“Are you okay?” Nate asks in a whisper.
“What, me? Yeah…no, nothing’s wrong. I’m good. Just great, yeah,” I manage, horrified.
“You look really pale,” he says, which prompted an outburst of strangled laughter and choked-up fake giggles from me.
His smile gets sadder and it swells an ache in my chest. I rub at it, numbly, wishing they would both go away, the ache and Nate.
“Look, I’m fine, really. I just feel…well, awkward honestly,” I say.
“Me too.” He sounds relieved. He grabs me gently by the wrist and walks me over to the two large vanity chairs by the mirror. He looks around the restroom, impressed. “Even the bathrooms in this place are upscale. Here, sit down for a minute with me.”
I sit down. He sits on the chair beside me.
For some unknown reason, this makes me want to cry. I scrunch up my face and stare down at my shoes. This most definitely is not the way I pictured seeing Mr. Perfect again.
“Listen,” he says softly. “I think both of us might want to say things that we felt that day during the game…but maybe we shouldn’t.”
I want to close my eyes and make his perfect face go away. He’s exactly how I remembered him, and I hate myself a little for it, but I can’t help wishing he would just lean forward and kiss me again. Just forget Julia, she has so many other guys interested in her. Why can’t I have this one?
He takes a deep breath. “Maybe since our lives took us in other directions, with me and Julia…God, you know I just don’t…I don’t want to hurt her, she’s beautiful and sweet.”
“And she’s perfect for you. I know,” I sigh.In my head I scream, “What about me?”
“I’m not saying don’t tell her about the kiss. You can if you want. We weren’t serious or anything yet, so she wouldn’t be upset. She’d probably laugh at the situation with the whole Kiss Cam and us feeling like wehadto kiss.” As he’s saying the words, my reeling thoughts screech to a halt.He felt like he had to kiss me.
I can’t let him tell her, because if he knew the things I said about that kiss, the plans I stupidly made because of it? I would be mortified. He doesn’t need to know how it felt for me. How it feels for me right now, sitting in front of him wishing, somehow, I had never gone to that game, or maybe if I didn’t get the intern’s coffee spilled on me yesterday, maybe then Nate and Julia wouldn’t have slept together and then maybe—
Maybes don’t matter right now, do they? There’s no “What if?”in this situation, there’s only what is.
“Nah,” I say, plastering a smile across my face. “Let’s not say anything, because then she’ll feel weird if me and you become friends.” I stand up and feign indifference with a carefree shrug and a “Who cares?” gesture. “Like you said, we were on camera, wehadto kiss. If there wasn’t the Kiss Cam, we would have never even realized we were sitting next to one another.”
Something in his expression tells me I’m wrong, but I don’t stay to ask about it. It’s done. I found Mr. Perfect and he isn’t the perfect guy for me. Now I just have to figure out a way to forget all about it and move on with my life.
Back at my workstation, Julia has opened a Tinder account for me and has my profile already made. All on my phone, the one I left on my desk before my mad rush to the bathroom.
I don’t want to deal with this right now.
She glances up at me. “Where were you? And why are your eyes all red?”
I cringe from her question and try to find that fake smile I was just wearing for her boyfriend to slap back on my face. “Bathroom,” I say, coughing. “And my eyes are red because I had a really messed-up article to do and I actually have to do it.It.Doooo iiiiiit. And how do you know my phone’s passcode?”
“What? Seriously,” she gives me a knowing smile that I really don’t understand. “Janie, you are so predictable. Your passcode is always your birthday. But why is writing the article messing with you?” She looks down at my phone again, reading some guy’s bio. “It’s not like you don’t hook up with a random every once in a while.”
Who does she think I am? Never, ever in my life have I hooked up with any random person. I’ve never had a one-night-stand.
“Uh, well, you know, it’s just,” I attempt to explain, but the formation of full thoughts and sentences elude me. I flop into my desk chair and pluck my phone out of her hands. I’m exhausted and it’s only half past ten in the morning. “I need more coffee.”
“I’ll send Richie out, no worries. I’ll hit him up on text right now. Caramel latte with skim milk?”
“No, better make it regular milk, but that sounds perfect. Thank you.”
I watch as her thumbs speed over her phone and zone out. She slips it on the desk when she’s done and tickles her fingers along my arm. “So, what did you think of Nate? Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“Yep.”
“He’s a little more than gorgeous, though, right? Let’s be honest,” she moves closer to me and pulls on my blouse. “His body istight. And the way he kisses, it’s just full-bodied, you know what I mean?”
Yes, unfortunately I do. I flatten my lips together so I don’t speak the words out loud.
