Authors: Melanie Jacobson
And that led me back to Landon.
I hated the idea of contacting him. A job wasn’t worth it. I’d date a thousand toad-faced guys with mother issues and gradually earn my way out of my column on the merits of my writing before I’d ever sit down to discuss even the weather with Landon.
But if in a bizarre twist of irony, he represented my only chance to find a solution to my impasse with Tanner, then . . .
I needed to believe facing Landon would be worth it. I took a deep breath, got out of the car, and headed into the
Bee
.
When I pushed open the lobby doors, despite my fervent prayer, Giggle Girl still sat there, her hair as shiny and perfect as it had been on my last visit four months before. She offered me a plastic smile when I approached the desk, but no recognition showed in her face. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t limping this time.
“I’m here to see Tanner Graham,” I said.
Her smile grew brittle at its edges. “Is he expecting you?”
“Could you just let him know Pepper is here?”
The name jogged her memory, and her smile faded completely. “He’s not conducting any interviews today.”
I wasn’t in the mood for this. She was the first and smallest in a long line of hurdles I was here to clear, and I wasn’t investing my energy in her turf war.
“Call him,” I said, not bothering to phrase it as a question.
She shot me a peeved glance before picking up her phone and angling her back toward me. She lowered her voice, but since only her desk separated us, I could still hear her, which was probably her intention.
“Tanner? Hi! Yeah, there’s someone here requesting to see you . . . Yeah . . . remember that Pepper girl? The one who walked funny? She’s back. Do you want me to tell her—oh. Are you sure?”
I offered her a winning smile when she turned around. I think it made her madder. “You can go up. His desk is—”
“I know where it is,” I said, which was not true, but I’d figure it out rather than admit ignorance. When I opened the door at the top of the stairs, Tanner was leaning against the desk that sat in front of it, waiting for me. He straightened when he saw me and, with an elbow under my arm, guided me toward the same office we’d interviewed in. It wasn’t the hug and “I’m glad you’re here” I’d hoped for, but at least he had told Giggle Girl to send me up. It was something.
He ushered me into the nondescript room and repositioned the only two chairs so they were by each other instead of being separated by the desk. We sat.
“What’s up?” he asked. He didn’t sound upset. Just tired.
I stared at him for a full minute. Four months ago I had sat in this office, berating myself for not planning what I would say in my interview. Here I was again, berating myself for the exact same thing. I hadn’t thought out a smooth way to say, “I was wondering if you love me and stuff.” Coming to his workplace was idiotic too. Who does that?
Lovesick seventeen-year-olds—that’s who.
Not grownups. At least, not emotionally stable, fully functioning ones.
I sighed. “When I got in my car and drove here and then parked and walked into your office building and then made the receptionist call you and then told myself that I was being brave, I was operating under the effects of sleep-deprivation. I’m an idiot.” I braced myself on the chair arms to push myself up. “I’m sorry. I’ll go. Can you call me later?” I was halfway out of my seat when he reached out and placed his hand on mine to keep me there.
“It’s fine. Sit down. I wasn’t getting anything done anyway.” He took his hand back and shoved it through his hair. I could tell it was not the first time he had mussed his hair that day. Despite his crisp blue dress shirt and gray pants, he looked . . . rumpled.
I eased back in the chair, and unsure of what to do with my hands, I settled them in my lap, where they lay looking limp and useless. Or perhaps I was projecting . . . ?
Tanner’s eyebrow lifted, which meant, “I’m waiting.” It was one of his reporter mannerisms, where he did it unconsciously when his Spidey senses told him he wasn’t hearing all of a story. He would quirk that eyebrow and wait patiently until he got the rest of it. It was a powerful eyebrow.
“The army should skip waterboarding and just turn your eyebrow loose on prisoners,” I said.
“What?” he asked, looking startled.
“Nothing.” I clasped my hands and studied them then decided that looked even stupider than before, so I put them back on my lap, naked and forlorn. I cleared my throat. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said last night, and I wanted to say that I heard you. I really heard you. But, um. I have some . . . questions.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Shoot.”
“You said that you wanted us to reevaluate our relationship and make it exclusive. Why?”
He considered the question for a minute. “I know I don’t want to be with anyone else. Exclusive makes sense.”
The correct answer would have been, “Because I’m madly in love with you and can’t live without you. Let my love give you wings as you face down Ellie!”
However, I had not given him a copy of his script and couldn’t be too upset that he didn’t know his lines. “I don’t want to be with anyone else” was a start. I’d cling to it like a lifeline while I threw myself a little farther off the cliff.
“Okay, exclusive makes sense,” I said. “Why don’t you want to be with anyone else?” The correct answer was, again, “I’m madly in love with you and can’t live without you.”
Tanner’s answer sounded like, “We connect.” Because that’s what he said.
We connect. Another true but unsatisfying answer.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be with anyone else either, and I know that moving this relationship to the next level is totally up to me, but it’s a little complicated at the moment.”
His face relaxed slightly. “It’s good to hear you say that.”
“That it’s complicated?”
He snorted. “When is complicated ever good? No, I mean it’s good to hear you say that you don’t want to be with anyone else.”
I frowned at him, taken aback. “I told you that last night.”
He shook his head. “No. You said you didn’t want to go on the Indie Girl dates. You never said you didn’t want to be with anyone else.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t.”
We stared at each other in silence for a moment. Wasn’t this where the heavens should part and a ray of light shine down to illuminate our new-found love? I saw no parting heavens, only the flicker of a fluorescent tube that needed changing. My stomach churned. I wanted him to proclaim his love so I could take the dive and set up the interview with Landon, knowing that despite the inevitable, horrible awkwardness of it, I would have Tanner waiting for me on the other side. But he wasn’t declaring his love for me.
This was a very ill-conceived plan.
Sensing my frustration, he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and caught my eye. “You’re upset. Why?”
“This isn’t how I thought this would go,” I admitted. “I’m having a hard time aligning my expectation with reality.”
Confusion played over his face. “What were you expecting?”
I fidgeted. “I don’t know. A better sense of how you feel?”
His confusion gelled into an expression of disbelief. “Wait. You think I’m being vague about how I feel?”
“Well, yeah.” I lifted my hands back to the chair arms and gripped them, preferring to give them something to do.
“Pepper, you ignored me for months. The only times you weren’t ignoring me, you were either glaring at me or making fun of me. Then I talked you into going out with me, but you’ve gone on a date with someone else every single week we’ve been dating.”
“But that was for work!”
“And I didn’t know that until yesterday! I thought it was just another way for you to say, ‘Friends with benefits is
great.
’” His emphasis was frustrated. “I have been trying to read you for months, and now you’re dragging me away from my desk to ask me how I feel about you because you think
I’ve
been vague.”
I shrank a little in my chair.
He sighed. “I think I’m way too exhausted to have this talk right now, and I can see a bunch of people out there trying to pretend like they’re not lip reading this whole conversation.”
I turned to catch about four heads in the newsroom whip around to their own desks. I scowled and turned back to Tanner.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t being very considerate in coming here. And I’m sorry I’ve been so hard to read. I haven’t meant to be.”
Up went the eyebrow. “You haven’t?”
I sighed again. “All right. I guess I have. I need to get back to the magazine. Can we talk later?” He hesitated, and my heart sank. Or not even that. It deflated and left a heart-shaped hollow in its place.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, yes, I want to talk. But at the moment, I have no idea what there is to say. I need sleep. And perspective. And to think, maybe. I don’t know.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “Mainly, I need sleep. My brain is fried.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that’s pretty much my fault.” I stood up, and he followed. Just as the night before, I didn’t really know what to say next. “So . . .”
“So.” He captured my gaze and held it. “I don’t know how long it will take me to think.”
“I understand. I’ll wait.” Kind of. But with any luck, the plan hatching in my mind would cut down that wait time significantly. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. Hugging Tanner in front of the entire newsroom was probably a bad idea, so I offered a little wave before slipping through the door to leave. I ignored all the curious glances on my way to the stairs, but I felt relief when I reached the first landing and the itchy feeling of having a dozen pairs of eyes trained on me faded. When I hit the exit into the lobby, Giggle Girl’s head shot up, and she stared at me, her expression disapproving. I gave her my most cheerful smile and headed out. What was that saying? “Smile. It makes people wonder what you’re up to.” Let her wonder. I was definitely up to something.
* * *
This was going to be way harder than I’d thought, and I’d already thought it was going to be pretty hard.
I sat in The Zuke and stared at my phone, glad no one upstairs in the
Real Salt Lake
offices was likely to see me in a casual glance out of the office window. It would look pretty odd, me sitting in my car in front of work, not going anywhere.
The number staring back from my phone belonged to Landon’s sister, Kylie. She had always liked me, and I knew she’d be glad to put me in touch with him. Too glad, maybe. I’d have to make sure she understood that I wanted to interview him, not reconcile, or she’d get her hopes up. My finger hovered over the call button. Once I set this all in motion, there was no turning back, and this was about so much more than seeing Landon face to face.
When I’d dropped in on Tanner earlier, I’d gone to him looking for a sign. Or more specifically, a declaration. I’d be ready to face Landon if Tanner were waiting with open arms and a huge “I love you.”
Instead, Tanner was guarded, and it was my fault. I’d forced him to take that approach with me from the beginning, at first by refusing to acknowledge the attraction between us and then by keeping him at an emotional distance with my “dating other guys” excuse. To add insult to all that injury, even after admitting to him that I didn’t like dating all those other guys, I wasn’t ready to quit because I wouldn’t give up my job for him.
Except Tanner didn’t want me to give up my job.
It was fair that not knowing how to deal with the dates was eating him up, yet he still refused to put me in the position of choosing between him and my professional goals. That already made him the polar opposite of Landon, not to mention his quality of character in every way that counted.
I understood that not asking me to risk my job didn’t mean he could accept me dating other people. I had grown to understand him so well in the last month, after hours of talking and laughing with him, that I knew the real issue wasn’t even me dating other people. I knew Tanner would really struggle with the lack of transparency in what I was doing, both in terms of the audience I wrote for and the guys I dated and wrote about. It would gnaw at him if he tried to ignore it, and we’d end up at this impasse at some future point even if he tried to accept it.
I stared at Kylie’s number and again thought about how much I had needed Tanner to profess his love for me before trying to take this next crazy step
.
Yeah, I needed to hear it.
But I had never said it.
And I had never given Tanner a reason to think that I would welcome hearing it. He’d tried a dozen different ways to show me that he cared, and I had reciprocated by
deigning
to spend time with him and not much else.
A tear slipped out and rolled down my cheek as the full measure of my jerkiness settled on me. I had walked away from Landon because I had deserved to be treated better. Would Tanner walk away from me for the same reason?
I hit Call.
Dear Landon,
Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. It was hard for me to even ask. And thanks for talking stuff over with me. I had every intention of just coming in and asking the standard questions then getting out. I’m sorry I was so stubborn when you first brought all of our relationship issues up, but I guess we both needed closure. I thought I had it before, but I know I have it now. I judged you too harshly.
I wish you success and happiness, Landon. I really do. I’m glad now that things didn’t work out for us, and it took me a really long time to understand and accept that, but I think we’re both happier for it. I knew you were. It just took me awhile to realize that I am too.
Sincerely,
Pepper
P.S. I got the card. I almost sent it back, but I guess keeping it is part of growing up and moving on. So thanks for that. Good luck with everything, Landon. I hope you find what you’re looking for.