Not My Type (26 page)

I broke off when I heard my dad laughing. “What?” I demanded.

“Nothing. Continue.”

“No. That was everything.” Except it wasn’t. I could have kept going.

“Obviously, Tanner cares about you, or your unwillingness to commit to him wouldn’t bother him,” he said.

“That could just be his ego,” I said.

“Do you believe that?”

I sighed. “No.” The truth was bittersweet.

“So Tanner cares about you. Why?”

“Honestly? I have no idea.” He should have washed his hands of me a long time ago. Like right after our very first interview. Heaven knows I hadn’t done much since then to impress him. And yet . . .

“All the things you mentioned that Landon loved about you were things that individually are fine, but taken together, they add up to something different. Can you see what it says about your relationship?”

I considered the question. My dad was pointing me toward a realization I’d made once before. “All the things Landon loved about me were things that reflected back on him,” I said. “They were things that either made him feel better about himself or that were convenient for him.” The convenience part still stung.

“You were never a typical girl, Pepper,” my dad said, his voice so warm it felt like a hug. “I watched you struggle through high school to understand why you didn’t get all the dates the other girls did and why no one ever noticed you. But you missed something key. They all noticed you. Especially the boys. But they didn’t know what to do with you.”

“Because I’m such a freak?”

He laughed. “Far from it. But you were different then, and you’re different now. You don’t jump on all the latest trends or do your hair like everyone else or even like a lot of the same things that other people do. Some people act different to make a point. They refuse to let people reject them, so they choose a lifestyle or persona that allows them to say, ‘You’re rejecting me because you can’t handle what I like or how I look, not me personally.’ You genuinely
are
different, but you’ve had a hard time embracing that because you’re afraid it will separate you from other people. Instead of letting people love you for your true nature and allowing that to act as a natural filter to sift out the people who wouldn’t really appreciate you, you buried yourself in a relationship with Landon because it signified acceptance.”

Whoa. Deep thoughts for my sleep-deprived brain. I shook my head to clear it, trying to process my dad’s words.

“Pepper?”

“I’m here.”

“Am I overloading you?” he asked.

“No.” I said. “Or . . . maybe a little bit.”

“Everything I’m telling you is an opinion. It’s a theory. Granted, it’s backed by a lot of experience and a PhD, but it’s still a theory.”

I laughed. “I’d take your theories over anyone else’s anytime.”

“Then consider this,” he said. “You buried yourself in your relationship with Landon because he swallowed you up in his identity, and that was far more comfortable for you than trying to be a cornflower in a field full of daisies.”

“At least you didn’t call me a pansy even if I was acting like one,” I said.

He chuckled. “I think you figured it out on your own and fixed it. You’re not with Landon anymore. You must have learned something. He’s not a bad guy, but he was never the right guy for you. Which reminds me. You’re avoiding my original question. Why does Tanner care about you?”

“I don’t want to speak for him,” I said, hedging. “He’s never told me his reasons.”

“You can guess. It’s important for you to answer this question. If you feel silly giving me an answer out loud, you should at least consider it seriously for yourself. Will you do that? I think it will help clear up some of your confusion.”

“I can do that. But I was hoping you would clear up all my confusion,” I wheedled. “Just tell me how to fix things with Tanner.”

“You have to decide what you want from all this first,” he said. “If you figure that part out, then the rest will come to you. Call me if you need anything else though. I’m here for you.”

“I know, Dad. That’s why I love you.” I ended the call and sat up straighter in my chair. I’d come into work much earlier than I’d needed to, and I wasn’t getting much done. I needed to reboot my day, and I couldn’t do that in the office. With new determination, I headed back to my desk and shoved my things back into my messenger bag, smiling in response to Chantelle’s look of concern.

“I’m all right,” I told her. “But I need to think. I’m going to head out for a while and clear my head.”

“Sure. Maybe I’ll catch you later.”

I headed out the door and had just reached the stairs when she called my name.

“Pepper.”

I stopped in surprise and waited for her to catch up.

“When I asked what you would do if you had the chance to get out of the column and still keep your job, it wasn’t an idle question. I’m pretty sure I know how you can do it, but you might not like it. Let me know if you want to talk about it.”

I studied her for a minute then nodded. “I will.”

She smiled and headed back to the office. I tossed my stuff in the backseat of The Zuke and started it up, anxious to find a space to decompress. A few of the stray thoughts careening around my brain since the disastrous conversation with Tanner the night before were calming down and looking suspiciously like insights. I wanted to tackle them without any distractions so I could wrestle my way to an answer. No more limbo. I’d lived in it for seven months after Landon. I couldn’t go back to self-pity and stagnation.

My dad had prescribed me a whole year of thank you notes, but it had only taken four months for his cure to work. I was changing, and I needed to figure out what the new Pepper would do.

Dear Hailey,

I don’t know how you feel about your job. Maybe it’s not that fun working at Straws, or maybe being the counter girl at a café is just your cup of tea. Or coffee. Or milk. But if I had to guess, I’d say you probably like it because you’re always cheerful and friendly to everyone who comes in.

I stopped in the other day for a cookie and a minute of peace and quiet on a day when I desperately needed it. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a day where you feel so fragile that you’re sure even a loud sound could break you. But it was one of those days. So I stepped in for some comfort food and thinking time, and you, with your kind smile and thoughtful “How are you?,” helped me find both. Because instead of pretending not to notice when I teared up at your question, you asked again, like you really meant it.

I’ve managed a little restaurant like yours. I know it’s hard to hang on to a positive outlook after a long morning shift of dealing with customers. But just know that sometimes your friendliness and courtesy go way beyond providing your customers with a pleasant café experience. You can actually lift a spirit. That’s what you did for me. I owe you thanks for a peaceful hour of reprieve in an otherwise really cruddy morning.

Sincerely,

Pepper

Chapter 18

Forty-five minutes later, I perched on the flat top of a large boulder in Mill Creek Canyon, overlooking the idyllic canyon stream. Besides one jogger and two dog walkers, I had the place to myself. I soaked up the sun, letting the confusion and frustration of the previous night evaporate in its mellow heat. I could hear the hustle and jive of chipmunks hurrying about their business on the grassy banks, and soon even that sound blended into the soothing rush of the water over creek stones. With a silent prayer for a clear mind and heart, I lay back and stared at a cloud while I sorted through the facts.

Even though it was late morning, I still hadn’t heard from Tanner. That hurt.

It hurt because I liked Tanner. A lot.

More than a lot.

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath.

“I’m in love with Tanner Graham.”

Forcing myself to say it out loud prompted my heart to give an extra thump, but my head didn’t explode. I took that as a good sign. I did a little internal poking around to see what kind of space the word
love
took up.

I felt bigger inside, in a good way, like when you wake up from a nap and the more you stretch, the better and more awake you feel.

So.

I love Tanner Graham? Yes. A witness of the truth tickled my mind.
Yes.

And I love him for all the reasons I told my dad. His loyalty and kindness and integrity. His intelligence and humor and friendship. For the way he curls my toes when he kisses me.

Heck, for the way he curls my toes just by smiling.

Does Tanner love me?

He cares for me, definitely. He wants to take our relationship to the next level, to figure out what our future together holds. That says a lot.

Why does he care for me? That was the stumper my dad had asked me, and as stupid as I felt trying to answer the question, I took another deep breath, stared back up at the cloud, and answered it anyway.

Tanner likes my sense of humor. He likes my brain. He thinks I have talent. He likes how I treat my family. He likes talking over his days with me. He likes hearing what I think about pretty much everything. He likes my testimony. He likes kissing me. A lot.

I am in no way convenient to him. He’s done his best to encourage my writing and support my goal of being a journalist.

So what’s the problem?

I sighed and sat up. He had asked if I cared more about my job than him, and it had offended me. And that was stupid because I would die a little inside if I thought his job were more important than me. It was fair for him to hope that he mattered more than the magazine.

He hadn’t even asked me to give it up. He understood that I was stuck with the column and risked losing my job if I dropped it. He didn’t like it, but he hadn’t asked me to drop it all for him. What he’d done was ask me to be honest about my feelings: did the magazine matter more than he did?

And I’d given him no answer at all. In the moment, I’d been too confused and defensive to come up with an answer, and then silence had fallen between us and had grown louder by the minute. At the moment, with my inert cell phone by my side, the silence was deafening.

I itched to snap up the phone and dial him, to bridge the gap. But I still hesitated.

Tanner wasn’t Landon. And I had changed. Had I changed enough? Because if I hadn’t, I’d end up swallowed up in Tanner before I realized it, deferring the dream I had for myself in order to make our relationship work. Tanner was worth sacrificing for, but if I lost me in all of it, we were doomed to fail.

My cell phone rang, and I snatched it up, relieved when I saw his name on the screen.

His hello was subdued.

“Did you get my messages?” I asked. “I think it was three voice mails, two texts, and an e-mail. I was going to sit outside on your doorstep this morning until you talked to me too, but then I decided to use that in case of an emergency.” I winced, hoping my joke came off as funny, not pathetic.

“I got them,” he said, sounding tired. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I’ve been trying to sort through everything.”

“I’ve been doing the same,” I said.

“Did you come up with anything yet?”

Yeah. I’m in love with you.
No way was I saying that out loud. “I keep going in circles, to tell the truth. I’m not even sure where we left things last night.”

“I know,” he said. He was quiet for a minute. Or maybe even half that, but it felt like forever. “I guess I can only speak for me. This is where I’m at. I would never ask you to give up your job. But I can’t handle you dating other guys. I’ve never thought of myself as the jealous type, but I can’t take it. I just can’t. Even knowing you don’t want to be there with them doesn’t make it better. It would take a much bigger guy than me to be okay with it, I think.”

“I get it,” I said. “I totally do. I wouldn’t like it if you were dating a ton of other girls.”

He sighed. “That’s good to know, but this is where I get stuck. Asking you to quit the column is the same as asking you to give your job up, and I can’t be that jerk. So I don’t know where to go from there. We can’t go forward as it is. There’s no going back. And that’s where I am. Kind of nowhere.”

“I’ve never told you about my past relationship—as in singular. As in only one,” I said, drawing my knees up and wrapping my free arm around them. “I was engaged. We broke up almost a year ago, and we’d been together for four years before that. I think I’m trying to sort through some of that baggage.”

There was another long silence from him. When he spoke, I could hear surprise in his voice. “I figured your relationship aversion had to come from somewhere, but I had no idea it would be on that level.”

“Does that freak you out?”

“I feel like when you’re going down the stairs and you miss a step so you end up taking two and scaring yourself a little,” he said.

“It gets worse,” I admitted. “Do you want to hear it?”

“I guess I need to,” he said.

“I was engaged to Landon Scott.”

After a beat he said, “You’re kidding.”

“No. And I spent four years being so totally wrapped up in everything he did, all the goals he had for himself, all of his plans, that I didn’t realize I’d spent almost our entire relationship out of touch with
me.
” I stood up and brushed my seat off then scooped up my bag and headed out the way I had come, depending once more on the movement to keep my mind clear. “I don’t miss that relationship,” I said. “I’m glad it ended. But I’m scared about getting lost in another relationship.”

When that met another long silence, I gritted my teeth. I hated doing this over the phone. I wanted to be able to read his face, to watch his reactions. Instead, my overactive imagination read the worst into each of his pauses.

“I don’t really know what to say,” he confessed. “You’re blowing my mind here. A four-year relationship? I’m worried
baggage
might be an understatement. How deep do those scars run, you know?” He was quiet again. “It almost doesn’t matter. We could figure that out. But then, there’s your job. I don’t see an answer. I don’t think I really have any moves here. This is kind of up to you, and that worries me because you have an easy choice to just keep your job. I wish I were okay with the Indie Girl thing. I’m not. And maybe that means I’ll have to accept that I’m the whole reason this falls apart.”

“But I—”

“I have to go,” he said. His voice was tight and hard. “There’s a call coming in from the city desk, and I need to take it.”

“Okay,” I whispered, not sure he even heard me before he hung up.

What now?

I dialed Chantelle’s number. “I need to hear your plan. It’s gotta be a million percent better than the plan I don’t have now.”

* * *

“I can’t do that.” I stared at Chantelle, appalled. I had driven from Mill Creek Canyon to Straws, a local café with a big breakfast crowd that quieted around lunch. A few customers dotted the tables inside the restaurant, and we had one of the four outside tables to ourselves.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I told you that you wouldn’t like it. But it will work. You know it will.” A half smile played around her lips at my stunned reaction.

“There is no way I’m contacting Landon for an interview,” I said.

“He’s a huge get,” she said, using the term journalists reserved for the hot interviews they all tried to land. “Everyone has access to him at the press conferences, but with his popularity in Utah right now, whoever scores an exclusive with him is going to draw a major bump in readers. Ellie will be able to sell a ton of advertising while the story generates hits, and you’re going to be her golden child if you pull it off.”

“There are a hundred problems with this plan,” I said. “I don’t know if I can get the interview, and even if I could, what if I put myself through all that and Ellie still doesn’t let me drop the column?”

“That’s why you don’t agree to the interview unless she agrees to the trade. You’ll do the exclusive with Landon, but she has to let you out of ‘Single in the City.’”

“I doubt I can score the interview,” I said. “It’s a moot point.”

“You guys haven’t talked at all since you broke up?”

I shook my head. I’d been hurt and angry and not interested in letting Landon lure me back in as his unpaid assistant/merch girl/cheerleader. “I shut him out,” I said. “I didn’t want him getting in my head again.”

“He wouldn’t agree to an interview even out of curiosity? Would he really not talk to you?”

I hesitated.

She noticed and pounced on it. “He would! You know how to get past his gatekeepers, and you know he’ll talk to you.”

“I can get to him,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he’d want to do the interview. Some people don’t like being used.”

She regarded me, her eyes shrewd and far older than her twenty-nine years. “He owes you,” she said. “After what you’ve told me about how he treated you, he owes you big time. Maybe a subtle reminder of that will be enough to get him to agree to it.”

I could read between the lines. “You’re saying I should threaten him,” I stated flatly. “I’d never air our dirty laundry. It would be an empty threat, and he’d know it.”

“Look, obviously you don’t have to do this. But for Ellie, scooping all the other papers and weeklies around here for an exclusive with Utah’s biggest celebrity would be totally worth putting the column on hiatus until she can replace you. It’s your choice.”

I slumped in my chair and stared at a few granules of sugar left behind by whoever had occupied the table before us. I pressed my finger against them to lift them from the tabletop and then brushed them onto the floor. Chantelle watched me move them a few at a time, but by the third pass, she grew impatient.

“You know this is your way out,” she said. “So I guess now it’s a question of whether you’re willing to deal with your ex to fix your job situation.”

“No. I’m not.”

Shrewd Chantelle reappeared. “Then are you willing to do it for Tanner? Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

* * *

After our lunch powwow, Chantelle returned to the office, and I called Ellie to tell her I was going to track down some information before coming back. Then I girded my loins, but only figuratively because literally doing that in public would have brought a whole new kind of headache involving complaints to the police and lots of pointing and staring.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of the
Bee.
I passed Tanner’s car, relieved that he was there and not out chasing a story of his own. I slid The Zuke into a space and pulled the key out of the ignition, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel while I girded some more. You know, figuratively. My gut told me that Chantelle’s plan would work. I knew I could probably get the interview and that once I did, Ellie would make the deal: I’d get her a Landon Scott exclusive if she let me out of the column.

But the devil was in the details. When I broke off our engagement, Landon had texted, called, and e-mailed furiously for about two weeks. When I didn’t respond, his efforts tapered off dramatically. He probably got so busy with his Hollywood whirlwind that he didn’t have more than two weeks to invest in trying to save a relationship he’d been in for
four years.
That stung. Two weeks of effort. That was it. While I truly didn’t want to talk to him, it would have been nice to know that I took longer than two weeks to forget. Maybe the girls flinging themselves at him every time he took the stage during
The It Factor
finals made it easier for him to move on.

In hindsight, the proportion made perfect sense. I struggled for a year to get over him. He was good to go in half a month. That sounded like an accurate reflection of our individual commitments to our relationship in the first place.

I so,
so
did not want to sit down with Landon for any reason.

I ran through the other options that had chased through my head since leaving Tanner the night before. I didn’t have enough credibility yet to have a real shot at another magazine. I’d start even lower than my current feeble grip on the bottom rung of
Real Salt Lake
, and I’d have to pick up a second job again to keep up with my debt. I had a sinking feeling that the stress from the extra hours would lead to resentment of Tanner and cause problems for us. I could try picking up a different full-time job and write freelance articles on the side to build my résumé before I attempted to get on with another newspaper. This was the best option—if it weren’t for the minor detail of the whole country being in a massive recession. Random full-time jobs in any industry weren’t falling out of trees. If I quit
Real Salt Lake
, I had nowhere to land. I’d torched my safety net when I’d signed my resignation letter to Mr. Handy.

Then there was the whole issue of fear. I knew intellectually that Tanner didn’t expect me to quit for him, but even if I chose to do it without any coercion from him, I was afraid I might resent him for that too. Intellect can’t always override emotion. For me, it almost never can. Thinking through the options had left me with a handful of other really bad solutions.