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I put the phone down again. I had not slapped Isaac.What was this romance novel version of what happened?Maybe this story wasn't about us, after all. But it was, and I could not stop the wave of excited butterflies I felt from reading it. I knew it was talking about me, and I felt drawn to the whole situation—drawn to the memory of Isaac.
I continued reading.
"What did you do that for?" Isaac asked, touching his cheek where she slapped him.
But before he knew what was happening, the woman's friend called Isaac a pervert and drug her from the restaurant. He wanted to apologize, but he didn't have the chance.
Isaac assumed he would never see her again, so you can imagine his shock when he noticed her at his brother's graduation ceremony the following day. Ari had on a dress instead of that horse shirt, and Isaac was able to look at her gorgeous face for the first time. She had dark hair and eyes, and he liked her instantly.
They introduced themselves, but only by their first names. The conversation flowed easily. She was friendly and held no grudges for his behavior the day before. She seemed to know he was telling the truth when he explained the dream.
She might have very well have been the girl of his dreams, and her first impression of him could not have been worse. Isaac had never made this bad of an impression on a woman. He was normally a confident, outgoing guy who had it all together, but his heart was pounding the entire time they spoke. They made small talk as they stood on the expansive sidewalk at Husky Stadium, and during that brief period of time, Isaac finally got his apology off his chest.
The two of them were talking for almost no time at all, and then suddenly, just like she was Cinderella and it was midnight, Ari ran off, smiling at Isaac and saying goodbye forever.
Finding out that she came into the restaurant the following day and that he missed her was devastating enough. But the nail in the coffin was that Ari left a note and she only signed her first name. It was a handwritten note on one of the restaurant tickets. Isaac had a handwritten note and a shirt that smelled like her, but that would not be enough to find her.
He knew that her friend was a dancer at the university, but he didn’t remember the girl's name and he had no other ideas for finding Ari. He thought they connected that day out there on the sidewalk, but she must have seen it differently. He thought she would have left him a way to get in touch with her when she left the shirt, but she hadn't.
Maybe she had a boyfriend, he told himself.
I dropped the phone again when I read that.
I did have a boyfriend.
Eddie.
Eddie was my boyfriend. I needed to get my mind on Eddie.How could I, though, when this story was making me want to drop everything and go to Seattle?I was absolutely rattling with adrenaline and excitement. I was shaking. I picked up the phone to read some more. "I don't even know if it's about me," I mumbled, even though that was untrue.
I looked at the screen again.
Isaac was doing his best to forget about Ari. It was an odd chain of events, and he chalked her up as "the one that got away".
The t-shirt incident, however, was brought up one day when Margaret Winterbottom, bestselling romance author and habitual eavesdropper, happened to be in the restaurant doing research for a novel. She sat next to Sherman and Linda who were at the restaurant, enjoying a cup of coffee at the counter.
Margaret overheard a piece of a conversation where Sherman asked about Isaac and the mystery horse shirt. Margaret's curiosity was piqued, and she interviewed him that very same day. It was a story of lost love, and she felt like if she wrote his story in a book, there was a chance the real girl would come back to Isaac.
I quickly put the phone down again when I heard someone come into the room.
"Hey, oh, hey, Ms. Kathy. I didn't know, I didn't know you were coming in this morning."
"Yeah, I… are you okay, Ari? You look kind of pale?"
"Me, no, this, I'm," I cleared my throat. "I was thinking about the stuff with Violet's mom yesterday." I swallowed hard, and Kathy turned and let out a long sigh as she hung up her jacket.
She went on talking about Violet's family and the discipline issues, and I just nodded and agreed and half-listened to her.
"I think I need to actually go use the restroom," I said, standing up a minute later.
"Yeah, you look kind of pale," Kathy said.
I made sure to take my phone.
I saw proof of just how pale I was when I went into the restroom. I stared at myself in the mirror for a few seconds before going into a stall.
I stood with my back to the door. Information about the book was in the history of the desktop computer, but I didn't care if Kathy saw that. I had to leave the office. I had to see what happened in the story. I stared at my phone again.
Weeks passed and Isaac had no idea what Margaret Winterbottom had planned with the novel. She crafted it with intrigue, mystery, and suspense. She wrote about the shirt and how the couple met twice in so many days. She wrote her characters with the same beginnings of their relationship. Her plan was to draw Ari back to Seattle, back to Isaac.
