“You need a new guy,” Matty says, pointing at me with his drink in hand. “I’m going to get Eric to hook you up with one of his friends.”
“You don’t want to date any of Eric’s friends,” his father, Frank, says flatly.
“They’re not that bad,” Matty says.
Frank snorts. “None of them have jobs.”
“Now, that’s not true,” Matty’s mother, Alice, says. “One ofthem is a DJ. And that other boy, James, he’s—what do you call it?—a social media influencer.”
“Neither of those are jobs,” Frank says.
“Hunter tried to be an influencer once,” Heather chimes in.
Hunter groans and covers her mouth with his hand. “She’s drunk,” he says. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
Everyone laughs, and I sit back a little in my chair. I feel—odd. Sort of off-balance, but not in a bad way. At the end of the dinner, Mrs. Costa asks for my phone number and tells me she’s going to call to check in on me, and Alice and Frank tell me they’re going to be at the last race and that we need to have dinner again, and Matty squeezes my shoulder and tells me he’s going to set me up with some hot guy he knows, and it’s all just so—
“You’re smiling,” Heather says, nudging my arm. Hunter’s already gone back to their hotel room, but Heather insisted on walking me back to mine.
I shrug. “That was fun.”
“It was,” she agrees. She threads her arm in mine as we near the hotel. “I’m proud of you, babe.”
“Yeah, well. It’s just one race.”
“I don’t just mean the race. Though you’re definitely going to win the next one.”
I hesitate. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I do.” She rises on her toes and kisses my cheek. “This year is going to end on a good note. I can feel it.”
I crack a smile. “Maybe.”
“Definitely.” She grins at me. “Now c’mon, let’s go.”
“You’re coming up?”
“Duh. I’m not going to let you sink back into a sulk after we’re gone.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Heather laughs. “Let’s go, Keeping. I’m thinking minibar snacks and a movie. Sound good?”
That off-balance feeling comes back, and this time, I recognize it as happiness. “Yeah.” I smile at her. “Sounds great.”
19
Color
I used to think that, before Jacob, my life was colorless. When I was with him, everything was brighter, and better, and it never occurred to me that I could find that brightness anywhere else. I put Jacob up on the highest shelf and withdrew even more from the people around me in the process.
Now, Jacob is gone—has been, for almost twelve weeks now—but somehow the world is starting to fill with color again. Mrs. Costa calls me once a week. Matty’s mother, Alice, calls every few days; his father, Frank, texts even more often. He works as an investment broker for some multimillion-dollar firm, and he’s helping me invest some of the money that’s been sitting uselessly in my bank account. Heather and Matty, though, are my constants. I never had a best friend before. Now, suddenly, I have two of them.
It’s a different kind of intimacy than I had with Jacob. I wanted him so badly, and I was so scared of losing him, that I never pushed him when he disappointed me. I hid all my negative feelings from him whenever I could, all my worries and doubts and fears. But Heather and Matty have already seen me at my worst.I trust Heather implicitly, and Matty speaks so frankly about everything, it’s impossible to lie to him. He was right when he said he was intuitive as hell. He always seems to know when I’m missing Jacob, or when I’m worrying about things, and he’s so relentlessly positive, it’s hard to stay down when he’s around.
I win the second to last race of the season, putting me only four points behind Mahoney for the championship. If I can beat him by more than four points in the final race, I’ll win the title.
Heather and Matty spend every day leading up to it with me.
