Chapter 15 Melanie
FIFTEEN
MELANIE
I’m not sure what I expected of my life after Nicolas Ramos was in it.
Whether things would be easier or worse.
Harder or gentler. Busier or plain boring.
I’m not sure I even considered what life would look like.
But I do know sleeping all alone in my home after a week with him in the next room is damn near impossible.
My bed is no longer comfortable. My pillows, hard as a rock.
My safe space where, in the past, I felt pure contentment, is now nothing more than a room void of anything worth staying for.
Life, post-Nick, is supposed to be about soaking up the quiet and reveling in the knowledge the wedding is now behind me and the pretense of associating with the people from my past is over.
I’m supposed to like isolation and silence. But now it’s just… well, it’s lonely. And quiet.
I’ve spent countless hours in my office, day after day after day, working on my deadline, not even sure if Mr. Manson will allow me to step back in the building since my speech on Saturday.
But all the while, half of my mind has been on my office door.
Waiting to be startled. Wondering if anyone besides myself will ever walk through it again.
So far, the answer is no.
I’m brutally aware that I gave explicit instructions for Nick to collect his things and leave me the hell alone. Don’t disturb. Don’t knock. Don’t interrupt. And yet, when I checked his room on Sunday afternoon to find it clean and his personal effects gone, my heart broke just a little more.
He was so near. But I didn’t get to see. To experience. To feel him.
Which is exactly what I asked for.
In all of my attempts to reclaim my power and give speeches about loving myself and living for me, I got caught up in dismissing the only real man I’ve ever known. I sent him away and begged him to stay gone. And now that he has…
“It hurts.” I sit where he sat on the morning of the wedding, but I slump across the counter and ignore the bagel Anna sets down by my elbow.
“I think I fell in love with a fake,” I groan.
“He was paid to say those things, but he had no business being so good at it, right?” Desperate, I roll my head and look up at my best friend.
“He was really good! Which means I tricked myself into falling for a man who wasn’t actually available to me. ”
“You should leave a one-star review on Google. Did a wonderful job,” she mocks. “Too good. Now I’m mad. Don’t recommend.”
“You’re being a jerk.” I stare at the dumb bagel, knowing I should eat it, but violently aware that if I do, I might puke on a boardroom of architects and a client waiting for her final design. “My heart hurts, even though my brain knows it shouldn’t. I hate it.”
“Well, wild idea, I know. But have you considered…” Crossing my kitchen, she sets a mug of coffee by the bagel and lowers herself to rest on her elbows, “calling him? Maybe he liked you, too.”
“He was paid,” I scoff, enunciating each word. “Paid. And besides, I called once. I was weak and sad and lonely, and it was nearly midnight. Which is sooooo inappropriate.”
“You called him?”
“Yes.” The pain! So much pain! “He didn’t answer, and he never called back.
He was probably with his next client, and now I’m humiliated.
Imagine he’s there with his next fake date, and I’m blowing up his phone in the middle of the night!
She’s there, in her cute little silky slip and sexy long legs, and she’s all: ‘who was that, Nico?’ And then he’s like: ‘No one, babe. She’s nobody. ’”
“Good lord!” Anna cackles. “You just made up an entire scene in your head! She’s wearing a slip? Did you wear silk while he was here?”
“Well… no.” But that’s because I’m weird and awkward and not nearly as pretty as that other woman. “But—”
“But nothing, you donkey. It was midnight, so he missed the call. And then maybe he woke to a billion notifications the next day because he’s a whole ass human being and probably has work and stuff.
Send the man a text and tell him you’re still thinking of him.
If he doesn’t respond, then that’s the end of that and you know.
But you’re not even giving him a chance because he has no clue why the hell you called.
Now eat something.” She slides my bagel closer, smacking my elbow with the plate until a sharp hiss bursts along my throat.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry,” she giggles. “We have to be out the door in ten minutes if you wanna make it in time for your meeting with Anderson. Pull yourself together and be that chick you swear you were at the wedding, though I’m yet to see evidence since no one filmed it, and you didn’t bring me as your plus one.”
“Goddddd…” I lean on my elbows and pick at my breakfast. “I made a whole speech.”
“And you kneed Tinky-Winky in the balls,” she cackles. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to have seen that.”
“I told three hundred people that Drew and Karla were the cheats and that the Taggarts are thieves. I told my parents never to contact me again.” A long, aching moan rolls through my chest. “And then I announced I paid my date to be there with me, which was literally the opposite of what I should have done.”
“Nah. You did fine. You hired a date so you could feel brave, and then you felt so brave you revealed your secret. It’s not the outcome you went in there with, but it’s the outcome you needed.”
“They’re going to gossip about me for the rest of our lives.”
“So? Who cares what they think? And, I’m pleased to remind you that you survived. The homeless guy didn’t murder you or wear your skin.”
“Stop.” I pick at my bagel and place a morsel on my tongue. “He wasn’t homeless, I’m pretty sure. He was just… ya know. A normal person, who maybe was having a slow work week, so he grabbed a job on the side for extra cash.”
“And he didn’t kill you,” she repeats. “Let’s focus on that. And now we know you’re capable of wanting a relationship, too. That’s a good sign.”
“Ugh.” I wrinkle my nose and feel exactly how I did the last time we had this conversation. Relationships… with other men? No thanks. “Kinda wish I met Nick like how I met Ms. Anderson.”
“At the club?” She reaches across and tears my bagel in half.
“You owe me thanks for that, by the way. You didn’t want to go out, but I forced you.
Drunk women in a club bathroom are like,” she beams around my breakfast, “best friends foreverrrr. When an architect, a lawyer, and an extremely wealthy developer’s lead assistant walk into a bar, they’re no longer three drunk chicks.
They’re powerhouses who could rule an entire city. ”
“We weren’t drunk.” I roll my eyes. “I’d had one drink. One.” I hold up my finger. “You like to exaggerate stories.”
“I made you go out,” she repeats. “We met her. We saved her from a handsy dude who thought no meant grab my ass. The rest is history. You’re welcome.
And now,” she snatches up the remaining half of my bagel and shoves it in my mouth, the action so fast and violent, I choke on the pastry and heave for fresh air.
Which only results in bread racing toward my lungs.
“We have to go. Get up.” She comes around and grabs my arm, yanking me to my feet until my stool spins and topples, landing on the floor with a loud clatter.
“That was more dramatic than I was planning,” she giggles.
“But we’re moving now.” She drags me through my kitchen and snatches up my laptop bag and the tubes of drawings I already prepared and set by the door.
“Anna—”
“Still moving.” She yanks me across the threshold and kicks my door closed. “You’re lucky you already have shoes on because I was gonna make you leave even if you didn’t.”
“Anna!”
“This is gonna be a fun meeting.” She leads me down the stairs that are no longer rickety, and through the gate that is no longer squeaky. “Get in the car. This is gonna be great! I feel it in my bones.”
“Lucky you.” I spit the bagel to the ground and snatch back my laptop bag. “I feel a formal dismissal in my bones. And a really negative reference letter, so I’ll never get a job anywhere else. I feel dread in my bones!”
“You’re being dramatic.” She yeets my tubes into the backseat of my car and gestures toward the driver’s side with a blinding, obnoxious grin. “After you, Boss Lady.”
My hands shake, and my stomach rolls. Black dots dance in my vision, and that nasty, self-sabotaging voice sings a song in the back of my mind about failure and imposter syndrome.
About how I shouldn’t be here and how, if it weren’t for Anna sitting on my left, I might throw myself out the twelfth story window of Manson, Mason, and Samson.
Luckily for me, Anna was at that bathroom meeting a couple of months ago, and seeing as how she’s technically, legally, in this state, anyway, a real-life lawyer, she gets to stay no matter how sour Mr. Manson’s expression is.
“You’ve done an acceptable job thus far,” he mutters, while outside the glass walls of our boardroom, Ms. Anderson takes a phone call that looks awfully serious.
“I know we discussed different windows,” he chastises, “and you completely ignored my instructions on the awning.”
But the builder, I think in my head. And the engineers…
“I want you to say nothing at all,” he huffs out impatiently, “unless specifically addressed, and even then, your job is to pass the baton to Carl and excuse yourself.”
Irritated, I glance across the eighteen-seat table at my colleague and sneer when he hasn’t even got the good manners to pretend to be humble about how he stole my client. He wants to paint the city skyline using my client, my drawings, and claim it as his own.
Again.
Wanker.
“Alright,” Manson rushes out nervously, twisting in his seat. “Here she comes. You know what to do, Melanie.”
“You don’t actually have to do that, ya know?” Anna leans closer and whispers in my ear. “You can tell him to suck a d—”