Chapter 3
THREE
BIANCA
I hear Waylon burst into the kitchen, but I can’t take my eyes off the wall to look at him directly.
“You okay?” he asks. I hear the gentle taps of his dog’s paws on the tile floors too.
“Can you help me get this spider out of the kitchen because I don’t want to take my eyes off of it and if it runs away I’m going to spend the whole night wondering if it’s in my bed and then I’ll burn this whole house down if I even think it’s there,” I say in one breath.
I need to take in another breath but I’m scared that if I breathe, the spider will move. It doesn’t make any sense but a spider being that huge and inside my house doesn’t make sense either. It’s the size of my palm, easily. And it’s just there . Aren’t spiders supposed to be outside? Or making webs or something?
“Yeah, that’s a big one,” Waylon says with a chuckle, as if we’re not inches away from some sort of mutant escapee from a lab. At least he’s not judging me whatsoever for practically pissing myself. “Do you have a bowl and some thin cardboard?”
“Bowls are in the cabinet in that corner.” I point without taking my eyes off the spider. “And maybe there’s some thin cardboard in the recycling? It’s in the corner too, in the bin.”
He rustles around behind me and appears with the bowl and cardboard. I let him step in front of me and capture it like it’s no big deal, taking it out back. He walks deep into the yard and lets it out in the grass.
The tension finally leaves my body and I can finally sag against the doorframe with a sigh.
Waylon’s dog is looking up at me expectantly, tail wagging. He’s cute and has an intelligent gleam in his eyes, with blonde-ish fur and ears pointed up like he’s ready to listen.
“Hi,” I say. His tail wags harder and he noses my hand, lifting it so I can pet his head. I scratch him between his ears and check his tag. “Hi, Duke.”
“Okay, spider’s way off in the backyard,” Waylon says when he comes inside.
“Thank you.” I run both hands over my face. God, this day is already a mess.
“It’s no problem.” His brow furrows. “Also not to cause more panic, but this smells a bit like hot rubber?”
He takes two long strides and he’s standing at the pot on my stove. And before I can stop him, he pulls off the lid.
“Wait!” I say, even though he’s already looking inside.
Inside, at the brand new silicone dildos I’m sterilizing. One of which is hot pink with a suction cup on the bottom, and the other of which is shaped like a dragon’s (theoretical) dick, just because I was curious and had two glasses of wine in my system when I was shopping.
He blinks and slowly slides the lid back on, his cheeks flushing.
Once again — can the universe just take me out? A gamma ray blast. An asteroid. Literally anything to save me from the depths of my mortification.
“That’s not soup,” he finally says. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Just…pretend you didn’t see all that,” I say. I click the burner off since they’re probably sterile by now.
“We just leveled out the cringe scales in the universe,” Waylon says after the longest pause of my life. I lift an eyebrow and he adds, “I incited the assless chaps incident because my mouth wouldn’t stop running. And now you have this. So, we’re even. I guess.”
The logic’s a little iffy because we both made things cringey, but it’s better than nothing. I smile. “You mean chaps?”
He grins. “Right, chaps.”
I guess we did balance the cringe scales in the universe because the tension in the air starts to disappear.
Sadie finally wakes up from her deep nap on her bed in the living room and walks in with a yawn. Like she’s right on time.
“I thought you could fight a spider,” I say to her as she sniffs Duke, her tail wagging. “Or at least bark at it.”
“Sadie would fight a moose but not a spider,” Waylon says. “The bigger the opponent, the more interested she is. Though that spider was about half her size.”
“So maybe we’ll have better luck with an axe murderer,” I say with a snort. “Thank you for helping.”
“Yeah, it’s no problem. I heard you screaming and…” He shrugs.
I finally let myself take Waylon in. I’ve only seen him in scrubs, but now he’s in a blue t-shirt and black joggers, which fit him to perfection. My hand remembers that light squeeze to his bicep and how muscular he felt too. Where else does he feel that good?
His eyes skim over me too, riding the line between polite and heated. I was going to workout before taking my new toys for a spin, so I’m in next to nothing — a workout unitard that rides up high on my thighs and cuts low in the back.
I like the way he looks at me too much. Especially now that the cringe scales of the universe have been recalibrated.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t squish the spider,” he says, tucking a hand into his pocket. “Sometimes those spiders are pregnant and a bunch of their babies come out if you squish them.”
My eyes widen, and he quickly adds, “But they’re not too common. You probably would have been fine.”
“It would be just my luck to have a whole bunch of them in the house.” I sigh. “Do you want something to drink? I mostly have seltzer. Regular and hard seltzer. And a bunch of non-dairy milk. I can’t have dairy, so sorry if you wanted a tall glass of milk for some reason.”
Apparently, my mouth and my brain aren’t quite in sync when it comes to speaking to Waylon. Who the hell would ask for a glass of milk in this scenario?
“Regular seltzer would be great, thanks.” He leans against the wall and Sadie walks up to him, her mostly hairless butt wagging back and forth. “Is this house giving you a lot of trouble?”
“Yeah.” I grab two seltzers. All my motivation to workout is gone. “I moved here kind of fast so I haven’t really had the chance to catalog it all. But a lot of stuff needs fixing and I don’t have a single handy bone in my body.”
“Oh, and there’s the problem with that tree that’s growing between our fences,” he says, scooping Sadie up with one hand. “It’s not that big of a problem right now but it will be in a few months when it gets rainy. I’m happy to help with that since the fences can be a bit of a project.”
“You don’t have to do all that.” I open a seltzer and hand it to him. “I’m sure you’re busy.”
“It affects us both, so I don’t mind. And I’m a whole lot cheaper,” he says, taking a sip of seltzer. “I can even fix a few things in here too if you need it. I’m right there.”
I bite my bottom lip. I’m not hurting for cash at the moment, but I’d love to save as much as possible for moving to New York and investing in the spa without need to do some dumb influencer posts that I hate doing just for money.
“You really wouldn’t mind that much?” I ask.
“No, it’s fine. Like I said, it affects both of us and it can be a bit of a hassle to deal with,” he says. Sadie licks the side of his can and he holds it out of her way.
“Okay, but I’d have to do something for you in return,” I say. “I wish I knew what.”
“Unless you want to come to this family barbecue for my brother’s engagement with me, I don’t know either,” he says.
He seems like he’s half-joking, but still, I say, “Sure, if you need someone to come.”
He blinks. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah, why not?” I shrug. “Sounds easy enough.”
“That would be a massive help.” He puts Sadie down and she trots over to me. “My mom’s a little obsessed with setting me up with someone. We wouldn’t have to pretend to be serious, but we could at least hold her back a little bit. At least until I think of something else to do for the next event.”
“A stopgap,” I add.
“Exactly.” He pauses, rubbing the back of his neck. “You really don’t have to if you’re not comfortable.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’ve been a fake date before,” I say. My PR team had set me up on some to distract the press from whatever scandal was happening — on my end or my fake date’s. “Sometimes just being seen with someone once is enough to get whatever narrative you want out there.”
“Thank you. Seriously.” At least twenty pounds of weight seems to lift off his shoulders. “I can text you the details if you give me your number.”
We exchange numbers and he texts me the time and location of the party. Is this a terrible idea? How bad could a barbecue be?
He heads out with Duke after giving the kitchen one more check for mutant spiders, leaving me and Sadie alone. She follows me into the living room, where I’ve set up my mat for my workout, and steps back into her fluffy pink bed.
Right as I turn on my video, my phone rings. It’s an unknown number with an LA area code, so I hesitate. It might be a loose end from back in LA. Or it might be the last person I want to hear from.
“Hello?”
“Baby,” my ex, Kyler says. “Don’t hang up!”
I don’t speak for a few seconds. He’s been calling me ever since I dumped him and left LA, all from different numbers. It’s like the world’s worst game of whack-a-mole.
Kyler isn’t threatening — he’s just annoying. And in the two and a half years we were together, a lot of our lives mixed, including our apartment. I’m still paying rent since the lease ends in two months and I don’t want to deal with the logistical mess of trying to pull out of the lease now.
Hopefully he has something of value to actually say, like we got out of the lease early or he wanted to pay a bill. Or a million of the other administrative bullshit that I’ll inevitably have to handle because I did all of that while we were dating.
I hold in a sigh.
“Why shouldn’t I hang up?” I put him on speakerphone and toss my phone on the mat. “What do you want?”
“Just hear me out.”
“What else could you possibly say?” I fold myself forward and grip my feet. “Is this about something important, or no? Like the lease or the bills.”
“I just miss you, babe,” he says. God, he sounds so pathetic.
I swallow and sit back up. He probably misses my connections. Was he ever into me at all, or did he just want a connection to my dad? If my dad produced an album for him, the odds of it being a bigger hit than any of his past albums were pretty damn high. And my dad didn’t produce albums for just anyone.
But his son-in-law? Yeah, he’d probably do it.
The fact that Kyler decided to “ask my dad for my hand in marriage” and pitch an album idea at the same time was such a red flag that my dad called me right after.
At least Kyler didn’t full-on propose. But he did drop every hint like it was a ball of lead — telling me to get my nails done, planning a vacation himself (which he always left to me), telling me to pack certain things. Good thing I saw his texts to some girl he told me not to worry about before we left.
He put in a thousand times more effort into those texts than he did with our relationship.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, though — nearly all my relationships, platonic or romantic, end up just like that.
“Bianca?” he says. “You still there?”
“What?” I bark. “Again, is there anything important — as in our apartment or bills or cars — that you need to tell me about?”
“Are you seeing someone else?” he asks. “Is that why you’re so stubborn about this?”
I squeeze the bridge of my nose and resist the urge to scream. Sadie’s ears prick up, like she’s thinking, is this asshole for real right now?
“It wouldn’t make a difference if I was or wasn’t,” I say. “I’m not coming back.”
“So, you are seeing someone,” he says, leaping to conclusions. Of course. “Who is he?”
“Bye, Kyler,” I say.
“B—”
I hang up on him and flop back on my mat with a heavy sigh. I’m not going to date anyone for the foreseeable future. Being burned by him and by all the friends who have chosen his side is more than enough reason to take time to sort myself out. Alone.