Seattle Girl (18 page)

Dillon was cocky, and a daredevil — like he thought he was immune to ever getting hurt. I heard that sometimes he went kayaking alone in the middle of night when the wind was up. And of course, although people didn’t come right out and say it, I caught wind that there might be some pretty heavy drug activity as well. Not that I was going to judge him without finding out the truth however.

The more he opened up to me from behind the bar, I started to see more and more about him that was funny, and sweet and insecure. I was letting myself fall for Dillon.

No matter the consequences, I was a slave to my heart.

* * *

I rattled off my drink order for the large party in the back room and Dillon said, “You’re getting pretty good at this.” He lined up glasses and started filling them.

“Thanks.” I was pleased he had noticed my cocktail waitressing acumen. Ready to know more about him, I blurted out, “So, tell me. What’s your big dream?”

He didn’t look up at me, but the corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Getting a little personal now, aren’t you?”

Maybe I should have backed off, but I could tell by the tone of his voice that he liked where I was going. “Well, since I’m guessing you don’t plan on working here forever…” We both looked up at Kirk on the other side of the bar.

Dillon laughed softly, but not unkindly. Opening his mouth, and then shutting it, he looked up at me as if he was trying to figure out whether or not he could trust me. I guess he decided I was on his team, because he finally said, “Actually, I’m planning on going to film school.”

“Wow. That’s awesome.” I was really impressed. He was sexy. He was artistic. And best of all, he was into me.

I was in heaven.

He un-corked a bottle of Merlot. “I was gonna go last year, but my girlfriend…”
 
Mid-sentence he stopped talking and I realized he was finished with my drink order and one of the other waitresses was waiting for hers.

Immensely frustrated that we had been interrupted at such a crucial point in out conversation, I loaded the drinks onto my tray and headed over to the table to deliver them, all the while wondering when the hell I was going to be able to get Dillon to open up again like that.

The rest of the night, I went out of my way to make it perfectly clear to Dillon that my interest in him had changed from purely platonic to something so much more. I upped my flirting to amazing new highs. I made sassy comments about the customers in the bar. I let my fingers gently rub against his as I took my orders off of the bar.

And in his own quiet way, he did the same. I’m not sure how I managed to get drink orders taken and delivered, given that I was totally focused on everything that Dillon said and did each time I went to the bar. Ya know how you’re driving and your mind is working on a problem, and then when you finally get to your destination you can’t remember any of the trip?

It was just like that.

We both worked until closing, and after calculating my take I went into the back room to change out of my uniform. Sandy and I were the only servers left by then. Saturday night was, after all, not a particularly popular shift if you wanted to have a social life. She was all packed up and ready to leave, but was sitting on a stool smoking a cigarette, clearly waiting to talk to me.

“Looking forward to your day off?”

I was uncomfortable with the additional advice I thought might be headed my way and was desperate to stave it off with small talk. But she would have none of that.

“Be easy on him Georgia.”

I stopped half-way through taking off my left shoe, and looked at her with my mouth hanging slightly agape.

She blew out a ring of smoke. “I’m not blind, you know.” She picked up her bag and headed for the door. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

I grunted something that I hoped would pass as a response. She was a hell of a lot more sure than I was that something was going to happen between me and Dillon. Not only had he not even asked me out yet, but he hadn’t even hinted at the possibility of being alone together. Besides, shouldn't she be worried about him being easy on me and not the other way around? I was the innocent one, wasn't I?

I wasn't surprised to see him waiting for me by the front door when I stepped out of the backroom.

“I’m closing up tonight. You got everything?”

I nodded and stepped out into the cool night air and he locked the doors. Alone in the parking lot, we became really coy with each other all of a sudden. Not because he was engaged and was suddenly getting a conscience and not because I knew he was engaged and was suddenly getting a conscience.

It was simply that neither one of us knew the right move to make next.

What do you say to the person you’re falling for? Do you reach for them or do you wait for them to reach for you?

“So, Georgia,” he said, looking more nervous than I had ever seen him. “You want to go for a walk or something?”

It felt a little bit like déjà vu from earlier in the week with Max, but I shook off that sensation. I told myself that if I was ever going to experience true love, I needed to stop being so afraid of fucking up all the time, so I forced the memory of Max and Steve and Lola and Kyle out of my head. Hopefully being with Dillon would forever purge them from my mind and heart.

I nodded. “Sure. I’ve got about an hour before I need to head over to the radio station.”

I was trying to act nonchalant about the whole thing, but my heart felt like it was going to pound right out of my chest.

We walked side by side for several minutes in silence. But given that I’m a talker by nature, I couldn’t help myself from asking the very question I should be leaving alone. “So, you’ve got a fiancée right?”

He glanced up at me from underneath his absurdly long lashes. Why do men always get the perfect lashes, whereas I always have to curl mine and they still never look just right?

Anyway, Dillon said, “Yeah,” and then tried to act like there was nothing left to say.

But I wasn’t going for it. “I take it things aren’t going that great with her?”

He sort of half-smiled, I’m assuming at my immense and unflagging nerve.

Or maybe he was just wishing I would shut up.

“We’ve been together for, like, ten years. And we’ve been engaged for five. We’ve been talking about splitting up.”

“You have?”

I didn’t want to sound too overjoyed about his impending break-up. But I was. Completely over-fucking-joyed.

“Yeah.”

No doubt about it, Dillon was a man of few words. But at least he didn’t call me baby every three seconds.

In any case, I was willing to let him get away with his crappy answer, because I felt like I already knew everything I needed to know. He and his honey were breaking up, so it was perfectly alright for me to swoop in and pick him up before anyone else got her hands on him.

Out on the beach, in front of the Taco Stand which had shut down for the night, he grabbed me and we went for each other like starved dogs. His kisses were pretty hot. No, scratch that. They were really hot. I felt his erection pressing against my stomach and felt satisfaction well up inside of me.

Georgia Fulton was a wanted woman, thank you very much.

But as we were groping each other, I felt something funny on the inside of his arm.

I ran my fingers from the inside of his elbow to half-way down his wrist. “What are these from?”

He had a whole bunch of little marks puckered up on his skin, and they were just slightly red.

He said, “It doesn’t matter,” and as he bent down and licked the corner of my mouth, where my upper and lower lips connected, I let it slide. But I was bound and determined to find out what was wrong with his skin.

After all, if I was going to be his new girlfriend, he wouldn’t have to be embarrassed about a weird skin condition.

* * *

That night I scrapped my original idea for my show–What Are The Worst Pick-up Lines You’ve Ever Heard?–and went with the question that had been dogging my heels for the past couple of days.

“Good evening and welcome to Seattle Girl with Georgia Fulton. As always, us girls may be talkin’ trash, but we always wanna know what’s on the mind of all you boys out there, so call in, one and all, and we’ll have a nice little chat.”

“For tonight, my question is this:
 
Have any of you ever been the other woman?
 
And what if the guy you’re seeing says he and his wife, fiancée, or even girlfriend, are on the verge of breaking up?
 
Does that make it easier?”

The phone lines immediately lit up. “Looks like this is a popular topic. Our phone lines are jammed!
 
Let’s see, who have we got on Line 1?”

“Hey Georgia, my name’s Julie and you’ve really touched a nerve with this one.”

“Hi Julie. Thanks for being a part of Seattle Girl. So, talk to me about your raw nerves.”

“I had been dating this guy for, like, five years. We were talking about getting married and buying a house together. And then one day, I get this phone call from some girl who says she’s looking for my boyfriend. Turns out he told her I was just his roommate.”

“Scum,” I said.

“No kidding. Anyway, even when I told her that he was already taken, she didn’t seem to care. She said something like, ‘Well, he sure doesn’t seem taken to me,’ and then hung up on me.”

“Did you confront him?”

I could hear her sigh into the phone. “This is going to sound sort of sad, but I didn’t, not at first anyway. I guess I was hoping there was some sort of mix up. You know, like the girl called the wrong house and our boyfriends both happened to have the same name.”

“Are you still with him?”

She snorted. “No way. We were out to dinner one night and his girlfriend, who I’m guessing had enough of his bullshit too, totally confronted him about being such a two-timing, lying bastard.”

“Wow. That must have been intense.”

“It was. But you know the funny thing was if it hadn’t been for his girlfriend spying on us and getting in his face, I’d probably still be with the bastard. Pretty sick huh?”

“Yeah, pretty sick,” I said, but really I was thinking about myself.

I mean, what the hell was I even thinking about getting involved with someone with a fiancée?

To put it bluntly, what kind of skank does something like that?
 

And was I destined to be the stalker girl in the restaurant?

* * *

Over what was becoming a regular morning meeting for my roller-coaster love-life updates, I filled Diane and Seth in on what had happened with Dillon the previous evening after work, while trying to keep my mind off of my disturbing on-air conversation.

“And then all of a sudden we were totally making out. I swear to god, when I told Sandy and the other girls at work I was going to have him, I was like, ‘Oh shit, what have I just gotten myself into? What if he’s not even interested?’ I hadn’t expected it to happen so fast, you know?”

“Sounds like he was pretty damn interested to me,” Seth said. “And it sure looks like our little Georgia Fulton knows how to work her thang!”

Feeling immensely cocky, I said, “If people could only see what a sex goddess I’ve become, they would be so impressed. I am no longer the girl who hid behind her glasses in high school. I am no longer the girl who barely managed to get asked to the prom by a geek in her math class. Take a look at a woman who sees what she wants and then pounces on it, devouring it whole.”

Diane kindly let me finish spouting off about how great I was without smacking me.

“I need you to sprinkle whatever sex-goddess fairy dust you’re using onto me. I’m so out of practice that I’m going to need to sign up for lessons soon.”

Seth and I made soothing noises, which she waved away in her haughty way. “I’ve got nobody,” she insisted.

“You’ve got us,” I protested.

She rolled her eyes. “But do either of you want to do me?”

Seth quickly piped in with a “No.”

“Do either of you want to pay my bills and set me up in style?”

This time Seth threw in a “Hell no.”

“See. I’ve got nobody. At this point I could walk into a room stark naked and no one would care.”

I snorted. “If you did that you’d have ten proposals of marriage before you even had time to get names.”

“And you’d probably get cast in a porno, too,” Seth said.

Diane glared at him and pursed her lips together. “You are not helping, Seth.”

“Maybe,” I said, hesitating a little because I knew she wasn’t going to like what I had to say, “maybe you’re going after the wrong kind of guy.”

Diane dropped her chin down and glared at me hard. “How so?”

I held up my hands as if to back off and gave Seth a look that said, “Save me!” which he nimbly ignored. But I knew Diane wouldn’t let me get away with starting something and not finishing it.

“Well, you know how you always go for the clean cut rich guy?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She was looking angrier and angrier. “What do you mean why?” she spat at me.

I sighed. I hadn’t meant to go and make Diane mad at me. But I was doing a lovely job of it, wasn’t I?
 
Thank God Seth stepped in right then.

“Georgia might have a point, Diane.”

She examined her perfectly manicured and moisturized hands. “So now you’re going to gang up on me too?”

He shrugged. “Look, it’s not exactly a bombshell that all of the guys you date are self-satisfied, macho dicks.”

I could tell she wanted to argue with him, but was finding it impossible to come up with one single date or boyfriend that didn’t aptly fit the description ‘macho dick’.

Her shoulders slumped forward. “Okay, you’re right, they’re all assholes. I don’t know why I always go for that kind of guy,” she said in an uncharacteristic whine.

Seth scratched his chin. “What does your dad do again?”

Diane turned on him. “Don’t you dare go all Freudian on me.”

But Seth wasn’t nearly as scared of Diane as I was. “He’s a lawyer, right?”

“Not another word,” she warned him.

Realizing that I needed to diffuse the massive Diane bomb that was about to go off, or I’d pay the price in days of silent treatment at home, I abruptly changed the subject to a question I’d been meaning to ask.