Cover: Using Laptop at Home © BraunS, courtesy istockphoto.com; Two Laptops and Pencil Cup Vertical © Steve Cukrov Photography, courtesy creativemarket.com
Cover design copyright © 2015 by Covenant Communications, Inc.
Published by Covenant Communications, Inc.
American Fork, Utah
Copyright © 2015 by Melanie Jacobson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format or in any medium without the written permission of the publisher, Covenant Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 416, American Fork, UT 84003. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect
the position of Covenant Communications, Inc., or any other entity.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are either products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real, or are used fictitiously.
First Printing: October 2015
ISBN 978-1-68047-665-1
To the Barbies, as is fitting for a story of best friends
Acknowledgments
So many of the same people go with me on this journey every time, even though we all should know better. I love them for climbing on the bandwagon anyway. For Kenny, who makes it all possible. For my kids, who are patient when I have to work. For my critique partners, Brittany and Kristine, who tell me how to make it better. For Ellissa, Ranee, Rachel, and Christina, who gave great feedback. And for Skip and Joan, who are always giving me the best spaces to work.
Chapter 1
I shoved open Will Hallerman’s apartment door and grinned. Widely. Then I stood there until he looked up from the bar of soap he was whittling and rolled his eyes. “That’s gloat face. Go ahead, Hannah. Spill it.”
“It’s her. Your dumb girlfriend is the laundry bandit of building H.”
That made him set down the soap. He was roughing out a sinuous shape. I could already see the curves forming. “That’ll be amazing in cocobolo wood,” I said.
“Maybe.” He didn’t even glance at it. “Still have some design elements to work out before I think about wood. Shelly isn’t dumb,” he said, returning to my accusation.
“You’re right. She’s too smart to steal clothes that I would recognize. But she’s a thief. I saw her raid a washing machine. She sorted through it and picked out what she wanted. That’s bizarre, Will. Who goes shopping in other people’s wet laundry?”
“Why are you assuming she was stealing? Why would she do that with someone watching her? Maybe it was her own washer and she needed something in particular.”
“She didn’t know I was watching. I staked out the janitor’s closet and peeked at her through the shutter slat things. She went over to the machine where my clothes were washing, dug out my favorite bra, and stuck it in her dryer. Proof. Your weirdo girlfriend is a laundry bandit.”
“The woman who staked out a janitor’s closet is calling someone else a weirdo. You get that there’s some irony, right?” But he slumped in his seat, and I smiled.
I had him, but I pushed the point anyway. “I’m sure if I got a search warrant, I’d find my white shorts plus a whole closet full of other people’s clothes in her apartment. Sucks for anyone who’s the same size as your girlfriend.” I dropped into my favorite easy chair but not before considering a victory lap around his living room first.
“You’re sure it was your bra? Maybe you forgot which machine you were using.”
It was my turn for an eye roll. “It was hot pink with black polka dots. Kind of distinctive, so, yeah, I’m sure.”
Will’s eyebrows lifted. I had no trouble interpreting that. Every one of his expressions read like simple declarative sentences to me. I’d been studying his face obsessively since I was thirteen years old. I spent my teenage years becoming an expert on it, on the way the planes and angles intersected, the exact degree at which his cheekbones curved under his hazel eyes, the scar near his hairline where he’d gotten stitches after my brother, Dave, had accidentally sliced Will open with the ragged edge of some reclaimed tin they were using to roof their treehouse. I’d worried for days after the accident until I was sure he hadn’t gotten lockjaw; only then had I finally been able to sleep at night, knowing the love of my life was alive and well and free to continue not taking notice of me.
By fifteen, I could extrapolate his mood on the strength of a single twitch. And not once did any of his twitches or smiles or frequent blank stares into the middle distance ever show me what I had wanted to see more than anything: that he was madly in love with me. So even though those hopes had flamed out back when I was seventeen, my skill set was still very much intact. And that lift of his eyebrows just now meant he’d never once considered that I wore hot-pink, polka-dotted bras.
Seventeen-year-old Hannah would have been thrilled to plant the image in his brain. Eight-years-sadder-but-older-and-wiser Hannah knew Will was running a computation in his head: Hannah = Dave’s kid sister who isn’t even in training bras, is she? Therefore, the polka-dot bra variable must be ignored as not fitting in the numerical set.
“Remind me,” I said, wading back to the present. At least Will never minded my fade-outs. His mind wandered even more often, working through difficult engineering problems, pondering the mysteries of the universe, and so on. “What do I get for winning?”
“Can we suspend the gloating and focus on the fact that I’m the real loser here?” He winced as soon as he said it, his mouth opening to snatch the words back, probably, but I was all over it.
“Yes, you are, dummy. King Loser. I think I’ll make you a beauty-pageant sash to wear around the complex for a week so everyone else knows too.”
“Funny. And you can’t make me. Those weren’t the stakes.”
“Too bad. But I’ll settle for Tetris nachos.” The precisely stacked nachos were the kind of thing only a brilliant mind like his could come up with, each mouthful a perfectly balanced blend of pico de gallo, carne asada, sour cream, guacamole, black beans, and his genius addition: smoked cheddar.
He groaned. “I’m not sure when I can do it. I’ve been working on a new sensor suite for the satellite’s navigation system, and I—”
I held up a hand to stem the tide of excuses. I knew it was a two-hour project for him since he fried his own tortilla chips and grilled the steak himself. “You’ll do it tomorrow so we can eat them during the Rangers game.”
He sighed. “Okay. But don’t you feel bad exploiting me when I’m in the middle of a breakup?”
“You are?”
“I will be by tomorrow. It’s not like I can date a laundrynapper. There’s weird, and then there’s unbalanced.”
“Should’ve listened to me when I told you not to date her two months ago.”
“You tell me not to date everybody I date.”
“Have I been wrong yet?”
He wore the same expression he got when he ran into math he couldn’t do in his head—the kind other people couldn’t do with a calculator and a tutor. The look cleared after a moment. “Nikki Gaines,” he said, smug triumph underlining his answer.
“She was pretty great,” I conceded. “But I was totally right that you guys shouldn’t have been dating. You were all wrong for her.”
His head dropped back against the sofa, and he stared up at the ceiling. “There have to be normal women out there. Right? Or am I doomed?”
“You don’t need normal, drama queen. That would be the worst thing for you.”
“I don’t know what I need.”
Me, Will. It’s always been me. It was an old habit to fill in that blank for him. But I’d been pushing that thought out of my head every time I’d had it for the last few years, and that habit had gotten pre
tty strong too. “You need pizza, I’m betting.”
“It’s the answer to everything.” He picked up his phone and tapped it a few times, his pizza app already letting the local delivery place know that he wanted his usual meat monster on pan crust delivered ASAP. “Send.” He dropped the phone. “I wish dating were that easy. Punch in what I want and the right girl shows up.”
“I don’t think it’s legal to find women that way outside of Vegas.”
“You’re on one tonight, hmm?” He straightened and fixed me with narrowed eyes. “This whole modern-dating thing is riddled with system inefficiencies. There has to be a better way than bumping into someone at the mailboxes by your house and hoping they’re normal when you ask them to lunch. Or when they’re alone in the laundry room and think no one is looking.”
“System inefficiencies” was a red flag. Any time that phrase came out of Will’s mouth, it meant he was about to fix a problem, and sometimes the search for a solution could preoccupy him to the exclusion of everything—including Texas Rangers games and Tetris nachos—for weeks.
I scrambled for a way to divert him, but before I could utter the words, “Look, Kate Upton’s on TV,” his eyes lit up and extinguished my hope. He’d thought of something. And whatever it was, he would think of nothing else now.
“Internet dating.”
I relaxed. “Be real, Will.” We’d had this conversation a billion times, like every time an online dating ad aired during game time. He had always insisted that dating that way was as inefficient as regular dating because it took the same amount of time and money to dig down and find the crazy.
“I’m being real. I’m going to figure out a way to game the system and bypass the inefficiencies.”
His eyes glazed over. That meant he’d already gone down a wormhole of algorithms that would make my head hurt. Sure, I could understand them if I wanted to. But I didn’t. Sometimes, though, listening to Will’s complex theoretical analyses was the only way to get his attention. I took a deep breath. “In nonmath terms, can you sketch out your basic idea for me?”
He turned his head toward me, but it took another half minute for his eyes to focus. “I need to study all the different sites, figure out which approach each one uses and what kind of people sign up for them. I’ll weed out the sites that attract a high proportion of psychos, like the mainly hookup sites, and focus on the rest. I’ll develop a matrix of what I’m looking for, comb through profiles for keywords—”
He grabbed a takeout menu and a pen from the coffee table and scribbled as he talked, his words barely keeping up with his scrawl. “I’ll assign point values for different positive attributes and subtract for negative qualities. This is going to—”
“What kind of negative qualities are you talking here?” I had to break in. He’d never looked at the world through the same lens as anyone around him; there was no telling what he’d single out.
“Cats.”
“Your hatred of them is unreasonable. It’s not their fault.”
“Want to trade allergies?” he asked, finally giving me all his attention.
“No.” I was only allergic to walnuts, which I didn’t like anyway, and my reaction was a scratchy throat. Cats made Will look like a superstrain of hay fever had tried to kneecap him.
“It’s not only the allergy thing,” he said. “Women with cats are afraid of being alone. They have a higher rate of being clingy.”
My jaw dropped. “Can you back that up with data?”
“It’s logic.”
I itched to grab the remote and give him a hard thump on his skull with it. “What about women with dogs?”
“They, logically, are looking for protection. That makes sense for females living alone.”
“What about females living with roommates? Or females with little dogs, the kinds that fit in purses?”
He shrugged, lost in his head again.
“Will! Make Benadryl your friend, suck it up, and let the cat prejudice go. What other requirements do you have?”
“She must be educated, driven, financially independent, physically active, and pretty.”
Check, check, check, check, and check, I thought but said nothing. I dug my fingers into the throw pillow sitting on my lap and pressed it down as hard as I could to keep myself still. “What about funny? Smart? Kind?”
“People describe themselves that way all the time. I’ll give self-analysis less weight. But having an education is a good objective indicator that they’ll be both smart and driven, so that gets more weight in the point system.”
As much as I wanted to point out all the flaws in his logic, I kept quiet, the hard knot in my chest easing for the first time since he’d announced he was going to take his search for love seriously. He’d never get it right if he went down the road he was mapping out for himself, and that meant I had more time to brace myself . . . The same way I’d braced myself again and again with each new relationship he’d paraded in front of me since his first girlfriend, Sarah Lancey, when he was sixteen. That had only lasted two weeks, but I hadn’t taken one quality breath that whole time.
The knot never went away entirely. A pebble-sized spot lived somewhere in the middle of my chest, made up of pure worry, with cancerous tentacles trying to creep outward. “Why now?” I asked, vomiting out the question that fed the worry. “You’ve done all right dating. Why not let it happen when it’s going to happen?”
He set his pen down and stretched, and I stole a glance at the lean muscles extending from the short sleeves of his Dallas Mavericks T-shirt. “You and fate,” he said, standing to ruffle my hair before wandering to his fridge. “You’ll never give up the idea of soul mates, even after all of your boring boyfriends.”
Of course not. I figured out mine when I was thirteen. How could I not believe? All I said out loud was, “That’s not an answer to the question. Why now?”
He retrieved a sports drink—blue, always blue—from the fridge and held it up. I shook my head, and he leaned against the counter, opening the lid and taking a long swallow. It was stupid how sexy that looked. It was second nature to notice and equally ingrained to never let that reaction show on my face.
“I’m twenty-eight,” he said. “It’s time.”
“Is that an algorithm somewhere too?”
“I’ve been thinking ever since the wedding. Dave is happy. I wouldn’t mind that.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair, and the caramel-colored strands tangled like unset taffy. He needed a haircut again. He always needed a haircut. For a guy who held an infinite number of complexities in his brain at any given moment, he had a habit of forgetting things like trips to the barber.
“I kind of want that, what Dave has. It looks like a better option than stringing together four to eight dates with someone before it unravels. He got it right. I should definitely be able to get it right.”
I shook my head at the competitive vibe in his words. It has ever been thus, Grammy would have said if she were still alive. Mostly it was healthy competition that drove my brother and Will to push themselves harder and to do better. And they genuinely cheered each other’s successes. But there was no doubt that every success created a new goal for the other one.
I had a difficult time drawing my next couple of breaths as I realized I hadn’t dodged this bullet after all. I’d feared this all the way through Dave’s engagement and marriage last year, but when a few months had passed and Will still seemed more interested in his work than in a wife, I thought this must be an area where Will didn’t feel the need to catch up.
Looked like he was having a delayed reaction. I took a breath to make sure I still could, careful not to sound like I’d been punched in the gut. But that was what it felt like. He was serious. I could see it in his face. And for the first time, I wondered what would happen if he brought the right girl home instead of the long line of wrong ones who had passed through over the years.
He wandered back to the sofa and plopped down. I popped up from my easy
chair. “I’m going.”
“Why? Pizza’s not here yet.”
“Seriously? I never eat the pizza you order.”
“But one day you’ll stop being stupid and you will.”
“It’s not stupid to take care of yourself.”
“It is when taking care of yourself means eating rabbit food.”
“Congratulations to you for being some weird biological anomaly, but the rest of us can’t live on carbs, fat, and sugar indefinitely and not blob out.”
“You’re in great shape. You’re paranoid.”
I did my best to ignore that so no color would creep into my cheeks. Not that he would notice, really, but if anything would give me away, it was my lame blushes. My cheeks stayed cool, and I raised my chin a notch. “The person in this room who was not named Heavy Hannah in high school should not talk. At all.”
“First, you were never heavy.”
Lie. I’d lost fifty pounds between my senior year of high school and sophomore year of college.
“Secondly, high school kids are idiots. Who cares what they called you? Probably they’d say Hot Hannah now anyway.”
Heat flare, solar level, in my cheeks before I could fight it down. I hid it by stooping to straighten the Smithsonian magazine on his coffee table to align with the Sports Illustrated next to it. “I literally have to run,” I said into his tabletop as I waited for my cheeks to cool enough not to betray me. “There’s always a creepy guy on the lake trail if I wait too much longer.”
This time it was Will who shot straight up, and I bit my lip, realizing I’d made a very dumb miscalculation.
“What creepy guy?” he demanded. “Someone been bothering you? Where? I’m coming with you.”
“Shut up,” I said, pushing against his chest until he sat down, savoring the fleeting feel of his solid pectorals beneath my palms. They were as hard as the rocks he’d spent years climbing to sculpt his chest and shoulders to perfection. And his legs. His legs . . .
I caught myself before I could wander too far off into daydreams. “No one has bothered me. I don’t like the way he looks at me, but I don’t like the way he looks at any of the women who run past him. And if he did bother me, I could handle him.”
Always Will Page 1