I spent the weekend alone, watching things I’d put in my Netflix queue.
In a way, I both dreaded and looked forward to Monday morning equally. I knew I couldn’t skip work, no matter how badly I wanted to avoid looking like something was wrong and having Kevin ask me about it. The flipside of the coin was that I’d have something aside from streaming movies to focus on, and not think about how stupid I’d been to go that far with Max.
Kevin called shortly after I opened the office and told me he’d be out all day. I breathed a sigh of relief. I could ease back into my work for a day.
I finally got in touch with Krystal when eating my lunch salad at my desk.
“How was your weekend?” she asked.
“Okay.”
“What happened with Max?”
The floodgates opened and I told her the whole story.
When I was finished she said, “What an ass! See, this is what I was telling you to be ready for.”
“I know, I know.” I didn’t want a lecture.
“And he didn’t call you all weekend?”
“Nope.”
“Ah, forget him,” she said. “I know you have a working relationship with him and all, but just keep it at that.”
I didn’t say anything.
Krystal said, “So…was it good?”
I sighed. “Best ever.”
She chuckled. “Okay, so you just chalk it up as the best sex ever and move on. Gotta keep moving in this town.”
“Speaking of which, what were you doing all weekend?”
“Oh, God. I met these two guys…” She went on to tell me the story of spending the weekend with two men, complete with the raunchy details of her first threesome.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said.
“Nope.”
“Damn. And here I was thinking you were working and I just kept missing you or something.” It wasn’t really what I thought. How would I have missed her between shifts? I was starting to figure out that Krystal had some kind of wild and quite unique lifestyle. And I was starting to puzzle together that her lifestyle didn’t involve working in a restaurant and going to auditions. But I didn’t want to pry. Not yet, anyway.
We didn’t talk any more about it for the rest of the week. I only saw her on Wednesday night, anyway, and just for a few minutes as I was heading off to bed when she got home.
I called my parents for a few minutes on Tuesday to let them know I was doing better, working, and everything else was going fine. Grace happened to be there when I called and we talked for a few minutes.
She lowered her voice at one point and said, “I ran into Chris at the gas station.”
Hearing his name sent a shiver down my spine and brought back the imagery of the dream I’d had over the weekend.
“I don’t even want to know.”
“Well,” she said, “he wanted to know about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
There was a pause. Total silence.
“Grace? What did you tell him?” I asked, a stern tone in my words.
“I told him you moved to California.”
“Uh huh. And?”
I heard a door close, and then it sounded like wind wooshing across the phone. She’d gone outside to get out of earshot of our parents.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it was stupid. I just wanted him to know that you were doing fine, and even better, without him. I wanted to make him feel like crap.”
I gritted my teeth. “If he calls here—”
“He’s not going to find out where you work. LA is huge, right?”
I leaned back in my chair. I didn’t want to argue about this. “You still shouldn’t have told him anything.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“But,” I said, “I do want that asshole to know I’m not crushed without him. It’s kind of my only sense of…victory or something, you know?”
We got past that little issue and she caught me up on the baby and other things going on in our little hometown. For the first time, and rather strangely, I felt a little tug of nostalgia. Not quite homesickness. Not yet, anyway. I figured it was simply an easy fantasy escape coping mechanism to deal with the fact that I hadn’t really adjusted to the hustle and bustle of LA and Hollywood yet. Kind of a yearning for the slower, simpler times.
NINE
There was nothing slow or simple about the way the rest of the week played out.
When I got home Wednesday after work, I found two dozen red roses on my doorstep, along with a card that said: Sorry I’ve been so busy. Thinking of you and want to see you again soon. I’ll call. – M
My initial thought was gratitude that he’d had the sense not to send it to my office.
My second thought was how to tell him I just wasn’t ready for something so intense, especially something fraught with so much possibility of letdowns.
I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t ready to date. Nor was I ready for a fuck buddy. And I really wasn’t—and might never be—ready for a high-intensity relationship with someone like Max.
My self-esteem kept chiming in and telling me I wasn’t pretty enough, rich enough, or sophisticated enough for someone like Max. The really depressing thing was that I felt like I was only good enough for someone like Chris Cooper. He’d done a real number on me, and while I had been able to break away from it for a while and enjoy the powerful seduction of Max, I was still drawn back to that self-defeating belief.
It seemed like a nearly impossible thing to admit to him, but there was a part of me that figured once he heard even half the story he would probably be gone in the blink of an eye.
So be it.
He called around 8 p.m. that night. I was putting some clothes in the washer when my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and let it go to voicemail. I heard no voicemail alert, and then the phone rang again.
I took a deep breath and answered it.
He said, “Hey, babe.”
Babe? I might have taken that as a cute term of endearment had the situation been different, and had I not talked myself into this frenzy of doubt over being his latest score.
“Max, I—”
“Before you say anything, I’m on the way over.”
“What?”
“I’m about ten minutes away from your place. Thought I’d stop by.”
“I wish you’d called before,” I said.
“I just did, but you didn’t answer.”
“You know what I mean.”