Will’s jaw set, and his arms crossed, a sure sign that he was about to dig in on the subject. I headed him off, whipping my phone from my back pocket. “I’ll keep this set to speed dial you the second I catch a whiff of Creepy Dude in the vicinity. Then you can come glare him to death. Good enough?”
“No.”
“Make it good enough, Will. I’m going running. Enjoy your pizza, and don’t worry about me. Worry about your internet-dating algorithm.” That was all I would worry about while I ran. His sudden focus on the project unnerved me, almost literally—as if my nerves were unstringing and no longer capable of holding me together like they should.
Running this evening would be about outrunning that feeling, not calorie burn or heart health. It would be about pounding back the anxiety trying to pluck at me, every foot strike against the lake path an effort to chip away at the knot that kept growing.
“Give me some of your drink,” I said, reaching over to pluck it out of his hand for a fortifying sip before I took off. He jerked it out of my reach and caught my wrist with his other hand, toppling me into his lap. Knowing what was coming next, I cursed myself for setting myself up for it, even as I managed to twist and land on my behind and not face-first into a sofa cushion.
“Will!” I hollered and tried to squirm away, but he pinned me to his chest with those well-defined arms, and I decided to curse them too. As if he were holding a sleepy puppy and not a full-grown woman who was straining against him, he leaned over and set his Gatorade down. “Will, no!”
But he lifted his free hand, folded his knuckles under, and delivered a noogie.
I wanted to kill him. For three seconds, I considered doing it. But years of experience taught me to endure it and he’d go away faster.
He let me go, and I dug my elbow in hard while leveraging myself to my feet. “Bye, loser,” I called over my shoulder.
“Don’t go away mad,” he yelled.
I slammed the door as an answer. I’d made it ten feet down the hall to my place, three doors down, when Will scooped me up from behind and held me against his chest, with my feet dangling above the ground. I’d resented every short girl Will had ever dated since very few guys were tall enough to keep my toes from touching the ground in a maneuver like that. I’d resented all the petite little things he’d fallen for over the years, wishing I could shoo them away like flies to go circulate among the much larger pool of men who would work for their height. Even though I was five nine, Will had me by a good six inches.
I cursed every one of those inches between him and me now as I tried to make contact with the carpeted hallway, but Will had me locked. I wasn’t in the mood for this. I skipped the pleading that I usually dragged out for maximum Will contact when he had me pinned and went straight to my surefire release option: I yanked on a tuft of Will’s arm hair. He yelped and let go, backing up so quickly I had to windmill for a second to catch my balance.
“That hurt.” He rubbed his arm and scowled at me.
I scowled right back. “You are not the boss of me. If I want to go away mad, I can go away mad.”
“At least I know you can handle yourself against the creepy lake dude. Seriously, let me come run with you.”
“You’re too slow.”
“Nice, Hannah.”
“You’d be faster if you trained too, but I’m not slowing down for you. You’re taking this keep-an-eye-on-me thing too seriously.” I started toward my door again.
“I promised Dave when he left—”
“I know what you promised him. It was nice of you. But I think he meant you should help me change lightbulbs or get stuff off tall shelves, not monitor my jogging.”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“Ooh, look, pizza guy is here,” I said without turning around. I knew he’d check behind him anyway. He was kind of Pavlovian about his pizzas. I slipped into my apartment and shut the door, waiting a moment to see if he would give up. He did. Of course he did. It wasn’t like I was going to trump a pizza.
Chapter 2
This is for real. This is for real.
My feet pounded in time with the words a half hour later even though I was doing my best to outrun them. If I managed to push away the chant for a few yards, the expression on Will’s face intruded, the image of the light his eyes caught when he was deep inside a new idea.
He had a crazy-smart brain. I did too, but Will was . . . beyond. And if he’d decided to take this seriously, to follow Dave’s lead and settle down, he’d solve the “system inefficiencies.”
I kicked up my speed, fueled by impatience. Why should I even think of it as bad news? I’d talked myself out of being in love with Will at least two hundred times since high school. I’d thought for sure the last talk I’d had with myself had actually gotten through.
But, then, why had I been so determined to prove that Shelly was the wrong fit for him? And pretty much every girl before that?
Because I’m a liar, I admitted. Liar, liar, liar.
Ugh. This was not much better as a beat for my footfalls.
I checked the running app on my phone and veered toward a lakeside cement bench when I hit the three-mile mark. I dropped onto the seat and stretched my legs in front of me, leaning down to touch my toes and enjoy the gentle pull on my hamstrings. After a minute, my brain quieted enough for me to straighten and look out at the water.
I punched out a text. I was going to need Sophie for this.
BND broke up with PS. “Boy Next Door” was my code for Will with my best friend since elementary school. PS was Psycho Shelly. Obviously.
But you don’t care, right?
I laughed at Sophie’s quick sarcasm. Nope. But now he’s got a Project. To Get Married.
Uh-oh.
I’d no sooner read the words than Sophie’s name lit up my screen on an incoming call.
“He’s getting married? I thought you said he just broke up with someone.”
“Technically he hasn’t broken up yet, but he will. I caught her stealing my bra. So she’s crazy, but she has good taste. It was my favorite bra.”
“So weird. Explain the marriage thing,” Sophie said, undeterred. I loved that I had every bit of Sophie’s attention. We’d bonded in fifth grade when we’d both put NSYNC stickers on our folders. She’d proved her friendship when my parents died in a car wreck two years later, and she’d held me together through seventh grade until I could bear to interact with people again. My aunt Cindy had moved in to raise Dave and me after that, and while she was well-intentioned, sometimes she was misguided, too strict about some things, and too lax about others.
Dave was too protective all the time after the accident. Sophie’s house and family had been my refuge. And her bedroom had been where I’d confessed all the ins and outs of my doomed love for Will. Almost all.
“He mumbled something about wanting what Dave has and online dating and gaming the system, and then he got the look.”
“Ohhh.”
“Yeah. I don’t know what he’s planning, but he’s never talked about dating like this before.”
“I wouldn’t think so. That dude has always been about who falls into his lap.” She paused for a moment. “Well, mostly. Present company excluded on account of he’s an idiot.”
“Whatever he’s planning, it’ll work. It always does. It sounds like he’s going to mathematically find the perfect girl for him. And you know him and math.”
He’d tutored both of us through college calculus, even though one of us always broke down in tears before the end of the session. Not because of him. Because calculus. Blerg.
“So basically you’re freaking out,” Sophie guessed.
“I don’t know what I am,” I said. “I feel like I’ve been on the verge of permanently losing him for years, which is stupid. You can’t lose what you don’t have. But this still feels different.” I sighed, frustrated at the loops my thoughts were following without getting anywhere. “Maybe it’s because the bombshell is brand
-new.”
“Bomb metaphors,” Sophie the English teacher said, sounding relieved. “Let’s go with that. You’re shell-shocked. Maybe you’re feeling like it’s blowing all your chances with him to kingdom come. But I think something else is happening.”
“You’re going to drop a bomb on me?” I said, cracking myself up.
“No, but I think that’s exactly what you need to do with him.”
We let the words hang while I tried to figure out what Sophie meant. But it could have been a thousand things, so I gave up.
“What kind of bomb do you see me dropping?”
“I think you need to pursue the nuclear option.”
“I’m nodding like I know what you’re talking about, but, really, I have no idea.”
“Tell him. Tell him how you feel.”
Right. One of the few secrets I’d kept from Sophie was that I had told Will how I felt once. When I was seventeen, I’d confessed my feelings for him through a panic attack while fighting back nausea. And he’d done exactly what I’d feared; he’d laughed at me. Not in a mean way, as if I were an idiot for thinking he would ever like me. But in the way adults laughed at kids who did something cute and then sent them off to play again. He’d dismissed my feelings as a kid crush.
He saw the three-year age difference between us as a generation gap. For me, that three years had narrowed the older we’d become until it was invisible. But he still saw me as an honorary kid sister, and the gulf between us was as big as ever on his side.
“I’m not going to tell him how I feel. After he finishes letting me down easy, he’ll give me pity looks, and then while I crawl back to my place to die of humiliation, he’ll be ten steps behind me, trying to feed me chicken soup to make me feel better because he promised Dave he’d look after me.”
“So? How is that worse than if you say nothing? What happens at the end of that road if you’re right about this new plan of his?”
“Me crying in my apartment, and he doesn’t bring me chicken soup because he doesn’t even know.”
Sophie let my conclusion hang there, and it drifted in front of the lake sunset like a hazy cobweb of unsolvable problem fibers I wanted to swat away. But touching it meant getting more tangled up.
“I don’t want things to change,” I said. “I love spending entire lazy Saturday afternoons on his couch, playing Mario Kart with him. If I say something and it messes it all up, it ruins that. What if he feels like he can’t drop by my place anymore to raid my bookshelves and talk about what we read? Or what if he quits talking to me about his carving? Sophie.”
“What?”
“What if I don’t get Tetris nachos ever again? I would die.”
“At least you’re joking about it.”
“Only so I don’t cry.” I stood and hit the trail again at a brisk walk. “Maybe I’m wrong, anyway. Maybe I misread the situation. Maybe he’ll get distracted by something else.”
“Maybe,” Sophie echoed. “But you’ve never called me this freaked out before. You need to get more details before you lose it, okay? What do you call it at work?”
“Gathering requirements.” It was what I’d been doing for the last year as a project manager in the IT department of a big life sciences company; I steered a small team of software developers through the deadlines upper management needed them to hit to develop new websites for their different products. I had to see the bigger picture and figure out the pieces it would take to deliver what my bosses wanted.
“Do that,” Sophie urged. “Find out exactly what this is. But if your gut instinct is right, and Will really is trying to hunt down the future Mrs. Hallerman, you need to decide whether you want to hold the train of her wedding gown while she walks down the aisle to marry him or stick out your foot to trip her as she passes.”
“Nice one.”
“Nope, totally flawed analogy now that I’m hearing it. You need to figure out if you even want it to get that far, because if you don’t, you’re going to have to trip him on his way out of the front door to his first date.”
“I want things to stay how they’ve been.” I heard the whine in my voice, but Sophie wouldn’t judge me for it.
“Really? You want nothing to change? That’s the central conflict in the story of your life, girlfriend. Think hard about it.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to think about anything else. I’m going to run home, shower, and go see where his head is at.”
When we hung up, I tucked my phone away and finished out my last two miles in a personal best time. I almost, but not quite, outran my thoughts. But it was worth it. By the time I reached the last block before home, I’d planned my approach to figuring out what was going on with Will.
Chapter 3
Will’s apartment door flew open right as I reached to open it, and Shelly barreled straight into me before we both took a step back.
“Sorry,” she muttered before pushing past me and heading for the stairs. I watched her go, wondering if I’d just seen my polka-dot bra walk off too. I shook my head and stepped into Will’s place. The sound of a cable news channel came from the TV, but he was digging in the fridge. Again.
“You break up with her?” I called.
He jumped and whirled, another energy drink in his hand. “Yeah.”
“What’d you tell her? That she was a dirty bra thief?”
“I thought she stole your clean one.”
“Ha.”
“I didn’t mention the laundry issues because I wasn’t sure how to explain how I knew without sounding like I was stalking her or ratting you out for lurking in the janitor’s closet while she sorted her colors.”
“Sorted my colors, you mean? So what did you say?”
“I went with it’s not you, it’s me.”
I plopped down on his sofa. “Usually that’s true. You’re a real gent for saying so tonight when it was most definitely her.”
He grunted and dropped down beside me and handed me a drink of my own.
“So what now?” I asked when he didn’t say anything else. “Grow a beard and hide from women forever?”
“Nah. I told you I’ve got a plan.”
My stomach clenched. “I was gone less than two hours, and you dumped your girlfriend plus put together a plan for getting yourself married off? You don’t mess around.”
He pulled his laptop from the end table on his side of the sofa and slid it onto my lap. “I got this finished before Shelly came over. It’s the first iteration. I’ll do some A-B testing and see how it plays.”
Cragen Life Sciences used A-B testing when we were rolling out a new product to see which marketing approach generated more customers. We’d use two different website designs promoting the same thing and see which one got more traffic. One of my first projects after my promotion had been overseeing the build on one of the A-B websites for a cream that lightened liver spots. But what faced me on the screen now was a gloriously un-liver-spotted picture of Will with some bullet points about his personality beneath it.
Engineer at Jet Science Labs
Hazel
Tall
Athletic
Jazz
Rap
Sports, mainly baseball
Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the smart superhero stuff
Comic books
Pizza
Smile, cloud
Cats
Long walks on the beach
“What is this?” I asked, looking up from the list.
“It’s all my stuff to cut and paste into the profile things they want you to fill out when you join a dating site,” he said. “That way I don’t have to re-type everything.”
“I get that hazel is your eye color and you hate cats, but what does ‘smile, cloud’ mean?
“That’s what’s important to me in a woman. First I’m attracted to her smile, but it’s everything she has stored on her cloud—music, movies, e-books—that decides if I stick around.”
“Ah. And long walks o
n the beach? You’ve been to the beach twice in your life.”
“I need to put things in there that women like.” He pulled the laptop back but kept the screen angled so I could see him highlight “comic books.” “I figure I have to let women know certain things up front, like about my comic-book collection. That one hasn’t gone over well in the past, so I’ll put it out there and let that filter some candidates out right away.”
Candidates. Like he was filling a job.
“But I don’t want to filter everyone out right away, so I have to put other stuff in there that women like. And you all like walks on the beach, right?”
I wrinkled my forehead. “I guess if women live by a beach they’d like walking on it. But I don’t think it’s a major requirement for Dallas women. They’re probably more worried about whether you like to go on long walks through the Galleria.”
“That’s cynical,” he said. “You’re not like that.”
“I’m not like most women,” I retorted, a point I’d tried and failed to make for years with him. But the urgency to make him get it was spiking to a level I hadn’t felt in years. I worried the tension would show on my face. He’d already come up with more plan specifics than I’d expected. “Why is rap on the list?”
“That falls under stuff I hate and dealbreakers.”
That made more sense. “You’ve already put a lot of thought into this.”
“Not really. I barely started working on it.”
“You think twice as fast as other people. That’s like four hours of thinking for regular humans.”
“Minus an uncomfortable twenty-minute conversation with Shelly, it’s really only three and a half hours.” He smirked, and I reached over to deliver a light smack to the back of his head, a long-standing code that meant it was getting too big.
“Anyway, I’m going to spend all day on this tomorrow, and then it should be ready to go.”
“What? Your list?”
He tapped a few keys on the laptop, and the screen filled with code. “No, this.”
Always Will Page 2