30 First Dates (30 page)

"Oh, there you are," Ben said. He was hurriedly tugging on his shirt, and then reached for his jeans. She tried to keep her eyes away from his muscular runner's frame as he got dressed but found it difficult. If he wasn't in such a hurry, she'd…
Stop it!
, her thoughts interrupted her fantasy. What the hell was going on with her? How could she have let this happen? This was
Ben
. She shook her head, hard.

"I called Nate," Ben said, walking back into the bathroom and coming out again with his phone. Distracted, he felt around his pockets—for his keys, she presumed.

"They're on the coffee table," she said, swallowing a bite of cereal. At the mention of Nate's name, Erin felt a lump in her throat. Last night she clearly hadn't thought of anybody but Ben—and herself. The thought of answering to the outside world for what they'd done was terrifying. "And? What'd he say?"

"I didn't tell him anything," he said. "Not where I was, at least. I just told him that if Catherine called, to tell her I fell asleep at my apartment last night and decided to stay. I don't want her to hear otherwise before I talk to her."

Erin nodded. She didn't miss the fact that he called her "Catherine," not "Cat."

"I'd better go now," he said. He walked quickly toward the door, but then paused, turned back, and grazed her lips with his. He searched her eyes for a couple of seconds and then said, "I'll talk to you soon?"

Her lips still tingling from his kiss, she nodded again, feeling dazed.

*  *  *

After both Ben and Sherri had left the apartment—crossing paths long enough for Erin to hear Sherri say, "Hi…Ben?" in a shocked voice before the door opened and closed—Erin sat cross-legged on her bed and contemplated the further wreck she'd made of her life. And not just her life—Ben's, too, and Catherine's. No matter how she felt about the woman, or how wrong Erin thought she seemed for Ben, Catherine was a person who'd just been cheated on, a spot Erin had been in herself, multiple times. She knew exactly how devastating it felt to be betrayed by a person you trusted—like a gut punch, or a public shaming. She felt sick—like she might throw up all over the spot of her and Ben's treachery.

Ben!

If things were weird with him before, what now? That thought brought on a whole new wave of nausea as Erin realized the scope of what she'd done, of what she'd allowed to happen.
Why
did
it happen?
she asked herself.
What is going on with me?
She'd never rushed into physical relationships before—just the opposite, actually. And now she'd made the same mistake twice.

Because it
was
a mistake.
But did Ben feel that way, too? A new wave of guilt and fear overtook her as she tried to see last night from Ben's point of view. She was dying to know where his head was and yet terrified to find out. Would he want to be with her now? Did she want to be with him?

Thinking about last night, her body reacted in ways that felt completely foreign, at least where Ben was concerned. She tried in vain to make sense of her own heart, her own mind. Did she have feelings for him, or was it the heat of the moment? Was it a result of her strange jealousy of Cat, or of Ben's jealousy of Devon and Paul?

Erin was so confused she didn't know how she felt. Right now she felt nothing, just numb. She sat stock still for several minutes, frozen in misery, until she realized she had to get ready for work herself. It was a magazine day.

She stood up and took her cereal bowl to the kitchen. Then she hurried into the shower to wash away the remnants of the biggest mistake of her life.

*  *  *

By the time she pulled up outside her apartment that evening, Erin had resolved to give up men completely. It was a strange mission, considering she still had sixteen dates to get through before June 14.

Ben hadn't tried to reach her at all, and she figured that meant he was as shell-shocked as she was by what had happened. She'd been stressed all day over what last night was going to mean for their friendship. Once she told him she couldn't be with him…like that…again, she was afraid she'd lose him for good.

Erin keyed into the front door and braced herself for Sherri's onslaught of questions—she'd texted like five million times that day wanting to know every detail of what had happened. Tired of typing on her phone screen, Erin promised to tell her everything tonight.

Not that she, herself, knew much.

When she walked inside, the apartment was dark and still. Sherri wasn't home yet. Erin breathed a temporary sigh of relief and was crossing the living room to her room when her phone buzzed in her hand.
Ben.
A glance at the screen confirmed it, and her heart constricted in a mix of confusion, guilt, and fear.

"Hello?" Her voice was anxious.

"Hi," Ben said, and her insides weakened at the sound of his voice, confusing her further. He paused for a long moment and then asked, "How was your day?"

"It was…weird," she admitted, sinking onto the edge of her bed, and then slipping off her shoes and pushing back onto the comforter and into her pillows. She closed her eyes and then opened them again when images of waking up beside him in this very spot filled her head.

He didn't say anything else, and the strain in his voice suddenly caught up to her. She felt his tension through the phone connection.

"Mine too," he finally said. His tone was weary, rough, and she knew then that something was wrong, something more than last night. Erin's mind began to whirl. Was it her? Was he pissed at her part in his infidelity? She'd been expecting him to be pissed after they spoke, because she assumed that after what he'd said to her in the park,
his
expectations from last night were not going to match hers.

But this wasn't about that, she could tell. She knew him so well.

"What's wrong?" Erin asked, barely able to keep the hysterical note out of her voice. Was it his dad again? Was it Catherine? Had he broken up with her? Had he told her about last night? Erin simultaneously hoped he had and hadn't, her stomach wrenching again with guilt.

"It's…Cat," he said, confirming her suspicions. She waited, holding her breath. "She…I—" He was silent for a long moment, and Erin felt like she might explode from the suspense.

Erin heard him take a ragged breath. "It's…her brother died, Erin. Of a sudden aneurysm. This morning." He paused for a beat. "She barely even noticed I didn't come home."

"Oh." Erin sat silently for a long moment, stunned at the unexpected turn in the conversation. "Oh. God," she said. "I'm so sorry." The three words were layered with meaning, and she only hoped Ben understood how very much she was sorry for. Erin's thoughts whirled around this new piece of information and what it meant for Ben, for her, for everything.

"Yeah," Ben said. "Me, too." He paused again, so long that Erin began to think their call had been dropped. And then he said, "I…didn't tell her, E." His voice was drenched in agony. "About last night. I…I couldn't."

"I…of course. I understand," Erin said in a faint voice, feeling very small.

Another long moment passed.

"Are we okay?" Ben asked. "Are…are you okay?"

His voice sounded distant, like he was talking to her through a tunnel. She realized the phone had slipped away from her ear, and she pushed it up with her free hand.

"I'm fine," she replied. "Are
you
okay?"

It took Ben a while to answer, and when he did he made a strange noise, sort of a dark laugh. "Honestly, E, I don't know what I am. But I do know that I'm…going to a funeral. I'm…going to be there for Catherine, even though I'll be feeling like an ass the whole time. I don't know what else to do."

Erin felt sick all over again. She'd caused this. Her. He'd played a role in it, too, of course, but mainly it was her and her stupid blog and her stupid experiments with love that had brought on this whole avalanche, this whole tumble-down mess of jealousy and emotion and turmoil.

Love just wasn't something to be experimented with, she decided, and her heart ached for him.

When they said good-bye a few minutes later, Erin had a sick feeling it might be the last time she'd hear his voice for quite a while.

*  *  *

The next several weeks were a bustle of activity—Erin kept herself busy almost every waking moment, making plans, writing posts, marketing the hell out of the blog. She was now averaging in the
A-B
range in both her classes, knowing full well she wouldn't be enrolling the next semester. The strain of this load was killing her.

She'd finally received a bit of the elusive "editorial work" Sheila had promised in her job interview, so along with her usual load she was spending Tuesdays and Thursdays calling sources and researching the ways aging impacted financial planning clients' decision patterns, her first feature assignment. She threw herself into the work with gusto, along with all the other work that was coming her way.

She'd received several requests to write guest posts for other bloggers, and she'd accepted them—including one for a well-known blog by a psychologist who specialized in relationship advice. She hadn't turned the piece in yet. So far she'd spent probably twenty hours writing, revising and agonizing over every word, knowing it could help her break in to the real world of writing more than anything else she'd done so far. The website had more than 100,000 daily views, and its other writers were far more credentialed than she was.

The excitement of getting that assignment almost eclipsed the fact that the issue of
Glamour
containing the blurb on her blog was set to hit newsstands any day. Another million or so readers who'd see her name and potentially click on her site. As a result, she spent still more hours agonizing over every word she posted on 30 First Dates. She'd officially hired Cameron, the website designer, and the redesigned site was set to go live within a week—hopefully before the
Glamour
piece launched. It included space for multiple banner ads—money from advertisers was finally rolling in with some regularity.

She had airfare booked for Utah and was in serious talks with a winery in California—a huge operation with a popular Napa label. The ski trip was set for January, and the Napa trip looked like it was going to happen in early spring, just under her big three-oh finish line.

On the dating front, she'd been on an unprecedented frenzy, too. Still shell-shocked from her night with Ben, Erin threw herself into completing her goals, but in a different way than before. She made a pact with herself that she would see her blog through, but with a different mission, one that focused on fun and adventure, not romance. She didn't
want
romance. Hell, she'd almost determined it was her lot in life to be single…and celibate. The alternative always ended in disaster.

Realizing how tough it was going to be to complete thirty dates on deadline at the rate she'd been going, Erin stepped up her efforts and leaned on friends, family, readers of her site, and the online dating service, and she was booked up on weekends stretching nearly to Christmas.

One of those dates included a U2 concert—serendipitously, the band had launched a new U.S. tour with a December stop in Fort Worth, and although she hadn't been able to score front row seats, she and her date, a friend of a friend of Sherri's from work, would be happily occupying the middle of row three. That was good enough for her, and even that wouldn't have happened without her newfound resources à la 30 First Dates. She'd worked with the venue's marketing people to score media passes, which had been hard as hell to do.

She would have loved to take Sherri, or Ben—she shook her head miserably at the thought—but she had to get cracking on her dates
and
her list, and the media passes made her feel like she had to cover the night as an "official" blog date.

Ben.
Every time his face popped into her head, which happened all the time, she popped it back out again. She was wrong that she wouldn't hear his voice again—he called her every few days, with an almost compulsive regularity. The problem was they never scratched much deeper than the surface, and she missed their closeness with a helpless desperation. Whoever had coined the phrase "sex ruins friendships" was wise beyond measure, Erin thought. It had ruined two of hers in the past year alone. For that matter, it had turned her into a person no better than Hilary.
Hilary
, of all people.

Her mind turned back to Ben, who never even asked her to run anymore. He'd helped her plan her marathon training schedule when she'd asked him to, and they talked about running together, but so far she'd done all her training solo.

He was still with Catherine. Erin had no idea what had happened between Ben and Cat since their night together, and she hadn't asked. Since his phone call the day after, Ben had never mentioned that night, not once. And he rarely mentioned Catherine's name to her at all.

She figured he must have changed his mind about the confession he'd made to her in the park, or at least resolved to forget about it. After the role she'd played in his infidelity, she didn't blame him. Erin squeezed her eyes shut and turned her mind back to her list.

"No. 23, Find Ben a woman" hung over her head as a constant, nagging worry. Why had she included that item in her list? When she'd written it, she'd meant it as a joke, but she couldn't actually have expected to fulfill that goal, so why hadn't she changed it for the blog? It now seemed more like a sick joke on her.

And then there was Devon. She talked to him every once in a while, and she'd even met him once for drinks, but she was careful not to put herself in a position that could lead to a repeat performance of their night at his house. The night she'd "picked" Ben over him had put a distance between them that neither of them had articulated but that Erin felt as tangibly as the floor beneath her shoes or the computer on her lap.

"How is it possible for any one person to be as bad at love as me?" she asked out loud.