a bad joke. Obviously, there will be no more double dates. Also, I am never talking to Max again because he is a complete douchebag.”
“Yeah,” she answered. “I have to go to work. I’ll talk to you later.”
I didn’t know which thing she was replying “yeah” to, but it didn’t sound like she was in the mood to talk. She didn’t sound angry, although it was impossible to read tone through text. But she did sound disappointed, which was almost worse.
I got ready and went to my office for a very busy and lucrative day at work. There was a lot on my agenda, and the caffeine and aspirin had helped enough to get me through all of it.
“Mr. Wilder,” Janet said as she knocked on my door about halfway through the day. “There’s someone here to see you.”
I looked up, hoping that it was Ivy. Instead, it was an attractive woman who looked vaguely familiar.
“Hello, Easton,” she smiled with perfect lips. “You probably don’t remember me since the drinks were flowing pretty heavily last night, but I’m Layla. I danced with you for a while at the nightclub.”
“Oh, sure. I do kind of remember you,” I said.
Why did everything that came out of my mouth make me sound like such an asshole?
“What can I help you with?” I asked. “My firm doesn’t handle individual investments. We mostly focus on large corporations.”
Layla laughed. “I’m not here for business,” she said as she smiled coyly at me. “I’m here to return your wallet.”
I felt my brows furrow as I reached into my pants’ pocket to find that there was no wallet there where I usually stuck it.
“You left it on the bar at the nightclub,” she said. “I tried to give it to you before you left, but you were pretty fast about getting into the cab with your friend and some pretty girl.”
“Thanks,” I said as I reached out and took my wallet from her. “I appreciate you coming all the way here to bring it back to me.”
“It wasn’t any trouble,” she said. “Can I ask you a question since I’m here?”
“Sure.”
“Was that woman last night your girlfriend?”
“Which woman?” I asked. I realized that was a dumb thing to say, too. Obviously, she meant Heather, the girl that I had my hands on during the late hours at the club. And regardless of whether she meant Heather or Ivy, I wasn’t in a relationship with anyone.
“The one who got into the cab with you,” she clarified.
“No, I don’t have a girlfriend,” I answered bluntly.
“Interesting,” she said as she slowly turned to walk away.
She was very attractive, even though she looked like almost every other girl I had ever dated. She looked a lot like Heather, to be honest, with the long, wavy, blond hair. Except Layla had green eyes and the tiniest waist, which didn’t seem capable of supporting her generous bust but somehow did. It almost looked like an artificial feat of nature. Which I was sure it was. Still, I was intrigued by the way her body moved as she walked away from me. I’d always had a pretty fierce libido, but lately, it had been somewhat overwhelming. Come to think of it, that had just started after seeing that dress in the boho shop downtown and picturing it on Ivy. Yeah, I definitely needed to get my mind off my best friend and onto an actual potential girlfriend.
“Layla,” I asked before she had made it fully out the door of my office. “Can I take you to lunch?”
She turned and smiled. I grabbed my keys and got up to walk out of my office with her. That pile of work on my desk was going to have to get done sometime soon. But since I couldn’t seem to concentrate right now anyway, I figured I would get to it later.
Layla and I hit it off pretty well. She was funny and had a carefree way about her that was nice. She didn’t really have too many interests—aside from shopping and clubbing—and the conversation over lunch and mimosas wasn’t a deep one by any means. But the way she twirled her hair around her fingers and the way that she wrapped her lips around her straw meant that by the end of the night, as was typical for me, the two of us had already slept together.
7
Chapter Five (Ivy)
“I don’t know, Easton,” I said as he loitered around the magazine racks while I unboxed this month’s current issues.
It was a good thing my boss, Ben, didn’t seem to have an issue with Easton hanging around and talking to me during my Saturday shifts. I thought it was because Easton usually dropped a coupl
e of hundred dollars on random books every Saturday while he was here, just to make sure that he remained in “customer” status instead of “friend distracting your employee” status with Ben. I doubted that Easton even read any of the books he bought. It looked like he just walked through the aisles and picked up any cover that looked interesting and then dropped them all onto the counter to purchase before he left. He always gave the cashier a wink, even if it was one of the women who were old enough to be his mother. He said he liked to “brighten people’s day,” which basically just meant that he liked to flirt with females.
He had been that way ever since I had first met him, flirtatious and attracted to beautiful things and people. I think it was just part of his nature. He never meant it in a harmful way, as Bridget liked to occasionally point out when she took particular offense to something that Easton said or did. He was just impulsive. Kind of like the way he was impulsive at the night club when he pulled Max off of me and looked like he was going to punch his friend in the eye. Kind of like the way he impulsively grabbed my wrist. Bridget saw me daydreaming again and came over to tap me on the shoulder as I continued to listen to Easton’s newest plight.
“Don’t fall for it again,” Bridget whispered in my ear. “You cried half the night in my car over this already.”
She was right. I had cried in her car the whole ride home from the nightclub, and even once we got home, I had sat in the car and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. When she had asked me why I was crying, I told her that I didn’t know. But she and I both knew that was a lie. I had cried because I was in love with my best friend and because leaving him back at the bar with a swarm of hot-looking women all over him tore my heart out.
“Hey, we’re in the middle of an important conversation here,” Easton said teasingly to Bridget as he waved her away from me.
“So why not?” he asked when he looked back at me for a more solid answer. “She seems really nice, and she’s very pretty. We hit it off over lunch.”
“And did she stay for dinner, too?” I asked, knowing that if the answer was yes, that meant he had slept with her. “Never mind, don’t answer that, please.”
I walked around to grab another box as I tried not to think about whose body Easton was wrapped around last night.
“What’s her name again?” I asked. I figured that was an innocuous enough question that it wouldn’t make me too upset.
“Layla,” he answered. “But she said her friends call her Foxy.”
I burst out laughing.
“What? What’s so funny about that?” he asked in all seriousness. “I thought it was a cute nickname.”
“Hey, Bridget,” I called over to her. “What would you think about the nickname Foxy for a woman?”
“I would ask which side of the street she works on as a hooker,” Bridget called back over the shelves.
I couldn’t help it; I burst into laughter all over again. It was good to laugh after all the drama that had happened a few days ago at the nightclub. I was ready to put all that behind me.
Easton looked at me with an offended raised eyebrow.
“Sorry,” I said as I tried to control my giggling. “In all seriousness, though, I would run the other way. Any woman who chooses to go by the name Foxy for reasons other than using it as a stage name for her theatrical career is probably not the long-term girlfriend material that you are looking for.”
“Why don’t you ever seem to like any of the women that I am with?” Easton asked.
I looked up because his question took me by surprise. He was serious, and he was waiting for an answer. I didn’t know how to respond to that question truthfully without saying something that I shouldn’t. Ben and Bridget both happened to walk by then to help me unload the mountain of magazine-filled boxes that Easton was resting his elbows on as he stared at me.
“I mean it,” he said. He was not going to leave this question alone, and I really wish that he would. “You seem to hate or, at the very least, find fault with every girl I go out with or express an interest in. How come?”
“Because none of them are her, you damn fool,” Bridget muttered under her breath.
Ben and I both stopped what we were doing and looked at her.
“Oh shit,” Bridget said with a genuinely horrified look on her face. “Was that loud enough for everyone to hear? I was only trying to mumble that to myself; I’m sorry.”
I felt the heat rise into my cheeks, and I suddenly felt as though I was breaking out into a sweat. I wanted to run away, but that would just make things worse.
“What does that mean?” Easton asked as he lifted his elbows off the boxes to straighten himself up and looked right at me. “Ivy?”
I looked to Bridget for help, hoping that she could save the situation with some sort of lie that she could come up with on the spot about how that comment was meant for someone or something else and not me. But she honestly hadn’t meant to say it so out loud, and now she looked as shocked and completely at a loss for words as I was.
“Hey, Ivy,” Ben said as if he hadn’t even heard the whole ordeal—which I knew that he had. “You want to go see a movie with me tonight?”
I looked at Ben, even more shocked than I had been feeling a second ago. What was going on? Bridget looked at him strangely, too. But when I noticed the slight upward curve on the side of his mouth and the “come on, you know what I’m doing here” look in Ben’s eyes, I realized what he was trying to accomplish. He was asking me out on a date in front of Easton, that we would never go on, to save me from dying of embarrassment. It was a chance for me to show Easton that I wasn’t thinking about him after all and that Bridget was just flying off on one of her random tangents.
“Sure,” I smiled at Ben.
Thank you for throwing me a life raft, I thought inside my head.
I looked over at Easton, who was now simply standing there, glaring at Ben. There was no further mention of what Bridget had said, and for that, I owed Ben big time.
8
***
“Did you see how jealous Easton acted?” Bridget asked later that afternoon after Easton had left.
“No,” I said. “He just seemed a bit mad that I didn’t answer his question, but I’m sure he’ll get over it. After the night at the club, he doesn’t get to be mad at me about anything for a while.”
“Nah, he was definitely jealous,” Ben agreed with Bridget. “That glare he was giving me spoke volumes.”
“What did it say?” I asked.
“It said that he isn’t too fond of seeing you with another guy.”
9
Chapter Six (Easton)
"How was that movie?" I asked Ivy the next day.
"What movie?" she said.
"The movie that you and Ben went to go see last night."
"Oh, that movie." Ivy acted like she had no idea what I was even talking about. "We didn't actually get to go see it. Ben came down with a stomachache.
"Sorry to hear that," I said.
I would have been lying if I didn't admit to myself that I was pleased Ivy hadn't gone out with the man. Ben was a great guy, super-nice, not at all a dick like Max. He would probably make excellent boyfriend material—just not for Ivy.
"Well, there's actually a movie in town that I've been dying to see. Do you want to go as friends? We haven't done a best friend movie night in a while." I don't know why I felt like I had to reiterate that we would be going as friends twice. I think it was more for my benefit in convincing myself than it was for hers.
"Don't you want to take Foxy?" she said with an overly exaggerated tone on Layla's nickname.
"All right, smarty-pants," I said as I poked her in the ribs to tickle her. "Layla doesn't like the movie theater. She says she doesn't like to breathe recycled air."
I could see Ivy getting ready to open her mouth to make a witty comment about that which would probably have us both cracking up, but then she thought better of it and stopped herself.
"Sur
e," she said with a smile. "Sounds fun."
10
***
When we got to the movies, the theater was pretty packed. I had kind of lied about there being a particular movie that I wanted to see. I just wanted to take Ivy to the movies since Ben hadn't. I assured myself again that it was a best friend thing and that it had been so long since we'd gone on a friend date that it was long overdue. Besides, I owed her a fun outing since the nightclub scenario was such a hot mess.
I stood at the ticket counter and looked at the movies that were playing.
"I thought there was a certain one that you were dying to see?" Ivy asked as the girl behind the register waited for me to make up my mind.
"Uh, yeah, there was, I just can't seem to find it now," I lied. Then I looked at the girl behind the plexiglass. "Which one is that really popular new release?"
She blew a bubble with her gum that popped at the exact moment that her finger pointed to the giant banner, highlighting the new action film release.
"Yeah," I said, feeling like an idiot now. "Two tickets for that one, please."
Luckily, Ivy didn't seem to notice that I fumbled all over getting the tickets. She probably just thought my mind was on other things like work or Foxy and that failing to remember the name of a movie was no big deal.
"Want popcorn?" I asked.
"No, thanks."
"How about a glass of wine?"
"They sell wine here?" she asked as she looked up at the concessions menu.
"Yep, sure do."
"Okay, that I'll have," she grinned.
I ordered us both a glass of white wine, and we carried it into the dimly lit theater as we found the perfect seats—three-quarters of the way toward the back and smack-center in the middle of the row. This theater wasn't too crowded, which made me think the theater employee had lied about this being the big release, but there were still probably a couple of dozen people here.