Page 12 of Still Her
“Yeah,” I answer with a smile, happy to put the whole Eli thing behind us. “I’ll come out there in a bit. I’m just going to try to crank some stuff out for the blog.”
“Great, see you soon.” He gives me one more kiss and heads out the door to make his way to the arena’s back tunnel entrance. I reach for my laptop and try to focus on putting the last couple of days’ experiences into words for the blog… and try to push the idea that I’m kidding myself out of my mind.
“Man, what a sleaze,” Annie acknowledges later that evening over the phone. Her call came just in time. My brain is fried from all the writing and I gladly picked up, eager for the distraction as I close my laptop.
“Yeah, he really is, but I didn’t need to go all fetal over it. I was a pathetic, jittery mess during that shoot. I think I overreacted.”
“Mmm… no. I’m with Jack on this one,” she counters. “There is a line, and he crossed it without a doubt.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do now, after the fact?” I ask, throwing my hand up, exasperated.
“Like Jack said, you keep your guard up and don’t allow it to continue. It’s not okay, Mayzie. He does it again, you stand your ground and let him know you’re not taking that shit. And if you run into trouble with that, don’t be afraid to let Jack do your dirty work.”
“Okay, I promise,” I reassure her. “So anyway,” I change the subject. “How are things with you? Do anything fun lately?”
“Oh… yeah,” she sounds very uncharacteristically hesitant. “I, uh, went out the other night…”
“Okay…” I’m really perplexed at how aloof she’s being. “Care to elaborate on this?”
“Oh, sure. It was cool. Went out with some of the girls from Dance It Out and um… ran into someone I haven’t seen in a while. Caught up, it was pretty cool.” She sounds like a teenager who got caught sneaking back into the house in the middle of the night. This is big.
“Is this someone a guy?”
There’s a pause before she finally sighs and says, “Yeah…”
“Ooh, tell me more, Sandy!” I tease her with Grease reference. “Who is it? Do I know him? Are you going to see him again? Do you loooove him?”
“Enough, you little asshole!” she fumes on the other end. Bingo. I hit a nerve.
“Come on, we have to maintain our best friendship. We have to communicate. I told you about Jack’s horny, skeezy agent. Tell me about who you ran into!” I nag, as Penny hops up on the bed, turns in a circle and flops down.
Annie let’s out a sigh. “Tyler.” Her one word response comes out in a tiny squeak.
“I’m sorry, could you speak up a bit? Because it sounded like you just said Tyler.”
“I did say Tyler! We went to The Cedar. It’s recently been renovated and the girls all wanted to check it out. I didn’t think he’d still be working there.” The Cedar is a bar in midtown that Jack worked at when I first met him. He and Tyler were both bartenders there, which is how their friendship began. Tyler and Annie occasionally flirted, but it never went anywhere.Back then.
“Oh, yeah. He’s actually the manager now,” I inform her. “He practically runs the place. He and the owner just put that place through a full overhaul.”
“Oh? You don’t say?” She asks, her voice thick with sarcasm. “That would’ve been nice to know before I set foot in there. Anyway, long story short: we shared some small talk, he asked me to take photos of the place all re-done so they could update the website, and well… I hadn’t had my bell rung in a while…” she trails off, leaving me to put the puzzle pieces together.
“Aww. I’m happy for you.”
“Don’t be. It was a one-time thing.”
“I’m still happy for you. I’m glad you got some good sex. I mean itwasgood, right?”
“It was alright.”
She’s lying.
“You’re lying.”
“Fine, it was epically mind blowing and I’m going to be feeling it for months to come. Now, moving on…”
7
Mayzie