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Kristy sidles over to me. “Well that was exciting.”
“That’s the kind of excitement I can live without,” I reply.
“So what’s up with you two?” she asks, a little secret smile beginning on her face. “Are you dating?”
“Dating?” I gasp. “God, no. Nothing is going on.”
“He looked awful upset for it to be ‘nothing’,” she cackles.
I glance toward him at the bar, still steely-eyed and angry and impossibly good-looking. Something flutters low in my stomach. “He sees me the way he sees Ginny,” I sigh.
A little light comes into her eyes. “Awwww … do you have a crush on our James?”
“No,” I lie. “He has a girlfriend.”
She bumps me with her hip. “It’s okay, honey. I’m practically engaged and I have a little crush on him too. I’d be suspicious of anyone who didn’t.”
“You’re not going to say anything to him, right?” I ask, a little desperately. “He’s sooooo not interested, and it would make things super awkward since we live together.”
She laughs. “I’m not going to say anything. But I wouldn’t be so sure about the ‘not interested’ part. He stares at you way too much for that.”
I wish I could believe her.
**
When I’m not working lunch, I go to the beach with Max, or Ginny when she’s not temping. James never comes. As far as I can tell, he divides his free time evenly between running, reading and looking off in the distance, his mind focused on something too far away to see and too stressful to be good.
“Why does James never go to the beach?” I ask Ginny over the weekend, as we head home.
She looks confused. “He does go to the beach. All the time.”
“I haven’t seen him go once since I got here.”
“He just went yesterday,” she says. “While you were at work.”
“Let me ask you something, Ginny: does he only go when I’m not going?” I’ve framed it as a question but already I know the answer, and it shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.
“No,” she says haltingly. She’s lying. Her eyes are too wide, too worried. “Of course not. It’s just a coincidence.”
“He acts like he hates me.”
“You’re imagining things,” she says.
“Then why am I not imagining those things with Danny and Max?” I counter.
“Not everyone is going to salivate over you like they do,” she says.
“They don’t salivate over me,” I argue.
She rolls her eyes. “Elle, I think you’re so accustomed to being worshipped by anyone with a penis that you don’t know what life’s like for the rest of the world. He’s just not treating you like you’re special, and no offense, but it’s probably time you experienced how the rest of the world lives.”
There’s something close to spite in her voice, and it surprises me. We’ve spoken a lot over the years but haven’t spent more than a week together since I moved from Connecticut. And this new, bitter version of Ginny is one I’m not particularly fond of.
I’m still mulling this over later as I fold my clothes in the laundry room. Naturally I’m holding a lacy pink thong in mid-air as James walks in, because of course I’d have to be holding a thong at that precise moment. There’s a flash of surprise on his face, and after it comes the inevitable look of misery, as if just seeing me here is enough to sour his whole day.
“I’ll come back,” he says, turning out of the room.
“I’m all done,” I call to his retreating back. “The washer’s yours.”
