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She’s not even hungover like the rest of us. I’m. So. Annoyed. Some of us have to concentrate. She makes it IMPOSSIBLE.
What are the odds we can ask Siobhan to switch her desk to the—
A voice behind me said, “Someone was a little crazy last night. I will forever remember that it was your idea to go tothe club. I’m putting that in the bank and saving it for when I need to blackmail you properly.”
Garrett. Leaning against my cube in the exact same spot where Siobhan had been an hour ago. My stomach dropped. It always did.
“Hello, pot?” I laughed. “Have you met my kettle? You were as drunk as I was, maybe more so. We should call you sloppy Joe.”
He came into the cube and sat on the edge of my desk, swinging one of his legs ever so nonchalantly. “Man, that dance floor was addicted to my moves. And so … I might need a play-by-play of what you remember from The Landing Strip.”
“Shhhh,” I hushed him. “Please don’t remind me. It’s so embarrassing. Let’s forget that ever happened. Did you just try to tell me that the dance floor was ‘addicted’ to your ‘moves’?”
He approximated a robot. “I’m so fly.”
“Flypaper, maybe—stuck in another decade, like the stuff hanging on the wall of my camp cabin circa grade six.”
Garrett’s blue eyes sparkled. I hated noticing cheesy, romantic details about someone who was a platonic friend. One who could onlyeverbe a friend. “So …” He slid off the desk to stand beside my chair and whispered, “What did you tell Rob?”
“Nothing.” I moved away so Garrett wasn’t so near to me. Yet I wanted to move closer, as always. “When I talked to him on the phone this morning, he simply mocked me because of how drunk I was.”
“I might leave the strip club portion out when you see him tonight.”
“You think?”
“Lunch in a half hour?”
“Sure. Beth’s abandoned us. Raj is coming down. I’ll meet you in the lobby. I can only walk across the street to the nasty food court.”
“Grease in ye old food court it is, milady.”
“Tudor documentaries?”
“Henry the Eighth, I am, I am,” he said on his way out of my cube. “See you at one.”
The butterflies. Flipping and flopping all around my insides. Making me flush, schoolgirl-crush style. That was my every reaction to Garrett. Like I couldn’t believe we were friends. Like one day he was either going to wake up and realize that he was madly in love with me and then we would run off together, or that I was a totally uncool fraud and then he’d run screaming into the wind.
I loved his lanky frame and his collection of T-shirts. A set of earbuds hung semipermanently around his neck, and he wore the best kicks. The boys in programming could get away with murder when it came to their definition of “business casual.” And when he brushed away his light, floppy, freakishly gorgeous hair from his forehead when he was concentrating, when he smiled … I melted.
Like my sister said, he was my work boyfriend, although I’d never admit that to her. Ours was a curious relationship somewhere between pal and crush. Part of my obsession had roots in the fact that he was so different from Rob, who wore suits and worked in the financial district. Deep in the belly of the beast, my real boyfriend moved money around for a living, and he was very good at it. He had that part of our lives tied down so well that I would never have to worry about it—though I did feel guilty about never being able to contribute in the same way. My mother’s terrible history with men and with marriages wasn’t always her fault, but it did contribute to the feeling of safety my relationship gave me. And Garrett was a safe outlet for my curiosity about what might have been—at least, that’s what I told myself.
Garrett’s real life girlfriend, Jen, was an enigma. We’d met a couple of times, ever so briefly, but I knew very little about her. They lived together, too, and had been together forever. She worked for a nonprofit, something to do with saving the environment. Garrett and I didn’t talk about our significant others, an unwritten rule. The façade of our work boyfriend/girlfriend relationship could only exist in a bubble.
Rob had no idea of the amount of the time I spent with Garrett or the depth of my feelings for him—that I spent entire workdays waiting for him to email me, IM me, or stop by my desk. I fantasized about us booking the Four Seasons and spending an afternoon together, naked, drinking expensive room-service wine. And every night after work I went home and got into bed with my guy, whom I loved. Nothing would ever happen with Garrett. Nothingcouldever happen with Garrett. But I was forever confused about whether I wanted it to or not.
Rob and I were so different, opposites attracting at the start of our third year at Queen’s. He had rescued me from the worst high school relationship, from myself, and he had shown me that love, sex, couples, and relationships could be okay—normal, even. And here we were almost a decade later. Still, I struggled with moments of being unsure about us, about continuing down this path that looked so straight, so narrow. And hanging out with Garrett gave me that little something I needed to make it through my long, tedious days. Perhaps it was selfish. Maybe it was cheating. Yet I would never take a real step in that direction. Never.
Rob has told me repeatedly that he’d support us if I went back to school, that there’s no quid pro quo in our partnership. But I’d watched my mother get burned by men when I was younger, and it had damaged me. I wouldn’t let Rob pay for my school, and I certainly wouldn’t let him support me while I was doing it—that was a line I couldn’t cross. So the cycle continued. I saved, but it was never enough. I started spec scripts, but they never got finished. I jotted down ideas in the same notebook where I kept my spending journal. Stepping, never leaping.
My will to change always faded by January 2. It took a lot more effort to dream about running off to Africa to make documentaries when I was being confronted by the limitations of the industry day in and day out. Garrett went through it on a near-daily basis, staring back at his beleaguered budgets and temperamental advertisers, bosses who needed to please executives, executives who needed to please boards, and boards that needed to respond to shareholders.
Sometimes it was easier to sit and respond to the messages in my inbox about someone’s boob making its way out of her blouse on prime time. I was okay shilling for the latest hot-stuff decorator for now, at least until I could handle the soul-crushing reality of spending five years developing a story that deserved to be told but would never get sold and would eventually end up on YouTube with five hundred views—or let’s get real—five views. Except on days like today, it was painfully clear to everyone, from Siobhan to Marianne, and Garrett in between, that this job and I had a limited lifetime together. Admitting it? Nope, wasn’t there yet.
Chapter 3
IN THE FREEZING-COLD food court across the street, I wolfed down a cheeseburger while Garrett, a vegetarian, made gagging noises with each bite that went into my mouth. I paused only for air and a fry or two to balance out the grease now lining my stomach. For the first time that day, I didn’t feel totally washed out and hungover.
“You were so hammered,” Garrett said as he stretched out his legs sideways and rested his head in his arms.
