30 First Dates (37 page)

The sum total of these events is that I'm forced to step out of the fountain, dripping wet, freezing cold, and STARK NAKED, in plain view of four people I barely know (in the case of Tim and Martin) or don't know at all (in the case of Alfred*, Martin's dad, and Annabelle*, Martin's mom, who remained shell-shocked in the passenger seat of the car the whole time). Humiliated, much?

It was worse for Tim, of course. He has to see these people again. Which might mean a lifetime's worth of high-fives from Martin, but as for Martin's parents…well, let's just say I'm pretty sure Tim's never looking Annabelle in the eye again.

Erin giggled out loud as she clicked publish. She immediately emailed a link to Tom—he was reading the blog now and he wanted to be the first to see the post. She had a feeling she'd keep in touch with Tom—he'd already friended her on Facebook and sent her a private message telling her she'd inspired him to start his own blog about following his dreams. He wanted to start a company offering guided bike tours of Sonoma County and one day open a bike shop.

She'd messaged him back telling him he should make "their" fountain a tour stop.

"Do I look okay?" Sherri sashayed into the room as Erin closed her laptop lid and slid the computer onto the couch. Her eyes grew wider as she took in her friend from head to toe. Sherri was wearing a royal blue dress with a deep-V neckline and ruffled hem that Erin hadn't seen before.

"You look incredible. What's the occasion?"

"No occasion, really." Sherri shrugged and walked to the kitchen to pick up her bag from the kitchen table. As she walked by Erin caught a whiff of her perfume, which had hints of both floral and citrus. It, too, was new. "But Alex is taking me to Calais."

"Nice!" Erin didn't know anybody who'd managed to get a reservation at Calais. It was the restaurant of the moment, opened by Rialto Rivera, TV show host, cookbook author, and the hottest chef in Texas. "He must've made that res, like, months ago."

"Nope. Rialto's a fan of the band," Sherri said proudly. "They're really starting to take off. Did I tell you they're doing another UK tour later this year?"

"Like, four times." Erin laughed. "That's awesome, though. Maybe you'll get to tag along for part of the tour?"

Sherri lifted a corner of the blinds to look outside. "That'd be nice. I can't believe Alex'll be gone for three whole months." She sighed.

Erin raised an eyebrow. Sure, Sherri being obsessed with a boyfriend was nothing new, but her obsessions usually didn't last beyond a few weeks. She'd even turned down Luke when he'd tried to lure her away from the rest of the group in California. Of course, Erin and Tom's dramatic scene by the fountain put an early end to that party anyway.

"He called from around Waco and said he'd be here by 7," Sherri said, glancing down at her phone's screen for the time. "Oh. I guess it's still early." She sat down beside Erin, who'd stretched out on the chaise end of the sofa.

"What are you doing tonight?" Sherri asked.

"Eh, you know," Erin said. "Maybe watch a movie. I've only got a few more to go."

"Finished
War and Peace
yet?"

"Ugh," Erin said. "I'm past all the peace now. I'm in this part near the end where Tolstoy goes on and on
and on
about his thoughts on Napoleon's legacy and the reasons nations are moved to war. So yeah, basically. I'm almost done."

"You didn't like it, then?" Sherri was distracted, scrolling down her phone's screen.

"Yeah, actually I really did like it," Erin said. "It was a lot…I don't know, a lot dishier than I thought it would be. The war parts were more interesting than I expected, and the characters really felt real. I mean, like, people are the same no matter where they're from in the world, no matter when they existed. Some people are lucky, some are destined to get what makes them happy, and some aren't." She paused, chewing on her bottom lip. "And in the end, the same things are important to everybody. In the end it's always about love."

Sherri stopped staring at her phone and turned to Erin. "You're going to make me cry," she said, sounding almost offended.

"Sorry," Erin said with a lopsided smile. She shrugged. "It kind of feels like that," she said. "It feels like everything's ending. I can't believe I'll be thirty in another month, and then this whole thing will be over."

"You're going to have to find a new focus for your blog," Sherri said. She paused. "I mean, you're not just going to stop blogging, are you?"

Erin laughed, because she'd hardly thought about anything else since she'd returned from California. Her whole life seemed wrapped around 30 First Dates now, to the point that she didn't know how she'd spend her time without it.

There was
The Bachelor
, of course. Filming was slated to start in September, so that'd occupy a few months—and give her plenty to blog about as the season aired.

"No, I'm not going to stop blogging," Erin said. "I still haven't met the future Mr. Crawford, so I guess the blog can continue as long as that saga does."
I might still be doing it when I'm forty.
"After that, who knows?"

"I think you should write a book," Sherri said matter of factly. "You know, like that
Julie & Julia
chick?"

Erin laughed. "You do like to dream big," she said.

"If you don't, somebody else will." Sherri shrugged. "Why the hell no—" Her words were interrupted by a shrill ringtone, and she jumped up from the couch. "He's here." She slipped back into her peep-toe stilettos and adjusted her cleavage before turning to Erin.

"Seriously, do I look OK?"

"You look fantastic," Erin said. "Have a blast." She pulled the computer back onto her lap and picked up the remote, her dates for the evening. Sherri smoothed the front of her dress, slid her bag onto her shoulder, and rushed out the door.

*  *  *

Erin yawned widely as the credits rolled for
Ordinary People
. Out of eighty-six winners of the Best Picture title, she'd now seen seventy-nine—twenty-two before she'd made the list and started the blog, and more than fifty in the twelve months since.
Pretty impressive.
And that wasn't the half of it. Erin tapped the mouse pad to wake her laptop up and navigated to her website, scrolling down to read through her Thirty by Thirty List. There was now a mark through twenty-five items. She still had to invest in the stock market, join a nonprofit board, skydive, pick a doctoral program…and find Ben a woman.

The pain of that last list item pricked behind Erin's eyelids, and she grimaced, moving her eyes away from No. 23. She still had time to check off the first two items, but the third terrified her to her very core. As for No. 28, she no longer wanted a Ph.D.—so at least she'd come to
some
sort of decision on a doctoral program, and that was going to have to do. She hoped her mom wouldn't be too disappointed.

Erin noticed a new message light up her phone's screen. She picked up the phone from the coffee table and read the text from Sherri:

"HE PROPOSED!!!!!!!!!!! OMGGGGGGGG. I AM ENGAGED!!!!!!!"

"Holy cow!" Erin said out loud to no one. She put her hand to her lips.

Sherri was getting married. Everything really
was
changing. She thought about Ben again, and her stomach wrenched itself into a ball. Sherri's engagement to Alex was something she hadn't seen coming. What she
did
see coming was Ben's engagement to Catherine—day by day, moment by moment she cringed in expectation of the news.

She typed back to Sherri: "WHAT???!!! OMG, so happy for u! We must celebrate SOON."

Sherri's return message came about twenty minutes later. By then, Erin had shut down her computer, turned out lights, changed into PJs, and was brushing her teeth. "Def will," Sherri texted. "Not coming home tonight, tho. I'll bring bubbly tmrw!"

Erin smiled and texted back, "Have fun w/Alex. CONGRATS."

As she crawled into bed she was thinking not of Sherri and Alex, but of Catherine and Ben. An hour later she was still awake, staring into the quiet darkness of her room.

Uncovering Truths

"What's this urgent thing you have to tell me?" Erin took a slow sip of her banana mango smoothie, wondering how the waves of marital harmony could brew into a storm this fast. "Is it something with Mark? Or with the house?"

Hilary's eyes gleamed the way they always did when she had something good and gossipy to share. "First you tell me," she said, and Erin thought,
fat chance
.

She still hadn't forgiven Hilary for the interview thing—or
things
. The
GossipMag
interview Sherri had shown her wasn't the only place Hilary had dished about Erin's blog without permission. Erin had considered backing out of this meeting today, but curiosity got the best of her—she wanted to know what the "urgent thing" was.

"I want to know what's going on with Ben," Hilary said.

Erin's throat seized with panic.
How did she find out??
Her eyes roved over Hilary's face, but she didn't detect any personal malice. She swallowed hard. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, what's going on with him and this girlfriend of his…Catherine, that's her name, right? Aren't they serious? I thought they were living together."

Erin blinked, confused. "Yeah, they live together." She felt suddenly paranoid. What did Hilary know that Ben wasn't telling her? "Why?"

"Well—" Hilary leaned forward, her ample chest bumping into her cup of low-fat frozen yogurt and pushing it forward a couple of inches. "I saw him with somebody else."

"What?" Erin's voice was high-pitched.

What the hell was going on with him? Confessing his love for her and then taking it back. Sleeping with her, staying with his girlfriend, and never mentioning it again. Cheating on Cat in the first place. And now cheating on Cat again, apparently. "Who was it? When? Where were you?" She felt like a reporter on the scene of a crime, and she hated that she sounded so eager.

"Mark and I were at the Flying Saucer in Addison," Hilary said, smug at delivering what was clearly new information. "Mark met some guys from work there. It was…let's see. The day before yesterday? Anyway, we were walking to our table when I walked right past Ben, and he was sitting with some blonde who was definitely not his girlfriend—I remember Catherine from the wedding. And besides, this girl was wearing a wedding ring." Her voice held a note of false shock, and Erin knew she'd just disclosed her juiciest detail. "She was kind of tall, and her hair was really light blonde, like platinum. Fake-looking, if you ask me. There's really no excuse for a bad dye job in this city, I mean, there are some awesome salons around Highland Park, and it's not like it's
that
expensi—"

"Focus, Hil," Erin interrupted her. "Was her hair really straight, and like around shoulder length?"

"Uh-huh." Hilary nodded.

"And did her eyes kind of bug out a little?"

Hilary wrinkled her nose, thinking. "I think so. That sounds about right. So you know her?"

Erin's mind spun. What was Ben doing alone with Melody? And what had they been talking about for so long at her party all those months ago? She'd forgotten about that incident, and she'd never thought to ask Ben. Now that he was avoiding her, she wasn't sure she'd get the chance.

"Huh," she said.

Hilary looked at her expectantly. "Well? Who is she?"

"She's a girl Ben works with," Erin said. "She was at mine and Sherri's party—remember?"

"I thought she looked vaguely familiar," Hilary said, sounding torn between annoyance and disappointment. She leaned forward again. "Do you think he's having an affair with her?"

Erin bit her lip. "I don't know," she said, hating that she didn't. "I haven't talked to Ben much lately."

But she would be soon. She had to get to the bottom of this. Hilary sat back, satisfied that Erin didn't know any more than she did, and started prattling on about curtains and upholstery houses and interior designers. Erin nodded and "mm-hmmed" here and there, thinking she and Hilary officially had nothing more in common. She imagined their future communications to be little more than Facebook messages on their birthdays and, eventually, Christmas cards bearing pictures of Hilary, Mark, and two blond-haired, blue-eyed children—no more, no less—as Hilary played out her dreams of suburban perfection.

*  *  *

Later that day, Erin finished typing a sentence for a column on living your dreams, trying to think of more creative ways to say things like "being your best self" and "just going for it." All the while, her mind vacillated between the news Hilary had shared with her about Ben and Melody and her nervousness about completing her list and finding her last three dates in time for her June 14 deadline. She had the website for SkydiveInDallas.com minimized in another window, and her throat closed with panic every time she thought about opening it and making an appointment.

I'm brave
, she thought,
but not stupid
. Then she swallowed the lump in her throat, thinking she'd better just get over it, already. Her list wasn't about taking the easy way out.

Hey, that's good.
She typed it into her article. And then before she could change her mind, she flipped to the website and clicked "Reserve a Skydive." She set the date for the Saturday before her birthday, read through the FAQs, and then tried not to think about it again.

About half an hour later, she was reading through her article when her phone rang. Erin grabbed it absentmindedly and clicked answer without looking to see who it was.

"Hey, stranger." Devon's low, throaty voice caught her off guard.

"Well, hello yourself," she said, surprised to hear from him. She'd figured he'd written her off completely, it had been so long since they'd talked.