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“He’s still in recovery, but I can have someone give you a call when he wakes up.”
“Really? That would be amazing. Thank you.” I jotted down my name and number on a pad of paper. “He doesn’t have any family, so I really would appreciate that call.”
The doctor nodded and took my note before walking away.
My mind flashed briefly to the angel from earlier, and I wondered if she’d be making an appearance at the hospital to check on Grant. My gut instinct told me that she definitely would, and I was tempted to camp out in the lobby until she showed up.
I quickly decided against it. If I was going to run into her “accidentally on purpose,” then I wanted to be prepared for it. I wanted to catch her off guard by being completely on mine.
In the meantime, I called an Uber to come pick me up and take me to get my car. I’d already run enough for one day.
Stupid Ryan Fisher
Sofia
The old man from this morning consumed my thoughts. I found myself thinking about him when I should have been focused on work. But one second my thoughts were on Grant, and the next, they were centered on Ryan Fisher.
Why did he have to be so good-looking? Even wearing workout clothes, Ryan still looked like a tanned god in running shoes.
The worst part was that he knew it. Ryan Fisher was completely aware of the effect he had on women, and I knew he assumed I’d be like all the rest of them the moment he jogged to my side. I refused to swoon at the attention he decided to toss my way, no matter how much my traitorous body had wanted me to.
I wasn’t like the other women who frequented his bar. At least, that’s what I tried to convince myself. I hadn’t lied when I told him that I’d only been to his bar once. It was Sarin, my coworker and friend, who had insisted we go there, claiming that Sam’s Bar had the best drinks and the hottest bartenders. Even the men in our group agreed, not about the hot-bartender part, but about the drinks. Not to mention the fact that we all worked for one of the social-media companies the bar featured on their wall, so it felt like going there was mixing business with pleasure.
I knew all about Sam’s, couldn’t have avoided the knowledge if I tried, but I’d never been there. I didn’t usually go out, even though my coworkers asked all the time, and urging me to join them at their standing happy-hour Thursday date together. Being a single mom hadn’t really afforded me the luxury of an active social life. Unless you counted Disney-channel movies with my eight-year-old as dates, which I totally did.
The second Sarin and I walked through the doors of the bar, I felt like I was in another world. The place was filled with so much life. All the patrons seemed genuinely happy and upbeat, chatting loudly and snapping pictures along the social-media wall that the youngest Fisher brother had dreamed up. It had been an odd thing to notice, all the smiles on people’s faces, but it was hard to ignore the atmosphere of the place when it surrounded you and sucked you in.
And then I saw Ryan, with those ridiculously beautiful blue eyes and sandy-brown hair, and a part of me melted inside. I hadn’t been attracted like that to a guy in what seemed like
a thousand years.
When our eyes met, Ryan smiled at me and the rest of the bar disappeared. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only person in the room. He’d asked me my name that night, just like I told him. The only problem was that he asked every girl her name before committing it to memory—only for the night, apparently—and then proceeded to talk sweetly, dropping your name now and then to make you feel special.
And like a fool, I’d fallen for it . . . hook, line, and sinker. For all of about two minutes, until I noticed the way he interacted with every girl at the bar.
I hadn’t been special.
I hadn’t been anything.
I’d been a customer, a paying customer, and that was all.
Ryan had a job to do, and he did it well. I couldn’t begrudge him that, so I think my annoyance stemmed more from the fact that not only had I stupidly thought he was genuinely flirting with me, but that I had actually wanted him to.
I had wanted Ryan Fisher, bar owner and custom drink-maker, to be into me. Even if it was purely ego based, I’d still wanted it.
I soon learned that I wasn’t the only one. The majority of the women at the bar hoped Ryan would choose them that night. I’d overheard more than one girl talking about his sexual prowess and the things he liked to do in the bedroom, many claiming they were back at the bar for seconds. Even when I tried to block out the conversations, they swirled around me, never ceasing or lacking in sordid detail. It was almost a little embarrassing, to be honest, and I wondered if Ryan relished in that kind of attention, or if it made him uncomfortable.
I never got the chance to ask because my cell phone rang after I’d been there for about an hour. My son, Matson, had developed a sudden fever, so my night was cut short. My coworkers groaned but understood as I left some cash on the bar and hurried out into the still warm air. There was only one person in the world I’d drop anything for, and it was my son. Nothing and no one came before him.
Being a mom changed you. It had changed every single thing about me. Like a bad after-school special, I found out I was pregnant my senior year of high school. I’d been on the pill, but apparently I could now count myself in the unlucky two percent of women the pill didn’t work for. My boyfriend of two years, Derek, bailed the second I told him. He’d already been accepted at one of the Ivy League colleges back east, and a baby wasn’t in his plans.
Apparently, I hadn’t been in his plans either, but I didn’t know that at the time. I’d always thought we would stay together once he left for college, but Derek told me that day that he never planned to date me long distance. He said that college was a time for playing the field, not being locked down. Then he begged me to get an abortion, even offered to pay for it, saying that this could singlehandedly ruin his reputation.
I’d told him I’d think about it, just to get him to back off, but I hadn’t meant it. I was keeping this baby whether he wanted me to or not.
One afternoon, Derek’s father, Damian Huntington, showed up at school and approached me as I headed to my car. After introducing himself, he told me he knew that I was pregnant and also asked me not to have the baby. He claimed I was ruining both of our lives, and that I would thank them in the future if I got rid of it—his words, not mine. He foolishly assumed that I insisted on having the baby to keep Derek in my life, but it hadn’t been about Derek at all.
I stood firm in my decision, telling him that they didn’t need to be involved, and that I’d forget they ever existed. I never spoke to them again, not to Derek or his parents. None of them tried to reach out, not even after Matson was born. So about a year and a half later, I blocked all the Huntington family on every one of my social-media accounts. The last thing I wanted was them stalking me and seeing pictures of the child none of them had wanted me to have.
