13
Tessa
“…and that’s why the Climb & Conquer brand embodies adventure, fitness, and, most of all, the pursuit of excellence,” Josh’s brother, Jonas, says into his microphone, and everyone packed into the massive gym applauds enthusiastically.
I’m at the grand opening for Josh and Jonas’ chain of new rock-climbing gyms, observing the festivities from a spot at the far back of their flagship Seattle location. At the moment, the Faraday twins are standing on a stage in front of an idle band, the two of them kicking off the party by telling everyone about their shared passion for climbing and their company’s inspiring mission to make the world a better place—and, honestly, after what happened last week at The Pine Box, being here among these excited, happy people on this joyous occasion feels like a balm for my downtrodden soul.
As busy as I’ve been this past week pulling this event together, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Ryan from The Pine Box—about how charismatic and honest andemotionally intelligenthe seemed to be—about how truly certainI was I’d finally met the man of my dreams—and about how totallywrong, wrong, wrongI turned out to be about him (surprise!). Talk about a girl with a defective picker! Every freaking word Ryan said, every smile he flashed me, every touch of his fingertips—and, in those last few, delicious moments, every soft kiss of his delectable lips on my cheek and ear and neck—every swirl of his tongue on the sensitive flesh under my ear—and, oh God, thatbiteon my neck—made me absolutely dizzy with desire for him. No matter what I babbled to Ryan about wanting to “take things slow,” I’m certain if we’d wound up going out on our dinner-date as planned, I would have wound up naked and spread-eagle in that man’s bed for dessert, the city-tour he’d promised me be damned.
“…a part of each person’s individual but universal quest to find the idealversion of himself...” Jonas says to the rapt crowd, eliciting enthusiastic applause.
I rub my forehead. Crap. I’ve got to stop thinking about Ryan. What’s the freaking point? As I so jarringly found out last week at The Pine Box, he has agirlfriend—a very blonde and “Extroverted Barbie” girlfriend (!) who’s my physical opposite in every way. Plus, as his charming girlfriend so eloquently informed me when she stormed into the bar, it seems Prince Charming hit on a blonde during a dinner date with her earlier that same night, the very second his raving bitch of a girlfriend got up to use the bathroom. Oh, but that con-artist-player didn’t stop there. Oh, no. He then proceeded to head out to a meat-market-bar later that same nightall by himself(yeah,sure,he was waiting for a friend who never showed up!) to hunt for yetanotherblonde to fuck behind his girlfriend’s back (and then, when no blonde presented herself, apparently decided instead to settle for hitting on the dark-haired idiot in a flight-attendant uniform).
Good God, why do men like Ryan and my ex-boyfriend, Stu, even bother having girlfriends if they’re simply going to compulsively cheat on them? I don’t get it. Do they have raging Madonna-whore complexes—they love having a good girl at home on standby while they fuck their hidden fantasies on the down-low every chance they get? Although, I must admit, Ryan’s girlfriend didn’t strike me as anything close to the Madonna by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe scratch that particular psychoanalysis.
Well, whatever the motivation for Ryan and men of his ilk, the bottom line is they’re all scumbags. It makes me physically ill remembering how Ryan so expertly wooed me that night at the bar, the same way he surely wooed the blonde in the restaurant earlier that same night. I could scream when I think about Ryan flashing that panty-melting smile at me and coaxing me to reveal more and more of myself to him (in the name of fostering “true intimacy,” of course!), not to mention the way Ryan snowed me with complete bullshit-lines like, “I’m looking for something real” and “Put you in a room with a million Extroverted Barbies and I’d go straight for you likeblancoonarrozevery time.”Asshole.
“And that’s why Climb & Conquer is all about reaching higher than you ever thought you could reach, literally and metaphorically,” Jonas says from the stage, his face aglow. “It’s about becoming better than you ever thought you could be.”
The crowd erupts into enthusiastic applause and I join them, partly because I’m hoping the physical act of clapping my palms together will somehow miraculously trigger my brain to stop thinking about Ryan from The Pine Box; and, also, even more so, because I’m genuinely inspired by Jonas’ obvious passion for what he’s saying.
After watching Jonas for a moment longer, my gaze drifts from him to his gloriously handsome brother and then grazes across the backs of all the heads in the large crowd. Oh, hey, I think the back of that one guy’s head in the middle of the pack belongs to Josh’s longtime hacker-friend, Henn.
Hey.
An idea pings my brain.
Maybe I should ask Josh if it’s okay to ask Henn to help me track down Ryan? I know it’s stupid for me to want to contact Ryan, seeing as how, one, he’s a lying cheater-player-douche, and, two, I’m the one who fled the bar without a backward glance when his girlfriend showed up and started reading him the riot act and calling me a “cunt.” But, for some reason, I haven’t been able to stop fantasizing about contacting Ryan and, at least, getting the chance to give him a piece of my mind... and also, maybe, hearing him out?
The truth is, now that I’ve had a week to process everything (I always do my best thinking after having a bit of time to process), I deeply regret not sticking around for at least a couple minutes outside the bar that night, just in case Ryan maybe came outside and wanted to talk to me. I mean, obviously, there’s nothing Ryan could have said in that moment to Febreze-away the stench of his two-timing-assholery, but, still, I can’t help wondering what hemighthave said if I’d stuck around long enough to hear it. I mean, crap, at the very least, I should have given myself the opportunity to tell the guy he’s a complete asshole, right? Maybe then I wouldn’t feel this almost desperate need to talk to Ryan again.
So, okay, that’s what I’ll do, then: I’ll ask Josh if it’s okay for me to pull Henn aside during this party and... Wait.No. Am I stupid? I can’t ask Josh for Henn’s help to find Ryan! How the heck would that conversation go?Well, Josh and Henn, there’s this guy named Ryan I met last week at The Pine Box and I’m desperate to find him and ask him if every single word out of his mouth was a lie, or only some of them. Why do I need your help to find Ryan, you ask? Oh, because Ryan never told me his phone number or last name because his girlfriend burst into the bar and started calling him a “fucking cheater” and me a “cunt” before we’d exchanged our contact info. Isn’t that awesome? Believe me, it was super-duper awesome!
Yeah, obviously, I can’t breathe a word about my encounter with Ryan to Josh and Henn.
Ah, who am I kidding? Even if I could enlist Henn’s assistance, he wouldn’t be able to find Ryan, anyway, not based on what little I know of him. What hacker, no matter how talented, could possibly find a guy named “Ryan” knowing only that he’s twenty-eight, a Taurus, has three brothers and a sister; was born and raised in Seattle, makes amazing guacamole, and can fold a fitted sheet?
“And as part of our genuine commitment to extraordinary aspiration,” Jonas continues from the stage at the front of the gym, “Climb & Conquer has identified certain designated charities we’ll be supporting with a portion of our proceeds.”
My eyes continue skimming the backs of heads in the packed crowd. The place seems to be filled with lots of twenty-something-year-old fitness types as I would have expected, but there also seems to be a surprisingly large number of families and older—
Oh my fucking God.My brain freezes mid-thought. My heart stops mid-beat.
I put my palm over my mouth.
The back of that guy’s head way over there in the middle-front of the packed audience looks like it belongs to Ryan from The Pine Box!
I clutch my chest.
Could it be?
I crane my neck, trying to get a better look—but, damn it, the crowd is too packed for me to make out the guy’s build or see if his arms are covered in tattoos.
Oh my freaking God.
It’s not a crazy thought, is it? I’m not hurtling into some sort of psychosis? I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable to think the one man on earth I’m thinking about at this very moment, the man I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this entire week, might be one of the four hundred or so people in a city of three-and-a-half million whohappensto be standing in this room right now?
I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
