I looked up at him gratefully, waiting for him to continue. I was thankful we were clearing the air. I waited for him to tell me about Lisa and apologize for that, too, so that we could start over again.
But instead, he just continued to rub my back comfortingly and run his fingers through my hair tenderly.
“Let’s promise that nothing like this will happen again,” he murmured. “That we’ll always be honest with each other.”
“Okay,” I agreed eagerly, wondering if he was about to admit his misstep with Lisa and explain what he was thinking. Still, no admission seemed to be forthcoming. Sighing, I took the lead. “What did you do tonight?” I asked innocently.
Matt released me and took a step back. He smiled down at me.
“I just stayed in by myself,” he said, shrugging as if helpless to control his own actions and decision. “I couldn’t stop thinking of you.”
I looked at him for a moment, frozen in place. He looked back at me, his face innocent as a newborn baby’s. Slowly, a thought began to creep into my mind.
He’s an actor,
said a little warning voice in my head. I tried to ignore it. Surely he hadn’t been acting with me.
“Matt,” I said finally, choosing my words carefully and trying not to sound accusatory. I knew there was a logical explanation. “I went by your apartment tonight, to apologize. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was and how I didn’t feel anything for Peter anymore. But...” I paused because the words were hard for me to say. I drew a deep breath and continued. “But I saw you kissing the woman you were with at the restaurant last week.
Lisa.
”
I said her name as if it were a bad word. Matt visibly stiffened. Then he shrugged.
“Yeah, okay,” he said finally. “What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal?” I repeated incredulously. “You were kissing another woman! Aren’t you going to apologize?”
“Why?” Matt asked defensively. He shrugged again. “She’s just my stockbroker.”
“Your stockbroker?” I repeated, failing to see how this was any kind of an explanation.
“Sure,” Matt said. “She’s one of the women I date.”
“
One
of the women?” I repeated, taken aback. I felt suddenly short of breath.
“Yeah. Is something wrong with that? I always date several women at a time.”
“You... you do?” I asked slowly. I flashed back to Emmie telling me that there were rumors that he was a player but that he’d never dated anyone on set as far as she knew. I had dismissed her words. Now it appeared that the joke was on me.
“Sure,” Matt said, looking at me as if I were crazy. “Why not? I’m an actor. I’m a good-looking guy. I’m in my prime. And women like you go crazy for me.”
“Women like me?” I repeated incredulously. I was suddenly feeling very weak.
“Powerful women,” he said, gazing dreamily off into the space behind me. “Doctors. Directors. Investment bankers. Women with balls. Figuratively speaking, of course. God, what a turn-on.” He turned his attention back to me and smiled gently. “But attorneys are my favorite, Harper. They always have been.”
I gaped at him, trying hard to grasp what he was saying.
“You only wanted to date me because I’m a lawyer?” I finally asked, appalled, my voice cracking on the last word. I felt as if my stomach might overturn.
“Well, yeah,” he said, looking surprised. “And you’re adorable and very cool, of course. But yeah, the whole power thing is a real turn-on for me.”
“Oh my God,” I murmured, horror flooding through me.
“What’s the problem?” Matt asked, looking truly mystified. “I thought that’s what you wanted. Didn’t you want someone who wanted to be with you because you’re smart and because you have a good job?”
I just stared at him, processing his words slowly. I’d been so flattered when he’d said he didn’t like me despite my job but because of it. But I hadn’t taken his words literally. I had assumed that he’d meant that my job was just
one
of the facets about me that he found attractive—not the primary one.
I felt sick. He had clearly slept with the majority of Manhattan’s female upper echelon. I was apparently just another powerful notch on his belt.
“Please leave,” I whispered finally, the sight of him in my entryway with wide, innocent eyes nauseating me. “Please just go now.”
Matt looked at me blankly. “You want me to leave?”
I gaped at him. What, did he think his words would win me over and I’d want him to stay? That I was masochistically looking for someone to appreciate me only for my job and then dash out of my apartment to go sleep with the next single girl on the block with a six-figure income?
“Right now,” I said firmly. My eyes were welling with tears, and I didn’t want to give Matt the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Matt started to protest, but I cut him off with a deadly stare. “Now,” I said coldly. “I’m not going to ask you again.”
He stared hard at me, then finally shrugged, as if in defeat, and took the few steps toward my front door.
“Call me when you change your mind,” he said with a small smile. Clearly, he wasn’t accustomed to being rejected and didn’t, in fact, recognize it when it was happening. “I won’t hold this against you.”
I didn’t say anything. Trembling with anger now, I reached behind him, opened my door, and gestured sharply with a flick of my wrist that he should get out. Shrugging once more, he backed into the hallway and opened his mouth to say something else. But I didn’t care what else he had to say. I slammed the door right in his face with a finality I hoped sent him the message that I intended, which was to stay away. Forever. I never wanted to see him again.
I stood there in my front entryway, trying to get the tremors racking my body under control. I didn’t think I’d ever felt this angry—or this stupid. I couldn’t believe I had believed him. A large part of my anger was currently directed at myself for being so desperate to find someone that I never paused to consider that Matt might not be all he was cracked up to be.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the door, breathing hard. There was only one thought in my mind at that moment, although I was trying as hard as I could to push it away, to deny that it was true. But it was no use.
Peter was right,
the voice in my head repeated over and over.
You’re never going to find someone who likes you for who you are.
A
FTER AN HOUR
or so of feeling sorry for myself, I had a sudden, illogical, but nonetheless powerful desire to go home to Ohio. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into my childhood bed in the house I’d grown up in and have my mother tuck me in tightly and tell me to sleep well, everything would be better in the morning. But that was impossible. It was nearly 11 pm, and there was no way I could catch a flight to Columbus this late. Besides, even if I could, I had to be at work in the morning; I had an early deposition that I couldn’t miss.
I knew I could go to Meg’s or Emmie’s or even Jill’s, but I didn’t want to talk to them. Not tonight. I just wanted to feel like I was home somewhere, somewhere no one would bother me or moralize to me about my situation or analyze my various shortcomings. I looked around me at my uncomfortably stark apartment, which I’d put little effort into making warm since Peter had left. In this moment, it didn’t feel like the home I needed.
Finally, I gathered my manila folders, a change of clothes, and my makeup bag and headed out the door to the closest thing to home I’d known in the last eleven years: my office.
I doubted I’d be sleeping much tonight anyhow. At least I could dedicate my sleepless hours to the one thing in my life that hadn’t rejected me: my job.
H
arper?” A concerned voice was calling my name from what seemed like far away. “Harper?” The voice sounded clearer now, closer as I finally came to, emerging from a dream that quickly slipped back into the fogs of sleep.
I sat up and blinked, startled momentarily because I couldn’t understand where I was. My back and shoulders ached, my eyes felt dry, and inexplicably, my left cheek was killing me. I reached up to touch it and felt, to my horror, a weird series of cubic imprints pressed into my skin.
“Harper?” the voice came again. I blinked a few times and focused, then jumped as I made eye contact with Molly, whose nose was just inches from mine. “Harper?” she asked again in that same concerned tone. “Thank goodness you’re awake. Are you all right?”
I blinked and slowly looked around, my eyes adjusting to the harsh fluorescent light. I looked down and slowly realized that my cheek felt so strange because I had fallen asleep slumped over my computer keyboard. The j, k, and l keys had droplets of drool on them to prove it. My back and shoulders hurt because I had been slumped uncomfortably forward in my chair since sometime in the middle of the night. And my eyes were burning because I had been reading legal briefs and precedents online until I couldn’t see straight anymore. Oh yes, and I’d spent much of the night crying.
“What time is it?” I asked Molly, my voice cracking, my lips sticky because my mouth was so dry. Out of nowhere, she produced a bottle of water, which she handed to me. “Thank you,” I mumbled.
“It’s only seven thirty,” she said soothingly. “I’m the first one in. Don’t worry. You have time to freshen up.”
“Oh,” I responded, suddenly acutely embarrassed and aware of how this must look. Who knew what was going through wide-eyed Molly’s mind as she found her unconscious boss slumped over her desk? I probably looked like I’d gone on some drinking binge and then wound up here. In truth, I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol; I had overdosed on pain and humiliation instead. “I wasn’t drinking or anything,” I mumbled defensively.
Molly nodded gravely, her eyes still wide. “I know,” she said without missing a beat. “But what happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just fine. Don’t worry.”
Still horribly humiliated, I stood up quickly and, ignoring Molly’s attempts to help steady me on my feet, mumbled something about how I needed to go to the bathroom, then grabbed my makeup and clothing bags so that I could make myself at least halfway presentable.
When I returned fifteen minutes later, after washing my face, changing into the gray suit I’d brought with me, and applying enough makeup to conceal most of the ravages the previous evening had left on my face, Molly was nervously neatening stacks of papers and folders on my desk.
“Thanks for waking me,” I said, eyes downcast, as I crossed my office and slid into my desk chair, pushing my overnight bag underneath my desk to get it out of the way. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“No problem,” Molly said softly, looking at the desk and not at me as she continued to straighten meticulously. “Sometimes I like to get in a little early and get a jump-start on the day,” she mumbled.
“I’m glad you were here,” I admitted gratefully. I thought with dread of what would have happened if one of the partners had discovered me, drooling on my keyboard as if sleeping off a hangover.
“Is there anything...” Molly paused, her eyes darting around the room, then she started again. “Is there anything you want to talk about? I mean, is everything okay?”
I nodded.
“Thanks, Molly,” I said, trying to sound as together as possible, although I think she and I both knew it was a charade. “Just a long night. That’s all.”
Molly looked up at me nervously.
“Did it, um, have anything to do with that guy? Matt James?” she asked. I looked up at her sharply. She blushed immediately and shook her head. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. It’s none of my business.”
I sighed, then cleared my throat.
“No, no, don’t apologize,” I soothed, feeling bad that she was so nervous around me. Was I really that mean as a boss? I paused, then nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes, it did have to do with Matt. And about a million other things.”
“I knew it,” Molly said quietly, balling her right hand into a fist and slicing the air. “I knew it,” she repeated. I looked at her, puzzled, and she looked back at me a bit sheepishly.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“There was just something about him that didn’t seem right,” she admitted. “I had the feeling he was up to no good.”
“You did?” I asked, mystified. “Why didn’t you say something, then?”
Molly blushed furiously and shook her head.
“That’s not my place, Harper,” she said. “I’m just your secretary. You’ve never talked to me about anything personal. I figured it wasn’t my place to say anything.”
I felt terrible. For a moment, I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry, Molly,” I said finally. “I never meant to make you feel like that.” Great, now I was alienating my sweet secretary, too. Clearly I couldn’t even get things right with her. I was a complete failure at everything.
“It’s not you,” Molly said quickly. “You’re a great boss. It just seems like something’s been bothering you for a long time, and you never talk about it. And you’ve been acting so strange these past few weeks. I just figured it was something you had to deal with on your own. I didn’t want to be rude.”
I sighed. “Molly, I don’t think you could be rude if you tried.”
“Well,” she said, pausing uncomfortably. She stopped neatening stacks of paper and straightened to look at me. “Is there anything you want to talk about? Only if you want to, I mean.”
I studied her for a moment, her earnest face, her wide, honest eyes, and I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to confide in her, no matter how awkward it was professionally.
“My best friends had this idea for something they called The Blonde Theory,” I began, and before I knew it, I was wearily pouring out all the details of the past few weeks, starting with meeting Scott Jacoby, which felt like an eternity ago, and ending with the sordid details of last night’s abysmal failure.
When I finished, out of breath and emotionally drained, Molly just stood there, looking at me. After a moment, I started to feel very uncomfortable. Maybe she hadn’t been the right person to confide in after all.
“Um, Molly?” I asked finally. “Is everything okay?”
She nodded slowly, then cocked her head to the side.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“What don’t you understand?” I asked, confused. I thought my explanation of the whole misguided experiment and my immense failure had been pretty clear.
“I don’t understand why you’d feel like you needed to do something like that,” she said, looking perplexed. “I mean, you have everything. You’re smart. You’re pretty. You have great friends. You have a great job.” She paused and looked me right in the eye. “Why would you want to pretend to be someone else?”
I sighed, frustrated. I hadn’t considered the fact that Molly might not see how difficult it was to be me. She seemed so intuitive, I supposed I’d figured she would understand immediately.
“Molly, it’s really hard for me to feel like I always intimidate guys and scare them away,” I tried to explain. But she still looked perplexed. I pressed on, trying to get the point of my patheticness across as clearly as possible. “Don’t you understand? No one wants to date me, because I’m a lawyer. It terrifies most guys. It’s not like I need a boyfriend. But I’m starting to feel like I’m going to grow old alone.”
“You just haven’t found the right guy yet,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. How many people were going to tell me that this week?
“You don’t understand,” I said, frustrated.
“No,” Molly said, more forcefully than I’d ever heard her speak before. “
You
don’t understand. I would give anything to be as smart and successful as you. You’re, like, my idol.”
Molly’s words struck me speechless. I had never thought myself capable of being an idol to anyone—certainly not to my secretary, who wasn’t all that much younger than me. Certainly I wasn’t old enough to be anyone’s idol...was I? I was flattered beyond words all the same.
“
I’m
your idol?” I finally asked incredulously.
Molly nodded. “I want to be a lawyer,” she said. “More than anything in the world. It’s just taken me a little longer to figure out what I love to do. And it’s not like I have all sorts of s-cholarship offers or anything. So I’m putting myself through law school.”
“You...you are?” I asked, thoroughly confused. I hadn’t had any idea. How had I not known that my secretary was going to law school?
“Yes,” she said, blushing. “Just one or two classes a semester. It’s all I can afford. So it’s slow going. But, Harper, I want to be just like you. I don’t know how you don’t see that. You’re amazing. You have it so together.”
I started to open my mouth to protest, but then I noticed how earnestly Molly’s eyes were shining as she looked at me. I thought back to the conversations she and I had had the past year and a half, the way she had asked me small questions about cases I was working on, the way she had treated me with so much deference that it made me almost uncomfortable. And for the first time, I saw myself through Molly’s eyes instead of through the eyes of the scores of men who kept rejecting me. It wasn’t much, because it didn’t erase the pain of my long string of romantic rejections, but it was something. I was so used to judging myself based on what Peter and every guy after him thought of me that I had forgotten to judge myself based on my own standards. There had been a day when I’d been as proud of myself as Molly was.
“Thank you,” I said finally. I was dumbstruck by how clear everything suddenly seemed.
Molly smiled shyly. “You’re welcome,” she mumbled. “I’d better get to work now.”
I watched her leave my office, my jaw hanging open. It wasn’t until she had shut the door behind her that I snapped out of my reverie.
“I’m her idol,” I said to myself, shaking my head in wonder. I smiled—a real smile this time—for the first time in twenty-four hours. “How about that?”
I
WAS JUST
packing up my things at six forty-five to go home when Molly came into my office, her eyes downcast and a slip of paper in her hand.
“You’re still here?” I asked in surprise. Molly was required to work only nine to five, and most days she left around five forty-five or six—probably to head over to her night-school law classes. A new wave of guilt washed over me as I thought about the fact that I’d been too self-absorbed to have even known she was going to law school. What kind of person had I become?
“Yes,” Molly mumbled. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Her concern almost brought tears to my eyes. I blinked quickly and smiled at her.
“Listen, thanks,” I said earnestly. “But I’ll be fine. Really. I don’t want you to waste your time worrying about me.” I felt badly for burdening her with my insignificant, self-absorbed problems while she had real issues to deal with.
Molly shook her head.
“It’s not a waste of time,” she said. She looked up at me nervously. “Actually, I’ve spent the whole day thinking about it. And I want you to do me a favor.”
I hesitated for a moment, studying her wide, blushing face. She had never asked me for anything in the year and a half that she had worked here. Besides, she had more or less saved my job—or at the very least, my reputation—this morning when she had awoken me from my drooling-on-the-keyboard slumber. I owed her one. Actually, I probably owed her about a hundred. I wasn’t exactly in the habit of agreeing to favors sight unseen, but I couldn’t say no to Molly.
“Okay,” I said with a nod. “Of course.”
“You have to promise,” Molly insisted. I studied her for a moment. What was it that she needed? At worst, it was probably some help with some briefs she had to write for one of her law school classes or something.
I hesitated, then nodded again. “I promise. What can I do for you? Do you need some help with some coursework or something?”
Molly shook her head, then glanced down at the piece of paper she was clenching in her hand. She looked up at me again nervously.
“I want you to go on a blind date,” she said firmly.
“What?” I croaked, my heart sinking. I’d been on enough dates in the last two weeks to last me a lifetime or two. There was no way I was going to go down that road again. Besides, blind dates
never
worked when I was actually acting like myself. “No, I can’t,” I said, shaking my head.
Molly looked wounded. “But you promised,” she said, her eyes wide and hurt.
I looked at her for a moment and sighed. “I know I did,” I said. “But I didn’t know that’s what you were going to ask me.”
“I know someone who would be perfect for you,” she said slowly. “And whether it works out or not, at least I know he won’t be scared of you because of your job.”
“How do you know that?” I demanded, a little curious, despite myself, about the mystery guy. But not curious enough to commit emotional suicide by agreeing to a blind date.
“I just know,” she said firmly. “He’s the nicest, most decent guy I think I’ve ever met.”
“Then why aren’t
you
dating him?” I asked accusatorily. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. If I had a nickel for every time one of my friends recommended a guy whom
she
wouldn’t actually date but who was “just perfect” for me...
“Because I’m gay,” Molly said, looking surprised. My jaw dropped. “You didn’t know that?” she asked incredulously.
“Um, no,” I said, feeling once again like a huge fool. I had seen this woman nearly every weekday for a year and a half, and I hadn’t known that she was going to law school
or
that she was a lesbian? Wow, I really was a terrible person.
“Oh,” Molly said, blushing again. “I hope that’s not a problem. I just...I just figured you knew.”
“No, no, of course that’s not a problem,” I said quickly. “I just feel terrible that I didn’t know. I never realized how little I knew about you.”