“Say it,” he says, gasping and heaving.
“You’re, um, big.”
I swear the horse head is staring at me.
“Again,” he says, pumping into my leg faster.
“You are so big,” I say, pulling my phone close and thumbing out another post: Lube is your friend. #GelatinousGlobsOfGoodness
He abruptly stops when a huge queef bubbles up from the middle of my thighs and echoes throughout the room. “Was that you?”
“Me? Um, well there’s a lot of lube…”
“That’s quite okay. I like it. It’s dirty.” Oh my God, he’s breathing in deeply. Is he trying to smell it?
He pulls back and slides his cock over my feet. What in the actual fuck?
“Oh, Mommy,” he murmurs.
Wait, what? That’s…that’s just not right. That’s just too much to unpack right there.
I’m mortified. This man-boy is having sex. With my foot. And he’s calling me Mommy.
“Are you close?” he asks, jamming himself along the webbing between my toes.
“Close to what?” I ask, amazed at his sheer stupidity. Does he think girls can have an orgasm this way?
“Are you close?” he moans out again.
“Oh, oh I’m good. You…you just go ahead.”
A guttural groan rips out of his mouth as he pumps two more times against my foot.
His body collapses on the tiny bed next to mine and he smiles lazily at me. “Give me five minutes and we’ll do it again.”
I may have started to weep.
I seriously consider it a gift from God himself when I hear a woman in the hallway calling his name. I don’t care if it’s a wife or a girlfriend; I just want an excuse to not be here any longer.
“Joooooon-Boy!” the voice calls as the door swings open.
There in the doorway stands an elderly woman holding an empty laundry basket. Her gray hair is tied back in a red kerchief and a ‘kiss the cook’ apron is wrapped around her waist.
“Who is that?” she stares at me through narrow slits. I am suddenly aware of how very naked I am in her presence. “You didn’t have to pay for this one, did you, dear?”
My next post: Time to vacate the premises. His mommy is here! #IThinkTheHorseHeadIsHers.
I find every piece of clothing except of course, for my pants. But I don’t care. It’s a sacrifice I will have to make to get the hell out of here as soon as humanly possible.
Last post of the night is a video of my bare legs running: So if you see a girl running down Main Street with no pants on, you know why. #UPCLOSEOneNightStand
Chapter 6
“Hey!”
Startled, I jolt back, sloshing my steaming coffee over my fingers and slamming my knee up into the bottom of my desk.
“Hello?” I say.
“That one-night stand article is hysterical. None of that was real though, right?” The voice is coming from just over my cubicle wall.
“Um,” is the only sound I can seem to make when I look up and see Nate’s handsome face hovering over the work divider gawking at me.
I have to be cordial and say something back.
I can’t be rude, but I can definitely lie. “Oh yeah, of course it’s not real. I can’t even imagine going through all that horribly humiliating stuff.” I touch a hand to my messy hair, embarrassed. It’s Monday morning and I need another cup of coffee pronto, one the size of my ass, to get me in gear and give me the ability to deal with all the pity-filled looks the people around here are giving me. They all know the date was real.
I tug out a fistful of tissues from the communal tissue box Julia and I balance on the top of our workstation divider. Nate grabs a handful too and shoves them at me. “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to scare you and make you spill your coffee.” He’s holding a small bouquet of flowers and I know they aren’t for me. Nope, just the tissues are.
I take the tissues and stare at the baby’s breath and assortment of colorful peonies blankly, wishing they were mine. I’m an awful friend, a terrible, no good, rotten one. I’m honest to God having sex with Nate in my head right now on a bed of red peonies, and it’s so explicitly dirty.
We stare at each other in awkward silence.
But in my head, I’m riding his face. My cheeks ignite.
“How was your weekend?” he asks the top of my head. It’s like he can’t look at me because he’s reading my mind; he knows all my filthy, raunchy thoughts.
“Great, my weekend was great,” I lie. After my date from Hell, I ran home and immediately wrote the article. Then I proceeded to hide in my apartment for the rest of the weekend. I haven’t even spoken to Julia. Who was I kidding, she was too busy with her multiple-orgasm issue, she didn’t even have time to call me and ask me about the stupid fictional date that I unfortunately really went on.
When I called Gail and told her I had my first draft, I told her everything that happened. She had the audacity to ask me to get even more research and cackled like the Wicked Witch. She said I was the magazine’s rom-com gold. I sent my draft right into editing instead, and boom, it was an instant hit.
Well, at least my awkward love stories could make other people laugh.
“Are you okay?” he asks pointing to my hand, which is bright red from the coffee. “Was that hot?”
Scalding, a layer of my flesh boiled off and I’m scarred for life, thanks for asking. “No, no.” I wave my scorched digits in the air. “It was lukewarm.” Just like my love life.
“Hey, girl.” Julia bounds into my workstation. “I just read the article, what a comedic piece—” She turns toward Nate and her eyes pop, “Are those flowers for me?” She squeals the ending of her question. My ears pop.
I glance back down to my half-empty coffee and the wads of brown-tinged tissue paper covering the top of my desk, and feel guilty as hell. I’m still thinking about sitting on his face.
In real life, his arms are wrapped around Julia in a sweet embrace, and she’s kissing him and whispering thank you in his ear.
My real life stinks. I can’t help watching them hug and I have to swallow down the lump that knots in my throat.
Julia pulls away from Nate and tosses the bouquet on the desk. I catch a quick glimpse of Nate’s reaction to it and it hurts my heart to watch. He doesn’t know this, but Julia receives a lot of flowers. Not only in her personal life, from the guys who want to date her, but from here at the magazine. She covers all the sports and interviews the hottest athletes. She’s discreet, but she loves being single and doesn’t have an inhibited bone in her perfect body. She gets loads of flowers.
I get gag gifts and books.
I think I’m the winner here, in this particular situation anyway.
“Hey guys, Gail just told me the magazine scored tickets to another game. Thursday night. What do you think?” She throws a playful look at me and lowers her voice, “Would you like to see if lightning strikes twice?”
“No!” I scramble for a legitimate enough reason to never be able to step foot inside a baseball stadium again. Allergies? It’s against my religion? I need to focus more on myself? I have this horrible headache that will definitely last all week? That’s the day I wash my hair? Nate’s staring at me, watching me struggle. I don’t want him to know how much that kiss meant to me. I can’t have her saying anything to let him know.
Oblivious to my inner turmoil, Julia wiggles her eyebrows at me and waits for my excuse.
“I, uh, I’m really not interested in sports. It’s not my thing,” Nate blurts.
What a liar. But now I like him even more for fibbing for me. I wish there was medicine that changes how you feel about someone.
“What? Since when?” Julia is wearing her charming flirty smile. She wants to go to this game and she wants to go for me. “I thought you loved sports, that’s what you said on our first date.”
I laugh, uncomfortably loud, and pat her on the back. “Oh, he’s just teasing you.” My coffee cup needs an immediate refill
, so I grab it, and as I turn to walk to the kitchen, I use my best nonchalant voice, “You two have fun at the game, I have plans on Thursday.”
“What plans?”
I did not think this lie through to the end. Now I have to come up with another lie. Oh, my God my mother was right, lying is a slippery slope indeed. Small lies become the gateway to bigger lies.
“I have a thing.” This is one of my closest friends, she’s going to know I’m making this shit up.
“But, Jane, come on.” There’s a long pause and she nods her head like I’m supposed to get what she’s not saying. Oh, but I get Julia. I. Get. It. “What if Mr. Perfect shows up? Gail says they’re the same exact seats!”
Nooooo!
“Mr. Perfect?” Nate’s voice is no more than a whisper. The shock in his eyes lingers for two or three excruciatingly long seconds before his expression falls.
Julia sighs dreamily and rubs her palms over the front of his shirt, “Janie here, went to a baseball game a few—”
“No, don’t. Julia, please,” I urge, but of course she doesn’t stop. Why would she? She doesn’t understand how truly mortifying this is to me.
“Stop. It’s Nate, he’s a romantic guy. He’ll love this story. Okay, so our Janie was sitting at the game and the Kiss Cam falls on her and a total stranger.” Nate watches me. Sweat breaks out all over my body. “And they share this passionate kiss that makes her fall head over heels in love with him that very instant. She’s been looking for him ever since. He’s the one.”
I stare at him.
He stares at me.
The silence between the three of us is deafening.
Nate holds his breath. I don’t know why he’s doing it, but he is.
This is so awkward it physically hurts.
My face flushes; I feel the minute all the blood drains from it and pools down into my intestines. Karma isn’t a bitch; she’s a crazy psychopath whose sole goal in life is to screw with me.
“I have a date on Thursday, I can’t,” I blurt. It’s not a lie either. I’m going to pursue an intense relationship with a book over five hundred pages. Me, my book, and a bottle of wine. A good old fashion Ménage à Trois.
“A date? With who?” Julia looks seriously confused.
I wave my hands away, “We’ll catch up more later. It’s a new thing right now. I don’t want to jinx it.” I’m desperate to exit this conversation right now.
Nate clears his throat, but it doesn’t help. His voice is hoarse and breaks over each word. “I’m going to go and let you guys talk. Uh, Jane?”
I look up and meet his beautiful eyes again, the knife in my chest twists.
“Do you need another coffee since your desk drank most of that one?”
“Yeah, sure thanks,” I say. “Light and sweet, please.”
“Light and sweet,” he repeats. “Kind of like you.”
Stop making me fall for you more, you idiot! I can’t help but watch him walk away.
Julia rolls her chair into my cubicle, seemingly unaware of me lewdly starring at the boyfriend’s bottom. “I had an orgasmic weekend. I think he broke my clit. I’m numb. But let’s not talk about me. Who is this new guy?” She grips my shoulders with an urgency I have never seen before. “Please don’t tell me you’re seeing that horse head freak again.”
I rip my attention off Nate’s backside and look up at her. “No!” I bark out a laugh. “Are you crazy?”
“Is this new guy a serious thing? If not, can I please match you up with one of Nate’s friends, I—”
“Julia, I really don’t want to meet anyone new—”
“Oh God, you’re not sleeping with anyone on the writing staff, are you?”
“What? No!”
“So, does this mean you’re just going to forget about Mr. Perfect?”
“He probably has a girlfriend by now, Jules. Guys that perfect don’t stay single for long. If he was single at all.” God, if she only knew the truth.
Nate comes back with my coffee. He hands it to me in silence, unable to meet my eyes.
“Jane, if it isn’t anything serious with this guy, would you please let us set you up? Nate, don’t you have plenty of friends we could set Jane up with?”
“One of my friends?” He stumbles over the question.
“Come on, she’s really pretty, right?”
Nate’s jaw tightens. “She’s beautiful.” His voice is still a hoarse croak and the air sucks out of my lungs.
“So, any friends?” she prompts.
He looks up and meets my gaze. “No one worth falling head over heels in love with the instant they kiss.”
“Well, that was a once in a lifetime thing, like a fairytale,” I say softly. My heart feels a bit bruised, like something is squeezing it from inside my chest.
“You should have run after him, Jane.” His words are thick and breathy. “You really should have run after him.”
Something bursts open from just beneath my ribcage. Grief or rage, I’m not sure, but it gives me a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.
Yeah, I need to erase Nate Cross from my brain.
I need to stay far away from him because falling out of love at first sight is going to be too hard if I don’t.
Chapter 7
I’m still in the office way after everyone leaves for the day. Almost everyone. Dex is the only other person here, but he doesn’t count as another human being to me, he’s more of a parasite. Both of us have stories due in the morning, but he’s spent the last hour watching porn on his phone while he writes. He might be doing it to get on my nerves, but I don’t pay it any mind.
My mind is too busy obsessing over Nate.
Nate, my friend Julia’s boyfriend. I have to keep saying it in my head.
I haven’t been able to focus on anything else. My daily word count hasn’t been hit, and I mistakenly sent out my grocery list instead of interview questions to the personal assistant of a fashion model I’m supposed to be writing a story about.
All throughout the day I’ve been bumping into walls or losing my pen, which was where I always keep it, jutting out of my messy bun.
I can’t stop thinking about what Nate said. Was he telling me that if I had found him at the game after our kiss, we would be together now? Would there have been no Julia and Nate? I roll it around in my head. Julia usually helps me interpret man-talk, or as I jokingly call it, Manglish. It’s the language that sounds exactly like English, but all the words and phrases have entirely different meanings, always leading to some disastrous communication between me and a random guy, who was most likely just trying to tell me I had something in my hair. This time I can’t go to her and I have no way of knowing what Nate was really thinking when he told me I should have run after the guy of my dreams: him.
I’m pacing in front of elevator, stockroom key dangling from my fingers. Back and forth, back and forth, wearing a hole in the carpeting that runs all along the hallway. Most of the lights are off and there’s just a small glow from the computer on my desk and the one on Dex’s. His fingers are clicking fast over his keys.
“I think you forgot to press the button.” Nate’s sudden voice surprises me and I whirl around, hand to my chest.
“Oh, you scared me. I thought I was the only one here besides Dex.” Nate is right; I never pushed the elevator button. How long have I been standing here waiting for the stupid elevator I never called to the floor?
“Art department is burning the midnight oil. We’re coming close to the deadline on next month’s cover and full page spread but the director hates everything the photographer shot.” He glides his fingers over the button and pushes down, it lights up with a ding.
“Yikes, it’s tough when the art director and photographer have two different ideas on how a story is supposed to be told visually.”
His gaze rests on my lips as his head bobs up and down.
The elevator door slides open, spilling the light from inside across the darkened office. He reaches ou
t and cups his hands over the edge of the door, holding it open for me. “Are you leaving now?”
“In a bit.” I hold the stockroom key up and shrug. “Printer is out of ink, so I’m headed to the stockroom.” I step into the elevator and turn around.
Nate lets go of the door and shoves his hands in pockets. “I need a break, I’m going a bit stir crazy. You want company?” He slides his body into the lift before I can answer.
“Um. Sure.” My face and throat go hot and when the elevator starts to descend, I feel the sudden urge to faint or vomit, or both, but I thank God don’t.
Hordes of butterflies flutter through my stomach the closer we get to the supply room. We’ll be alone, Nate and I, in a room packed with so many things we’ll have to stand really close to each other.
I’ve seen a dozen porn movies with that exact scenario.
I practically leap out of the elevator when the doors open and rush ahead.
A chair at the door to the supply closet supports a towering pile of office supplies—reams of copy paper, file folders, index cards, and binders. We bump into it as we walk in and everything topples onto the floor.
We laugh and jump into the room, sealing ourselves inside.
“Doesn’t it feel naughty, doing something we aren’t supposed to?” he asks. “How did you get the golden stockroom keys?”
I giggle at his joke, and because his hand is on my elbow and his fingers are heating my skin. “Oh stop, the keys are always on Jessa’s desk.”
“Well, this place is like finding Oz, the art department isn’t allowed down here.” Our laughter dies away and both of us are standing in the middle of the messy stockroom, staring at one another.
His hand drops away from my elbow.
His eyes drift down. They’ve started at my lips and work their way south, ever so slowly, trailing over my neck and along my collarbone to the swell of my breasts beneath my tight fitted top.
My imagination roars to life. I picture myself opening my blouse slowly, twisting each button with a sexy flick of my fingers, then running them down along my cleavage. How would he react? Would he say, “We shouldn’t, but—”
Are You There, Karma? It’s Me, Jane.: A laugh out loud romantic comedy Page 4