Cheating on Myself (24 page)

“Yeah, of course. That’s fine.”

“I’m glad you came.” He reached his hand across the center console and took my hand in his again. “Even though you didn’t truly experience a hash.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“Would you like to, uh—try it again sometime?”

“Hashing?” I asked. “Or all that other stuff we did out on the trail? In either case, asolutely.”

Joe snuck a quick peek at me and smiled. Then we sat in comfortable silence, holding hands and listening to something that definitely wasn’t the Dog Hounds, all the way home. I couldn’t wait for next time.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“
My feet smell like cabbage. Or maybe sprouts,” Lily announced as we stood in the twelfth floor pantry at work later that week. She was digging through the cupboards, and sniffed a package of crackers clearly marked “Corinne.”

“It’s weird. When I wake up in the morning, I swear they smell normal, then I take a shower, pluck my brows, pick an outfit, and that’s when I notice they smell like earthy vegetables.”

I laughed, picking at the leftover spaghetti I’d heated up in the microwave for lunch. “Your feet don’t smell like vegetables.”

“They do, I swear. It must be a disease.” Lily pulled one foot out of her tall, shiny black pump and held her foot out toward me. “Take a whiff.”

“Lil, I’m not sniffing your feet.”

“You don’t even have to get close. You can probably smell them from there. Put down the noodles and you’ll notice.”

“You’re just being self-conscious.”

“If it’s not my feet, it must be my breath that smells like rotting earth,” she muttered. “There’s
something
wrong with me.”

“There is actually nothing wrong with you,” I assured her quietly, studying my always-perfect friend in the flickering fluorescent light of the pantry. How could someone be so perfect, yet so self-conscious about every little thing? “The only thing wrong with you is your head.”

“What’s wrong with my head?” Lily hissed, reaching her slender hand up to touch her soft waves. “Oh my god, does my head smell?”

I laughed again, and Lily groaned. “I know it’s too small,” she said certainly. “But I can’t do anything about that. I try to compensate for my pinhead with big hair. Do I need to change shampoos?”

“Lil, I mean you’re mentally deficient. No offense, but the only thing wrong with you is your self-esteem. Maybe you should get rid of your destructive, absent boyfriend and the married man you’re messing around with on the side, and see if you can find someone who won’t make you doubt yourself.”

Lily narrowed her eyes at me. “Oh, I see. Now that you’re screwing a hot, sensitive musician, you’re allowed to get on me about my messed up relationship? I seem to recall you yourself were stuck in—what did you call it?—an unsatisfying relationship for, oh, about fifteen years?”

“Twelve,” I corrected, trying to bring the volume of the conversation back down to office-pantry-acceptable levels. “And I’m not sleeping with Joe.”

“Ha! There’s no way you’re not fucking him—”

“Lil, pipe down,” I begged, shushing her as a pair of interns walked past the pantry at eavesdropping speed. “And I’m really not having sex with him. We did kiss this weekend, but that’s it. Just because you’re all full of sex doesn’t mean I am.”

I thought back to the weekend, and how much I’d enjoyed my date with Joe. Since Sunday, he’d sent me a few emails and had called on Monday night, just to talk. On Tuesday, last night, I’d come home from work to find him sitting on my front stoop with a box of fresh pasta and a jar of yummy sauce from the Italian take-out place near my house. He also had a bottle of wine tucked into his jacket pocket. The impromptu date was quick, since he had to meet up with the band for rehearsal, but the fact that I knew he was thinking of me made me fall even harder. He’d given me a quick kiss at the door when he left, and said, “You taste like Italy.” Then he grinned and promised he’d be back for more later in the week.

I’d peeked out the frosted glass in the front door, watching as his hot little ass sashayed down my front steps and back to his car. If only it were appropriate to chase him down and jump him. If I didn’t get him naked soon, I’d be forced to do just that.

“Then who are you sleeping with?” Lily whispered, hands perched on her hips. “You’re obviously getting some. You’re smirking.”

“I’m not.” I twisted violently at a piece of my hair and dug into the pile of lukewarm spaghetti that was left in the plastic container. Lying to friends had never been my strong suit. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about the shower thing with Erik, but I was trying really hard to pretend it hadn’t happened. He’d called a few times, but once again, I was letting it go to voicemail. I think I just needed some distance from Erik while things got off the ground with Joe, or I was going to keep messing up.

“Fine,” she said, obviously unconvinced. “Lie to your best friend who smells like head and cabbage. I get it.” She was sulking. I knew she wasn’t really that upset, since she was still trying so hard to make me laugh. “It’s because I smell weird, isn’t it? You’re picking Anders over me for confiding, since he smells like boy soap and fancy cologne?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you about sleeping with Joe, Lil. If I sleep with him, I’ll tell you.”
Maybe
.

“Okay, fine.” She started to walk back to her office, obviously expecting me to follow. I did. “So this is going to sound weird, but I need you to do me a favor.”

I swallowed the last of my pasta and threw the disposable container in the trash. I groaned. Lily’s favors scared me. “Okay…”

She didn’t say anything more until we got to her office and she was perched in her desk chair, feet up. “I’m going out with Brad tonight—”

“Oh, Lily, I thought you were going to break that off,” I said, settling into my seat across from her. “You need to step away from the married man.”

Lily violently thrust her hand into a bag of goldfish crackers that she’d taken from someone’s stash in the pantry earlier that week. An intern’s name was written in purple glitter pen on the top of the bag.

“I’m trying,” she whispered. “I really am.”

“So what do you need from me?”

“I want you to come to Plant & Bean with us tonight.”

“Like a double date?” Ick. Plant & Bean was the gastro-vegetarian-raw food place. I’d been there twice—once with Erik, once with Laurel—and both times I’d left hungry.

Lily chewed at her lip. “Sure. A double date. Except it needs to be more of a ‘work thing.’” She air-quoted me, which reminded me of Hardcore Lil who everyone else at Centrex got to see. I had a feeling she was trying to trick me into something.

“What’s the catch?”

“I want you to meet him.”

I narrowed my eyes and watched as Lily pulled her Blackberry out of her suit coat and aimlessly scrolled through the emails that had amassed during our short lunch break. I knew she was just trying to avoid my suspicious gaze.

“I don’t want to meet him,” I said honestly.

“Please, Stella,” she pleaded. “We want to go out on a normal date, but we can’t really go out, just the two of us. He thinks it looks too fishy.”

I snorted. “He put his hand up your skirt at a restaurant after a work meeting. And now he’s suddenly worried about what people might think? Can’t he write this off as a business dinner? I would think you two have an easy excuse to go out together.”

“I totally agree,” Lily said in her talking-to-underlings voice. “But he’s been a little weird since I freaked out at him about telling his wife.”

“As he should be.” I met her gaze head-on, and her eyes shot back down to her Blackberry.

“I just want to do something other than take-out in my apartment with him. You’re the only person I trust to tell. I’m begging you to suspend judgment, and just give me this one night where we all pretend to be talking about the Centrex-brand toilet paper campaign so I can go out with him somewhere other than this office or my condo.”

“He’s from the agency you’re working with on the toilet paper campaign? This relationship is destined for the shitter.”

“Ha-ha.” She wasn’t laughing.

I was not deterred. “We need to wipe this guy out and flush him.”

“Aren’t you cute.” Lily glowered at me.

“I hope he doesn’t
cling on
after you tell him it’s over.”

“So mature, Stella.”

I beamed proudly. “Seriously, if I have to enable an adulterous relationship, I’m not pretending to talk about toilet paper all night. It’s going to be toilet paper and bathroom comments flying at you
all
night long.” I’d always lucked out of the less glamorous assignments at Centrex, like toilet paper campaigns. My worst project had been the time I’d had to work under Erik, when he was still at Centrex, on a new hand-soap strategy. But it wasn’t the product lines that had made those months of work unpleasant. It was the fact that Erik wanted to talk about our plans and campaigns all freaking night long. That month, we didn’t have sex at all.

I needed a new line of business, or I was going to have to start to get excited about shit. Literally.

“Fine, whatever. We can talk about the Easter campaign if you want. His agency is bidding on that, too.” Lily looked irritated, which had been the whole point of my goading her. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her to sleep with a married man, but I was a little curious what the deal was with this guy. If I joined them, I could see what his damage was, and hopefully I’d have a better strategy for getting Lily the hell away from him. “It’s not like we’re actually going to talk about work. It’s all for show. And you can bring Joe.”

I got excited for a minute, thinking about seeing Joe again. But then I remembered something. “Isn’t Joe an old frat brother of Chad’s? I’m not lying to Joe, so if he comes we really will have to talk about shit or the Easter campaign or whatever. It will be a true agency-client dinner.”

“No, no, you’re right.” Lily ran her hands nervously through her hair. “Fuck.”

“I’m not coming alone. I do not want to be a third wheel in an already-awkward situation.”

“What about Anders? He’d come with you. I’ll pay.”

“I’ll ask him. But I will not make any guarantees about how either of us will behave. You have to take your chances. We might talk about whether we load the TP roll over- or under-handed all night.”

She studied me for a minute, then said, “You’re not a bad person. I’ll risk it.”

* * *

Later that day, as I sat in my cube dragging images around on my half-assed, in-store soft drink strategy presentation, I saw an email pop up. Every time that little envelope appeared in the lower corner of my screen, I dropped whatever I was doing and clicked to open it. Didn’t matter who it was from—it had to be more interesting than what I was doing.

A few years ago, James hired someone to come in and teach us personal efficiency (thanks to an intern, who’d graciously suggested Centrex people needed the course, and then left for a job analyzing men’s underwear at Wal-mart). The efficiency coach had told us to block fifteen minutes off on our calendar every three hours to respond to emails. She’d said opening them as they came in would ultimately lead to a less effective workday. Well, I’d tried that, and found I would just stare at the little unopened envelope icon for two of those three hours, and I began missing important coffee outings and illicit in-office happy hours coordinated by email. Now I opened and responded to every email immediately. It could be someone announcing free cupcakes in the pantry, and if I didn’t see the email right away, they’d be long gone before I could scurry over there.

There were two new emails. I opened the one from James first. Our boss often sent out motivational emails to his staff, little quotes or excerpts meant to rally the troops. Once, he’d scanned and emailed the first four chapters from a management book—a long series of anecdotes about great battles in military history, and the reason they were won or lost and the leadership strategy that had been employed. Today, the email was an announcement about a new training program, “Hope to Dream.” Sounded cheesy.

The second email was from Joe. The subject line said, “Turkey Day.” I opened it up, thinking,
is it too soon for holidays together?

Joe: “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

I took a deep breath in. This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about Thanksgiving. What was I going to do for Thanksgiving? Did I need to stress out about the significance of Thanksgiving? Couldn’t I just order Chinese in, alone?

Me: “Are you going to invite me to your grandma’s house for homemade potato latkes? (I’m still considering all of my offers for next Thursday.)”

I hit send, laughing a little. Within seconds, I had an email back.

Joe: “My grandma makes lefse, not latkes. Does that matter?”

Oh. Did he actually have a grandma who made lefse? I had been joking about the grandma thing, but now I was a little worried. I wasn’t actually sure I was prepared for a new family Thanksgiving. Did he already think after just a few dates, we were serious enough for a family holiday gathering? I liked him more than I thought was possible (considering he wore overalls in his job—not that I’m judging), but were we there yet? We hadn’t even had sex.

Me: “Do you make the turkey? Or are you one of those eat-too-much-and-pass-out-in-front-of-football guys?”

While I waited for a response back, I re-read the email from James so I could delete it. But when I clicked the link attached to his email, I found that Centrex had set up a career development program. It looked like I could enroll in classes in just about anything—not pole dancing, sadly—and Centrex would pay for it.

I thought back to dinner at Cat’s. I’d told Laurel and Erik I was taking a class on entrepreneurship, which had been a lie. But it didn’t need to be a lie. I’d hated and been uninspired by my job at Centrex for years, but I’d never done anything about it. I had always found it easy to criticize Erik for never pursuing his dream of starting his own business, but now I was stuck in a dead-end job, working eighty-percent, and hating one hundred percent of it. I’d always thought middle-management marketing was enough for me, but that was back when I thought Erik was enough for me.