Someday Maybe (12 page)

“I remember that,” Oliver said, leaning against the kitchen doorway, looking all gorgeous and intense—like in my dreams. His voice was low, meant only for me to hear. “
You
were the one who burned our toast in the morning, Rachel. If I recall.”

My stomach filled with butterflies and I took in a deep breath, ready to begin some kind of dialogue about our past with this hunky guy who lived in a pink house.

“We ready?” Meghan reappeared, fresh as a daisy. “Good night, Rad. Thanks for”—she smiled and wound a curly lock of her hair around a finger—“you know, everything.”

“Sorry again that it’s so late.” His eyebrows pulled together as he glanced at the floor, looking and sounding apologetic. “The night got away from me, there was something else I wanted to—”

“It’s no problem for me, since I’m not due at the studio until noon,” Meghan said. “Rachel’s the one with the early schedule.”

“Don’t remind me.” I automatically started kneading my left temple. “I’m going to be dead tired in the morning and I have such a busy day with—” I cut myself off, knowing I did indeed sound like I was “working myself to death.”

“Ya know what—screw it.” I grabbed my purse and jacket. “I officially decide to play hooky tomorrow and go to the beach or the wine country. No wait, there’s that twenty-four-hour spa in Calistoga with the volcanic mud baths. I’ll start my weekend early and head there tonight.” I slid into my jacket and pulled open the door. “Thanks for dinner. I’ll see you guys later.”

Before either of them had the chance to speak, I was out the door and down all those steps, heading toward the bus stop, finger on the trigger of my pepper spray.

True, I’d been meaning to try out that mud spa, but my exit had more to do with not wanting to witness how Oliver and Meghan said good-bye.

Chapter Seventeen

For a while, I didn’t see Oliver very often—the odd museum outing or group trek to Alamo Square to picnic at the feet of the “painted ladies.” Though I did receive steady, unrequested updates from Meghan and Sarah.
Ollie
was busy at work again.
Rad
said the funniest thing the other night. Once, Roger was sitting right next to me on the couch during one of Meghan’s updates.

“She doesn’t know?” he said to me after she’d left.

“No,” I said.

“Have you two—”

“No.”

More often than not, when I did see him, he was monopolized by Meghan or otherwise engrossed in conversation. We were never alone. He never came around. Sarah—his sister—had my phone numbers, knew where I lived. If he wanted to see me or talk to me, he could have. But he never reached out. Then again, neither did I.

The rare moments when we did happen to be sitting next to each other in a taxi van or happened to be at the bar waiting for drinks at the same time, he was polite, but no more stolen glances across the room. Whatever I’d felt at his house that night…I’d imagined it.

Oliver was over me.

Worse than that, it was as though we had no history at all.

A group of us were meeting to watch the parade and lion dancers in Chinatown one Saturday afternoon. I’d made sure Oliver wasn’t coming before I’d agreed, and was surprised when I saw him standing on the curb along the parade route on Grant Avenue, leather jacket and jeans, sunglasses, and a huge smile as he chatted with Meghan and a few of our other friends.

I sucked in a breath, adjusted my purse strap over my shoulder, and joined them, doing my best to stay on the other side of the group from him. It was easier for me when I didn’t give him the chance to snub me. Later, at Dim Sum Heaven, I had no choice of proximity, since I was last to our table and the waiter had to pull over an extra chair, right next to Oliver. After weather and traffic was all I got out of him, I stopped trying. Halfway through lunch, my stomach felt all knotty and I couldn’t stop wringing my hands. After the third time I caught Oliver glancing at them with an annoyed expression, I kept them in my lap.

“You didn’t eat the chicken, did you?”

I had to look twice to make sure he was actually addressing me. He glanced at my twitchy hand when I reached up to take a drink. It was red and splotchy.

“There’re sesame seeds in that dish.”

I flipped my hand over. Hives. I’d always had a minor allergy to sesame seeds, but I’d been so preoccupied by trying not to talk to Oliver that I’d forgotten to check what I was eating.

“Is your throat closing?” he asked in a quiet but rushed voice.

I swallowed, testing it out. “No.”

He pushed back from the table a bit to get a better look at me. His eyes doing a quick assessment of my body made my heart thud. “Is the rash just on your hands?”

He was running down the checklist we’d done half a dozen times when I’d had an allergic reaction. I pushed up my sleeves. “Stops at my elbows.”

“Do you have your Benadryl?” I nodded and went for my bag, but Oliver was already reaching for it. “Can we get some water here?” he asked as a waiter breezed by. Then he pushed my cup away. “No more black tea. You need to flush it out.”

I was peeling the tiny pink pill out of its wrapper, about to thank him for being so observant and calm and kind, but when I looked up, he was moving to a chair on the other side of the table, switching places with his sister.

Disappointment weighed down on my shoulders. He wouldn’t look at me.

“Hey.” Sarah slid into Oliver’s vacated chair at my side. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I said, feeling a chill and nausea in my stomach that had nothing to do with allergies.

“Ollie said to…to keep an eye on you.” She glanced at the pill in my hand. “Make sure you took that with two full glasses of water.”

Tears pressed against the backs of my eyes. Taking extra-long to keep my chin tipped while swallowing the Benadryl, I blinked them away. For the rest of the meal, I kept trying to catch his attention. It finally dawned on me that, with Sarah at my side now, he was done worrying about me. After that, I couldn’t look at him, either.

The following weeks brought a string of new dreams. There was the one when I fell down Alice’s rabbit hole and, instead of Wonderland, I was in the first car on the Titan Scream Machine at Six Flags. As the car climbed the first hill, I realized I wasn’t strapped in. My subconscious literally threw my sleeping body out of bed to wake up. Because, as everybody knows, if you die in your dream, you die for real.

Then there was the reoccurring dream that sent me hiking through dark woods trying to find my way to the white castle. With that rusty tin cup in my knapsack, I continued on until I came to a high stone wall. I needed to get to the other side, but as I looked down at my feet, I was wearing flip-flops. Not the proper gear for climbing straight up, even in a dream. The ground below was covered with thorns and sticker bushes.

“Trust me,”
my dream-self heard from the other side of the wall
. “Reach out and trust me. I’m here.”
Like most interesting dreams, my alarm clock always woke me before I could find out who I was supposed to be trusting and reaching for.

A week before Christmas, Meghan, Gio, Sarah, and I were at my apartment watching one of Meg’s “movies” while picking at two different cheese logs and cheering each other to good health with homemade holiday cider—Giovanna’s Canadian recipe which was guaranteed to grow hair on our chests. Yikes.

“This job,” Meghan reported as we watched her in a reenactment of the Bubonic Plague, “paid my rent for three months
and
Scorsese’s second-cousin-twice-removed directed it.” She glared at the screen. “But all the body makeup gave me a rash so I couldn’t play Mary Queen of Scots the next week.” She downed a Classic Coke then tossed the can near the vicinity of the trash.

“She was inconsolable for weeks.” Gio patted her shoulder.

“It should’ve been my big break.” Meghan accented her foul mood with a very unladylike belch. “Where’s all the chocolate?”

“You ate it.” I lounged back on the couch. “Aren’t you supposed to be paleo these days?”

Megs lay prostrate across the floor, her arms out, stretching for her purse just out of reach. After a few moments of searching through its contents, she threw it aside and grabbed her jacket. “Ah-ha!” The look on her face was ecstatic as she pulled a Snickers from an inside pocket.

“I hope she gets cellulite for Christmas,” Gio mumbled, staring at the TV where some actor in splotchy makeup was barfing in the bushes. She grabbed the remote. “We’ve seen this three times.”

Sarah scooped up a handful of popcorn, then slid across the couch cushions toward me. “Did Ollie tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Meghan asked, even though Sarah had clearly addressed me.

Of course Oliver hadn’t told me anything; we’d barely exchanged twenty words since lunch at Dim Sum Heaven. It wasn’t entirely his fault. Just because we happened to be in love when we were practically kids didn’t mean we had to be friends now. So much for my plan to be adult about it and make proper closure with transparent communication to everyone.

Sarah gazed at me wide-eyed, waiting for my answer. Why she considered her brother and me to be such
great
friends was a mystery.

“No, sorry,” I said to her, glancing at Meghan who was giving me a look. “I haven’t talked to your brother about anything.”

“Really?” Sarah frowned. “Well, anyway, he has to go to Vancouver in January, but when he gets back, he’s heading to L.A. for a week.”

“I didn’t know his job took him to other parts of the state,” I said. “We’re from Santa Barbara, Meghan and me.”

Sarah laughed. “I know that. We’ve got friends in Pasadena—that’s close, right?”

I nodded. “About an hour away.”

She smiled bigger. “Ollie and I are taking vacay and we were thinking you guys should come, too. You can show us your old stomping grounds.”

“Los
Ang
eles!” Meghan sang with an accent, snapping her fingers above her shoulder like a flamenco dancer.

“Road trip!” Sarah squealed.

“Vacation?” I said it like I’d never heard the word before.

Sarah rose to her knees, firelight catching the auburn in her hair. “Two of Ollie’s college roommates live in Pasadena; they’re like brothers to me, and there’s a huge festival that whole week.”

“Get Happy.” I’d read about it a few weeks ago, actually tagged it in my Yahoo news feed. “It’s an annual street fair. There’s a pub crawl, a scavenger hunt, and a 5K color run. All proceeds going to charity.”

“Sounds like a blast.” Meghan sat on the coffee table across from us. “I’ll check with my agent, but I don’t think rehearsals are ‘til the end of January.”

“Wish I could go, chicas.” Gio refilled her cup by dunking the entire thing into the pitcher of holiday cider. “But I’ll be in Atlanta for trade shows.”

When I didn’t chime in, all three looked at me.

“There’s no way I can leave work for a week.”

Sarah widened her eyes like a puppy. “Did you take off extra days for Thanksgiving?”

“No.”

“Are you taking time off for Christmas or New Year’s?”

I shook my head, feeling awkward and pissed off; pissed off that I had the suckiest job in the world.

“Sounds like a done deal to me,” she said.

“Yeah, me too.” Though Meghan didn’t sound as enthused. “You’ve been talking about doing something charitable, right?”

“Peer pressure, Rachel.” Giovanna pointed at me, a curtain of her black hair covering half her face. “Just. Say. No.”

I considering for a moment. “Well, I guess it’s been six months and I haven’t taken more than a few days off, and it’s probably time I check in on Krikit to see if she’s lit anything on fire.”

“So you’re in?” Sarah asked.

“Don’t stress, Rach.” Meghan pulled out her phone. “If you can’t come, you can’t come.”

I frowned as she disappeared into the kitchen to make a call. “Sarah,” I said in a low voice, “are you
sure
your brother’s okay with this?” I glanced toward the kitchen. “With me coming, I mean?”

“Totally. He told me twice to make sure I invited you.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what to make of that, but I nodded and walked into the kitchen. Meghan was leaning against the fridge, typing on her phone. “Hey. Are you okay? Do we need to make a chocolate run to—”

“What’s going on with you two?”

I blinked when she cut me off. “Me and Sarah?”

She put a hand on her hip. “Don’t play dumb. You and Rad.”

My hands felt cold and tingly. “Nothing, Megs.” I made double fists behind my back in case my hands started to shake. “He barely speaks to me, barely
looks
at me.”

“It’s called sexual tension, Rachel. Anytime I’m around you two, the room screams with it. Am I imagining that?”

“Meghan, it’s not—”

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way
you
look at
him
. So I’m either blind or crazy. Either way, you’re not being a very good friend.”

She was dead right. I didn’t realize I’d been obsessing over him in the guise of gaining closure. Which wasn’t fair. He didn’t want me and I didn’t want him—but my best friend did. If I didn’t stop this crap, I really might damage our friendship.

“I’m sorry.” I touched her arm. “But I swear to you, there’s absolutely nothing going on between us. I’d promise to stay away from him if that would help, but honestly, I don’t know how to stay away from him more than I am.”

She twisted her lips and stared at the floor. “I like him, Rach.”

I smiled supportively, but my stomach hurt.

“He’s confusing.” She snorted. “Typical guy, right?”

“Maybe he’s busy with work. When you first met, he probably had more free time.”

“Maybe.” Meghan smiled and seemed relieved by my explanation. Lovely how I was trying to convince my best friend to not give up on the guy I was trying to get over.

Damn. My
brain
needed a vacation, if nothing else.

In my gut, this particular vacation felt like a bad idea, but after confirming practically in blood that I was going, I did everything I could to get out of it, keeping Meghan’s feelings in mind.

Adding to this stress, work was beyond hectic. With Claire finally on my side after the emery board brainstorming session, I was offered more responsibilities. Which was great—if staying in advertising was what I wanted.

I’d just gotten out of a long meeting when my cell rang.

“Are you packed?” Meghan asked. “We leave first thing in the morning.”

“Locked and loaded,” I confirmed, happy to no longer hear suspicion in her voice.

“Got your license? Health insurance card, passport?”

I stared down at my phone. “Megs, what do you think is going to happen, exactly? We’re going to Pasadena.”

“Just preparing for anything. So you’re completely ready?”

“I still have to stop my mail.” I opened a browser window to do just that while I was thinking about it.

“Roger’s in town. Can’t he grab your mail?”

I didn’t reply right away. A few weeks ago, I’d submitted a short story—the one with my Texas-style Bridget Jones—to
Self, Women’s Health
, and a couple other women’s magazines. I’d also emailed ten resumes. No one needed to know that yet. I just wanted to see what options I had. I didn’t need Rog to see a bunch of rejection letters addressed to me from New York.

Plus, there were other considerations when I thought about amending my ten-year plan.

Oliver had snuck into my nightly dreams. Sometimes he was a minor character who’d pop in then fade into the background. Other times it was just him, talking to me, sitting in a chair, standing in a room, sometimes rehashing conversations we’d shared six years ago; but always kind, always reassuring, even when I wasn’t, as if he knew something Dream Rachel didn’t. Those mornings, I would wake up energized and buoyant. It usually took me a few moments to realize it wasn’t real.