Ah, heck. It made me feel good even with Will standing in the next room. Maybe even because he was in the next room. I wanted to shove it at him and say, “Funny, good-looking guys want to take me out.” But I didn’t want him getting any ideas for himself from Jay’s message about how to approach women.
Still, efforts like Jay’s should be rewarded. I opened his profile to repay the favor of responding to more than a headshot. His screen name was FenwayJay. He was loyal to all Boston teams. Our love was doomed, then, but I liked that even though he seemed to have been transplanted to Dallas from the East Coast, he wasn’t letting any of the outsized Texas personalities that surrounded him cow him into hiding his love for the devil spawn Red Sox. His interests section cracked me up again. “I like long walks on beaches and dancing in the rain, if you do. Ditto cozy fires and warm cocoa. Otherwise, I’m more of a Gatorade and golf kind of guy. I’ll watch romantic comedies if it will make you happy. But if I ask you what movie you want to watch and you say you don’t care, that I should pick, prepare to spend the next two hours in 3D glasses.”
Down to earth. It sounded like a boring quality for someone to have, but it was incredible how rarely I found it. I clicked his message back open and hit reply. “I’m not going to lie. I’m on this site under duress, and I’m not really looking to date right now. But I couldn’t let your love for the Red Sox go. Every swear word I learned by the time I was eight was from hearing my dad curse the Rex Sox. Clearly we’re not meant to be. Besides the Red Sox and Celtics and Patriots thing—dear heaven, the Patriots thing—there’s also the small problem that even if you liked walking in the rain, I wouldn’t. Which is too bad, because there’s not much I like better than 3D movies.” I pressed send and went back to watching as Chandler broke up with Janice again on TV.
“What are you typing in there?” Will called. “You Hemingway all of a sudden? No, he wrote short books. What are you up to, Melville?”
“It was nothing. Answering an e-mail. Make me nachos, house boy.”
He answered by tearing off a sheet of aluminum foil and letting it crackle so much I had to turn the TV volume up.
A minute later, another message popped up from Jay. “Anyone who isn’t a Patriot is a traitor. Is that even allowed on HeyThere?”
I snorted and typed back. “Nothing against present company, but it’s beginning to look like anything is allowed on HeyThere.”
His reply was instant. “It hurts how true that is.”
Suddenly my laptop disappeared, shooting over my head as Will whisked it away. “Give that back!” I said, lunging for it, but he spun out of reach.
“I want to know what’s so funny.”
“Friends, duh.”
“Really?” he drawled, inclining his head at the TV screen, which now showed the season-one icon and a prompt for me to press play on the next episode. “You think the Netflix load screen is hilarious?”
He skimmed the open dialogue box and looked up at me, his eyebrows drawn together, his smile fading. “What’s this?”
“Nothing. Just a message from one of the guys on the website.”
“More than one message. And from you too. Is this the breakfast guy?” His expression darkened.
I stood and faced him, my fists clenched at my side, but I wasn’t going to act like his sister. I coached myself, imagining Sophie’s scolding voice in my head. “Yeah, it’s the breakfast guy, because I don’t have the sense of a gnat.”
Will’s face stayed clouded over as he read the e-mails in more detail. His eyes flew up. “What do you mean you’re not looking to date right now? Why’d you go out with that snorefest the other night?”
I didn’t have a handy explanation for that beyond the truth. I’m hung up on you, and there’s no point in wasting anyone else’s time. And for an intense few seconds, the urge to say that out loud forced the words to the tip of my tongue, and I could almost taste them. But then bile surged up the back of my throat at the memory of Will laughing off my teenage confession of love, and I walked past him to the bathroom, calling out, “It’s a strategy!” before I closed the door and took a minute to splash cold water on my heated cheeks and think of how to back myself out of the corner his snooping had painted me into.
Will was in the same spot when I walked back out. “What strategy?”
“I say I’m not really up for dating because it builds in an emergency exit. So if I let him flirt me into meeting him, he feels like he’s extra special because he was able to change my mind. And if I don’t, I have a built-in excuse for saying I’m sticking to my no-dating policy, and he can chalk it up to that instead of taking the rejection personally.”
Will’s mood didn’t seem to be improving. “And either way, you come out smelling like roses.”
I sniffed a strand of my hair. “You said peaches.”
He shook his head. “How did I not realize that you’re so . . .”
“Smart?”
“Calculating.”
It was too close to the bone, too much of an echo of the doubts I’d had about my strategy for winning Will over. “It’s not. It’s smart, a way to keep us both safe from an awkward situation.”
“This doesn’t seem like it would be awkward,” he said, scanning the screen again. “Seems like you hit it off great. So are you planning to let him ‘flirt you into meeting’ him or not?”
His question changed the answer I would have given him three seconds before. Or not so much his question but his tone. His voice was rough, spiky emotion running through it. It wasn’t annoyance, which, combined with condescending indulgence, was the way he’d talked to me since I was a kid. It was a tightness I recognized because it mirrored the fierce possessiveness I felt every time I walked into his place to find some girl who wasn’t me sitting on his sofa and watching a game.
My chest warmed, and my heart beat harder, louder, bigger. Will was jealous that I was flirting with this Jay guy, because he’d recognized as easily as I did that this Jay guy was cool. And there was a meanness in Will’s tone, the same cattiness that I couldn’t filter out of my own voice when I felt threatened by his more beautiful dates.
It was sick that I was getting so much satisfaction from watching him stumble through the same ugly emotions I’d dealt with for years, but it was even sicker that I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt. It was awesome. I walked around the couch and scooped his laptop up, settling it against my hip. “Give me back my computer, or I’m getting into your HeyThere account and sending a message to Letterbox that you’ve found a mailbox you want to show her.”
He snorted but closed my laptop and dropped it with a soft thud on the couch. “Whatever.”
I fought a grin. A grin of victory. He was getting the tiniest taste of the medicine I’d been swallowing for years. He went back to the kitchen, and all I wanted to do was fly down the hall to my place and call Sophie to tell her what had just happened. But it would look junior high–ish because it was a maneuver he’d seen me do at least a hundred times back then. And I kinda wanted to stick around to see what else I could read in his body language and deliciously telling scowls. Those scowls were practically novels to someone with my experience in reading him.
I went back to the bathroom and slid my phone out of my pocket. Even typing fast, it took a few minutes to tell her the condensed version, but I sent off the text and followed it up with, THE PLAN IS WORKING!!!
She shot back, YESSSSSSSSS!!! Pick blue bridesmaid dresses!
When I walked back into the living room, Will had taken over my spot on the couch, and it was him typing like a madman. Was he checking his own messages? Finding a date for himself? Copying Jay’s approach with the pretty women on HeyThere?
I padded up behind him and snatched the computer from his lap like he’d done to me. “What’s this?” I drawled in a perfect imitation of him from minutes before. “Jealous that Jay was able to pull your dream girl with a single message?”
“He pulled a made-up profile. It doesn’t m
ake him a baller.”
His dismissive tone slid right under my skin and itched. “It’s not a made-up profile. Twilight Sparkle is pure me. There’s not one thing made up in there, not a single word that isn’t true. Why is that so freaking hard for you to understand?”
He looked like he was about to argue, and I waited, but ultimately nothing came out of his mouth. There was nothing to say. I was right. “I know it felt like a thought experiment to you, but you described the ideal woman, and there’s no doubt that if you stick my face on the facts, somehow you ended up describing me.”
The muscle at the corner of his mouth jumped, but I kept my voice quiet and even. “I’m sorry if that weirds you out, but that’s your problem. Jay, on the other hand, doesn’t seem at all weirded out by it. Get over it.” I gave him my best evil grin and set the laptop on the counter, finally taking a good look at what he’d been up to.
“It’s only going make you mad,” he muttered, heading out to the patio to check on the carne asada. I was glad because that way he couldn’t see the way the IM in front of me wiped any smile, evil or otherwise, right off my face. He’d been talking to my brother, jumping into it like those two always did.
WILL: Your sister is losing it, man.
DAVE: What’s she up to now?
WILL: She’s messaging random dudes online and going on dates with them.
DAVE: How random? Like weird hookup sites?
WILL: No, it’s the same dating site as the last one, but I think she’s planning on going out with another guy.
DAVE: So don’t let her.
WILL: Have you met your sister?
DAVE: Just explain why it’s not smart. She’ll listen to you.
WILL: She hasn’t yet.
DAVE: She’s on a stubborn streak?
WILL: You know how she gets.
DAVE: Yeah. She’s not going to listen to you. So you have to make her check in.
As I watched, Dave popped up with ???, waiting for Will to answer. I felt the touch of Will’s gaze and looked up to find him watching me. I wanted to cry. My plan wasn’t working at all. This wasn’t the conversation of someone coming to his senses about how I was his true love. This was the same old, same old.
But I couldn’t cry because Will was looking at me, and if I cried, he’d know. He’d know everything. And while right this second I didn’t know how to process the news that my relationship with Will was exactly what it had always been, I did know I couldn’t let him know how much it hurt that I was only the girl next door. Or three doors down the hall.
Chapter 12
I had years of faking it, and even though it hurt like fire to shoot him a careless grin, I did. “I’m not your sister. And even as Dave’s sister, he’s still not the boss of me. Why do you think he’s telling you what to tell me instead of doing it himself? I don’t listen to him either, because I’m a grown woman, and you guys are clueless.” I closed his laptop and carried it back to him on the couch. “Resign yourself to the fact that I’m going to do what I’m going to do.” I held his laptop out to him and picked mine up instead.
He frowned at me. “Okay, but I’m sitting right here and watching over your shoulder to make sure you don’t give this guy the wrong idea.”
“Because you didn’t hear a word I just said? Does it help when I yell it? You’ll mind your own business, or I’m leaving. And the problem with that is you can’t eat all those nachos by yourself, and you’re going to waste them.”
“You’re holding me hostage via nacho.”
“Of course not. I’m blackmailing you.”
The oven timer beeped to announce the nachos were done.
“Be a shame to waste those,” I said, icy and threatening.
“You are cold.”
“Thirty more seconds and you exit the prime cheese melt window and tip over to burnt.”
He shot off the couch for the kitchen. “I shouldn’t share these after that.”
“I’m not even scared of you. No one loves those nachos more than I do, and you live for my nacho praise.”
“And yet you would walk away from them because you can’t stand a little caring concern.”
“I can’t stand nosiness, and, yeah, I hate it more than I love nachos.” What I really hated was being here and trying to keep up the jokes when my heart was barely holding together, disappointment wrapping a tight band around my chest and making it hard for it to beat, much less for me to breathe through the hurt. I’d thought we were getting somewhere. I’d thought I’d felt a change in the way he looked at me, a difference in the energy between us. I thought he’d felt the same tiny electric shocks I did when he touched me.
I choked back a bitter laugh. There was no new paradigm. He was taking my dating more seriously, but he was only thinking about how to put more limits on me, not looking at me in a new way and fumbling through what that meant to him.
“Fine. I’ll drop it.” He muttered, “For now,” under his breath, but I pretended not to hear it and sat back down to my laptop. Jay’s message waited for me, and it was the only reason I didn’t let the tight dam of tears behind my eyes break and release all the frustration to pour out.
Technically, Jay was better looking than Will. He was the kind of guy Will wouldn’t think in a million years that I could date. And I hadn’t even gone looking for Jay. He’d come looking for me.
Well, time for another newsflash for Will. He wasn’t the only hot commodity on the second floor of building H.
I typed a message to Jay, picking up our conversation. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m the only normal human on this website.”
He typed back immediately. “Not possible. That’s me.”
“One of us is going to have to prove it.”
“Can I IM you? This is serious. We’ve got a problem to solve, and I think the severity requires instant messages.”
It made me smile, and I needed to smile. I sent Jay my info, and he pinged me within seconds.
JAY: How are we going to settle this? Feats of strength?
ME: Chili cook off?
JAY: Bake sale! Highest profit wins.
ME: Sack race?
JAY: Scrabble?
ME: Arm wrestling.
JAY: All of the above. Which is going to take a while. We should take these one at a time. Let’s start with a bake sale. But instead of a bake sale, maybe we could meet at a bakery. And then buy stuff there. Then try it. Then give them money for it. Then maybe sit around and talk.
ME: Sir, did you just ask me out?
JAY: Yeah. I don’t see how else we’re going to prove that I’m the only normal one on this dating site.
ME: But I told you I’m not really up for dating right now . . . and yet, I’m considering this. Are you . . . are you a wizard?
JAY: I really want to make a corny joke about casting a spell on you, but I think it undermines my “normal” argument. Which I’m trying to prove by winning the “come out with me some time” argument. (How am I doing?)
“Hannah!”
I jumped at Will’s shout. “What? What’s wrong?” I asked, scrambling up from the couch.
“I asked you three times what’s so funny, and you haven’t heard me once.”
I pressed my hand to my pounding heart and glared at him. “I’m not talking to you again until I get my nachos.” I plopped down in my seat to rescue Jay before he felt like I’d left him hanging.
ME: You’re effective.
JAY: It was the promise of baked goods, right?
ME: Yes. So I guess that means we need to find a place with chocolate chip cookies as big as my head so I can work my way through one while you argue for your normalcy.
JAY: Right. But you’re not going to make your case?
ME: No. I exude normalcy. It’s interesting that you feel like you have to convince me.
JAY: Oh man. I walked into that.
ME: Yep.
JAY: This is going to be fun. Let me look up “chocolate chip cookies as
big as my head,” and then we can pick a place. Hang on.
Take that, Will. It felt so good to have a guy flirt with me after the utter wipeout of realizing it would never cross Will’s mind to do it that I whooped and threw my hands up in victory as Will set the nachos down on the coffee table.
“Now what?” he asked.
“I’ve got Tetris nachos and a date with a hot guy. I’m so stoked I’m debating getting up to do a happy dance.”
He grimaced. “What can I pay you not to do that?”
“Ha. These are enough,” I said, scooping up a tortilla chip holding more meat and cheese than seemed structurally possible. I took a bite and moaned. “This might be all I ever need for perfect happiness.” For a few seconds, as I savored the delicious mouthful, it occurred to me that Will’s nachos were almost an acceptable consolation prize if I couldn’t have Will himself.
He flashed a grin at me, and that was all it took to remind me how much more I loved him than the chips. But I’d lived with my lovesickness for him too long to let it get in the way of my appetite. My sleep, my mood, my daydreams, sure. But not my eating.
He disappeared down his hallway when I turned up the volume on Friends, but he was back moments later with the block of cocobolo I’d bought him for his birthday months ago, a beautiful piece of striped wood from Central America. I loved his carvings, and I’d been dying to see what he would do with the wood, but he hadn’t touched it until now.
He pulled a Wired magazine from under the coffee table and leaned over it, shaving off thin curls of the block, his face relaxed. Later in the whittling project, he’d have more furrows in his forehead as he concentrated on the technical execution, but this part, roughing out the shape, was mindless for him. I think it did for him what running did for me.
Always Will Page 11