Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
I misjudge everything on my very first bite: the amount of cheese, the temperature of the pizza, the floppiness of the crust, and as a result I burn the roof of my mouth and a string of molten mozzarella flops onto my neck when I pull the slice away.
“Nnngggh!” I think I say, tossing the pizza onto my plate and sort of… waving both hands in the air.
Lucy and Nora look over at me, alarmed and concerned.
“Spit it out!” Nora says. “Quick, no one’s looking!”
“MMPH,” I say, both hands fanning my mouth while I do that thing where you breathe in cool air. It’s not working very well.
“Do you want us to blow into your mouth?” asks Lucy.
“Blow into her mouth?” Nora says. “Like, with our own mouths?”
“It might help!”
I am now shaking my head so hard my hair is falling out of the weird, messy too hot to even think about hair bun it was in. Nora looks horrified. Lucy looks embarrassed. I finally chew my bite of pizza enough to swallow it, and immediately follow it with some water.
“Please don’t ever blow into my mouth,” I tell the two of them. “Let me die instead.”
“It was just a suggestion,” Lucy says, sounding a little defensive.
“Are you going to live? You’re the color of… uh, a very pink thing,” Nora finishes.
“I’m fine,” I say, even though my eyes are still watering a little. Nora and Lucy, of course, are still holding their slices of pizza in front of them, waiting for them to cool off before taking a bite. As always, I’m the impulsive one whose brain short-circuited at the sight of cheese.
“The waitress did tell us it was hot,” Lucy points out, gently.
“And didn’t this happen last time we came here?” Nora adds.
“Yes,” I admit, regretting everything. Well, a few things. Mainly the one thing where I bit into pizza that was too hot. Nora reaches out and pats me on the shoulder, and I’m pretty sure they’re both trying not to laugh. I appreciate the effort.
“Anyway, you were saying,” I tell them, looking down at the slice of pizza that I am not touching for at least another minute or two, “Your coworker secretly swapped his chair with your other coworker’s chair and thought she wouldn’t notice?”
“I’m gonna guess she noticed,” Lucy says.
“She noticed,” Nora confirms, and finally takes a bite of her own pizza. Notably, she does not suffer for it. “And launched a week-long CSI-style investigation into proving that it wasn’t her chair. I swear I overheard her asking security if they had any footage of the cubicle in question.”
“Did they?” I ask, and Nora just shakes her head.
“But now we all have to go to sensitivity training for half a day next Friday,” she says. Lucy makes an ugh noise, and I wrinkle my nose because while sensitivity in the office is great, I’m pretty sure Dante wrote about sensitivity training in The Inferno.
“All this drama over a chair,” Lucy says. “Why are people such idiots?”
I lift my pizza to my mouth again just as my phone buzzes in my pocket. I jump about a foot in the air and drop the pizza, going for my phone so fast I don’t even wipe the grease off my fingers.
“People think they can get away with anything,” Nora says, and gives me a sideways look. “Is that still hot?”
“No. What? Sorry, my phone. Just jumpy for no reason I guess,” I volunteer, sounding extremely cool and collected and not at all weird. “I didn’t think anyone would be texting me right now.”
“Uh huh,” Nora says.
* * *
Ash: Got back early, you around?
* * *
And I’m pink again as I shove my phone back in my pocket, ignoring the text. Lucy and Nora are both looking at me again with looks that very clearly say Bridget, you’re being weird, and I smile at them and pretend I don’t know what they’re thinking.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Just my mom wondering if I read that article she sent me yet.”
“What was it about?” Lucy asks, her mouth full of pizza. Nora continues to side-eye me for another minute.
“Dunno, I haven’t read it,” I say, and stuff my own mouth.
We keep talking. Lucy tells us a year-long epic saga of two of her coworkers who waged war over a printer—not even a color printer, a black and white printer—and normally listening to other peoples’ pointless, petty drama is my catnip, but tonight I’m distracted.
My phone will not stop going off. I don’t want to give anything away by looking at it again, but I also might claw my own skin off in a few minutes if I can’t see what he’s saying. But then again, if Nora or especially Lucy saw the texts, it would go badly for me.
“Anyway, now the toner’s locked in a cabinet and only the office manager has the key,” Lucy says. “I think she keeps it on a chain around her neck so no one can steal it.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Nora deadpans. “Just doing what any normal adult in a normal adult workplace would do.”
Buzzzzzz. Buzzzzzzz. Buzzzzzzz. Great. Now he’s calling. I ignore it until it stops, but he just calls back.
“Just answer,” Lucy says. “Look, stall her and I’ll read the article and tell you what it’s about. Or I’ll just do my impression of you and talk to her myself.”
“You think that would fool my own mother?”
She shrugs. “Worth a shot?”
“Either answer it or turn it off, it’s making me crazy,” Nora adds.
Once I get the chance, Ash and I are going to have a talk about reasonable boundaries and how many times he’s allowed to text in a five-minute period. In the meantime, I wipe the pizza grease off my hands and pull my phone from my pocket, angling the screen away from my friends as as I answer it.
“Hi, Mom!” I say, leaning very hard on the second word.
There’s a brief pause on the other end.
“That’s a new one,” Ash says in his low Southern lilt. “Maybe if you said Daddy I could—”
“Sorry, I haven’t read it yet!” I cut him off, my face instantly flushing hot. “But uh, yes, I’ll be careful about going into ponds because of the new amoeba they’ve been finding…”
My mom’s kind of a hypochondriac, and she loves to send me dire warnings about every new virus that’s currently afflicting rabbits in Siberia but could, maybe, possibly, someday become a problem for humans. I love her, but it’s a little exhausting.
On the other end of the line, Ash clears his throat.
“Are you with Lucy?” he asks, his voice now at half-volume.
“Yeah,” I answer, glad for something normal to say. “She and Nora say hi!”
On cue, my friends wave.
“My mom says hi back,” I lie.
“Come over,” he says.
I sigh dramatically and roll my eyes at Nora and Lucy, then stand, pointing at my phone. I have no idea if I’m selling this whole gotta talk to my annoying mom for a minute, sorry, bit, but Ash has been away for two weeks and I… would really like to talk to him.
“Sorry, one minute,” I tell my friends, and then head for the restaurant doors. I don’t talk again until I push them open and I’m standing on the sidewalk outside, in the almost-cool night air.
“I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow,” I say.
“Surprise,” he answers, that one word low and delicious. “You alone yet?”
“Sort of,” I say, head back against the brick, trying not to think any thoughts that might be too interesting. “I’m on the sidewalk outside Pie in the Sky.”
“What are you wearing?”
I roll my eyes and snort. It’s not the most ladylike sound, but I’m not the most ladylike lady.
“Pizza sauce on my face, probably,” I tell him.
“Sounds hot.”
“It’s nothing, compared to the pizza.”
“Please come over?” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “I’ll make it worth your time.”
“Promises, promises,” I tease.
“You know I’m good for it.”
Yeah, I know. God, do I know.
“I’ll come over,” I say, as if there were any universe where I was going to say no.
“I’ll be ready,” he says, and then laughs, and the sound makes me smile at the empty street. “I’ve been ready. Two weeks, Bridge, goddamn.”
“I helped you out that one night.”
On the other end of the line, he sighs.
“Yeah, you did,” he says. “God. That was something else.”
There’s a long, quiet pause. I don’t need him to tell me that he’s thinking about the one night we managed to video chat in the last two weeks while he was on a family vacation.
“Fuck,” he says quietly, and I swallow.
“Don’t you dare do anything until I get there,” I tell him.
“Anything?”
“No coming without me,” I say, lowering my voice, even though there’s no one within hearing distance. Sprucevale is a small town with a large pearl-clutcher population, and I don’t need someone overhearing me outside a pizza joint.
“You gonna be here soon?” he asks, and I take another deep breath, blow it out toward the sky.
“I’ll try,” I promise, and I mean it. “It’s been two weeks for me, too.”
“What should I wear?” he asks, laughing again.
“A condom.”
Ash swallows audibly.
“You got it,” he says.
* * *
When I drop Lucy at her parents’ house, where she’s temporarily living after her old roommate was a total dick, I wait to leave until she’s safely inside because I’m not a monster. Even though maybe I am, a little bit.
I wait until we’re out of the driveway before I speak up, because it feels sort of rude to talk about someone in their driveway.
“Do you mind if I just drop you at our place? I’ve got some errands to run,” I say, keeping my eyes perfectly straight forward.
“Sure,” Nora says, and fuck, she already sounds sarcastic. “I assume you’re going to volunteer at a soup kitchen before building an orphanage with your bare hands and then rescuing ten puppies?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“Make some friendship bracelets while you’re at it,” she suggests.
I say nothing, just scrunch my face up, because even if Nora’s being kind of a dick right now, she’s not wrong to be kind of a dick.
“I’ll tell her when she starts a new job,” I say. “And moves out of her parents’ house.”
Nora takes a deep breath and then sighs very, very dramatically.
“Just get it over with,” she says. “How mad could she actually be?”
I take my eyes off the road for a second just to glance over at Nora, who glances back at me, already a little regretful.
“Okay, point taken,” she admits. “But you should tell her anyway. Maybe in a public place where she can’t stab you.”
“Maybe she’d be fine with it,” I say, and I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince. Myself, probably. “It’s been more than a year.”
“She got drunk and cried about it last weekend,” Nora points out, and my stomach twists inside me because yeah, she did. “It was a murderous, angry cry, but still.”
“Shit,” I mutter.
Ash is Lucy’s ex, and Lucy has been one of my best friends since middle school, when we were the only two girls in the trombone section of our middle school band.
An experience like that bonds you, and we’ve been close ever since, through high school and college, until both of us wound up moving back home to Sprucevale.
There are plenty of things I could say in my defense: that they only dated for a few months; that by her own admission it was never that serious between them; that she said the sex wasn’t all that good; that they broke up over a year ago.
But, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, Lucy took the breakup way harder than anyone was expecting.
She’s still mad at Ash for breaking up with her, still rages about him whenever anyone else says his name, still acts like he’s the worst person in the world when all he did was break up with her.
Obviously, it has more to do with everything else that was happening in her life at the time—her grandmother died, who she was super close to; she got laid off from her job; it turned out her roommate had been taking Lucy’s half of the rent and spending it on a multi-level marketing scheme—but if you try telling Lucy that, she’s likely to bite your head off.
I love her. She’ll get through this and come out the other side and someday this will be funny, but today is not that day.
“Soon,” I tell Nora, who does not look convinced.