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“I want to get married, Charlie, and start a family. My sister is pregnant with her third, and she’s only two years older than me. My parents are pressuring me to move home and settle down in Jersey.” She turns away briefly, her finger running through the condensation on the plastic cup. “I told everyone I was bigger than Jersey when I left, but my life here is stagnant. I’ve been working here for over a year and still do the same thing. It’s starting to get embarrassing when I go home for visits.”
Though I’m not desperate to be settled right now, I remember how good it felt to be in a relationship, knowing that part of my life was determined and I had found my partner. That was a foolish dream, not reality.
I rub her shoulder, hoping to comfort her. “You’re twenty-seven, Rach. It’s not like you don’t have time. You’re young and beautiful, a great friend, and a lot of fun to be around.”
She wipes at her eyes. “I shouldn’t drag you down.” Taking a deep breath, she waves her hand in front of her face. “Enough with my pity party. Back to you. Tell me all about yesterday.”
I look down, now more uncertain than ever if I should talk about Charlie or not. I don’t want to make her feel worse. I start with the funeral. “It was harder than I thought it would be. I expected Jim’s mother to either ignore me or say something snotty. She didn’t disappoint. In just a few sentences, she managed to remind me exactly how she felt about me.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Yes.” I close my eyes, gathering my strength because I need to confide in her. I open them and confess. “I ran into Charlie.”
Her expression goes blank then several emotions flit across her face before settling into confusion. “Charlie? As in my Charlie? Charlie Adams?” Her arms rest defensively across her chest.
No, this isn’t going to be easy.
She looks away, but I can see the hurt tinged with a bit of anger on her face. “He was at Jim’s funeral?” she asks.
How am I going to explain this without hurting her more? The truth. The truth is better than lying. “I ran into him when I was walking to the funeral. We started to talk after we recognized each other.”
“Then you just asked him to go with you, or he was going already?”
“No, it wasn’t like that.” Now that I think about it, it does seem strange, but my mind was muddled, and it felt right at the time. “He was going to a funeral, a different one. His great-aunt’s.” Her eyebrows are raised as she listens to me ramble on. “And it wasn’t awkward, so we decided to go to each other’s funerals. It was kind of spur-of-the-moment.”
“So you took a date to Jim’s funeral?”
“No,” I say, feeling defensive. “Not a date. Charlie. A friend.”
“Since when are you and Charlie friends? You just met him. You know I went on a date with him the other night, and though we aren’t seeing each other romantically, he did ask me out first.”
I grab my purse from the floor and stand upright. I’m not liking the direction of this conversation or her insulting tone. “It wasn’t a date, Rachel.”
“Well, I hope not because that would be awkward.” She turns back to her computer. “I have to get this to Mr. Allen before ten so . . .” She leaves her words hanging between us, but I get the message.
“Okay.” Frustrated, I leave her alone and walk around to my cubicle. I drop my purse into the bottom drawer like I do every day, but I kick it closed harder than usual.
That didn’t go how I wanted at all. I open my emails and start reading through them, hoping to distract myself from the guilt building in my stomach. The guilt morphs into irritation fast, and I start to stew.
“Charlie?”
I lift my head up and see Rachel peeking over the wall.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For being weird. I didn’t mean to get defensive. I just . . . it’s just Paolo and . . .” She looks down. “Are you going to see him again?”
“It wasn’t like that. We’re just friends.”
“But you want to see him again, right?”
I gulp, not comfortable with the confrontation. “I don’t know. We didn’t exchange numbers or anything like that.”
“Well, that’s not a good sign.” She shrugs and then drops below the divider wall.
No. It’s not going down like this. I push back from the desk and walk around the wall. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you may have spent some time together, but it’s obvious it’s not a love connection since you didn’t exchange numbers.”
I refuse to hold back any longer. “I already told you that it wasn’t like that. He was a great support at the funeral yesterday, and I think I was for him, too. We had drinks at a bar afterward, then ate dinner before calling it a day. It was the best non-date date I’ve had in a long time.”
