Boomerang (22 page)

Working to keep my tone level, I say, “I’m sorry. I know I invited you up, but I think I need to just chill here on my own.”

His eyebrows lift in surprise. “I wasn’t—”

“I just need to take a shower and curl up for a bit. I’m fine.”

He shakes his head. “Can I get a word in here, Mia?”

“Sorry,” I say. “Go ahead.”

He gets up and comes over to sit on my bed, which makes everything ten times worse. I have to fight tears
and
the urge to throw myself on top of him.

When he looks at me, his eyes are soft and deep as night. “Listen,” he tells me. “I need to apologize for the other night. I sounded like an asshole, and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

You’re hurting me now,
I want to tell him.
Just sitting here and not being able to touch you hurts.

“But it’s the right thing,” he finishes. “We both have a great opportunity at Boomerang. I don’t want to jeopardize that. For either of us.”

“I get it,” I say. All this time I’ve wished for the opposite of
that tool
Kyle, someone who knows what he wants. Who makes a choice and stands by it. I should have been more specific. “And it’s fine. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, okay?”

I feel his reluctance to leave as a palpable force between us. But he stands and crosses to the bedroom door. “Okay,” he says quietly. I feel his eyes on me, but I can’t look at him. “See you tomorrow.”

Cookie, Rhett, and Adam have flown out to Vegas for a pre-planning junket, which means Intern Gulag is now Party Central. True, it’s at least partially my fault, as today’s employee catnip came in the form of piping hot Fatburgers. What can I say? I’m the Pied Piper of food bribery.

Vanessa—from IT, I think—and Trent from Customer Relations have created a gnarly obstacle course of coffee filters and Styrofoam cups and compete, blindfolded and in rolling chairs, to reach the last burger, placed like a victor’s trophy, atop the copy machine in the corner.

“You are my new best friend, Mia,” Vanessa tells me, and tugs down one side of her blindfold to cheat her way through a hazardous switchback.

I get my little Canon Vixia out and train it on them while they bump each other off-course, laughing and grabbing at each other’s chairs. Watching them stirs an inkling of an idea inside me, something I can use for the Boomerang booth presentation.

Maybe when I put the film together, I can slow down the scenes. Give it a dreamy, romantic quality. I’m not quite sure yet what I want to say, but maybe it’s that fun can be meaningful, that something can be short-lived but still worthwhile.

I think of my mother telling me I need to “play” and turn the camera on Ethan, who clicks away—two-fingered—at his tablet keyboard. We’re being careful with each other today, but mostly it’s all right.

Without looking up, he asks, “What are you doing there, Curls?”

“Nothing. Just ignore me.” I zoom in, getting a close-up view of his face, of the rare strands of gold-blond hair mixed in his with the caramel brown and of that little scar over his brow, curved like the indentation made by a fingernail. I move to his full lips and the dimple on his chin, which I see now is off-center by just a millimeter.

Even taken separately, every part of him contains this raw, imperfect beauty. I understand why my mom wanted to take pictures of him, though this Ethan is a lighter one, with sun from nearby windows haloing his skin and creating tiny sine waves on his sweeping dark lashes.

A mottled shadow fills my lens, startling me, and I pull away from the viewfinder to see Paolo grinning down at me. He hops onto the corner of my desk—the spot he’s now claimed as his rightful habitat.

“How’d the dates go, kids?”

“Well, I guess I’d rank it right up there with the time you tried out that ménage-à-trois joke on Cookie.”

He winces. “Oooh. Rough.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, I’m gonna hook you up today, Mia, and no arguing, got it?”

“Got it.” I sign into my Boomerang account and hand him my tablet. A blind monkey couldn’t make a worse choice than I did.

While he scrolls through my options, I walk around and shoot more of Vanessa and Trent, who have cleared off the long kitchen island and now seem to be using tiny Pippa from the Art Department as a kind of human curling stone.

“You won’t fall, we promise,” Vanessa assures her, but sure enough, she goes careening off the end of the counter on the third pass and ends up sprawled on a case of paper towels.

“Foul!” she cries weakly from the floor.

“She meant you won’t fall on the
ground,
” Trent says, and hoists her to her feet.

I get a little tingle of excitement because I’m starting to really see it now. Images like this. People playing, having fun, maybe being a little daring. Trying new things. I can film around LA, enlist Skyler and Beth.

Paolo gives a sharp whistle. “Yo, Mia, back to me.”

I practically skip back to my desk, excited to start getting some of my ideas down, though less excited by the idea of another painful setup.

“Okay, I’ve got two options for you. Both primo.”

“Lay them on me.”

“First . . .” He swipes at the screen. “Brian. Film guy. Tremendous Whedon nerd like you, so total score.
And
he’s got a band. Blues and alt covers. He uploaded a video, and it doesn’t suck.”

“Sounds awesome,” I say. And I have to admit he kind of does. “Boomerang him.”

“Do you want to look at his picture first?” asks Paolo. “He’s a good-looking dude.”

“Surprise me. Who else?”

“You go on, Frisky, dating two men at once!”

I smile. “No, I’ve got to do two more dates. You pick.”

“What if you really like this Brian?”

I’m aware of Ethan’s attention on me, the weight of his focus.

“I’ll figure that out if I need to,” I say, not risking a glance in his direction. “But, you know, for research purposes . . . I think it’s important to experience, um, a cross-section of the clientele.”

“For research purposes, of course.” Paolo winks. “Then I present you with King.”

“King
? No.”

“Okay, I totally get it. Douchy name. But trust me. He’s a writer; you’re a filmmaker. He’s from New Jersey; you’re from New York. I won’t even get into the fact that he looks like he could be Drake’s twin. I know you don’t want to see him, but—”

“Pull the trigger,” I tell Paolo. “I trust you.”

“I wouldn’t steer you wrong, baby,” he says, and taps around on the screen a bit. “Okay, two dates, two weeks. You’ll thank me.”

“I’m thanking you now.” Mostly for sparing me from having to pick for myself.

Paolo turns to Ethan. “Your turn.”

Ethan pushes back from his seat and rises. “I’m good, man,” he says. “Took care of it.”

“You did?” asks Paolo.

He did?

“Yep, I’m all set. Thanks.” He glances up at the clock. “Hey, Curls, can you give me a lift to soccer practice? My ride won’t be back from Vegas ’til later.”

“Sure,” I say, knowing I’m doomed to spend the rest of the day wondering when he picked his dates and who they are.

Luckily, I actually find myself absorbed in making notes for the booth and talking to Pippa about some concept sketches. I see something cinematic, framed as a movie, but I don’t know what style yet, what tone. They teach so many things in film school but there’s that “it” factor, that mysterious, instinctive thing that can’t be taught. A point of view. A singular way of seeing. I’m not sure I have it, and that terrifies me.

Before I know it, I hear the sounds of chairs squeaking back, people gathering their stuff. They drift by, dumping out their coffee mugs and rinsing them at the sink, gathering up leftovers from the fridge.

Ethan stands and gives his seat a sharp shove into the desk, toppling my camera, which rests on its rubber tripod atop my desk.

“Sorry,” he murmurs.

Something’s on his mind, I can tell. He gives off an unfocused, impatient energy, though maybe he just doesn’t want to be late.

He’s quiet all the way to the soccer field.

“At least you don’t have to worry about Rhett clothes-lining some little kid today,” I offer.

“That’s football,” he says, with a distracted smile. “But he’s coming along later, after he lands.”

He unfolds his long body from the car and gets out. “Thanks for the ride, Mia.” He gives the roof of my car a little pat. “You have a good night, okay?”

“You too,” I say, but he’s already shut the door. I don’t know what bothers me more: that he barely looked at me all day or that he called me Mia instead of Curls.

He jogs onto the field, and a glimmer of red catches my eye.

It’s Raylene. There on the field. With Ethan.

She’s in a tight yellow dress and black heels—on a soccer field. She races toward him like they’ve been separated for ten years and throws her arms around him. Watching them, my chest tightens like I’m in one of RobbyDTF’s anaconda hugs.

What’s she doing here?

She’s got a little kid with her—pale with hair that’s orange red to her deeper auburn. He’s either her son or some kid she picked up so she could get closer to Ethan.

But that would be crazy, right? A person wouldn’t do something like that, would they?

I don’t know. Putting my car in drive, I know I better get out of there before I do something crazy myself.

Chapter 28

Ethan

Q: Team player or Lone Ranger?

A
s I walk up to Raylene, who has a curly-haired kid glued to her hip, I try to gear myself up for the next hour and a half.

In the car the other night, I made it sound like I could help her.
This is my specialty,
I’d said. But what do I know about getting the lives of heartbroken thirty-year-old single mothers back on track?

“Hi, Ethan James,” she says, moving in for a hug like we’re old friends.

Instead of peeling away from his mother, Parker only slides to her side so he’s buried under her armpit. It’s the kind of thing you see toddlers do all the time, but he’s almost nine.

“Hey, Raylene,” I say, patting her back. “Hey, Parker. I’m Coach Ethan. I hear you played left forward on your other team?”

Parker turns away from me, so I’m talking to the back of his curly head.

“Sorry,
” Raylene mouths.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’ve got it from here. You can pick him up at seven.”

That gets Parker to look up.

“What?” he asks his mom. “You’re
leaving
?”

“Well, I . . .” Raylene looks at me.

“Team policy,” I say. “The boys train better without parents around.”

Parker throws his head back. “No!” he yells. “I’m not staying here!”

He goes from yelling to tantrum, which is my cue to leave. “I’ll be on that field,” I tell Raylene and walk away.

As I grab my gear from storage containers, I glance toward the parking lot, but Mia’s car is long gone. I wonder what she thought of Raylene being here. Maybe it was close to how I felt earlier, hearing about the awesome dudes she’s going to be meeting on her next two dates.

Fuckin’ Paolo. The shit-disturber. But it’s not like he knew it was torture for me to hear. No one at work seems to have any idea about Mia and me, which honestly is surprising.

I get the team going through warm-ups and stretches, keeping an eye on Parker, who sits at the edge of the fence tearing up grass.

“Where’s Coach Sweat?” Tyler asks me. A few of the other boys chime in.

Rhett’s an official coach now, cleared through the league, with his own set of keys to the storage lockers, his own team shirt, everything. When I told him he was in, I swear the guy got emotional.

Being around his level of energy can be overwhelming. It’s like hanging out with a team mascot. Like he’s a fire hose of enthusiasm. But you can’t keep someone like that at a distance for long. Sooner or later, they wear you down.