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I WAS FRAZZLED AS HELL, and when I sat down at the booth in the little restaurant/bar area of the hotel, I was still shaking. I needed to talk to someone, even if it wasn’t about what had just gone on. I just needed to talk. To try to reset my brain into being normal. Anything other than the creeping anger and fear that had filled my body since I’d walked out of the coffee shop and proceeded to be followed all the way back to the hotel.
At first it had just been the one guy. I thought I might be able to take him. Then he was joined by another. And another. When I got into the parking lot of the hotel, my only solace was that it was still technically daylight, and a bunch of windows faced the parking lot. Surely, they wouldn’t try to do something when they were so visible. Right?
One look at their eyes when I heard my name and turned toward them told me that was untrue. These were men who didn’t mind being seen. Because they would keep their cool in a situation that other people wouldn’t. Because they had done it many times before.
My fingers were still jittering on the table when Lila’s last text came in. She was on her way down.
I didn’t even know what I was doing asking her to dinner. It was probably the wrong kind of message to send, but I had typed it before thinking. I needed someone other than Kevin to talk to. Kevin wasn’t the guy to let know that anyone was threatening me, ever, unless I wanted to start a war.
As the catcher, he was fiercely protective of his pitchers, and as my long-time friend, it was doubly so for me. If I had told him about what happened out there, he likely would have changed into boots, put on gloves, and told me it was time to go find those guys and put a hurt on them. They would have killed him before he had a chance, but he would try. No way any of them would want to get into a fistfight with a man that looked like a mountain. They would just shoot him.
The problem with all that was Kevin would have no idea what he was getting into. I had spent our entire lives trying to keep my parents—and the kind of life they lived—away from everyone. Kevin knew they weren’t great parents, and his folks seemed to know about them in a passing sort of way that normal people knew about drug addicts and drunks. But they didn’t know about Dad and his constant desire to get involved in money-making schemes. About his flirtation with biker gangs and mobs.
About how, as Mom put it, absolutely stupid he was.
Not that I thought it would make Kevin think any differently of me, not now, anyway. Not as adults. But he wouldn’t take it seriously enough. He would think he could handle it.
A waiter came by the table, clearly non-plussed at having someone sit in the booths at this time of evening rather than hang out at the bar, and I ordered a beer. The eye roll that followed before he asked for my ID was enough to temporarily make me not think about the terror of the few minutes before and instead want to toss him through a window. After I gave him my ID and he handed it back, I told him I had someone joining me, and the visible slump of his shoulders was enough that if I were a petty man would have eliminated any chance of a tip.
As the waiter walked away, Lila appeared at the elevator, coming out of it and looking toward the bar area with a smile. I felt my chest tighten as she walked toward me, and I stood. The pull toward her was strong, so strong that I didn’t even process what I was doing until my arms were wrapped around her in a tight hug that lingered far too long.
But, as I noticed, she wasn’t trying to break the embrace either.
“Good to see you looking better,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“Yeah, I feel great,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was just saying that or not, but regardless, she looked great.
Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail like she often had it while playing or studying, but she was wearing a breezy dress that showed off more of her chest than I was used to seeing. It was clearly the kind of thing that someone wears to the beach, maybe over a bikini, though it was appropriate for what we were doing too.
Which was dinner. Just dinner. I had to repeat that to myself. Just dinner.
We sat down, and the waiter returned with my beer and then eyed Lila suspiciously.
“May I see your ID?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m not drinking,” she said. “I am over twenty-one, but I’ll just have a water, thanks.”
“Of course,” he said, and I wondered if it was dripping with sarcasm or disappointment that the bill wouldn’t be higher.
“Don’t want a cocktail or anything? My treat,” I said.
“No, no, thank you,” she said. “Need to rehydrate. Besides, this is my treat, not yours.”
“I don’t think so,” I began, but she had already pulled a menu up and shushed me.
“You came and took care of me while I was sick. Least I can do is buy you a meal. Now do you know if the burgers are any good?”
I smiled.
“I heard they’re great. Kevin said so anyway,” I said.
“Kevin seems to know his food,” she said. “When I met him, he was so much of a frat boy, but have you noticed how he’s turning into a grown up all of a sudden?”
“I have noticed that,” I said. “His wine evenings are my favorite new wrinkle of his.”
“I actually smelled something like curry coming from his room earlier,” she said. “Smelled delicious.”
“Wait, you went up to Kev’s room?” I asked, cocking my head to one side.
“Oh, yeah, that,” she said. “I went up to say thank you for last night. You weren’t there, but Kevin was. He stuck his head out and talked to me for a minute.”
“Ahh,” I said.
“Hey, are you okay?” she asked.
I froze.
“What?”
“It’s just that your hands... you’re tapping on the table.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down at my fingers, which indeed were doing a Billy Joel impression on the table. I shoved them down in my lap and tried to put on a smile. “Yeah, I’m just amped up over some stuff.”
I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her about my parents. About how they had done this all my life, and now it was just escalating. Just when I thought that, as an official adult, I wouldn’t have to deal with their bullshit anymore, it was just getting worse. That the men tonight had really freaked me out, and the things they said... I wasn’t going to be able to forget them any time soon.
“Look, you don’t have to say anything. I understand,” she said.
“What?” I asked, confused yet again. I felt like I was stumbling backwards in this conversation, unable to get a strong foothold with everything else racing through my mind. Not the least of which was how soft her skin looked, and my desperate attempt to not look directly into the center of her chest. How that clearly defined Y-shape where her breasts met seemed so... lickable.
“I get it,” she said. “I really do. Last night was a mistake.”
My stomach dropped, and it felt like a hot rock had been slipped down inside.
“A mistake?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice rising a pitch like she was trying to convince me but wasn’t entirely all that sure herself. “A mistake. I should have just let you go back to your room earlier. It was really stupidly selfish of me to want your company like that, and I don’t want you to feel weird about it at all. You were just helping a sick friend not feel so pitiful.” She was smiling, but there was something else behind her expression.
“Yeah,” I muttered.
“Star will understand,” she said. There it was. That was what this was all about. Star.
My girlfriend.
“Right,” I said.
“I mean, she knows we are friends,” she continued, her eyes locked firmly on the menu. “We’ve been friends since you started tutoring me. No big deal. And you know how she is, all hippie-like. She will understand us falling asleep was just two friends zoning out. No different than all three of us doing that on the couch back at home. That’s what I’m going to tell her when I call her later. But really, she won’t mind, I don’t think. And if she does, I’ll let her know it’s on me. I was the one who kept you up late just to take care of my pitiful, sick ass.”
I was confused. And kind of angry.
“Wait, have you spoken to Star?”
She looked up from the menu for just a second, catching my eyes and then looking back at it as she flipped it over to the dessert side.
“Sort of,” she said. “She’s sent me a few messages. I sent a few back earlier, but you know how it is. Time zones.”
“Right,” I said.
Time zones. I wasn’t entirely sure where she was, but wherever it was, she’d had all day to contact me and hadn’t. She hadn’t contacted me in a long while. Her supposed boyfriend.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“France,” Lila said. “Some chateau her friend got them through some family member, I think. I honestly kind of tuned out the story, but you know how Star is. Life just kind of hands her these awesome things, and she just goes along with it and doesn’t really appreciate it.” She paused for a moment and then looked sheepish. “That was mean. I shouldn’t talk about my best friend like that.”
“It’s fine if it’s true,” I said.
She shrugged.
“Anyway, she’s lying around on a beach mostly, hanging out with some friends.”
Something in the way she said that felt like there was more to the story than she was saying. Like perhaps there was more to the friends she was hanging out with that bothered Lila. I knew it had to be at least a little difficult that Lila viewed Star as her best friend when it was very clear that Star was incapable of having a best friend for herself. Whichever friend she was around at that moment was her best friend. Whoever interested her the most at that moment was her best friend.
And currently, that was probably someone on a beach in France.
It certainly wasn’t Lila. Or me, for that matter.
“Who did she go there with, do you know?” I asked, trying to pry a bit. I felt like I was entitled to at least a little bit of information considering we were technically dating.
“Amber?” she said. “I don’t really know. Like I said, I kind of checked out when she went on about the details. You should just call her. But when you do, just wait until I’ve had a chance to talk to her about last night before you do. I think it would be better coming from me so you don’t have to feel awkward about it.”
“Okay,” I said, unconvinced.
“Seriously, just let me do it. It will be better that way. There’s nothing for us to feel ashamed about. It’s okay. We’re just friends. We were just hanging out. But it can be weird to talk about when one person is so far away, and I know how to talk to her. It’ll be better if I do it.”
She was smiling still, but I could see that whatever it was behind the smile was eating at her.
I swallowed it all as the waiter came back. The bikers, the threats, Star, France, the way Lila’s body looked incredible inside the dress, all of it. I shoved it down as far as I could. Nodding, I looked down at the menu and chose something at random as the waiter began talking. I didn’t hear a word of it, but I didn’t think I needed to. He was mostly talking to Lila, anyway.
To her chest, anyway.
“I’ll have the rodeo burger,” I said when his eyes reluctantly floated back over to me. “And another beer. Keep them coming, actually.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, straightening up and rolling his eyes again. If he did it one more time, I might just put him through a window.
I looked back at Lila, who grinned as she sipped her water through a straw. And I couldn’t fight the thought going through my mind that I had never been jealous of a straw before.
