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Considering that I was way better with words than numbers, it surprised me how well I’d remembered her number. I guess mooning over it for the first couple of nights after I’d entered it into my contacts and talking myself out of using it all the time had paid off.
Who am I? This is pathetic.
“Hello?” she greeted between the first and second ring, and just like that, I forgot all about questioning why Lola made me feel the way she did and how much I couldn’t understand it. Instead, I laughed, a picture of her face conjuring perfectly in my mind.
“Phone was in your hand, huh?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she confirmed.
“It’s that bad there?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice dropped in volume and changed tones—this one consoling. “I completely understand.”
“There’s an emergency here. And according to the restaurant, it’ll be ready to come to a head in about twenty minutes.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, feigning shock. “Are you sure you can wait that long?” she asked in a near panic. Chuckles rolled continuously like waves in my chest.
“I’ll leave now,” I offered.
“But I’m here with my friends—”
I understood immediately what she was getting at, and my chest puffed out in confidence. There was nothing I could handle better than distracting a group of people from an awkward encounter by making it even more ridiculous. I reminded her of the same. “Don’t you worry, LoLo. This is your best friend Reed you’re talking to.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
“Looking forward to it,” I told her honestly, and she hesitated.
I waited, and it was worth it when her response finally came. “Me too.”
My hand paused before leaving the receiver as I hung up the phone. She hadn’t argued with me or herself about our friendship status.
Maybe it’s just because her friends are there?
I shook my head to clear the questions and moved—into my room to grab a pair of socks, to the chair at my desk to swing on my jacket, and over to the door to pull on my boots and grab my keys and wallet.
It was a short walk down the block to my old Toyota Corolla that I never used—I preferred walking and public transportation on a daily basis because of the entertainment value they provided—and thankfully, it started up on the first crank—something it didn’t always do.
I actually knew quite a bit about cars. A little pang of a memory sounded in my chest—rebuilding the engine to my dad’s 1967 GTO with my friend Brandon while our other friends were at parties in college. We’d had our share of beer while we were doing it, but I wasn’t about getting wild. And neither was he. We didn’t fit. We didn’t conform.
At least, not until graduation. As my dad liked to put it, Brandon had matured. He had a steady job and a steady family, and I hadn’t talked to him in three years.
I wonder what he’s up to?
But tonight wasn’t the time to employ my mechanical skills, and it wasn’t the time to get lost in old memories.
I had a woman waiting on me, one whose friendship was still alive and growing.
Lola’s group wasn’t hard to find when I got there—it was the rowdiest table in the place. Three men hovered over the seated women, flirting and inserting themselves into their night mostly seamlessly. But there was one flaw in the stitch, a tiny thread popping when it should have laid flat: Lola.
In a half-seated, half-crouching tiger, she had her right leg hooked back at an awkward angle, and her toe dug into the floor. She looked like she was ready to bolt.
I hadn’t personally met Jen or Abby yet, but Lola had spent part of our time in Golden Gate Park earlier that day telling me about them. Perky. Pseudonormal. Intelligent, talented, and pointedly organized. The way she talked about them made them seem like one person most of the time, but I knew they had to have some differences once you skimmed below the surface. I already knew enough about Simone not to bother.
“Lola!” I called as I approached the table casually, hoping to give her tense muscles some reprieve.
“Oh, my God!” she yelled—and I do mean yelled—as she jumped up to standing. Her cute little pumps made her legs look six miles long, and the short hem of her T-shirt dress didn’t hurt either. It floated just below the curve of her ass. “Reed! I’m so sorry about your sister’s…uh…cat…uh…Mr. Sprinkles’s death,” she mumbled, picking up her bag from the table and clutching it under her arm so she could be ready to run.
I laughed outright as I stopped in front of her. “It’s terrible, huh? Poor Mr. Sprinkles taken way before his time. I felt like I barely got the chance to get to know him.”
“Who’s this?” a guy in a suit standing right next to her interrupted before she even had time to laugh. I leveled him with a look. One I rarely employed and personally hated, but conveyed my point all the same. Step away from the woman.
“Her mortal enemy,” Jen said through a laugh at the same time I said, “Her boyfriend.”
Jen looked confused, and she wasn’t the only one. The eyebrows of the guy standing closest to Lola pulled together. “I thought you were a lesbian.”
A smile tugged one side of my mouth higher than the other as I slipped her hand in mine and did what I do best—lied.
I also couldn’t deny the surge of satisfaction I felt knowing that Lola had told these guys she batted for the other team. I had no claims to her, but it didn’t change the fact that I wanted her to give me those claims.
I sure as fuck didn’t want to focus my attention on anyone else but her.
Lola tumbled closer to me as I gave her hand a yank, but she didn’t put up a fight. I was her only lifeline, and getting out of here was way more important than a million dollars. “She was. I’ve always had a crush on her because…” I paused and gestured in a way that said, “Look at her, right?”
The guy smiled his agreement, uneasy and pissed off to be cockblocked as it was. He’d noticed the way she looked. In fact, it was the only thing he’d bothered to notice, and quite frankly, that pissed me off on Lola’s behalf.
“Well, years and years of watching her go through girlfriend after girlfriend, and she finally tried out some heterosexual porn one night when she was looking to get off.”
One of the guys’ hands went to his crotch in an effort to conceal his reaction, and I smiled bigger.
“Usually, she just got together with Jen, and they helped each other out. Right, honey?”
Lola nodded but never opened her mouth. Her eyes were wide with the effort to keep all of her hysteria inside. Jen, not knowing the joy of my friendship, didn’t engage in the same compliance.
“Uh, I don’t—” Jen started, but I cut her off.
“So she’s masturbating to guy-on-girl action, stroke for stroke, and bam! It’s like it all clicks. She’s not into chicks, after all. It’s the dicks.”
Guy One’s and Guy Two’s eyes had glazed over by this point, but Guy Three, the one closest to my Lola, still had some synapses firing outside of the head of his dick. “But she told me she was a lesbian tonight.”
I nodded as though that was completely expected. “Selective amnesia. Sometimes she forgets, but I just take her home and fuck her to remind her, you know?”
“Yeah…” he muttered, still confused. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with his proximity to my woman—let’s face it, she is—but I had to give him a little credit. He was obviously the best prospect of the three, choosing Lola as his target in the first place, and he didn’t let his baser instincts distract him to the point of becoming a robot.
Still, fuck him.
“That’s actually where we’re headed now.” I turned to Lola. “Ready, honey?”
She bit her lip and turned back to Jen and Abby. She didn’t even bother to include Simone, and somewhere deep inside, I smiled. I never understood the compulsion to pretend to be friends with someone you hated.
Oh, shit. A thought struck me like lightning. Maybe that’s what I’d forced her into with me.
It wasn’t like me not to consider both sides. But I’d been so fucking drawn to her.
I considered her closely as she leaned into me, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “Sorry, guys. I gotta go.”
No. She likes me. She has to.
“Lola! You’re leaving with him?” Abby questioned disbelievingly.
“Yeah.” She glanced at me before turning back to Jen and leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. The crotch-coverer groaned. “I am. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
Jen’s eyes were like lasers as she pointed her order. “You better call me tomorrow, Lola Sexton.”
“Oh, shit. Lola Sexton, like the columnist for the San Francisco Times?” the half-chub asked.
Shit. Time to abort. A little like a piece of gum on a cracked chair, the lies weren’t going to hold much longer.
“Let’s roll,” I told her, but she was already moving, dragging me along behind her.
“Through the bar,” I ordered. She immediately rerouted to comply.
Our food was already sitting there waiting, thanks to my buddy Freddy behind the bar. I swiped the bags while still in motion and lifted my free hand in a wave.
