Cocky Nerd

by Kayley Loring

  Oh so it’s going to be this kind of call. “There’s no scenario where you actually try to look at things from my perspective instead of his, is there?”

  “I get your perspective. We don’t need to discuss your perspective. I’m trying to give you my perspective. On my best friend. Are you listening?”

  I sigh again. “Yes.”

  “Johnny is the only true romantic I’ve ever met. Not in the lovey-dovey way, but the way he views the world. He has this universe of ideas and emotions inside of him, he just doesn’t feel confident that he knows how to get them out and into other people’s heads—and no, he’s not anywhere on the autistic spectrum, he’s just…You think he’s ever told me that he cares about me with words? I’ve had a thousand conversations with him where it’s like he’s not even aware that I’m in the room, but he hears everything, he responds when necessary. If I need him, if I ask for anything, he’s there. He’s always been there, whether I ask for help or not, actually. That job I took with the startup, in Austin? They didn’t offer me moving expenses or enough to cover first and last month’s rent. Johnny wired me the money immediately, I never would have asked. Did you know he offered to buy Mom and Dad a house? Of course they wouldn’t let him, but.”

  I can’t believe he didn’t tell me that.

  “He’s the best possible version of a child of two workaholics. I mean, Mom had to teach him how to make a sandwich.”

  “Come on.”

  “Well. She had to teach him how to make a decent sandwich, with vegetables in it. Dad taught him how to ride a bike. I taught him about sex…”

  I inadvertently snort-laugh.

  “I mean I told him about the basics, I know he’s surpassed me in that department by now, shut up. I think he learned about girls from being around you.”

  I scoff at that, even though I am quietly bawling my eyes out.

  “We’re so different. We don’t understand each other.”

  “Yeah. You do. It’s just that you’re both trying to understand each other the wrong way.”

  I finally find a Kleenex and blow my nose. “Maybe you should marry John and I’ll marry Katie.”

  “You stay away from my woman. I know I’ve always been protective of you, because you’re my little sister and I don’t want you to get hurt. But I think you’re being overprotective of yourself right now, and if anyone’s going to hurt you, it should be Johnny, because it’ll make you stronger and he will do whatever it takes to make things right.”

  “He might not want to see me.”

  “I don’t care if he wants to see you or not. Go check on him. As a friend. He sounded…lonely.”

  The Lyft driver is outside my apartment building within ten minutes. I text Callie to let her know where I’m going. I text John to know that I’m coming. I don’t hear back from him. I have the driver wait for me at a Whole Foods while I buy ingredients for my mom’s special soup.

  I ring the doorbell, expecting someone to answer the door—Gracia or Sanjay or Richard or some tech nerd employee whose name I do not know. I knock three times, the way Johnny always did when he came to our house. No answer. I panic. Because inside the brain where it makes sense that John would ask my brother to call and break up with me, it also makes sense that John isn’t answering his door because he’s dead.

  I am so glad I still have his house key. And then I pause before pressing down on the thumbpiece of the door handle, because the sassy black lady in my brain is all: Wait, girl, just wait! What if this is all some kind of ruse to get you to come to his house? Some surprise grand gesture is waiting for you behind that door. Take a breath, get your shit together and make sure you look hot and lovable when you enter.

  Okay, thanks brain, I’ll do that.

  I shake off the panic and open the door.

  I am not met with a surprise grand gesture.

  I am met with a series of very sophisticated-sounding beeps.

  The security system.

  I drop my shopping bag and go to the security keypad. I guess now we’ll know if John really remembered my birth date. I punch in a six-digit code, plus the “off” button.

  The system turns off. He got my birth date right. Of course.

  “John?”

  A few table lamps are on in the living room and foyer, the kitchen lights are set to dim.

  The first room that I check is his office, because it occurs to me that he could be working with his headphones on, but he’s not in there.

  When I get to the master bedroom door, after cursing my brain for presenting me with the imagined image of John in bed with crazy Montana, I poke my head in and see him in bed, alone, still.

  “John?”

  He grunts.

  He’s alive.

  I go over to the side of the bed and kneel on the floor. He’s like an infant, so sound asleep. I place my hand on his forehead, and the shock of my cool skin against his hot skin wakes him.

  “You’re burning up.”

  “You’re here.” He holds onto my hand with a weak grip.

  “I’m here. You’re sick.”

  “It’s not the flu. It’s you.”

  “Well that’s just rude.”

  “It’s not having you.”

  “Who says you don’t have me?”

  “I took TheraFlu to knock me out.”

  “You sound dehydrated.”

  “You sound like you’re not mad anymore.”

  “I just want to say one thing, and then I’m going to make soup.”

  “Okay.”

  I try to formulate the words in my head, so I get it right.

  “Did you say it yet?”

  “No. I just want to say that I don’t need to understand Giselle with my brain in order to dance the part.”

  “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “But what I’m saying is—I think I know what you meant. I think I know what the story means. A part of us has to die before we can really fall in love. The person we fall in love with protects us and brings us back from the parts that are dead or broken, even if we can’t be together on the same plane of existence. Even if we’re different. That’s what makes love real. I hate that you understood that before I did. I hate that you can understand that, but you can’t understand me. But I don’t need you to understand me. I just want to be with you. I love you. I’m here for you. I’m going to make you soup. Don’t get up.”

  He squeezes my hand and mumbles something. I only understand the words “swan” and “time.” He is delirious. He is asleep.

  I am asleep in John’s bed when I wake up and realize that he’s sitting next to me, watching me. His eyes are clear. I reach up to touch his face. He is no longer feverish.

  “Damn, that soup really works.”

  Last night I made him sit up in bed and spoon-fed him Steph’s Sickie-poo Soup and then he went right back to sleep.

  “I think something was leaving my system. I think it was fear.”

  “Or you were sick.”

  “Don’t be cynical.”

  “Okay.”

  He holds my hand. “I love you.”

  Damn, that soup really really works.

  He holds my hand and strokes my arm. “I’ve been falling in love with you for most of my life, but I didn’t know it until two years ago when I saw you dance in Pittsburgh. I made a last-minute decision to go to Swan Lake. I didn’t tell anyone. I had a meeting with my parents, in Cleveland, I was supposed to return to Palo Alto that night, but I just…wanted to see you. But I didn’t know if you’d want to see me, so. That’s when I realized that I wanted to marry you. That’s when I realized how beautiful and important ballet is and how important it is for you to do it. It was an epiphany. I was going to go say ‘hi’ to you backstage, but Julian was there. I figured it just wasn’t the right time. Yet.”

  Gasp. “The lavender bouquet.”

  He smiles, surprised that I remember. “Yes.”

  Of course I remember. I thought about that lavender bo
uquet for a long time. I kept it until long after it had dried out and gathered dust. I had fantasies about the mystery man who left me that bouquet. “That was you?...Of course that was you. Todd, the guy who was at the backstage door that night, told me I had a handsome secret admirer. I had no idea who it could be. I kept hoping the guy would come back, or make himself known.”

  He shrugs. “I’m the guy. Here I am.”

  I pull him down to me and kiss his beautiful face. “I’m your girl. Here I am.”

  Epilogue

  JOHN – TEN YEARS LATER

  I didn’t know I could love anything so much. Of course—who doesn’t love a toddler with eyeglasses? He doesn’t really need glasses, but O likes to put these little plastic frames on him when she makes us pose for pictures. Sometimes she puts bowties on us and makes us hold calculators. Somehow she still clings to very old-fashioned ideas of what nerds look like.

  Jack Webster Brandt aka Baby Nerd is fifteen months old. He has his mother’s grace and his father’s ability to make my wife nuts.

  So much has happened since I woke up in my bed that morning and finally told Olivia that I love her. So much, so many little things, so many grand gestures and so many moments.

  We did go to the wedding in Santa Barbara together. After seeing my tech nerd colleague get married to a statuesque blonde, and seeing all of his awkward friends and family and coworkers trying to flirt with the bride’s friends and coworkers and family, I decided to move forward with the Brainy Hearts idea. The matchmaking offshoot of Brainy Biz was an immediate success, and Olivia was, of course, an unofficial consultant. I wanted it to be the subject of the Ted Talk I did in Sweden, but I had to talk about my food tech venture in China instead.

  I did make a donation to the Bay Area Ballet, and she was featured the next season. She may have been even if I hadn’t made the donation, we’ll never know, but I never would have not made the donation, I never would have not tried to help her do the thing that she loves.

  I did propose to her, at Christmas, when we were staying at her parents’ house. I did it in her old bedroom, in an attempt to erase the memory of the first time she’d seen the ring. I think it worked.

  The next summer, during her hiatus, we danced to Can’t Help Falling In Love at our wedding.

  She gave me that handwritten note that we wrote to each other on the plane from Shanghai to NYC, handsomely framed, for our first anniversary.

  Olivia spent two years with the Pacific Northwest Ballet because they offered her a higher rank and more money. I was able to spend a lot of time with her in Seattle, and traveled a lot. She finished out her career with the Bay Area Ballet when they asked her to come back as a principal dancer, and as soon as she danced the lead in Giselle, she retired. But no one will forget her performance. By then she understood that role with every cell of her being.

  It was two years ago that she retired and she immediately got pregnant with Jack, whom she is able to drive around in a minivan because I made her get her license nine years ago.

  Jack keeps us both very busy, but I’m helping Olivia to form a company that helps train retired dancers and find them jobs and new careers. She knew back when she was seventeen that she’d have a career after she stopped being a dancer and she was right.

  We’re having a picnic in the backyard and taking pictures. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake drifts out from the speakers inside the house, and I have a full-body chill, remembering the time I was in the audience at the Pittsburgh Ballet and knew with such clarity that I would marry this woman.

  The music connects me to all those moments in time, but Olivia connects me to everything in myself and the world.

  She is poetry in motion, and I am a brain with a body and a heart and a wife and a baby and so much love. No words or numbers or symbols will ever help me understand how I can feel so much or be so happy, and I don’t need them to, I only need this life.

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  Also by Kayley Loring

  EVERY INCH OF YOU

  VIVIAN: I’m in hell. Three months ago I got dumped and it sent me into a downward spiral of red wine and pie. Now my Type A sister is getting married and she’s hired me a personal trainer so I can look respectable standing next to her as the maid of honor.

  The good news: she’s paying for the hottest hard-ass personal trainer in town.

  The bad news: he used to be the fat kid at my high school, the one my popular friends bullied. He was my friend, the first boy I’d ever kissed, and the one who claimed I broke his heart.

  The worst news: He is now the hottest man I’ve ever known, still hasn’t forgiven me, and I have never wanted anyone more in my life. But I can’t erase the past any easier than I can get rid of those stubborn last five pounds.

  BRAD: A fat boy’s best revenge is to work out, get hot, and then get all the women. In high school, I only wanted one girl. Fate has brought her to my gym, and I am going to make her feel the burn like she’s never felt it before.

  My plan is to torture her with ab work, get her to fall for me, then blow her off and break her heart like she did to me.

  But she’s making it so damned hard…to do that last part.

  I hope she doesn’t figure out that deep down I’m still Fat Brad, the book nerd who eats his feelings and would do anything just to kiss her.

  EVERY INCH OF YOU is a standalone sexy second chance romantic comedy with lots of laughs, plenty of steam, an HEA, no cheating, no cliffhanger. It’ll work your heart, your core and your glutes!

  The Workation (Work Less, Play More: Book One)

  When twentysomethings Molly Kidd and Ryan Murphy formed a startup company in Seattle three years ago, they agreed that they were perfect for each other—as business partners.

  Molly made the rules: they will never date each other, they will never talk about their personal lives, they will never visit each other’s homes. Fortunately, they have so much fun spending so much time working together at the office that they barely have time to do or talk about anything else anyway.

  Now that it’s winter and everyone at their small successful company is overworked and grumpy, Murphy gets this crazy idea that they should all take a work vacation at a resort in Hawaii. Yes, the woman who organizes the workations at this resort happens to be gorgeous, but Murphy believes it will benefit the whole team to have more work-life balance.

  Molly refuses to admit that she’s intimidated by the thought of the most important guy in her life falling for this perfect lady, so she agrees to the trip despite being equally uncomfortable with the idea of relaxing in a bikini in front of her coworkers.

  Turns out it’s impossible to draw a line between business and pleasure in the sands of Oahu, and giving in to temptation could lead Molly and Murphy to lose more than just their hearts. But would it be worth it?

  THE WORKATION is a standalone, the first in the Work Less, Play More series.

  It’s a friends to lovers romantic comedy that works!

  The Flirtation (Work Less, Play More: Book Two)

  I like my men like I like my tea—HOT and BRITISH.

  I love my job. The more time I spend working to make my wealthy clients’ financial dreams come true, the easier it is to ignore the shocking reality that there’s no one in New York that I’m even remotely interested in dating and that my sister is convinced my overused vibrator is going to destroy my lady parts.

  Better yet—I actually get paid to Skype with Luke Mason (aka Sir Flirty McFlirtson) a hot British bu
siness consultant in London who dampens my knickers and makes me want to lick my computer screen.

  But now our mutual client has invited us both to a private villa in the Bahamas for our first face-to-face meeting. When there’s no longer an ocean separating us, I’m afraid he’ll either find out what a dork I really am—or—this international merger will heat up in ways that neither of us are prepared to deal with.

  THE FLIRTATION is a standalone, the second in the Work Less, Play More series.

  It’s a transatlantic romantic comedy that works!

  THE WEDDING SEASON (Work Less, Play More: Book Three)

  It may be a creative marriage made in heaven, but Erin Duffy is cordially inviting Scott Braddock to go to hell…

  ERIN: There are millions of guys in L.A. so I why do I keep bumping into my nemesis Scott Braddock? He’s hot. He’s rich. He’s cocky. I’ve been competitive with him as a writer since college, and my former dormmate lost her mind after he had hot sex with her. He is nothing but trouble for me.

  Now we keep going to the same weddings, and I keep accidentally hooking up with him. But I will not let the fact that he’s mind-blowing in bed make me lose my head.

  I came to Hollywood to be a successful screenwriter, and I will let nothing stand in my way. Especially not naked Scott Braddock.

  SCOTT: Ever since college, there have been two things I’ve wanted more than anything—to be a successful screenwriter and to date Erin Duffy. She's a pain in the ass, and I want her to be MY pain in the ass. I screwed things up with Erin big time at school, but now our agents want us to work together and I have the chance to make things right.

  It’s going to take everything I’ve got to win her over and have the kind of career we would both kill for, but I will do whatever it takes—on both coasts, at the computer, on the dance floor, in bed...I will rewrite every scene until we get our happy ending.