Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (35 page)

Oh, and she’d also gotten a few Puritanical wrist slaps, because apparently people had waaaay too much time on their hands.

Serves you right for making out with someone you didn’t know
.

That’s vile that you didn’t ask his name before you rammed your tongue down his throat
.

It was testament to the shape and size of her desperation that she’d been briefly thrilled by that last one, because it had raised her hopes that the critic had seen them kissing and just needed to be persuaded to tell her who the mystery guy was. She’d emailed back and asked, but she hadn’t gotten a response. And then she’d realized the email writer had probably been extemporizing. “Rammed your tongue down his throat” was social commentary, not a description of what he or she had witnessed.

She hadn’t rammed, anyway. Neither of them had. There had, admittedly, been a
lot
of tongue involved, but he had great technique—rare, she thought, or maybe it was simply another irritating aspect of Henry she’d put up with too long, the way his tongue filled her mouth, all wet and blobby.

Sad-Eyed Guy’s tongue had this way of being in exactly the right place, with the perfect
slide and caress, the advance and retreat, at exactly the right time. As if he were anticipating what she needed. As if they were psychically linked. Ah. Psychically linked kissing.

She was officially insane. It was probably what happened when you were on the brink of having hair-raising, toe-curling, mind-numbing rebound sex with a hot guy but then were abruptly deprived of the opportunity just when your body had kicked into high gear. Inopportune-sex-cessation-induced psychosis.

She could open her own sex-ailment clinic, where they would treat inopportune-sex-cessation-induced psychosis with psychically linked kissing. She would be the first patient. The doctor would say,
Nurse, this patient presents with the severest of symptoms. We’d better act quickly
. They’d make her change into a thin slip of a hospital gown behind an inadequate curtain hung on a half circle from hooks and chains. She’d step out of the curtain and there would be a knock on the door and Sad-Eyed Guy would step in, in a white coat. And nothing else.

Yep, insane.

Mostly, her social-media campaign had yielded dead ends.

Sorry, can’t figure out who it might have been
.

Did you say his friend had long red hair?

Did he have a guitar with him?

She had chased them as far as the elevator, taken another car down, and lost them. It was as if they’d never existed, like some kind of crazy Cinderella transformation where the form they’d taken when they stepped out of the elevator was unrecognizable. Pumpkins and mice. Or, you know, Clark Kent. She guessed they must have somehow beaten the rush and run straight into the backseat of a waiting cab. Vanished into thin air.

She held out some hope that he’d be looking for her, too. He’d said that his friend Owen was the friend of a friend of a friend who’d gotten some Facebook invitation that had been passed along. Surely…

But if he’d wanted to be found, wouldn’t he have asked her name before he fled? Wouldn’t he have found some way to wait for her? Or to come back and find her?

The thing was, even if those fifteen minutes had felt like a lifetime, they’d only been fifteen minutes. She was probably deeply delusional, the result of bad rebound juju and too many pink and blue drinks. And even assuming
she’d
felt what she thought she had, there was no
reason to think he’d felt the same way. What was she basing her convictions on, anyway? Lustful stares, wry glances, tidbits of conversation whose content she couldn’t remember—only the sparkle and joy she’d felt, which could very well have been the result of seeing things through girly-drink goggles.

Could she remember
anything
he’d said to her?

“Mother of God.” When he’d tasted the cheese. Although the words were kind of secondary to the look on his face: total abandon. The thought had crossed her mind, of course, that she would like to put that look on his face for other reasons.

“You’ve got that part
dead
wrong.” Again, the expression, not the words.

“You looked great to me.”

“Wow.”

“Really hot.”

Hardly William fucking Shakespeare.

Had he said anything else? Or had she just talked? Had she babbled at him, all high on Blue Lagoons and Cotton Candies or whatever the bartender was calling those things?

Possibly she’d manufactured the whole experience—certainly the whole buzz—off nothing at all.

So Nora moved the email into her
Sad-Eyed Guy
folder and gave up.

On a perfectly ordinary Friday night right after Thanksgiving, unexceptional in every other possible way, Nora’s phone pinged with a Twitter notification. That, too, was not unusual and brought with it no hike in adrenaline or sense of urgency. She picked her phone up from the coffee table where it lay. Swiped it open and had a look.

Her heart processed the tweet before her brain did, a rush of excitement off “friend” and “midnight” and “New Year’s Eve,” and she had to reread it several times before she understood that the scruffy blond guy, Owen, the one who’d been at the party with the Sad-Eyed Guy, had somehow found out who she was.

She sat down on the well-worn couch in her living room and tried to catch her breath.

She supposed a more careful person would probably not respond to the tweet, especially given the barrage of awfulness that had resulted from her last attempt to use social media to solve her New Year’s Eve mystery. But it had been a long eleven months. She’d gone on many insufferable dates. Her friends had fixed her up with a musician who appeared not to have any notion of dental hygiene and an English professor who was an aggressively bad kisser. She’d gotten pizza with a disheveled-but-cute guy who’d picked her up in the T, but he’d gone to the bathroom before the check came, and he never returned. She’d gone on several Match.com dates. Nice guys, no chemistry. Or smart guys, too much ego. A few nice, smart guys who weren’t interested in a second date.

When dates went wrong, she sometimes missed Henry, but more often she missed the guy whose name she didn’t know. She missed his minimalist conversation style, the intensity of his eyes on her, his dry sense of humor, and his kisses.

She missed
liking
him. In fifteen minutes, with no good reasons at all, they’d actually enjoyed each other’s company. It was shocking how hard that was to achieve in dating. She tried to think whether there’d been another fifteen-minute interval, on
all
the ten-plus dates she’d been on in eleven months, when she’d believed that she and her date were both having a good time.

Nope.

She wrote:

@OwenYouSomething Yes
.

His reply was almost instant.

@Noramal Follow me and I’ll DM you

@OwenYouSomething Done
.

And then, because her fifth-grade teacher had been fond of saying that discretion was the better part of valor:

@OwenYouSomething How do I know you’re for real? I’ve heard from some serious weirdos
.

@Noramal He shoved another guy who tried to kiss you, after. And we ran like bats out of hell and he never asked your name
.

Because he didn’t
want
to know your name
, a little voice in her head reminded her. And he probably still doesn’t.

@OwenYouSomething How did you figure out who I was?

@Noramal A friend just tweeted me to say she’d gone on FB after a year off it and seen something about it
.

@OwenYouSomething That’s crazy. I put stuff out on Twitter and FB but no one knew who he was
.

@Noramal He’s my friend Miles. Good guy. Can totally vouch for him
.

Miles
, she thought. Nice name.
But I have promises to keep. And Miles to go before I sleep
.

She recognized that the surge of excitement she was feeling would translate as desperation in a tweet, so she kept her response low-key.

@OwenYouSomething I’d like to see him again
.

@Noramal Call him
. Miles Shepard,
216-555-2760
.

@OwenYouSomething Seriously?

There was a long silence at the other end, and she wondered. Whether Miles knew that Owen was tweeting her. Or whether Owen was acting on his own recognizance. The silence seemed ominous, either way.

@OwenYouSomething He doesn’t know you’re talking to me, does he?

@Noramal Just call him
.

@OwenYouSomething Should I not mention our little conversation?

@Noramal Up to you
.

@OwenYouSomething I won’t get you in trouble?

@Noramal I can take care of myself
.

@OwenYouSomething Thank you. I really appreciate this
.

@Noramal Just … be good to him
.

@OwenYouSomething You’re a good friend
.

@Noramal Let’s hope he thinks so, too
.

Amen to
that, she thought. She saved the phone number to contacts, then got up, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of red wine. She stood in the circa-1970 kitchen, sipping the wine and trying to pretend that she wasn’t desperate to call him. As if there were an invisible TV audience, ready to respond with applause or a laugh track.

She took a slug of the wine, set down the glass, and picked up the phone.

Her thumb played over the swipe bar on the iPhone, waking it. She could call him. Right now.

Native caution, which had been peculiarly absent on New Year’s Eve, forbade her to dial the number. Instead, she tapped open the Facebook app. Typed
Miles Shepard
into the search window.

Miles Shepard. 1 mutual friend
.

No effing way. How was that possible? Social media was supposed to be the connector, and she’d spent weeks back in January trying to find him, when all along he’d been one degree of separation away. Not knowing his name had been the deal breaker, apparently.

She clicked through, and her breath caught at the sight of Miles standing on the beach
with several friends, his arm carelessly flung around another guy’s shoulder. He wore a T-shirt and board shorts and was grinning, squinting slightly into the sun. The light glinted off the water behind him. The grin made him look like a different man entirely. Someone mischievous and fun. The juxtaposition of
that
Miles with the dark serious one who’d kissed her so
thoroughly
on New Year’s Eve—

It was sort of Oreo-esque in its awesomeness. Or like that advertisement for peanut butter cups, which claimed that peanut butter and chocolate were the best combination since Saturday and Sunday.

Like finding out that the guy you’d been drunk sex-tweeting with was the hot guy at the bus stop.

She flipped through some of his status updates. More photos of the beach trip with guys who turned out to be his college buddies. A kayaking trip with friends. Frequent photographs of funny signs, most of which made her giggle. A lettered roadside sign: C
AMPING
& Z
OMBIE
A
POCALYPSE
S
UPPLIES
. A hacked traffic sign: P
REPARE TO
B
E
A
NNOYED
. Side-by-side shops: K
IMBERLY
’
S
K
ANDY
S
HOP
and R
OBERT
P. T
RUST
, D
ENTIST
.

He’d posted several work-y updates from a conference for—she Googled it—people who ran nonprofits. She clicked on his profile. He was the executive director of a nonprofit that helped kids get three meals a day. She tried not to get all swoony about that. She wasn’t supposed to exult in his awesomeness, because he wasn’t hers in any way, shape, or form.

He hadn’t posted a status update since last fall. Nothing too outrageously weird about that. She was a sporadic Facebook user, too. On-again, off-again, as her life got busy, sometimes not posting for as long as a year at a time.

Their mutual friend was Stacey Heany. Nora sighed. It would have been more helpful if it had been someone she knew well. Stacey was an acquaintance from her teaching master’s program, someone she’d been friendly, but not friends, with.

Still, Stacey knew Miles, so Nora swallowed her pride and messaged her.

Hey, Stacey. It’s been ages—how are things with you? Weird question—you know Miles Shepard?

The answer came back right away.
miles! how do you know miles?

Met him at a party. Sorry to be a weird stalker, but I didn’t get his name and just tracked him down and I wanted to make sure he was—I dunno, not scary
.

miles is totally not scary. but I havent been in touch with him in years. in the interim he might have become scary? but probably not, dont think he has it in him. really nice guy. college friend of mine. we hung out a lot senior year bc he was dating one of my roomies. youre interested in him?

Yeah
.

As Nora wrote it, she had the urge to hedge her bets in some way. Cross her fingers, knock on wood. Typing it made it feel too real. As if she was committed now. To … calling, reaching out to him, whatever.

go for it
.

I don’t even know if he’s single
.

hes the kind of guy you could just ask. straight ahead, totally. no bs
.

I will
.

report back?

For sure!

good luck
.

Thanks!

She switched back to Twitter. She surveyed the DM conversation she’d had with Owen.
Just call him
.