Knock Me for a Loop

by Heidi Betts

  Unfortunately, the second his lips had touched hers, she’d gone boneless and breathless and brainless. The three Bs of the lonely, horny female.

  Those were the only reasons she could think of for why she’d capitulated so easily. She’d been spending too much time alone lately, not dating, not going out, only going to work, knitting meetings, and for Girls’ Night Out with Ronnie and Jenna once a week.

  Not that she didn’t have plenty to keep her busy. Between walking, entertaining, and knitting a whole new wardrobe for Muffin—whoops, it was back to Bruiser now—and reviewing her notes and scripts for upcoming shows, she was never bored, never sat around feeling sorry for herself.

  But maybe, without even realizing it, she’d been missing a bit of male companionship. Lord knew her apartment had been almost cemetery quiet since she’d broken up with Zack. Even though they’d split their time between their two places when they were together, no matter which apartment they were in at any given moment, the television had almost always been turned to a sports channel, filling the rooms with too-loud arena or stadium noises and commentaries.

  She still had her television, of course, and could put it on any channel she liked, but it wasn’t quite the same. There was no six-foot-four blond Adonis sitting on her sofa yelling back at the screen or calling for her to bring him a beer, even though he knew darn well her response would most likely be, “What, are your legs broken? Get it yourself.”

  Then there were the times when she’d bring him a drink willingly and sit down to watch a game with him. Or when she was able to convince him to snuggle through a movie or show of her choosing.

  And the bedroom…oh, the bedroom was the worst. It had taken her months to get used to sleeping alone, knowing she wouldn’t soon be sleeping with Zack at her side. To fall asleep on her own, without resorting to a late-night cocktail, over-the-counter sleep aid, or simply crying herself into exhaustion.

  So perhaps Zack had just caught her at a weak moment. Maybe he’d been studying her and noticed her vulnerability, then picked the best time to strike.

  That would be just like a man. And even more like Zack.

  Besides, believing she’d been needy and he’d been a cad was a far sight better than admitting that she’d enjoyed the kiss because it had been Zack, and because she still had feelings for him. She wasn’t sure that was a road she wanted to traverse just yet.

  Setting her knitting tote on the seat of an empty chair, she shrugged out of her long ivory wool coat and draped it over the back of her seat.

  “Hi, everybody,” she greeted those who were already there.

  They smiled and said hello while digging out their own knitting projects or getting a drink from the small refreshment area the craft store provided for meetings just like theirs. Because it was so cold outside, most of the ladies opted for hot coffee or tea, but there were also bottles of water and soda for those who were courageous enough to brave the chill.

  A plate of homemade banana bread sat in the center of a small, round coffee table at the center of their circle of mismatched armchairs, and though she shouldn’t have, Grace sneaked a slice.

  “Mmm, this is delicious,” she moaned, practically inhaling the dessert and reaching for a second slice.

  Geez, what was wrong with her tonight? She’d eaten dinner before changing into nice clothes and leaving for the meeting, so she shouldn’t be hungry. Not that anyone would believe her, given her stomach’s sudden growling and hunger pangs.

  Maybe she was PMSing. Or maybe she was stressed to the max by that kiss and all the questions that were now flooding her brain about what it meant, how she felt about it, what Zack was thinking about it. And her hormones had apparently decided that if she stuffed herself with enough banana bread, those questions might be answered…or at the very least, she’d be too fat and too nauseated to worry about them any longer.

  “I’m glad you like it, dear,” the mop-headed Charlotte beamed from a chair directly across from Grace. She had her knitting out already, size-ten needles clicking and crossing as she added stitches to the sleeve of the navy blue cardigan she was working on, no doubt with yarn spun out of fibers from her very own herd of alpacas.

  “I should have known you were the one to bring treats,” Grace said. “You’re so good to us, Charlotte.”

  If possible, Charlotte’s smile stretched even wider. Her bright orange beehive was particularly high and fluffy tonight, making Grace wonder just how much hairspray the woman went through in a month. And if she measured the coiffure with a ruler, striving each time to get it taller than the last.

  Her short, squat body was squeezed into clothes one size too small—black polyester slacks and a long-sleeved turtleneck covered in a dizzying black, yellow, red, and green floral pattern. She was wearing a truly hideous pair of purple fake Ugg boots, but had already taken off her coat—a lime-green monstrosity that made her look like a crazed leprechaun.

  Despite Charlotte’s terrible fashion sense, she was one of the sweetest people Grace had ever met, and everybody in the group loved her. She was Jenna’s aunt by blood, but treated every single one of them like a beloved niece or daughter, bringing them homemade goodies and homespun skeins of yarn.

  “You know how much I love to bake,” Charlotte said, “and I certainly don’t need all those calories calling to me at home.”

  Finishing off a final bite, Grace reached for a napkin to wipe her hands, and then stood, crossing to the tiny kitchenette for a Constant Comment teabag and mug of hot water. She would fill up on liquids rather than fattening desserts, and then, if she was still feeling guilty on the way home, maybe she would also stop off for a case of Slim-Fast and stick with that as sustenance for the next ten or fifteen days.

  Returning to her seat, she left her tea to steep on the table in front of her while she dug around in her bag for needles and yarn. There were a couple different choices in her tote this week, and she couldn’t quite decide what she wanted to work on. Glancing around the circle and tuning in to the different conversations taking place with half an ear, she noticed the others were knitting scarves, boas, slipper socks…Melanie was even trying her hand at a complete layette set in the lightest of pastel baby colors for a friend who was expecting her first child.

  “So tell me, dear,” Charlotte said to her from the other side of the circle. “What did you think of that yarn I gave you? Have you made anything wonderful with it yet?”

  Uh-oh. Grace paused with her hand on an olive-green vestlike sweater she’d begun, then lost interest in.

  She’d forgotten all about the skein of bright pink yarn Charlotte had given her after their meeting …gosh, it had been months ago now. Not so surprising, considering all that had happened since then—Zack’s accident, Grace’s moving in with him, the Insides Out offer…

  But Charlotte was such a sweetheart, and she tended to take the appreciation and use of her yarns seriously. Grace remembered when she’d given Ronnie and Jenna each balls of “very special” yarn—skeins Charlotte had apparently been quite fond of for some reason. Charlotte had hounded them for weeks to find out how they liked it, if they’d started knitting with it yet, what they were making …

  If she discovered that Grace had forgotten all about the skein she’d given her, Grace was worried Charlotte would be both hurt and offended, and she would never want to make the woman feel either of those things.

  Pasting an overly bright smile on her face, Grace said, “Oh, yes, it’s wonderful.”

  She dug around in her bag, trying not to draw too much attention to her actions while she frantically searched for the yarn in question.

  Please let it be in here, she thought. It has to be in here. This is the same bag I bring to every meeting, and I don’t think I took it out.

  From the corner of her eye, she spotted a flash of pink and sent a prayer of thanks heavenward. Next up, she needed a story that would sound logical, as well as appeasing and pleasing to Jenna’s aunt.

  “I�
�ve actually been saving it because I wanted to make something really special with it, and I wanted to have all of my other projects out of the way first.”

  She drew the yarn out of her bag and set it on her lap while she rooted around for two needles in the same size she thought would do for the project she was thinking about starting on the fly.

  Charlotte frowned. “Oh,” she said, disappointment clear in her tone. “I expected you to have used it already.”

  Crap. She was a terrible friend.

  “I’m going to,” she assured the woman. “Right now. I told you, I’ve been saving it. I’m very excited about making it into a new sweater for Muf—” Hmph. “Bruiser.”

  Zack would shit a brick when he found out she was knitting yet another girly pink outfit for his “boy dog” instead of something dark and manly and dirt-colored, but what could she do? Charlotte was staring at her with such a sad but hopeful expression, and she’d made so many doggie sweaters over the past months, it was the one pattern she knew best and by heart at the moment.

  “Did I just hear you call your dog Bruiser?” Ronnie asked, breaking off from a conversation she was having with the spiky-haired young woman to her left and leaning to her right instead, toward Grace. Grace glanced from Ronnie to Jenna, who was sitting on her other side, before lowering her gaze and hoping they wouldn’t notice the flush of embarrassment she was sure stained her cheeks.

  “Oh, my God,” Ronnie exclaimed. “He actually got you to change the dog’s name back.”

  This was going to get rough, she could tell. Grace was not one to back down once she’d made up her mind, to lose once she’d set her cap for something, or to not get what she wanted in any given situation. Her friends had probably expected to see her go goth before they would have expected her to ever give in to something her “cheating bastard” ex-fiancé wanted.

  With a sigh, she unwound a good bit of Charlotte’s fluffy-soft pink yarn and began casting on, loop after loop after loop. In the back of her head, she was counting, but her frontal lobe was busy deciding what to say, how to respond, how much to tell her friends, and how much to tell her best friends in front of the others, who were more acquaintance-friends than deepest-darkest-secrets friends.

  Everyone in the circle knew about her engagement and subsequent breakup with Zack. How could they not? It had been such a public spectacle, she wouldn’t be surprised if monks in Budapest who had taken vows of silence and didn’t have running water, let alone electricity or cable, knew about the split.

  But not all of them knew that she’d moved back in with Zack to help him while he recuperated from his injury. Briefly, she filled them in on that, and then explained about the Insides Out offer.

  Ronnie and Jenna knew the truth—that I.O.U. had been interested in doing a major campaign with both her and Zack while they were together, but had then withdrawn the offer when they were no longer a couple. The others didn’t, however, so she let them believe it was something new.

  Fudging a bit on the details—which she would clear up later for Ronnie and Jenna only—she told them that she and Zack were back on speaking terms…not romantically involved, not even close friends, but getting along well enough that they had mutually accepted the I.O.U. offer.

  “And letting him change Muffin’s name back to Bruiser was part of the deal we worked out about driving to New York for the photo and commercial shoots instead of flying,” she finished with a halfhearted shoulder shrug.

  “Wow. The things I miss when I don’t come every week,” Melanie, one of the gals who’d been attending the Knit Wits meetings since their inception, said. She was young, in her early thirties, and married with two small children, so she didn’t make it as often or religiously as some of the others. “I’ve really got to find a more reliable babysitter.”

  Because there wasn’t much more to tell that she wanted the whole world to know, Grace did her best to change the subject, asking about the others’ weeks and following up on some of the things she knew were going on in their lives. Thankfully, everyone took the hint and filled the rest of the hour with easy banter and the clickety-clack of needles putting together an assortment of interesting items.

  As the meeting wrapped up, and they all stood to put away their knitting and shrug into their coats and gloves, Grace asked Ronnie and Jenna if they were heading to The Penalty Box straight from The Yarn Barn.

  For the three of them, going for drinks after their knitting meetings was almost a given. But after she’d left Zack, the practice had become a bit hinky, because the Box also happened to be the guys’ favorite hangout. Which meant that either Grace had to take great pains never to be there at the same time as her cheating scumbag ex or she and her friends had to hole up in a far-far corner booth, as far away from the men as possible.

  Unfortunately, since Ronnie and Jenna were now both seriously involved with two of the three men, asking them to avoid their significant others like the bubonic plague was kind of like asking the sun not to rise in the east every morning.

  So instead of making her friends feel as though they had to choose between their men or her, Grace had suddenly become very, very busy and begun making excuses for not going out for drinks after their meetings.

  She was sure her friends knew they were just that—excuses—but they’d played along. And truth be known, Grace had gotten a lot of extra work done in the time she wasn’t spending gossiping like a Desperate Housewife and sipping Limoncellos.

  But she’d missed the weekly ritual, too. Missed the sense of decompression the tradition brought, as well as simply chatting with Ronnie and Jenna.

  Which sort of made her peace treaty with Zack worthwhile. It meant that she could go to The Penalty Box again without worrying about bumping into him or feeling the overwhelming urge to throw a drink in his face. And without making her friends feel awkward or torn between two loyalties.

  Chalk one up for waving the white flag of surrender. Something she never would have considered doing before, and especially wouldn’t have thought she’d end up being grateful for.

  Look at me, she thought with a silent chuckle and a grin she didn’t let reach her mouth, making all kinds of personal growth without breaking out in a cold sweat.

  Well, a moderate amount of personal growth, anyway. She still enjoyed thinking of it as maturity with a side of snark.

  “Yeah, we’re going,” Ronnie said, slipping her arms into her calf-length, leopard-print coat and slipping the black buttons through their holes from bottom to top. “We’ve gotta pick up our guys before some other skanky hos do.”

  Grace and Jenna both raised similar brows.

  “Other skanky hos?” Jenna asked pointedly, pretending to be insulted.

  Ronnie laughed and rolled her eyes at her own gaffe. “You know what I mean.”

  To be polite, they asked if any of the other ladies from the group wanted to join them, just as they always did. Thankfully—or at least Grace was thankful—most of them passed. The knitting meetings ran late enough, making the older women and those with young children want to get home.

  “I can spare another hour or two,” Melanie said.

  And Charlotte added, “I still need to get home to feed my babies, but I’d love to join you for a glass of wine.”

  They agreed to meet at the bar, whoever arrived first promising to find and save a table for the rest.

  Fifteen minutes later, Grace walked into The Penalty Box behind Jenna and Ronnie, who both made a beeline for their beaus. The men were seated at a small round table near the front of the room, so they weren’t hard to spot.

  Melanie waved to them from a booth at the back of the bar and Grace held up a finger, signaling that they’d join her in just a minute. Following her friends, she said hello to Gage and Dylan, trying not to act like she was overly concerned about Zack, even though she kept him in her peripheral vision the entire time.

  She had to admit, he looked quite happy and comfortable. No doubt the past months hadn’t
been any easier for him than they had for her.

  Admittedly, before now, she hadn’t cared much what he’d been going through or how rough a time he was having. If anything, she’d have been delirious knowing he was miserable and suffering.

  But now, being on a slightly different level than before…personal growth and all that…she realized that the same press that had hounded her had likely hounded him. The same outrageous headlines that had embarrassed, pained, and infuriated her had likely embarrassed, pained, and infuriated him. And if she had avoided people, places, and things for fear of running into him, then he had probably done the same to avoid a confrontation with her.

  Recognizing those facts somehow made her feel a tad more sympathetic toward him. Not forgiving, not wipe-the-slate clean, but the other side of the coin was starting to become a little clearer when she hadn’t even noticed there was another side before.

  “How’s your knee?” she asked quietly, sliding into a free chair between Zack and Dylan, who had Ronnie perched on his lap. Across the table, Jenna was sitting on the edge of her own chair, but she was leaning so close to Gage that she might as well have been in his lap.

  “Good,” he responded. “Better.”

  “Will you be in good enough shape to leave for New York on Monday?”

  “Should be, as long as I don’t try to do any more heavy lifting,” he said.

  At his words, she cocked her head and gave him a very pointed Excuse me? look. First Ronnie called her a “skanky ho,” and now Zack was calling her “heavy.” Much more of this kind of treatment from her so-called friends and she was going to develop a complex.

  Zack’s mouth twisted half up in self-deprecating amusement, half down in remorse. “You know what I mean.”

  She made a noncommittal noise. “Uh-huh. I suggest choosing your words more carefully from now on. Unless, of course, you want to make the trip to New York tied to the roof of your Hummer.”