“I don’t even want to get up to use the phone.” Carmela stretched.
“I can wait.” Hailey looked over at Alex, thinking she was awfully quiet.
“I’ll do it in a minute. What do you think you want?” Alex was thinking of something light because they’d had a buffet breakfast.
“A double bacon cheeseburger,” Carmela said.
Hailey laughed. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah,” Carmela answered. “I’m famished.”
“You ate so much at breakfast.” Hailey had indulged in a stack of pancakes, but Carmela had gone back for seconds and had one of everything offered.
“I can’t imagine packing away that much food.” Alex got up and went inside the room to call for room service. After confirming with Hailey what she wanted, she placed the order and went back out on the balcony.
“I could stay here forever if I could afford it,” Hailey said after a few minutes of silence.
Carmela snorted. “Yeah, if we didn’t have to go back to our jobs in about two weeks.”
Alex thought about how long it had been since she’d last seen Grant. It was in July, which meant she hadn’t seen him for about three weeks, and the last time they’d been together was over a month ago. She really missed him, and that felt ridiculous. She didn’t know him.
She heard the knock on the room’s door and got up to accept the food delivery. The other two joined her in the room and they took it out to the balcony to eat. Alex really did need the time with the girls. They spent a lot of time together anyway, but getting away and focusing on themselves felt like a good way to renew the spirit. Pretty soon school would be starting and they would have to deal with new students, fighting off germs, spending their own money on school supplies, and a myriad of planning meetings. Late August and early September were the busiest times for Alex, and she worried that she would find herself without any extra time to spend trying to cultivate a relationship with the man she craved but was basically a stranger.
The time at the resort flew by as any good time tends to do. Alex said goodbye to her friends as they dropped her off and went inside to begin the task of unpacking and doing her laundry. She was lucky enough to have a stackable washer/dryer combo in her apartment, making it much easier to get her chore done. She went through her mail and then looked over her calendar for the first meeting of the year. She had just over two weeks before she had to get serious about work again.
So she made a plan. Just like the girls told her, she decided she wouldn’t approach Grant looking for a quickie like she’d done before. The only way she knew how to get in contact was to find him at the shop, but she wouldn’t pull any tricks or ask for work she didn’t need. She would merely ask to talk to him and see what happened after that.
And that saying, the best-laid plans often go to waste was entirely too true. He wasn’t there when she went, and she was beginning to feel like a stalker. She refused to go back and run the risk of missing him again. Defeated, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with herself. It would be desperate for her to go there every day and watch for him to show up. The odds were in her favor; he’d have to show up, eventually. But she still had some pride left.
So she did what she normally did. She lived her life; she went out for dinner with her aunt and Carmela, she called her parents in Montana, and she worked on her lesson plans for the first quarter of the year. She cleaned the apartment, went grocery shopping, and thought of Grant every minute of every day.
And that pissed her off.
She was working on the Sunday crossword when her cell phone rang. She wasn’t really paying attention as she filled in a word and answered at the same time. “Hello.”
“Alex?”
She dropped her pencil and choked on her saliva so that the first thing he heard was her trying to die of embarrassment.
“Grant!”
“Is this a bad time?” He sounded amused, which ratcheted up her mortification.
“No, I was just . . .”Trying to stop thinking of you. Failing miserably. Rinse and repeat.“Doing a crossword.”
“On purpose?”
She laughed, and her feelings of idiocy fled. “Yes, on purpose. I like them.”
“I guess that makes you a smarty pants, then,” he teased.
“I guess I am.” She got up to make another cup of tea, cradling the phone against her shoulder as she moved around her kitchen.
“Are you doing anything other than the crossword today?”
Alex nearly melted into a puddle on her floor. He sounded so unsure of himself. “No, I don’t have any plans for today.” Wait, did that make her sound incredibly boring?
“Me either.” He coughed. “I don’t know why this is so hard.”
