I keep rewinding the first five minutes on exponential growth, but I can’t bloody focus, on account of staring over the fence and wishing my neighbor would appear.
I go back inside. Gritting my teeth, I tell myself not to pop out onto the front porch just so I can swing my gaze left and see if she’s home.
I remind myself I don’t need to wander down the driveway and check the mail.
It’s Sunday night. There is no fucking mail.
I issue a restraining order against me going to the guest room just to straighten the blinds on the window that looks out on her kitchen, where I can sometimes see a sliver of her when she’s at the sink.
I don’t do any of those things, because I’m not a stalker.
Or a creeper.
Or that kind of guy.
Also, there’s no furniture in my guest room, so it’d be really obvious that I was spying.
Instead, I retreat to my bedroom and slump down on my bed with the black cover, flashing back to January’s comments on my monochromatic color scheme.
A smile bends my lips as I remember the day I met her.
How fiery and fun she was.
How outgoing and welcoming she was.
How easy to talk to she was.
She’s still all of those things.
And we’re two trains chugging in opposite directions.
I reach for my wallet and flip it open. Sliding out the card from Valeria Rodriquez, I replay my brief ice cream encounter with her.
The sparkless one.
But that’s not her fault.
Perhaps we’ll find that magic in person.
When we talk.
When we connect.
It can happen, surely.
And I can do this.
I can absolutely do this.
After all, dating, searching, and hopefully finding that special someone is my big goal, after helping my dad.
And since I’m doing just fine on that first one, it’s time to stay the course on the second.
I text her.
On Monday morning, Ethan and I hop on our bikes and ride down Mallard Lane, then along the next one, making our way to Duck Falls Elementary. When we reach the school, he parks his bike in the rack and shoulders his backpack, then gives me a salute and says, “Okay, you can go now.”
I laugh. “Were you worried I’d cramp your style?”
He shrugs. “Kind of.”
I punch him on the shoulder. “Glad I’ve raised you to be so independent at the ripe old age of nine.”
“Nine and four-fifths.”
“Hello? Arithmetic, please. You turn ten in a month.”
“Nine and eleven-twelfths.”
“Well done. Thank you.” I roll my eyes, then grab my phone, holding it up. “Pic for Aunt Jane and Oliver?”
“Sure,” he says, giving a smile for the camera, then he whirls around and calls out, “Also, you look clean.”
“All without any white sneakers.”
I send the first-day-of-school pic to my New York friends and family, then hop back on my bike and wheel away, heading to The Good Egg. It’s a cute little breakfast café just off the Duck Falls town square, where I’ve arranged to meet Valeria for a quick breakfast date.
A breakfast date that might lead to sparks.
A man can hope.
A man in pursuit of Ms. Right can dream indeed.
When I arrive, I park the bike outside and lock it up, then head inside and grab a booth, looking around as I wait.
Does January ever come here?
Does she pop in on Mondays?
Would she order the veggie omelet? Maybe make a joke about tormenting me with peppers? Then I’d tell her I actually love peppers—red, orange, and yellow.
But not green. Never green.
Bet that’d surprise her but make her roll her sky-blue eyes too.
A ray of warmth spreads over my skin as I imagine that conversation, having it with her. Here, or at her home, or mine.
The bell tinkles above the door, and for a sliver of a second, I imagine it’s her.
In her pink work shirt.
In Timberlands.
With that crooked grin.
Those birds peeking out of the sleeves of her shirt.
Picking up a to-go order but deciding to join me instead.
But as my eyes laser in on the woman walking through the doorway, I sit up straighter, conducting a full mind sweep.
Erase all thoughts of other women from your brain now.
I catalog my date. Toned arms on display in a light-blue sundress, freckles splashed across her nose, hair in a braid.
A smile that’s inviting.
I stand. “Hello, Valeria.” Awkwardness kicks in for a few seconds. Do I drop a kiss on her cheek, give her a hug, or clap her on the back?
I don’t normally feel awkward on dates.
But then, I’m not normally thinking about other women when I’m on dates.
Do what you’d do if you were having breakfast with Summer.
A quick, chaste hug wins.
We sit, open the menus, and peruse the offerings.
After the waitress takes our order—eggs and potatoes for me, while my date chooses French toast—Valeria sets her hands on the table and shoots me a warm smile again. “I have to admit, I have a bit of a sweet tooth. I can’t resist French toast for breakfast or cereal for dinner. And I guess that’s why I’m in the ice cream business.”
And how about that? We have something in common right away—a shared sweet tooth.
Must latch on to this commonality. “Honestly, it’s a daily battle for me not to have French toast and cereal for every meal as well.”
She laughs, then we chat a little bit more about our favorite treats.
It’s rather innocuous. It’s mostly fun. Surely this is the start of a good date.
She’s easy to talk to. She’s quick-witted. And we seem to have enough to say to each other.
But there’s one big, glaring problem.
One huge, massive issue.
She’s not January.
At the end of the date, I’m not entirely sure what to do.
I should want to go on another date with her.
But I don’t.
So I stay the course, pretending she’s Summer, or any female friend.
Nothing wrong with friendship, right?
Except I get the sense from her body language, from the way she leans a little closer and parts her lips the slightest bit, that she wants more than friendship. That she wants a second date.
As she finishes her French toast, she says with a flirty tone, “I know a great place with chocolate chip pancakes. We could try that next.”
My stomach nose-dives.
Because I’m going to need to tell this smart, fun, lively woman that this is going nowhere.
My interest is elsewhere.
All my sparks are lit by someone else.
Someone who doesn’t have the same dreams, the same goals, or the same five-year plan as I do.
I brace myself to end this before it starts.
After I pay for breakfast, I say, “This was fun. It reminds me of going out to breakfast with my friend Summer in New York City.”
Two lines form above Valeria’s nose, a telltale crease in her brow that says she didn’t want to be friend-zoned. But then she erases it quickly, gives me a smile, and says, “Friends. Perfect. That’s what I was thinking too.”
I beam. Whew. Maybe I read her all wrong. Or maybe she’s simply cool with a guy being up-front about what he wants and what he doesn’t want. Either way, I’m glad I was able to be clear and kind. It’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone.
“Great, then,” I say, and now I know what to do. I extend a hand to shake.
She shakes back. “Thanks for breakfast, and if I run into you here again, we can have a friendly . . . chocolate croissant.”
“Sounds perfect,” I say, and on the way to work, my phone buzzes.
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It’s Missy, confirming our lunch date for tomorrow.
Missy, who doesn’t like fish.
Missy, who’s outgoing and friendly.
Missy, who January knows.
Dammit.
When I reach the Lucky Falls office, my vet tech tells me a little brown terrier is on her way. “Blossom has a terrible bee allergy, and she was stung this morning on her walk.”
That’s all I need to extricate dates and women from my mind. Minutes later, the cutie-pie arrives with a swollen face and a worried person.
I administer the necessary shot for the little sweetie, reassuring the owner that her darling Blossom will be fine, and that she won’t look like an overgrown shar-pei for very long.
For the next few hours, the prospect of dating and faking it is forgotten, but later the charade weighs on me like an anchor tugging me down.
It makes me start to question all the things I thought I wanted when I moved here just a few weeks ago.
Missy is funny.
At least, I think so.
I’ve done a serviceable job of paying attention to her over tea during my lunch break the next day.
The willowy redhead chatters on about the time she bumped into a wall in the yarn shop because she was checking out a brown-and-tan Chihuahua walking by outside the store.
“I was like this.” She demonstrates by smacking the air in front of her as hard as one can possibly smack air. She shrugs a shoulder, saying with humor, “That’ll teach the store to put a wall in the way when I’m trying to stare shamelessly at all the dogs walking by.”
“Walls should be removed when cute pooches stroll the streets,” I say, a little deadpan, and she laughs too. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, facile with a dry sense of humor, my favorite kind.
But it’s January’s favorite kind too.
January’s quite good at dishing out the dry, the droll, and the deadpan.
She’s good at dishing out vegetables too, and that’s not something I thought I would enjoy, but I definitely like them coming from her.
She’s also great at serving up honesty and openheartedness. Our conversations have been the kind that can spill endlessly into the night.
“Some are definitely hard to resist,” Missy says, and I blink, reorienting myself to the moment.
Hard to resist?
Like my neighbor?
Wait. No. That’s wrong.
We’re talking about dogs that are hard to resist staring at, not neighbors who are hard to resist talking to, thinking about, and wanting to kiss.
Wanting to kiss all over. Wanting to taste, to savor, to please.
Taking a drink of my tea, I zero in on the woman in front of me. The woman who is taking the time out of her day to go on a date with me. The woman who popped over from Duck Falls to have a meal. I want to be respectful of her and keep my mind and heart open to all of the possibilities.
Since the possibilities won’t happen with the woman commandeering my thoughts.
“Tell me what you like about Duck Falls, Missy,” I say to the redhead.
She talks about all the little things, like the glitter on the sidewalks and the ducks in their pink wading ponds, then the sheer number of women-owned businesses. “We like to joke that somehow Athena is responsible for the town. No one can really figure out why there are so many more women here than men. It doesn’t actually make any sense.”
“Magic?” I suggest playfully. “Also, I’m absolutely not complaining that there are more women here than men.”
Missy flashes me a bright smile. “I bet that doesn’t bother you in the least.”
This is the moment when a date should tip over into flirting. Into banter. Into talk about being good in bed or banging in the kitchen, like January and I teased each other about at the IKEA café.
Yet I can’t seem to sit on that end of the seesaw with Missy. Don’t want to tilt it in the direction of innuendo.
Because I don’t actually want to have that banter with anybody other than my neighbor, and that is getting to be a problem.
I’m three dates into my quest, and already my stupid heart craves exactly what it can’t have.
“I just love Duck Falls,” Missy continues, wrapping her hands around her iced vanilla latte. “I love all of the ducks, the people, and the train tracks, and I love the women-owned businesses, like the yarn shop and the bookstore and the hair salon and the carpenter.”
I sit up straighter, keying in on that, like a dog cocking his head when his person opens a bag of kibble. “Carpenter?” I ask, doing my best to seem casually interested.
Not deeply, intensely, ridiculously interested.
“You know! Your next-door neighbor. January. She’s the best. She actually started our board game and beverage nights.”
I try to suppress a grin that threatens to take over my whole face. Now this date is getting interesting. This date is going where I want. Perhaps Missy is my dating insider, about to serve up details on the woman next door. Details I want to gobble up. “What’s board game and beverages?” I ask, as if I’m only mildly intrigued by that tidbit, when I am fascinated with every morsel.
“It’s a really cool club for the female business owners of the town. We all try to get together once a month, and we play board games and have beverages. The whole group of us—me as the lingerie shop owner, and then Alva, who owns the hair salon, and Nina with the boba tea shop. And the best part is we make up crazy rules on the fly. Like, a couple of weeks ago, we were all playing Monopoly, and January had this funny idea,” Missy says, and I’m on the edge of my seat, elbows on the table, eyes wide open, ears pricked. I’m listening to every word because I want to soak in everything there is to know about my next-door neighbor.
“Alva was being a total stickler, so we thought it would be so much more fun if we randomly banded together and bought groups of properties and charged her higher rent when she landed on them,” Missy says, grinning the whole time.
“And that was January’s idea?”
She nods vigorously. “She’s just like that. It’s so her personality. We were drinking and toasting and mostly poking fun at Alva, and then January started tossing all the money at us, saying she was going to open a club and she was making it rain, making it rain,” Missy recounts, and I’m so ridiculously delighted with this story that I cannot wait to see January later and ask her all about her board game night.
That is all I want.
Plain and simple.
Since Mum invited us for supper that evening, Ethan and I pop home after school and work, then head to their place in Lucky Falls before I have a chance to give January grief about making it rain Monopoly money.
Over chicken enchiladas, my dad peppers me with questions. “And what about Kate Stevenson’s dog? How’s Freddie doing with his heart condition?”
I update my dad on the golden retriever he treated for eight years. He gives me some suggestions—they are exactly what I told the client, but I simply nod and say, “Yes, that’s great advice. I’ll tell her that.”
It makes him happy to stay involved like this. It keeps his brain fresh. I can only imagine that as his world is narrowing, becoming blurrier by the day, it must mean so much to him to still be able to use his mind.
But the thing is, I don’t actually need my father’s advice on how to handle a dog’s heart condition. Instead, I need his wisdom on the condition of mine.
After dinner, I pull him aside, setting a hand on his arm so that I can guide him through the living room toward the back deck. We step outside.
“There’s something else I want to talk to you about, Dad.”
He gives me a crisp nod, sliding into that fatherly zone that he’s so good at occupying. “What is it, Liam?”
I tell him a little bit about my dilemma, a little bit about how I’ve been feeling, a little bit about what I want.
He takes a deep breath, the kind that says, Wow, you’ve got quite a conundrum there.
We talk a little more, then I clap him on the shoulder. “You’ve always steered me in the right direction, Dad.”
He shakes his head. “No. You’ve always known what direction to go. All you needed was someone to remind you of what you’re already feeling here.” He taps my sternum.
When Ethan and I leave, I let his advice sink in, slide under my skin, invade my brain.
I let it roll around in my cells.
Be up-front.
Be honest.
I have been, but not all the way, not with every woman.
And I need to be. Because I know where I want to be, even though taking a chance isn’t part of my plan, or the great dating escapade, and it won’t likely align with my goals, my dreams, or my five-year plan.
But I can’t seem to want anything else.
And there’s a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things. Whether this is a big town or a small town, there’s only one way to do the next thing.
Once I’m home, I don’t text Missy.
Texting a woman who unexpectedly fed you nuggets of information about another woman is for cowards.
Calling is the only way to do it. I ring her up.
“Hi, Liam. Good to hear from you.”
“Hi, Missy. I had a great time at lunch,” I say, pacing in my kitchen, readying myself to say something I didn’t plan to say, because I didn’t expect to feel it.
Or rather, I didn’t want to.
“I did too. You’re a hoot,” she says.
I swallow, then finish. “And one of the reasons I had such a great time is because you shared so many terrific details about January.”
“Oh.” That one syllable is laced with confusion.
And I’m about to unlace it.
“It seems I’ve developed a fondness for my next-door neighbor,” I say, opting for a little old-fashioned flare, just because Missy seems like someone who enjoys more of the story.
The Dream Guy Next Door: A Guys Who Got Away Novel Page 13