Chapter 13 Crap
Whitney: Rikki are you awake I need you
That’s the text I got from my cousin last night. The same cousin I maid-of-honored for last week in Palm Springs. Not at all what I was expecting when I practically flew across the room to my cellular device.
I haven’t heard a peep from Reed Tyler.
Glenn is missing. Whitney’s husband of exactly seven days is MIA, and she’s inconsolable. Jordyn’s driving me to the airport so I can catch a noon flight to LA.
Apparently, Whitney and Glenn had a big blowout yesterday when they were packing to leave for their honeymoon.
He let it slip that he had been married once before: a secret he’s kept through their entire relationship and went out of his way to conceal when they got their marriage license.
He left the apartment after their tiff to “surf it off” and never came back.
Glenn’s car is still parked at the beach.
His phone goes straight to voicemail. She can’t get into his credit card history because they just got married and haven’t shared all that yet.
Her mother, my Aunt Teresa, reported that there’d been weird tension between them all week as they moved into their new place.
Last night when I called Whitney, Aunt Teresa had to come on the line to help articulate the situation, because beyond I need you Rikki. Come home. Please, I need you, she could barely string three words together without hysterically sobbing.
Whitney really needs her cous-sister right now.
Aunt Teresa calls us cous-sisters. We’ve kindly asked her to stop. The word cous-sister burns. I physically shudder every time it’s said aloud.
It’s been a weird eleven months for Whitney and me.
Other than helping coordinate and plan every minute detail of her wedding, we haven’t spoken.
We’ve been almost exclusively communicating about wedding shit since she and Glenn got engaged last November.
She had only met him three months prior at a Harry Styles concert.
Before that, we would talk on the phone every afternoon as I walked from work to the train, or my apartment to the coffee shop I like to write in.
I miss nonwedding Whitney. Of course I booked a flight.
Jordyn reaches out and turns down the radio. “So, have you told him about Whitney?”
I pull my eyes from the monotony of the black tar highway. I’ve been in a sort of trance, tracing the white dotted lines along the road with my eyes. Between the erotica email and Whitney’s distress call, I didn’t get much sleep last night.
I frown. “Him who?”
“Reed,” Jordyn says loudly as she changes into the fast lane.
My stomach dips. “Why would I tell him about Whitney?”
“Not about Whitney, just that you’re going to be in LA for a few days! You’re going to be in the area! You have to see him again.”
“Jordyn, I’m going to LA for Whitney.”
She blows out the sigh equivalent of an eye roll. “I’m sure you can find a few hours to see the best first date of your life again. Send him a text.”
“Jordyn. Last night I sent that man homemade porn. He hasn’t responded.
I am not about to casually text him that I’m now coincidentally going to be in the area.
That will not come off casual. It will come off serial killer.
” My voice is squawking higher by the second as I imagine this scenario from his point of view.
“We don’t know each other well enough for that chapter.
I shouldn’t have sent it. We don’t even follow each other on Instagram. ”
My phone dings. I glance down. From Instagram: @R.Tyler followed you. A scream flies out of me as I throw the phone at the windshield.
Jordyn screams right along with me. “What is it?” She swerves across the right lanes and pulls over to the shoulder. Several cars blare their horns at us. I brace against the door as she throws the car into park and turns to glare at me.
“Sorry!” I bleat, dropping my head into my hands.
“What happened!”
“He just followed me on Instagram.”
Jordyn blinks. “Right after you said you didn’t follow each other on Instagram?”
“Don’t say Disney gods—”
“Rikki, this is the Disney gods!”
I drag a palm across my face in shame. “I’m sorry I just almost got us killed for Instagram.”
Jordyn turns the hazards on and shifts in her seat toward me.
“Rikki. If you don’t see him while you’re out there, you’re going to regret it.
You met him through an actual meet-cute!
You know him through an actual friend! That never happens.
He comes preapproved through mutuals! And you already really like him. ”
I stare down at the notification in my hands. “There’s no point in entertaining this! To what end? He doesn’t live here!”
Jordyn shifts the car into gear and pulls back out onto the road.
“I don’t think you should worry about how it might end.” She maneuvers us back into the fast lane. “I think you should just let it start and see where it goes.”
“Glenn could be in serious trouble,” I mumble. “I can’t go gallivanting around with a new random guy I have a crush on while I’m there.”
Jordyn throws her hands up and lets them land on the steering wheel. “Glenn could be fine. Life is complicated. Sometimes you have to juggle two situations at once.” She pauses. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like you were at that wedding.”
“Like how?”
“You were incandescent. Like somebody plugged you in.”
I scratch at my arm nervously. I thought that exact same thing.
Jordyn and I have always been in sync like this.
Our brains weave the world together in very similar ways.
We have epiphanies at the same time. We get good news at our separate jobs around the same time.
We get sick at the same time. It’s part of what makes our soul-sistership so powerful.
She’s correct. I was radiating joy at that wedding.
“Reaching out now gives him so much power.”
Jordyn sighs. “You’re not giving him power—you’re seizing yours. If you don’t reach out, nothing happens.”
I’ve been leaning forward without realizing it. I flop back into the seat.
“How did your chapter end?” she says suddenly.
“It ends with a quick conversation of how epic the sex was, and then the topic of trust comes up and things get vaguely deep before realizing they only have a few hours left together before his flight home. He dubiously suggests that they meet at the golf course lake one year from their first date and do it all again, and Fiction Rikki shoots that down with an abrupt no before he even gets the full thought out. He says all right, all right, and then she says so what now?”
Jordyn nods, as we turn off the exit toward Newark Airport. “Nice throw to his court.”
“If I text him now, I will come off like a psychotic stalker.”
“Rick, he just followed you on Instagram. That’s not nothing. You have an in to open up communication. Use it.”