Last-Minute Love (Year of the Chick series) (16 page)

Despite my diagnosed lack of energy, I practic
ally jumped two feet out of bed and sat up straight on my knees. “You finished your song?!”

“
OUR song. Your lyrics worked out great. It’s like they unblocked my creativity...you’re a lifesaver.”

I smiled warmly, forgetting how hard it had been to actually write it. “It’s no big deal.”

He laughed. “Oh right, I bet any girl could’ve done this. Next time I’ll just ask some random chick in New York if she can help.”

I frowned. “NOT
funny.”

“Relax, I’m kidding!
Anyway I thought it might help you feel better to hear it. Would you like to use Skype so you can watch?”

I grabbed a strand of my greasy matted hair and was immediately horrified. “I don’t think my Internet’s working.”

“Ah okay. Now remember I will send you a recorded version later, where I add in all the instruments and harmonies. But this is just me and my guitar. So forgive me if I screw up any notes.”

“I’m sure it’ll sound great. I
can’t wait!” I was literally holding back a squeal by now.

“Okay, listen closely.”

I heard him put down his phone, followed by some shuffling noises, where I imagined him picking up his guitar, and putting the strap over his wonderfully fit body. Before I could lick my lips I heard a strum to kick things off. A second later, he started singing and playing at a fairly quick tempo.

“Life was nice and easy,

Happiness was free;

I thought I had it figured out,

Then you crashed into me.”

Hearing him sing instead of talk was a revelation. He wasn’t some
“American Idol” contestant belting it out, but instead it was a not-so-perfect but perfectly-passionate voice. With the slightest mumble that reminded me of Bob Dylan.

I loved it.

As he sang on, my smile grew as wide as the Joker’s.  Only less creepy.

“A smile, a look, a laugh,

It’s nice but I’ll forget;

Then words then so much meaning,

It’s you I won’t forget.”

I nodded my head to the beat as he continued.

“Addicted to your dreams,

The sweetness in your eyes;

They tell me you’re the devil,

Doesn’t matter I won’t hide.

A smile, a look, a laugh,

It’s nice but I’ll forget;

Then words then so much meaning,

Don’t leave me cold just yet.”

My smile was still in place,
but the joy of hearing him sing was being overshadowed by a feeling of sorrow. I hadn’t been prepared for that, so I tried to focus harder on the music instead of the lyrics.

“Nothing grows in darkness,

The sun won’t shine this way;

Stay here in this moment,

Before it fades away.”

My smil
e was gone and I wiped away a tear.

***

My bedroom was in darkness once again, as I lay in bed with my phone casting a glow on my frowning face.

“Two weeks isn’t really all that long,” said Erik.

“Yep.”

“I’ll e
-mail you all the time!” he insisted.

“No you won’t. And you shouldn’t.
You’ll be at home spending the holidays with your family.” I paused. “And loved ones.”

He sighed. “I will definitely miss our chats, but like I said I’ll be back soon!”

I smiled. “Well hurry up. I want winter to be over anyway, ‘cause I’d much rather visit you in spring. How’s New York in springtime?”

There was a pause. “Last year was nice. I don’t know how this year will be.” Out of nowhere he was sounding really weird. I wanted to ask what was up but he cleared his throat and
continued on. “I better get going, Romi. So much packing to do.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Bye for now.”

Just like that he was gone, and the rollerco
aster of our contact took another downward turn…

Chapter
Fifteen

A week before Christmas, with my antibiotics cycle long complete and my exhausting kidney infection now only a memory, I was finally back in the groove at work. I was also ready to indulge in some wine with my gossip hounds Amy and Eleanor. It was just what I needed to distract myself from Erik being home for the holidays. Yes, he was in Denmark now, which meant that as I sat here, he was probably really busy getting his “reunion” on.
Ugh.

I left my desk and met
an eager Eleanor and Amy on the ground floor.

In less than thirty seco
nds we crossed the street and raced into the fancy steakhouse (proximity to the office was crucial on these cold winter nights). The dark décor and dim lighting was a perfect match for the classy Christmas wreaths and garlands, which were decorated with soft yellow light-strings and burgundy ribbons.

I sat down first and straightened my
festive red cardigan, which went great with my nerdy faux pearls.

Eleanor---a self-proclaimed
Grinch when it came to Christmas---was all dressed in black, which was...quite frankly, hot. Amy on the other hand was wearing a combination of green, red and white (luckily her office pants were black to somewhat normalize the look). She was a true office elf.

“I can’t believe
it’s been a month since we all hung out!” said Eleanor.

I nodded. “
Imagine missing two weeks of work and then drowning in your boss’s shit pile.” I sighed. “I guess I had to pretend you guys didn’t exist so I could actually catch up.”

Amy p
atted me on the shoulder. “Aww…we still love you. But you missed a ton of juicy gossip…like Eleanor’s final date with poker-face!” Amy was completely sober, yet already cackling like a maniac. I loved her. I was also surprised to hear that Eleanor’s poker-playing suitor was out of the picture. Well I wasn’t surprised that it was over (
come on, a poker player?
), but surprised that I hadn’t heard.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“Well I felt bad bugging you about it when you were sick,” she said.

“Are you kidding? It would’ve been an awesome distraction. So how did it end? Are you okay?”

Amy cackled again. “Oh she’ll be fine.”

I was totally intrigued, and when our wine finally arrived I could be patient no more. “Spill it.”

Eleanor took a long sip, put down the glass, then rolled up her sleeves to her elbows. I could tell this was going to be good. “So, after I constantly told him I was busy…”

“For how long?” I asked
.

“Two weeks.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Go on.”

“Well I finally scheduled a date with him.
” I nodded as she went on. “So he invited me to his place for takeout and a movie, which I thought was pretty innocent.”

I considered
it for a second. “What was the cuisine and what was the movie?”

“Thai and ‘The Smurfs.’”

I nodded. “Bad make-out breath and a G-rating? Yeah that seems pretty innocent.”

“We talked a lot during the movie, like making jokes and stuff
…I was actually having a really good time!”

I gave her my most serious Barbara Walters face, pursed lips and all. “So
Eleanor, what went wrong?”

“Well…I was in the middle
of laughing at one of his jokes...and he basically mauled me!”

Amy laughed. “H
e’s a famous poker player you know…gotta put out!”

Eleanor punched Amy in the shoulder. She barely flinched.

“No hold on though,” I said. “She kinda has a point. So what happened next?”

“Well I pushed him off of
me. I mean he didn’t even start with some casual kissing. Like he was ON me, and he has such a big upper body! Don’t you remember?”

“DO I?” I shook my head. “His upper body is shaped like an upside-down triangle. Like a slice of pizza.”

“Pizza body!” Amy cried.

“Yes, a pizza body. Thank you. So did he take off his shirt, and if so, did he have greasy pepperoni nipples?”

Amy and I were laughing uncontrollably now, but Eleanor looked extremely annoyed.

“Sorry,” I quickly said. “So t
hen what?”

“We
ll I told him it wasn’t going to happen for him, at least not then, so we watched the rest of the movie in silence.” She shook her head. “I mean I barely know him, right?! The ‘Eleanor code’ does not crack so easily!”

“But wh
at about the third date rule?” said Amy.

“No, no,
” I said. “Meeting a guy at a club is not a first date. This was only their second. Besides, those rules are dumb. Rules like that help loser guys get laid, and pressure girls like us into taking something emotional and making it trivial, when let’s face it, is anything ever trivial to us?”

Amy gave me a blank stare.

“Well you might be the exception,” I said.

We all laughed.

“So then he just drove you home?” I asked.

“
That’s the worst part. On the way to his car he was being such a pouty little boy. Then once we were on the road he kept saying how I live so far away, and that maybe he could drop me off at some intersection. Like it’s a ten-minute drive and it’s one a.m. bitch!”

A
nearby table of respectable-looking older women frowned at us. Luckily they weren’t our co-workers.

“
Sorry you went through all that,” I said. “It’s disturbing but also hilarious.”

She nodded. “It kind of is. Then when I asked him why he was so upset, he turned to me and said ‘because I didn’t get laid.’”

I almost choked on my wine. “Wow, don’t hold back, pizza-body.”

“Like w
hat a jerk,” said Eleanor. “Anyway he messaged me the next day but I deleted him off my BlackBerry. DONE!”

“Well I think this
validates the professional poker player stereotype,” I said.

“What do you mean?”
Eleanor seemed curious all of a sudden.

“Just think about his life for a s
econd. He probably plays in these glitzy poker tournaments in say…Monaco or something. When you’re in a place like that and you’re winning tournaments, I bet a row of groupie vaginas just opens up, like flowers pointing at the sun.” I tried to mime an opening vagina with my hands. It looked awkward. “Oh and in case you didn’t catch it, he’s the sun in this analogy.”

Amy stared at me hard. “You’re such a weirdo.”

I smiled. “And you’re our leader.”

We finished off our wine and ordered another round, which was j
ust the distraction I needed from the thought of what or “who” Erik was doing…

***

Thick snowflakes gently fell on our snow-covered yard, as I watched from the warmth of the kitchen. I cradled a cup of hot chocolate and slowly sipped, while Frank Sinatra’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” provided a nostalgic soundtrack. That song was the most beautiful and perhaps the most depressing Christmas tune I knew (
aside from the one about starving children who don’t even know it’s Christmas
). It made me think about all those people wishing to spend Christmas with their loved ones, but instead having them thousands of miles away where they were banging some other chick.

Wait, maybe
that’s not what “Old Blue Eyes” was trying to say.

I hea
rd a scratching noise coming from the family room, followed by the familiar sound of Christmas ornaments dropping to the floor.

“Tommy!” I set down my cup and stomped
right over to my badass cat, who hopped onto one of the chocolate-brown couches like he owned the place.

I narrowed my eyes. “If you don’t behave, you’re not getting ANY treats in your stocking!” I p
ointed to the smallest red stocking hanging from the mantle, the one with the name “Tommy” written out in glitter paint. I couldn’t even remember when we’d made the decision to humanize our cat with a stocking. It was just one of those normal pet owner realities, like making him wear a party hat on his birthday.

Tommy watched intently as I cra
wled around the floor looking for ornaments. Even though I couldn’t see his yellow-green eyes, he was enjoying it, that much I knew. Once I had them all, these different looking mismatched balls, I hung each one of them back on our seven-foot artificial tree. This was one of those fancier pre-lit trees, but instead of getting the kind with the clear white lights, we’d chosen the one with a gumball-coloured mash-up of bulbs. Our ornaments weren’t cohesive either, but rather the sum of all the ones that hadn’t broken over the years, plus whichever new ones seemed cute.
Like this stuffed gingerbread man in a chef’s hat. Aww!
Martha Stewart definitely wouldn’t approve, but as if I was about to take decorating advice from a hardened criminal?

I wagged my finger angr
ily at Tommy one last time, before I hurried back to the kitchen. It was time to pop the shortbread cookies in the oven, because cookies were something I knew how to do. Self-published book marketing however, was more of a mysterious beast (a beast I had twelve minutes to investigate, while these cookies bloomed to perfection).

I
sprinted up to my room, grabbing my laptop and hopping onto the bed in one quick motion. I was selling three copies a day now of “Year of the Chick,” which was great…but still not the kind of money that would pay for a year in Paris. I’d recently heard about authors selling hundreds of copies following a giveaway of their book. They had to give away thousands of copies to actually pull this off, which seemed totally counterintuitive.

I dug deep into a popular message board to find out more (
if my friends knew what I did in my spare time...
).

After five minutes of reading
, I found a bunch of authors who insisted it could work.
It had something to do with rankings while you were free which connected to “post-free rankings,” a popularity list, your visibility on the “also-bought” pages of other popular books (
umm
what?
), and some other “algorithm” business that went totally over my head. It seemed strange and slightly disturbing that as long as your book was in front of enough faces, you were bound to sell tons of copies...even if your book kinda sucked. On the other hand, was a brick and mortar bookstore any different? The publishers who negotiated end-cap space or entire racks for their books sold the most, while the ones on the dusty bottom shelf of a seldom-travelled aisle…didn’t.

I decided to join the game
, and enrolled my book in this promotional program, by promising I wouldn’t sell it anywhere else for three months (
whatever, almost all of my sales are here anyway
).

I scheduled a free promotion for a few days after Christmas, when everyone woul
d hopefully start using new e-readers and loading them up with books. I also found a list of websites I could inform about my free promotion.

Once that was done I stared at
my over-flowing bookcase and shook my head. Several years ago, when I’d first dreamed about writing books and being an author, I’d never imagined how much of it would hinge on website exposure and free digital copies and complicated algorithms. At the root of it though the book still had to be decent, otherwise readers would tell you all about it. Even if your book wasn’t horrible, readers might still tell you to get a life. In my case I had two of those “get a life” reviews. At first they had made me sick, but when I looked at the bigger picture and the ten great reviews I did have, I knew I’d live.

I could’ve spent another five or six
hours learning about the world of self-publishing, but unfortunately my twelve minutes were up.
And the line between a melt-in-your mouth shortbread cookie and a crumbly mess? Oh so fine.
I sped back down to the kitchen, and pulled out the tray from the oven. I wouldn’t dare touch the cookies in this delicate white-hot state, so instead I used my X-Ray vision to see through the bottom of the tray
. X-Ray vision says “done!”

After putting the next batch in the oven, I
tapped my fingers against the counter, in a house that felt way too quiet. My brother was in the depths of his basement bedroom, wrapped in a Snuggie no doubt, and my mother had dragged my father out grocery shopping before the Christmas Eve closing bell. It was only my sister and her husband coming over, but my mother made it seem like she was hosting a governor’s ball. The fridge was packed with food, but still she needed more, from mainstream grocery stores to her Punjabi specialty places. It was all to make an Indian-inspired feast large enough to feed the US army.

Except there were only six of us.

To my utter relief, my vibrating phone broke the silence, with Laura’s lovely face on the screen.

I smiled and answered the phone. “Merry Almost Christmas!”