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Chapter Six
I can’t believe you just left him standing there with his dick in his hand.
Bianca’s text hits my phone first thing Monday morning as I’m reaching my cubicle. It’s nothing she hasn’t already said to my face a dozen times. She hasn’t taken the whole “Running out on Kyle” thing well. She thinks I should have stuck it out and talked to him. Somehow, she has it in her head that we can work things out. That the past is the past and should remain there.
I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t that simple, but there’s no reasoning with her. My friend is a hopeless romantic, and she simply will not stop until she has made her point clear and gotten her way. In this case, she wants me to see things her way and patch things up, so she can have her fairy tale ending.
The problem is that we’ve been friends since third grade. Bianca has been there for every milestone and major life event, so she knows just how deeply entrenched in my history with Kyle is. Some—Bianca, specifically—might even argue that she has just as much emotional investment in the outcome of this as I do.
I call bullshit. No one but me has to live with my choices, and I’m trying to be as careful with my life as possible. I don’t want to end up in the same blinded-by-love relationship as I was back then.
It took a lot of energy and work to get where I am today.
I can still hear Bianca in my ear, using my dating history—or lack thereof—as an example of why I need to give him another chance.
Yes, I haven’t exactly been lucky in love since Kyle and I broke up. A person would have to actually go on dates to find that. I freely admit that when I closed the door on him, I closed the door on every male in the tri-state area, too.
I just wasn’t interested in getting hurt again. Instead, I put my nose to the grindstone and focused on my education and finding a good job.
I got exactly what I wanted. Except, money and knowledge don’t fill the gaping hole inside my chest.
After I tuck my brown-bag lunch into the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and wheel my chair up under the desk, I fire up the ancient computer and wait for the screen to load. While it does its thing, my mind rewinds back to that hospital and that room and, invariably, to Kyle and that smoldering kiss.
My skin tingles all the way to my knees. He’s a strong kisser, calling to mind my favorite movie growing up, Pretty in Pink. Maybe he’s like Duckie, I think with an internal laugh, and he practices on watermelons.
God, what I wouldn’t give to go back to simpler days, when the only thing I had to worry about was writing book reports and whose house I was going to tell my parents I was staying at overnight so I could spend the weekend camping out in the woods with Kyle.
We were inseparable back then. Maybe that’s what did us in. Maybe we spent too much time together.
There’s no point in rehashing this now, though. Lord knows I’ve been over it and over it enough to make a person nauseous.
What I should be focusing on is the fact that I left my damn wallet in the hospital utility cabinet. I was so panic-stricken after Kyle kissed me that I ran out of there without it. I’ve been trying to drum up the courage to retrieve it, the irrational fear of running into him again getting the best of me. But I can’t avoid it any longer. Today, after work, I’ll have to chance it.
My stomach flips with nervous anticipation just thinking about it. I know he’s not there, but a part of me wants him to be.
I’m so screwed up in the head.
Using the mouse to select a client file, I pick up where I left off Friday, imputing numbers into the spreadsheet and, before I know it, my troubles are forgotten, overshadowed by hours of numbers in and out.
Accounting: we have a love/hate relationship.
Numbers have always been my thing—women can do math with the best of them!—but when something goes wrong, as it invariably does, it’s the bane of my existence.
Today, the job is easy, and before I know it, lunchtime is closing in.
I’m setting out my cellophane-wrapped bologna and cheese sandwich and the guiltiest of all pleasures—Capri Sun—when I hear a throat clear behind me.
Looking up, I see Travis’s fat head propped up on the edge of my cubicle wall, smirking at me. Normally, I wouldn’t be so happy to see him, but the random sparkles glinting in his hair tell me that he received my present.
“You got a little...” I motion to my hair while looking at his.
“Dammit, I thought I got it all. Some asshole sent me a glitter bomb,” he complains while scrubbing a hand though his hair. “What kind of monster does that?”
“The best kind.”
Spotting my mile-wide, uncontainable smile, Travis scowls. “You rotten little... Paybacks are a bitch. Remember that, Sunny.”
“I’m not worried,” I say as I pull apart the plastic wrap on my sandwich. “Besides, you like glitter,” I remind him, thinking of the time he dressed up as a fairy princess for Halloween. It was one of the few times I’d ever seen him let his flag fly.
