B00AAOCX2E EBOK (20 page)

I sucked in a breath. Of all the questions that could have come at us today, it had to be one like this. It was too close to home. I gave Ian a sideways glance.
Way too close.
I didn’t even know how to answer something like this, not with the way things had been changing between us lately.

Be cool,
I told myself. It was an opportunity, after all, to see what Ian’s take was on the subject. I swallowed. “How about you take this one?”

“Sure,” Ian said after a beat, keeping his gaze on the audience. “Seems to me,
Girl
, that you already know the consequences of trying to turn your friendship into something more. You say you don’t want to ruin the friendship, and if you really mean it, then the answer is really simple; don’t tell him.”

I stared down at the scuffed-up surface of the stage with a strangling heaviness pressing down on my chest. It didn’t get more black and white than that.

“Hold on.” I stared at him until he finally looked my way. There was a wary look in his eyes.

“What?”

“You’re ignoring one very important fact.”

A muscle flicked in his jaw. “And what’s that?”

“That she doesn’t really mean it,” I said, thinking it was pretty obvious. “If she did, she wouldn’t have said she couldn’t keep the feelings locked inside her anymore.”

“And?”

“Maybe that’s the part of the question you should address.”

“Fine. Looking at it from that perspective, I would say that she…” he turned to the audience, “
you’re
looking for an easy answer on how to reclaim what you have if your friend rejects you, and there are no easy answers. Once you take that leap, there is no going back. It will be there between you forever, if your friendship even manages to remain intact, and there’s no guarantee that it will.” He looked at me again. “Now, can we move on?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Why are you in such a hurry to move on?”

“We answered the question,” he said, his voice rising an octave. “Why keep beating a dead horse?”

“Point of fact,
you
answered the question. And I’m not sure I agree.”

“You answer it, then,” he spat, pushing his hands in my direction. “I’ve given my answer.”

“That you don’t think she should tell him?”

He shrugged. “Why risk it?”

“I guess that’s easy advice to give for someone who has never been in love.”

I sucked in a breath, wanting to swallow those words right back up. I knew they were a slap in the face, and I had no right to say something so personal in front of a class of strangers.

The hard stare he leveled at me made me want to shrink back. “I’ve never lit a match near gasoline, either, but I know it will blow up right in my face.”

Sound logic. Dammit.

“Well, you’ve shared your take, now I’ll share mine.” I looked out at the audience again. “While I can’t deny that mixing friendship and romance can be as dangerous as mixing business and pleasure, I also believe you should be true to yourself. That may be a question of deciding what’s more important to you. If it’s your friendship, then take his advice and call it a day. If it’s your heart, then I say take a chance. It may work out, and it may not, but at least fifty years from now, you can say you gave it a shot, and you’ll regret that a lot less than you’ll regret your choice to play it safe.”

***

“So, how’d it go today?”

“Fine, I guess,” I said into the phone. I leaned toward the mirror to look at the small pimple developing an inch below my left eye. While I’d been blessed with clear skin most of my life, on certain occasions a blemish would sneak up on me. Usually, after a stressful day, and today had been a whopper.

“You guess?” Amery asked through the line. “What, was it weird being in front of an audience?”

“No.” Sighing, I dabbed some astringent on a cotton ball, then swiped it over the pimple. I was hoping to dry it out before it grew roots. “The audience was fine. Great, in fact. It was a lot easier being in front of a group than I thought it would be.”

“What was the problem, then?”

I tossed the cotton ball in the trash. “It’s not a big deal. Ian was just being a bit of a butt.”

Amery chuckled. “Isn’t he always a bit of a butt?”

“Well, yeah. But it wasn’t a good buttiness.”

There was a pause on the other end. “Did you just say ‘buttiness’?”

“Maybe,” I said, a reluctant smile tugging at my lips.

“Okay. So, it wasn’t a good ‘buttiness,’ but a bad ‘buttiness.’ And what, pray tell, is bad ‘buttiness’?”

I rolled my eyes. “Ha-ha. Enough with the ‘buttiness’.”

Amery giggled. “Okay, what was he doing?”

“Interrupting me, being argumentative, snapping – at me, not the audience.” I took one last look at myself in the mirror, and then left the bathroom. “That kind of thing.”

“Really? That’s surprising.”

Walking into the living room, I propped a pillow on the end of the couch and dropped down onto my back. The whole day had been an exhausting mess and I wanted nothing more than to sleep it off as soon as I got off the phone. “Are you being serious or sarcastic?”

“I’m being serious. Look, we both know Ian can be…temperamental—”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s one way to put it.”

“But he usually doesn’t bring his moodiness with him on the air. He knows how to act professionally.”

I pulled a face. “Do you know how weird that sounds, calling what we do ‘professional’?”

“Why’s that?” Amery sounded taken off guard.

“We have a talk show about
sex
.”

“Hey, it’s in your job description. That doesn’t make it any less professional. People have made careers on a lot less.”

“Except this isn’t in my career plan,” I pointed out. Not that I had a career plan. I enjoyed Sociology, but I wasn’t quite sure what I planned to do with my degree yet. I kind of envied Chelsea in that; she’d wanted to be a chemist since grade school. Of course, she and Parker had the next ten years of their life planned out, which sounded like a nightmare to me.

“No, but it is for Ian,” Amery said, “or, at least a stepping stone to his future career plan. That’s why I’m surprised by his behavior. He knows his work on
Truths
can impact his future career opportunities. Something must have really been really bothering him.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”
But I have my suspicions.

“Did you guys have a fight or something?”

Yes.
“No.”

Frustration crept into Amery’s voice. “Well, did you ask him what was wrong?”

“I tried before the show, but he shut down on me.”

“Well, maybe he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. It happens to the best of us.”

“Maybe.” I left it at that, not knowing how to tell her he’d been just fine until I’d made a semi-flirtatious proposition, and how he’d gone stiff on me after that. Amery would latch onto that detail and turn it into something it wasn’t.

Something that would never be, if Ian’s remarks during the panel were any indication.
Not that I want there to be anything.

Stretching out on my back, I threw my arm over my head and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about his answer to the question about best friends falling in love. Why was it bothering me so much? Had I really been entertaining thoughts of us getting together? Thinking of how crushing his answer had been, I realized that I had. A little, at least.

Well, that’s enough of that
. It was better this way. Better to know where we stood before I did something stupid, like jeopardizing our entire friendship because I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what it might be like to be with Ian…have his hard chest pressed up against mine...to taste his lips…

My fingers brushed over my parted lips as I imagined it.

“Hey, you still there?”

I jerked into a sitting position. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“You okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine,” I said, tossing my hand in a casual manner, as if Amery could actually see me. Looking around the room, I scrambled for a topic change. “Oh, so, now that I have joined the ranks of loners on Valentine’s Day, are we all still planning on meeting up at O’Shea’s tomorrow night?”

“Well, that’s actually why I called…” I detected a bit of hesitance in her voice. “While, yes, O’Shea’s is still in the plans, not all of us are going to be loners.”

I blinked. “Are you saying you have a date?”

“Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Casey
has a date.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Oh, my god! When did this happen?”

“Today. Just after you left us.”

“Casey got a date during lunch?”

“Uh-huh.” Amery laughed. “Can you believe that?”

I totally forgot about my own problems for a second. “Well, who is she?”

“Her name is Carrie. She’s my partner in my Broadcast News Reporting Lab.”

“Wait? Did you set them up?”

“No, this was all them. She just stopped by our table to say hello and I invited her to sit with us. She’s really shy and I don’t think she has a lot of friends. Anyway, we talked a little bit about class and she seemed nervous, so Casey kept doing his best to make her feel comfortable. He kept making stupid jokes, and she actually thought they were funny. Can you believe that?”

I smiled. “Sure I can.” While some of his jokes were out there, he could be pretty funny.

“I guess he was encouraged by her laughter, because, before I knew it, I was feeling like a third wheel at the table while they were chatting away, and next thing I know, he asked her if she wanted to go out with him.”

I clapped my hands together. “Yay. Good for him.”

“Yeah.” Amery sniffed loudly. “Our little boy is growing up so fast.”

“So, who are
you
going out with?”

“Chris Stewart from the station’s morning show. But it’s not a big deal, really.”

While I knew Chris only from the staff meetings, it was no secret he had a big thing for Amery. “Does he know that?”

“He knows I don’t think of him that way,” Amery said. “Look, I was complaining about being alone in class this afternoon, and he said we should go out and have some fun, just as friends. I thought, what could it hurt?”

I shook my head. “It could hurt
him
. He likes you, Amery. You don’t want to give him false hopes.”

“I’m not. He’s the one who said it was just as friends.”

“Okay, just…tread lightly with that one,” I advised. I had to remind myself that Amery was a big girl, and she could deal with this on her own. Right now, I had my own problems to deal with.

“Well, this sucks,” I said. “Now, aside from Ian, I’m going to be the only one without a date.”

“You don’t have to be.” I could hear the grin in Amery’s voice. “Didn’t you tell me that Chelsea offered to set you up on a blind date?”

I made a face. “A blind date on Valentine’s Day?” I hadn’t even really given the blind date offer much thought since Chelsea had first asked. “Wouldn’t that classify me as a new level of pathetic?”

“Not at all. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be surprised and things will work out really well.”

“Because blind dates often work out well.”

“But this one could. Think of it this way: you’ll probably get a free dinner out of it. And you won’t be alone on the most romantic holiday of the year.” There was genuine enthusiasm in her voice.

The off-white wall blurred before my eyes as I thought about that. More than anything, I wanted to be able to say being alone wasn’t such a bad thing, but I was lonely.

“I’ll think about it.”

I hadn’t really meant it, so I was surprised to find myself actually giving the idea consideration long after Amery and I ended our conversation. I knew that more often than not, blind dates turned out to be awkward disasters. But the optimistic side of me kept saying that maybe I’d be pleasantly surprised. Maybe this Garrett could be someone I really liked. Maybe he could be “the one.”

I flipped on the T.V. and chuckled at myself. I didn’t know anything more than the guy’s name, and already I was wondering if a pair of monogrammed towels was in my future? “I think mommy needs psychological help, baby,” I said to Pandora, who jumped up on the couch and cuddled into my side.

As I stroked the cat’s fur, I came to the decision that while things may never go anywhere with a blind date, it might be worth it to take the gamble.

And if nothing else, it might provide a nice distraction, getting the disappointment with Ian off my mind for a few hours.

I jolted.
I meant
Jayden
. The disappointment with
Jayden
.

My ears rang. Ian had taken over my every thought.

This was not good. Not good at all. I was in trouble. I needed to act fast.

“I want to go on that blind date you told me about, if it’s not too late,” I said later that evening.

Chelsea stared up at me from her bed with a shocked and baffled expression. I
had
kind of burst into her room without knocking. From the spread of papers on her beige bedspread, it looked like I interrupted her in the process of paying bills. “Really?”

I gave a curt nod. “Absolutely.”

Chelsea removed the pair of gold-framed eyeglasses perched on her nose and stared up at me. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

That was a question I wasn’t ready to answer. “Oh, you know,” I said with a fake smile, “it’s like you said: I never meet anyone new, and I thought it would be nice to do so.”

“What happened with Jayden?”

My shoulders rose and fell. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I know how much you were hoping something would happen there.” Her smile was sympathetic. “Well, I don’t think it’s too late. Let me give Garrett a call and check.”

That was a conversation I could do without listening to. I felt pathetic enough, already. “Thanks. Just let me know what he says.”

***

Well, the blind date was on. And I was already questioning my sanity as I left the house that night to go to the station. I’d hoped having a date to stress and worry about would give me the kick in the ass I needed to minimize my concerns about whatever I was feeling for Ian. But it only seemed to intensify my worries and multiply my stress.