Chapter 6
Deacon
“I drank too much wine.” Willow leaned back against the arm of the couch in Cruz’s living room and set her glass aside. “Opening a bottle after the wedding was a mistake.”
“Big mistake.” My face was warm, as I’d finished far more of the bottle than her.
Gus had given up on us and wandered back to his crate after our drunken walk around the block.
“Odds are good I’m going to stumble into a bush on my walk home.
” We sat on either end of the couch and her toes brushed my thigh when she stretched.
More drinks at the wedding had led to hours on the dance floor.
She’d wanted more practice dancing, and I wasn’t going to deny her. Not when she’d been so cute, if clumsy.
Willow snort-laughed, sitting back up.
“Oh, me falling and injuring myself in some shrubbery is funny?”
“I’m just imagining you flailing.” She snorted again, the way I was learning she did when she was a little drunk and found something stupid endlessly funny. She wiped a tear from her eye.
“You’re mean,” I said. “Cruz told me you were nice.”
“He doesn’t know the real me,” she said, still giggling at her own imagination. “Deep down, I’m a cold, calculating bitch.” Willow kept laughing, the tone darkening at her self-deprecating joke.
“I don’t buy it.” I swiveled to catch her eye. “You’re a softy. Like a…” I struggled for the word. “Like what’s the softest thing there is? You’re like one of those blankets that only girls have in their house. The ones that feel like a puppy.”
She giggled. “Chenille? That was a lot of words to call me a pushover.”
“I didn’t say pushover. I said puppy blanket.” She’d changed out of her dress and into sweatpants when we got back to the house and now sat with her feet propped up on the couch near me. “But in a nice way and not an evil way.” I played with her big toe through her thick sock.
She sank into the couch. “We’re friends now, right? Cruz gave you to me as a friend?”
“I don’t think he gets to give me to people but, yeah. Friends. We bonded over cake.”
“I was your wing woman,” she said proudly. “I talked you up to the redhead and that dark haired woman when I ran into her in the bathroom.”
I dropped a hand to my pocket where the brunette’s number was written on a napkin. I’d forgotten about her once I started dancing with Willow, but I reached out my fist for a bump. “And I kept you from hooking up with your cousin.”
“Cousin Rupert,” she corrected, forgetting the joke for half a second. “He’s not even a real person!” She fell into another fit of giggles that made me smile. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Name it, Willis.” That wasn’t right. “Cruz calls you Willy. What does everyone else call you?”
“Um, just Willow. Why?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said. I couldn’t use the same nickname her brother used.
I’d taken too much notice of her body already to make that right.
“I can’t call you what everyone else uses.
What kind of unoriginal friend would that make me?
” I tugged on her toe again, a touch that felt safe and platonic and quelled this curiosity and need I’d had to touch her all night. “What’s the favor?”
She nibbled on the side of her lip. “Can you look up Spencer on Instagram?”
“No,” I said, tipping my head back. “Not my type.”
“Seriously,” she said. “My best friend won’t do it, and I blocked him so I wouldn’t be tempted, but I’m dying to know what he’s doing.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “Don’t look, Lou.” I shook my head. “Lou isn’t good.”
“Please?” She sat up again and ended up next to me, her eyes big and pleading. “I had such a good night. This is the best possible time to see it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know much but I know not to look up an ex. It’s never a good idea.”
“I’ll buy you a coffee.”
She looked so hopeful, and maybe she was right about being in the right headspace. What did I know? Maybe seeing the ex’s feed would give her the closure she was hoping for. “Extra caramel?”
She nodded and handed me my phone from the coffee table. “I just want to see if he’s posted anything interesting.”
“Don’t tell Cruz I did this for you. It would be almost as bad to him as me taking you to bed.”
“I’m decades too young for you to try something. You go for much older women,” she said, navigating to IG on my phone and typing his name into the search bar before handing it to me.
I squinted and blinked a few times, forcing the photos to come into focus. “Looks like…” I tapped on a photo and read the caption. “Oh.”
“What?”
“He got a dog whose name is Annabelle,” I said, zooming in on a rat-looking dog snarling at the camera.
I scrolled the series of photos all posted within a few days.
Him and a brunette in glasses, the same girl and the dog, and a selfie of the girl kissing his cheek at a park.
“And is maybe…dating someone.” Nope. This wouldn’t go well.
I wished I could pull back the words as soon as they left my mouth.
Willow sat back, her expression crestfallen. “Oh. Wow. That was fast. I knew there was someone else. I just didn’t think they’d really get together so soon.”
I kept scrolling further back, hoping to catch a photo of him and Willow, but the feed was sparse and mostly photos of birds and landscapes, sometimes with this guy in the foreground.
“But looks like it’s new…” It was a mistake to look him up, and I needed to course correct. “All of that is posted over the last couple of weeks. No pics of the woman or the dog before then, so you can take solace that he’s probably spending all his time cleaning up shit off the carpet.”
She sniffed but gave a slight smile. “From the dog or the girlfriend?”
“I meant the dog but maybe both. I don’t know what he’s into. See? You’re better off.”
She nodded unconvincingly. “I just can’t believe he ended things with me and then, poof, was ready to move on. It’s only been a month and a half. We were together for over ten years.”
“Hey,” I said, rolling to one elbow and tossing my phone aside. “None of this sad face. He’s boring black coffee, remember? His feed is full of bird pictures, and you got a re-do on your first dance tonight. You had wasted the original on him, anyway.”
She nodded again, blinking back tears I saw welling in her eyes. I’d really fucked this whole thing up.
“And it was way better than your real first slow dance, right?”
“How do you know?” She sniffed again.
“C’mon.” I motioned to my body and gave her my best smile. “I’m certain there’s no contest.”
Her lips tipped up. “It’s hard to compare,” she admitted. “I was fourteen the first time.”
“See? You’re moving on, too.”
“I guess,” she said, wiping away a tear, but her expression quickly changed to a more resolute one. “I got a re-do. That’s right.” She stood without another word and marched to the back of the house where I heard rummaging noises.
“Willow?” I called down the hall from my spot on the couch. “Low? Can I call you Low? I don’t know what’s happening here.” There was no answer, and I debated following her, but then she reemerged from the hallway holding a notebook and a photo album.
“Are you gonna read me a bedtime story? I like Goldilocks and the three wolves.”
“That’s…very wrong,” she said, falling back onto the couch, tossing a pen and pad at me. She’d been flipping through the notebook roughly and I was worried she’d rip the pages.
“Where did that come from?” I pointed to the photo album in her hand. “If that’s Cruz’s, I need to review what photos he has of me. Lots of potential for blackmail.”
“It’s mine,” she said, tracing a finger of a photo I couldn’t see. “I got a ton of digital photos printed when I graduated college.”
“Oh, I should not have let you look him up on my phone,” I said, making a grab for the album. “Now you’ve dragged out an album of the guy?”
She shook her head, flipping a page. “Not all him. Look.” She held up a page containing photos of her and Cruz, but when she flipped it, there were a lot of shots of the dude from the bird pics.
“Not all.” She waved a hand in the air. “It doesn’t matter.
We’re making a list.” She pointed at the legal pad. “You can take notes.”
“A list of what? We’re both drunk, and you should not assume I understand what you’re talking about.”
“Firsts.” She kept flipping, pausing only momentarily every few pages.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
She ignored me, flipping several pages back and forth. “Dancing.” She flipped page after page, barely looking at the photos and mumbling between instructions. “Painting, date, brunch.”
“Brunch?” I glanced at my handwriting, which was twice the size and half as legible as normal.
“Brunch. Fuck him and his egg white omelets and staying away from religion and politics at the table,” she muttered under her breath.
“I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“We’re making a list of firsts I want to re-do without him. Brunch. Breaking a rule. Camping. My first concert. We saw Beyoncé. Third row in Dallas.”
I stopped writing again. “You want a re-do on third row at a Beyoncé concert?”
“No!” She bit the corner of her lip. “Not her. Never her, but now I can’t hear ‘Formation’ without thinking of him.”
I glanced at my phone screen and woke it up to see a guy who fairly closely resembled a white version of Steve Urkel from that old Family Matters show. “Yeah, you need a re-do on that. This is not the face to associate with ‘Formation.’ ”
She was quiet for a moment. Flip. Flip. Flip. The sound of the pages made me dizzy, like they were swirling around me. She swallowed. “Orgasms.”
I dropped my pen at the word. “What?”
“I told you he was the only one I ever danced with.”
“Yeah…” The dots were coming together, but too slowly.
“Well…he was the only one I ever danced with. If he gets a new dog and a new girlfriend, then I should get lots of orgasms without him.”
I started writing the word to buy myself a little time before responding. “You haven’t given yourself one in the time since you split?”
Flip. Flip. Flip. “Just write it down.”
I intentionally stared at her face, because my best friend’s kid sister had started talking about orgasms and my drunk brain was working on overload. “You have to have given yourself one at some point.”
She threw a pillow at me. “I’ve never been able to do it, okay? I’m aware that makes me a freak, but I haven’t, so I’ve basically just been horny for a decade.” Flip. Flip. Flip. “Learn to drive.”
I wrote it down, letting her words swim in my head and, if I was honest, my dick.
“Why not add sex, then, if you’re so horny?”
She nodded. “Good idea. He’s having sex with someone new. So should I.”
I shifted, the legal pad hiding my body’s initial reaction to this conversation about Willow’s orgasms.
Flip. Flip. Flip. “The park,” she said quietly.
“Just the park?”
“Just the park.” She set the album aside and I put down the pen, leaving the legal pad where it was.
“This is a long list,” I said, making a quick count and wondering if I’d caught everything between her mumbles. “You’re going to re-do them all? While you’re here in Iowa?”
“Yes. That’s how I start over.” She took the list from me and looked it over. “That’s how I make sure I’m ready for the next relationship.”
“You’re already living your life without him.”
She pointed to the list. “Not yet, but I will. If I can make new firsts…if I can remind myself who I am without him…I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s what I need to do to move on and really find my way again. Will you help me?”
I studied her expression and saw a little of Cruz there—the set jaw, the decision to do something that I knew there was no talking her out of. “Can I sober up first?”
She grinned, the smile spreading across her face the way I’d seen earlier in the night when we were dancing.
It was a good smile, a friendly smile, and she was a good person.
Helping her with this silly project wasn’t what Cruz had in mind, but it seemed to be what she needed and might even take my mind off my preoccupation with rushing to reenlist.
“Why not?” I held out a palm for a high five and let my head fall back against the couch again. “We’ve got three months to make it happen.”