Chapter 7 #2
She felt like he’d taken a knife and slipped it effortlessly beneath her skin. “Yes, Carson,” she said, looking at the brunette staring back at her. “She is pretty.”
“I’ll match with her.” He picked the brunette while Perry kept scrolling furiously through her phone.
She didn’t like any of her options so far.
Not really. But then she saw a man in a blue button-up shirt with a tie, who had a little bit of gray at his temples; he was closer to forty than thirty, but she wasn’t opposed.
“How about this guy?” she asked.
Carson made a very similar face to the one he’d made the other day when she had brought up the last time she had sex.
“Yeah. Why not.”
“Great.”
“I’m going to tell him that I want to meet at Rocky Tonk.”
“I don’t know where that is, but it sounds fine.”
“It’s just downtown.”
“All right. I’ll let Vanessa know that also.”
“ Vanessa .”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to say her name. Because it’s a nice name.” She was a liar, and not a very good one. She needed to get better at it. Not just to Carson, but to herself. She didn’t like that her running internal monologue was this honest.
“Great.”
“If you want to, we can leave the trailer here instead of trying to park it downtown.”
“Yeah. That seems like a good idea.”
“You just pull it into the lot, and I’ll bring my car around.
” She realized belatedly, as they went to their respective vehicles, that the two of them pulling up together was likely to be a little bit confusing to their respective dates.
But this was just a trial run. That’s all it was.
Carson wasn’t going to go home with Vanessa. Surely not.
He parked his car and trailer across two spaces, and then got into the passenger seat of her vehicle. She drove out on West Main, heading toward the bar.
It was relatively early to get started on a going-out kind of evening, but again, it was just a trial run. They had a little bit of time before they were supposed to meet their dates, so they stopped and got Taco Bell. And then continued on.
She found a parking spot against the curb, and the two of them crossed the street, heading toward the upstairs bar.
It wasn’t crowded at all at this hour, and they took a booth in the corner, while she opened up the app and decided to message Ryan, her date for the evening.
Be there in five.
She took a breath and tried to still the jitters in her chest.
It was Vanessa who got there first. And she looked beautiful in a yellow dress, which was both too close to the color that Perry was wearing, and too much nicer for Perry to feel anything but insecure.
She gritted her teeth and tried to focus as Carson got up from the booth and went over to greet Vanessa.
They didn’t discuss what they were going to do next.
She looked up at them and saw him gesture toward her.
She assumed he was explaining the relationship.
Perry lifted a hand and waved, and Vanessa waved back.
Regrettably, she seemed both sweet and pretty.
Perry drummed her fingers on the table.
A few minutes later, Ryan walked in wearing the exact color blue shirt he wore in his profile picture.
A coincidence? Intentional? She wasn’t sure she would ever know.
She decided that it would be better if she made him come to her.
She waved when she saw him, and he smiled and nodded and then made his way across the room.
Ever so slowly, the bar was beginning to fill up, and she hoped that the crowd would make her less conscious of Carson and Vanessa.
“Hi,” she said as Ryan sat down at the booth.
“Hi.”
“Glad that I caught you. Because I was just getting off work.”
“Great. Perfect timing.”
She knew that he worked as the manager of the tech department at one of the big-box electronics stores. Because it was in his app profile. “So, tell me about your job.”
“Oh. I mainly manage the intake of broken computers all day. Same stuff all the time.”
“Right.”
“You’re a florist?”
She nodded. She found her gaze slipping over to Carson. She had forgotten how much she didn’t like this. Having to get to know somebody. It didn’t happen quite this way when she was dating in Rustler Mountain, because everyone had a common background there.
So many of them had been in high school together.
Or even went back further, with parents and grandparents who knew each other.
Everybody knew that she owned the flower shop on Main Street, and usually, she had some idea about her dates.
That meant they got to skip some of the small talk, and sometimes they could even come together to gossip about people that they both vaguely new.
That was the perk of small-town living.
Medford was also a small town, in fairness, even if it was much larger than her town, but it wasn’t her town.
And because of that, she didn’t know the local lore.
“Yes,” she said. “I own my own shop in Rustler Mountain.” He frowned. “Where’s that?”
“Do you know where Jacksonville is?”
“No.”
It never ceased to amaze her how many people had no concept of the small outlying towns in the area. If they didn’t go to them, they didn’t know.
“Oh. Well … it’s around twenty miles out of Medford.”
“Wow. That’s quite a drive.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m probably moving here in a few months. I just brought a bunch of stuff to the storage unit, which is why I thought I would start trying to get to know people here.”
“Oh,” he said. “Interesting.”
She couldn’t tell if he really thought it was interesting or not. The problem was, she already knew that she wasn’t interested. And it wasn’t anything he had done specifically, it was just that …
She looked over at Vanessa and Carson. The brunette was clearly more into Carson than Perry was into Ryan. Vanessa was leaning in and touching Carson’s chest every time she spoke and smiling broadly every time he said something.
She was obviously totally charmed by him, and who wouldn’t be? He was the most gorgeous man in the room.
“I could use a drink,” said Perry.
“Sure,” said Ryan.
He didn’t seem to think anything of getting up from the table and going over to the bar.
Definitely he was going to pay, but he hadn’t asked her what she wanted.
She decided to let that go. He brought her a mojito.
She noticed that a few minutes later that Carson had a drink too, but it appeared to be soda.
She was glad he was sticking to a nonalcoholic drink. But she also knew his choice might invite questions from Vanessa. Or maybe not. Maybe she wouldn’t pry. Maybe she would think he was a Mormon.
“There’s just a lot of corporate politics.”
She turned her head and realized that Ryan had been talking the whole time, and that she hadn’t been listening. Which was really crappy of her, because if he had done that to her, she would be furious. Thankfully, he didn’t seem to notice her distraction.
“Really. I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Honestly, a lot of the managers here float around all the different retail stores. The same thing is true of the CEOs. There’s only so many businesses in the area. A lot of them are medical.”
She nodded. She did not tell him that she knew that. Because while he might be ignorant of Rustler Mountain, she was not ignorant of Medford. Folks spent a lot of time there buying supplies, or utilizing the medical facilities.
“You want to dance?”
She hadn’t really noticed, but the music had been turned up, and it was currently thumping pretty loud.
People were out on the dance floor, seemingly having fun, though she was having a difficult time imagining herself enjoying dancing at the moment.
But then Vanessa seemed to ask Carson the same question, and at that moment, Carson turned and looked at Perry.
Their eyes locked. She turned back to Ryan. “Yeah. I’d love to.”
He reached his hand out, and she took it. She did her best not to marinate on the fact that letting a stranger hold your hand was actually an exceedingly weird thing.
She wasn’t attracted to him. That wasn’t really fair. Because he was a pleasant-looking man. It was just that there wasn’t that extra thing . Remembering the ice cream analogy, she preferred praline pecan.
So sometimes she could settle for caramel ribbon crunch.
But this man was cotton candy ice cream. Which was way too far removed from what she actually wanted.
It made sense in her head.
Still, she let him pull her close, and she danced with him through an entire song. But then she made the mistake of looking over at Carson and Vanessa. Vanessa had her arms looped around Carson’s neck.
And Perry did something that she would be ashamed of later when she looked back on it. Maybe.
She pretended that her phone was buzzing. She took it out and frowned at the screen. “Oh. Oh no. My grandmother is having a medical emergency. I need to go.”
“Oh,” said Ryan. “That’s too bad. I was having a nice time.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I forgot to mention. I have a grandmother, and she’s not very well. We live together, actually. I have such a long drive to get back home. So. So.”
She pulled up her texts and pretended to be responding about her grandmother but was actually texting Carson.
Carson jolted when his phone buzzed, and then he looked over at her. He took the phone out and looked down at the text. She could see him making apologies to Vanessa.
Perry reached into her purse and took out five dollars. “To tip the bartender. Thank you. For the evening. Maybe we’ll run into each other again when I’m actually living here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe.”
She had a feeling that he knew she was making an excuse, and she felt guilty.
She hadn’t said anything about Carson, so if Carson followed her too soon, it was going to look weird. She hustled herself out of the bar and down the stairs without looking at Carson.
When she ended up on the street corner, she wrapped her arms around herself. And waited.