Always Will

by Jacobson, Melanie

  “What are you doing?” Will called over the running water he’d turned on to do the dishes.

  “My makeup.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah. I need a good profile pic. We went over this. It’s got to be just right.” I shut my bedroom door behind me, plugged in my curling iron, and pulled out my makeup bag. I didn’t wear a ton of makeup, usually, but I loved playing with it. In college, my roommates and I had spent hours watching makeup and hair tutorials on YouTube, playing with different looks and glamming each other up.

  I was good at it, and I’d mastered the fine art of applying a dozen products while looking as if I’d put on nothing more than a pretty lip gloss. My eyes were bigger, my cheekbones sharper, my lips fuller, my skin more dewy. I put it all back in the bag and gave it a pat. Magic. Three more minutes and some big loose curls in front, and I was ready for my close-up.

  I walked back out to the living room. Will had taken over the remote and was surfing for a game. He glanced up and froze, his arm extended with the remote at the end dangling as if his grip had gone as slack as his jaw had.

  “I need you to take a picture on my phone,” I said, reaching past him to root around the sofa cushion on the other side of him. That was where my phone always ended up if it wasn’t on the coffee table.

  “What did you do?” he asked, sniffing my hair. “Did you put perfume on? Why would you put perfume on for a picture?”

  “No, I didn’t put perfume on,” I snapped back as my fingers closed around my phone and I straightened.

  “But you smell good.”

  “Don’t know what to tell you. That’s pure Eau de Hannah. Maybe you’re smelling my shower gel.”

  “Must be it,” he said, leaning away until I straightened with my phone.

  I handed it to him. “Shoot me.”

  “Don’t you have to do some thoughtful pose too?”

  “Nope. I’m going for confident sophistication. It’s going to take a sincere smile and direct eye contact.”

  “A sincere smile that you’re totally calculating?”

  “You really want to talk to me about taking a calculating approach to online dating?”

  He gave me a “whatever” face and held up the phone. I smiled but not too big and imagined myself shaking hands with my boss’s boss. I did this whole routine before one of those meetings to get myself in a headspace where I projected the “I got this” vibe. The camera clicked, and Will handed over the phone.

  “Do I look confident but warm and approachable?”

  Will stared at me for three whole seconds, then turned back to the TV, unmuting it without a word. I checked the picture. “Dude, I’m a one-take wonder.”

  “Yeah. Who spent ten minutes doing her hair for that one take. Very spontaneous, Han.”

  “I spent three minutes doing my hair. The other seven was my face.” I struck a Vogue pose. “Worth it though, right? I’m coming for you, Gisele.”

  He didn’t even look. “Who? You clean up all right.” But he was already deep into a baseball game.

  “Gisele Bündchen?”

  He didn’t look up.

  “Tom Brady’s wife?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  But the Rangers weren’t letting him go. I gave up and sat beside him, opening my laptop to fill out my own HeyThere profile. I did the initial stuff on autopilot—gender, age, physical description. Next came the “About Me” section. “What are your three best qualities?” I read aloud.

  Will didn’t say anything.

  “Will!”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s my best quality?”

  “Uh, cookies.”

  “That’s not a quality.”

  “Making good cookies is a top quality, actually.”

  “It doesn’t scream sophisticated. Name something else.” My stomach tightened. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know what Will really thought of me. Or worse, how little he thought about me.

  The game broke for a commercial. He looked at me and blinked. “Dependable. Nice. To other people, anyway. Generous. Smart. Funny. Bossy. You could put you’re a good leader for that.”

  I liked being thought of as smart and funny, but lumped with all the other attributes he listed, they sounded exactly like qualities on a list Dave would make about me. I unclenched my fists and smashed out my frustration in some lightning-quick keystrokes. Spontaneous. It hinted at an adventurous side without screaming of RealChillPill’s wildness. Intelligent. It irritated me when people didn’t want to own that about themselves. Why was it bragging to acknowledge that you were smart but okay to say you were spontaneous? It was kind of ridiculous.

  I paused to consider what to list third. What did I like about myself the most? I was determined. I liked that. And I liked to take care of my friends. I drummed the keys for another minute before I typed nurturing.

  I moved on to hobbies. Running. That was always good to list because it suggested I took care of myself. Cooking. Because the way to the heart, blah blah blah. But mainly because it was true. Reading. That might scare any nonbookworms away, but that was a good thing.

  Will shifted on the sofa next to me, and our cushions dipped toward each other, our arms brushing. Goose bumps popped up on mine, but he only settled back again and turned up the sound.

  I was a fixture to him. An ottoman. A throw pillow. That truth curled up in my stomach and folded itself into a hateful knot. Guys found me attractive. They wanted to take me out. I wasn’t a dating machine, but I didn’t have to sit home on Saturday nights unless I wanted to. He was infuriating. The dumbest genius I knew. At least about love. And me. And what he needed. Again: me.

  My fingers flew over the keys again, the right words flowing. I watched them fall neatly into place the way code usually did when I had to correct bad programming from developers on my team. It was strange to do this with English instead of computer language, but the zone was the same, the path to shocking Will’s long-held ideas out of him as clear as finding the bug in a stack trace.

  I had always been Will’s girl next door. But I wasn’t everybody’s girl next door, and he was about to see me through their eyes. I hoped.

  I uploaded the picture and smiled bigger than I had for the shot. Will had snapped me at just the right moment. Now let him see who dated the Profile Me, who was nobody’s girl next door.

  Although . . . I loved the irony of the name. In two clicks of the mouse, I became HeyThere.com’s very own DallasGirlNextDoor.

  Chapter 7

  Bam, bam, bam.

  Will threw open my front door before I’d processed his super-loud knocks, and I jumped. “Dang it, Will. You can’t come barging in here.”

  “I knocked.”

  “You’re supposed to wait for people to answer the door. What if you caught me in a compromising position?”

  “Like what? Do you have a drug habit I don’t know about?”

  “Ha. Yeah. Either that, or sometimes I walk around in my—never mind. Just stop barging in.”

  “In your what?” Will asked. The intensely curious look he got when he was figuring out how to reverse engineer a household electronic was written all over his face.

  “Strawberry Shortcake slippers,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I said never mind.”

  “If you don’t want people walking in, lock the door.”

  “Thanks, big brother,” I said, catching him by the sleeve and tugging him toward the door.

  He spun away and made for the sofa. “I’m not leaving. I need to talk to you.”

  “Hurry up. I’ve got plans.”

  “Your HeyThere profile came up in the network crawl I programmed.”

  Of course it did. Obviously the computer knows what you need better than you do. Get smarter, Will. “Congratulations. You can debug it to ignore me. I’ll show you how. It involves lots of the use of the word algorithm. I know how much you love that.”

  “I wrote
the algorithm for the search in the first place. I know how to make it exclude you.”

  I ignored the way that made my stomach pang.

  “That’s not what I’m here about. You need to change your profile.”

  “Why? Did I make a typo? I hate typos.”

  “Not a typo. Just misinformation. I don’t think you realize how your profile comes off.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Does it make me look needy? Stuck up? Ugh. I even showed it to Sophie, and she said it looked great.”

  “It’s not that. It doesn’t sound like you. You should fix it.”

  Irritation crept in. “What do you want me to fix?”

  “It makes you look like a corporate wife in training. You need to put more information about yourself. And maybe some more photos that aren’t so glamour shot or whatever.”

  The irritation grew to annoyance. “That was a no-filter picture that you took after I spent about ten minutes on my hair and makeup. That’s exactly how long I spend getting ready for work. The picture is fine. What do you want me to do? Post a picture of myself when I come back from a run? Or maybe when I roll out of bed? You’re supposed to put up a good shot of yourself. Now go home. I’ve got plans.”

  “But we haven’t talked about your profile. Wait. What plans? Are you doing something with Sophie?”

  “No. I have a date that I got using the fatally flawed profile you’re complaining about.”

  “What kind of date?” He ran his eyes over me, noticing details for the first time. I was still wearing my tailored black trousers from work, but I’d switched my button-down for a filmy floral top layered over a cute cami and swapped out my ankle boots for strappy sandals. “Why are you so dressed up?”

  “D-a-t-e.” I spelled it slowly.

  “Who is it with? Is he coming here?” He glanced around my apartment like I was hiding a contraband man behind one of my throw cushions. “That’s not safe.”

  “We’re meeting at a restaurant for dinner. Stop being dumb.”

  “It’s dumb to paint yourself as something you’re not,” he snapped, and my head jerked back.

  We teased. That was what we did. Even telling him to stop being dumb was an exasperated order. But snapping was not teasing. I stared at him, unsure of what to do next.

  “Sorry,” he said on a big sigh. He walked over and set his hands on my shoulders, brushing them with his thumbs, a soft stroke, like he was trying to calm a tense cat. He wasn’t far off. I was wound up and more than tempted to hiss at him. “I’m worried. You’re on that site looking enigmatic, like you’ve got good secrets. And guys will see you as a challenge. You’re going to draw the hunters, the ones who want to make you a trophy.”

  “You think I’m an open book because you’ve known me my whole life. Trust me, Will. I’ve got secrets you couldn’t dream I’m keeping.”

  His hands stilled, and a long pause followed before his arms dropped to his side and he stepped back. “I made you mad. Sorry. Of course you’re a catch. It stresses me out to think about how hard these guys are going to work to catch you.”

  The stress in his voice smoothed my ruffled fur. I smiled at him. “You’re being super dramatic. I feel like I’m starring in my own Lifetime movie and this is the scene that foreshadows all the bad things to come.”

  “I’m not being dramatic. I just know guys like you know girls, and I’m telling you, you’re going to draw the wrong kind of guy.”

  “Putting the idea out there that I’m smart, together, and a touch sassy is going to draw the wrong kind of guy? Will, please. Predators do not go for confident women with strong personalities, and that’s all my profile shows.”

  “I don’t mean you’re going to draw predators. I know you’re not twelve.”

  Do you? Really? Somehow I don’t think so.

  “You’re going to get these slick guys who are big deals in the courtroom or the boardroom or whatever. And they’ll chew you up and spit you out.”

  “Remember when you used to think I was smart?”

  “This isn’t about smart. Your brain is ridiculous. You’re the smartest person I know.” The fact that he didn’t limit that to “girl” softened me in spite of myself for a second. Then he kept talking. “But smart is different from experienced, and it’s also different from common sense.”

  My eyebrows shot up. I let them say, “Are you kidding me with this?” because if I’d used words for that, I would have yelled them. “Do you think I’ve been hanging out on my couch every weekend since you and Dave left for college? I know all this. I’m not naive or gullible or whatever insult you’re going for next.”

  “But, Hanny—”

  “Hanny, Hanny, my well-shaped fanny.” I patted it for emphasis. “I started working on this years ago. You know what happened? When I started running farther every week, and I started thinking about what I ate and how it made me feel, and when I started lifting heavier weights, and I started realizing I could do hard things, the pounds started falling off. And boys asked me out. But they were kind of jerks.

  “So I ignored boys, and I ran harder and lifted more and learned to cook and take care of myself, and thought about what I really needed. And you know what? I also started feeling good about myself. Amazing, even. And then guys started asking me out. Not boys. Men. Who were not jerks. Who liked me. Me. And not because I’m thinner now. It’s because I’m funny and smart and strong. And pretty!”

  I grabbed a pillow from the sofa and swung it at his head, aiming to smack some sense into it like I’d tried to a million times. He knew my moves too well, and his hand shot out to close around my wrist, stopping me midswing. Before I could yank loose and go after him again, he tugged me hard enough to tip forward, and as fast as lightning, I was pinned to his chest again. “I know how pretty you are,” he said, and the warmth of his breath near my ear sent an involuntary shiver through me. “I’m really sorry I’m making you mad. I don’t mean to. I want to look out for you. Sometimes it’s confusing how to do that.” He held me for another second, maybe waiting to make sure I wasn’t going to lash out at him again. When I stayed still, he released me, slowly, still on guard.

  I turned and cupped his cheek with my hand, brushing my thumb over the top of his cheekbone. A muscle twitched beneath my palm and sent tingles up my arm. “Let me wipe away those worried tears,” I said, and he smiled, reaching up to pull my hand down. “I can take care of myself. But so help me, if I have to redo my hair right now, you’re never using my remote control again. Go away, and let me get ready.”

  “When’s the date?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “None of your business, Dave.” I injected my brother’s name with all the annoyance I used to feel when he hovered. Will was being ten times worse.

  “If you’re as smart as you say you are, you know you better let someone know when to expect you back if you’re going to meet a stranger for the first time. So tell me, or I’m going to text you every fifteen minutes to check on you.”

  “I’ll turn my phone off.”

  “And I’ll tell Dave.”

  “Oh my gosh. You are the worst.”

  He pulled out his phone. “You don’t answer the first text, I call him.”

  Great. Another two-steps-forward, one-step-back conversation. “Fine. I’m meeting him at the Sun Grill at seven for dinner.”

  “What’s the Sun Grill?”

  “That new place by the gym. It’s getting really good—never mind.” I got behind him and pushed him toward the door. “You can Yelp it. I need to get ready.”

  “You’re already ready. And that’s still over an hour away.”

  “Yeah, but I have more HeyThere messages to open.”

  “You really need to change—”

  “Shut up,” I said, pushing him over the doorstep and closing it on him. I shot the bolt for good measure.

  “Hey!”

  Ignoring his protest from the other side
of the door, I snatched up my phone and called Sophie. “This plan is not working. At all. And somehow I’m going out with some guy tonight that isn’t my type.”

  “He might be,” she answered. “You won’t know until you meet him.”

  “Anyone who isn’t Will isn’t my type. Remember I have a stupid brain? What’s that weird thing that werewolf did with Bella’s kid in Twilight? Imprinted? I think I’ve been surrounded by a cloud of Will’s pheromones for too many years. I’ve imprinted on him, but he hasn’t imprinted on me, and, therefore, I’m going to die alone.”

  “Why don’t I take you down to the animal shelter this weekend, and I’ll treat you to your first cat.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Neither is your whining. Think it through, Hannah. Plan A didn’t work: have a silent crush on Will for half your life. Plan B is going to need more than a week.”

  “I want to believe that. But I know him too well, and I know our dynamic too well. His filter is set up to see me as a sister, period.”

  “Which is why you should shove him up against a wall and kiss him. He’d get the message.”

  Part of me wanted to do that the way a linebacker wants to take down a quarterback, but I imagined Will’s reaction when I let him go. “It would make things totally weird. He needs to figure out on his own that we should be together. That’s the whole point of making him see that anyone else is wrong for him. And so far he sees that, but he’s still not looking at me any differently.”

  “So you threw a fit and set yourself up on a couple of dates because you were in a snit.”

  I moaned. “When have I ever made any intelligent decisions when it comes to Will?”

  “Right. Good point.”

  I could only groan again, but Sophie wasn’t one for wallowing. “So Plan C. Which is really more of an expanded Plan B. Keep Will going on these dates, but make him see you the way other guys see you. Once he gets over the shock of realizing you’re a genuine grown-up lady, maybe he’ll start thinking about himself in relationship to your feminine glory.”

  “Feminine glory?” I repeated.

  “Sorry. We started a unit on the Romantic poets today. Had some Lord Byron in my system. But you get what I’m saying. Minus college, you’ve always been neighbors, so seeing you in your own apartment paid for by your own bona-fide career isn’t really making the point. Think about getting him to see all the other sides of you too, to see you the way the guys who looked you up on HeyThere are going to see you.”