Sex, Lies, and Online Dating (13 page)

For several long moments, Lucy stared at the door, reeling, her emotions and thoughts in total ruin. Her cat wove between her legs and she bent and picked him up. She took a seat at the table and buried her face against Mr. Snookums’s fur. A sob broke from her throat. How could she have fallen in love with a lie? How was that even possible? She was a smart, successful woman. She was thirty-four years old. Things like this didn’t happen in real life.

She felt so stupid.

She’d known the whole time that there had been something wrong with Quinn, but she’d made excuses and told herself it was because he was a widower. That trolling chat rooms wasn’t
really
weird. The signs had been there, but she’d ignored them.

Her fingers burrowed into Mr. Snookums’s fur, and a loving purr rattled his chest. “At least you love me, Snookie,” she cried as he licked her hand. But her cat’s love was no comfort. Not today.

She raised her gaze to Quinn’s coffee cup, then closed her eyes. Quinn hadn’t pursued her because he’d wanted a relationship with her. He hadn’t pushed to spend time with her because he’d been attracted to her. His intense gaze hadn’t had anything to do with longing or lust. He’d been watching and waiting for her to do a Lizzie Borden on him.

A hiccup lifted her aching chest, and she gave up on trying to hold back the flood. She’d fallen in love so fast, so ridiculously fast, and she felt so stupid. She could only hope that her heart would mend just as quickly.

“It all makes sense now,” Lucy cried. “All the questions about those men being killed. All the interest in whether I’d dated any of them, and I just thought he was being cautious. I excused everything because I thought we liked the same television shows!”

Two hours later, they were all feeling the buzz of alcohol and condemning all men on principle.

Maddie reached for the bottle and refilled her own glass. “Men are lying bastards.”

“Sneaky, lying bastards,” Adele added, her eyes getting as glassy as Lucy’s. “Too bad we need them.”

“Why?” Lucy asked. “Sure, they come in handy when you’ve got fifty pounds of cat food loaded into your car and you need someone to tote and fetch, but that doesn’t make up for the sheer volume of all their lies. I’ve had enough of men’s crap.”

“They cook dinner sometimes,” Clare added to the conversation as she swirled the wine in her glass. “And it is nice when they make little tables out of broken tiles.” She looked at her friends and was quick to add, “But you’re right. Men for the most part are a pain in the keister. Vibrators are a girl’s best friend.”

They all fixed their attention on Clare. On the one woman in the room who believed she’d found her soul mate the moment she’d laid eyes on him. So why was a vibrator her best friend? Perhaps all was not well in romance-ville.

“Oh, don’t you all look at me like that,” she said. “I know you girls aren’t exactly sitting around waiting for a man to give you an orgasm.”

“I’m not waiting around,” Maddie said. “But I thought you were.”

Clare took a drink of her wine and licked her top lip. “Sometimes Lonny is tired. He works really hard.”

“Making tables out of tiles?” Maddie shook her head. “Honey, if a guy is too tired to have sex, doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Yes. That he’s artistic.”

Lucy cleared her throat and shook her head slightly. As drunk as she was, she wasn’t going to let anyone tell Clare that her dream man dreamed of doing men. Clare was one of the most genuinely nice people Lucy knew. She was kind and had a huge heart, and if she wanted to pretend that Lonny wasn’t gay, that was fine with Lucy. Besides, who was she to tell anyone anything about their love life? She’d fallen in love with a man who’d only dated her because he’d thought she was a serial killer. Adele had dated a guy who kept sneaking up to her house and leaving stuff on her porch like he was some sort of double-secret knot-knot spy. Maddie was so freaky that she thought every man she met was a serial something-or-another, and she hadn’t even had a date in about four years.

Frankly, Lonny and his tile tables looked pretty damn good.

Adele sat on the couch next to Lucy and rubbed her arm. “Well, at least you didn’t know Quinn long enough to fall in love with him.”

“That would have been a disaster.”

“Good thing you don’t believe in love at first sight.”

“Yeah. Good thing,” she lied and set her glass on the table before she dropped it. A sure sign that it was time to step away from the booze.

“You know I love you,” Maddie started, which always meant trouble, “but I’ve got to say it. This fits your typical pattern of dating guys you want to rescue.”

Lucy held up one finger. “Not this time. Quinn didn’t have rescue issues, and he didn’t steal my money. He’s normal.” She frowned and felt a little confused. “Well, except that he’s a lying bastard.”

“Which just made Maddie’s point,” Adele said. “He had lying bastard issues.”

Lucy felt her forehead get all wrinkled. Was there such a thing as “lying bastard issues”? “I don’t want to talk about men anymore. It’s just too depressing.”

“I know what we can talk about.” Adele sat up a little straighter. “I need help plotting the next scene of my book.”

Lucy groaned inwardly. Plotting with Adele meant that you came up with suggestions and she never used them.

“Now might not be the best time,” Maddie said, bless her neurotic soul. “I’m having a really hard time concentrating.” Then she turned to Lucy and asked, “Do you really buy fifty pounds of cat food at a time?”

“I think it might be more like forty.”

“No wonder Snookie is so damn fat.”

“He’s not fat. He’s husky.”

Adele laughed at that. “Husky is just a nice PC way of saying he should push away from the cat dish. If he were a man, he’d have to buy his clothes at a big and tall store.”

“You need to put Snookie on a diet.”

“I’ve tried,” Lucy said through a sigh. “But if I don’t get up and feed him when he wants food, he bites my feet.”

Clare looked up from inspecting her fingernail and sort of listed to one side. “Did you know that Costco sells coffins online?”

Obviously it was time to sober her friends up. Time for dinner. “No way,” Lucy said and reached for the phone.

“You’re kidding.”

“Do you have to buy two at a time?”

She pulled into a parking slot and washed down the last of her burger with a swig of Diet Coke. Yeah, she knew. What was the point of a Diet Coke when she’d just scarfed about two thousand calories and one hundred grams of carbs and fat?

Who cared?

She stuck her brown Coach hat on her head and climbed out of her car. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, spring flowers were beginning to bloom. The world was moving on, and she felt so empty inside. Even after stuffing herself with French fries. It just didn’t seem right.

She moved into the post office and opened her PO box. It was crammed with mostly junk mail, which she tossed in the trash. She shoved five reader letters in her purse and headed back home. When she got there, she checked her answering machine, but her voice mail was empty.

“I’ll call you,” Quinn had said, proving yet again that he was a big fat liar. Not that she would actually pick up and talk to him if he did call, but he should at least grovel on her machine.

Lucy yawned and tossed her hat on the kitchen table. She knew she should march her butt upstairs and get to work, or clean her house, or do something productive. Instead she fell into bed and curled up with Mr. Snookums.

She rolled to her side and scratched her cat’s belly as her thoughts inevitably turned to Quinn. Everything he’d ever said to her, everything she believed about him, was as tangible as smoke. Did he actually have a family? Had he really broken his arm showing off for the neighbor girl? Was his wife really dead? Or was Millie an ex-wife or a former girlfriend? Or, God forbid, he was married or in a relationship. Was his name even Quinn, or was that, too, a lie?

Just like everything he’d said, everything he’d made her feel was a lie. It might have felt real. Even now it felt real. It burned inside her chest like it was real, but it wasn’t. She’d kicked men out of her life for various reasons, but at least she’d known those men. Quinn was different. She’d fallen in love with a man she hadn’t even known. A man who’d touched and kissed her because it had been his job. Oh, she knew that he’d been attracted to her. She’d felt the proof of that against her thigh and held it in her hand, but that didn’t mean he cared anything for her. That just meant he was a man.

Mr. Snookums purred and licked her hand. Then, in an effort to make it all better, he pulled out all the stops and head-butted her chin. She wished it were that easy. That a loving head-butt from her cat could take away the pain in her chest, but it only made things worse by reminding her that she was probably going to die all alone with no one but her cat. Her biggest fear was that Snookums would blow through his cat food and turn his hungry eyes on her corpse.

She thought about getting out of bed and getting to work. Instead she took one of the sleeping pills she usually saved for stressful times in her life. Her heart ached and her head pounded and she wanted to sleep until it all went away. She promised God that if he would just help her out with the hangover, she’d never drink red wine again.

She fell asleep until the next morning, and when she woke, she instantly noticed three things. One: She was still dressed in the clothes she’d had on the day before. Two: God had been good to her and her hangover was blessedly gone. Three: Her heart still ached. She wasn’t over Quinn yet. Maybe she should have asked God to heal her heart instead of her head. The only consolation, although not a big one, was the fact that she would never have to see Quinn again.

Lucy changed into her bathrobe, then padded into the kitchen and made coffee. While she waited for it to brew, she fed Mr. Snookums and grabbed the reader mail out of her purse. Three of them had the same typed address and Boise postmark. The others were from California and Michigan. The reader from California praised Lucy’s talent and wrote that she was looking forward to her next book. Lucy set that letter aside to be filed with the other readers whom she planned on sending a note and a bookmark. The writer of the Michigan letter wasn’t so praiseworthy. He pointed out that the trajectory of a bullet’s path in her second novel was physically impossible. He’d drawn a diagram and asked if she did research. Lucy filed that letter in the trash.

She took the three remaining letters with her to the counter and poured herself a cup of coffee. She checked the date on the postmarks and opened the oldest, which had been sent mid-February.

Lucy took a drink of her coffee. For legal reasons, she did not read people’s unpublished manuscripts. She was going to have to write to this person and tell him or her not to go to the expense of sending it. She looked at the envelope sitting on the counter and noticed there wasn’t a return address. Weird.

At first I thought I would write a book about these dirty men, but I lack discipline. And really, the odds of getting published are so slim. So, I’ve decided to live it instead.

Lucy straightened, and she felt her forehead get tight.