Page 23 of Thank you, Next
“You’re so busy with that new restaurant that you never have time to come see me in the middle of the day.” She arranged herself on the sofa opposite him. “This must be important.”
“It’s about Alex—”
“You’re finally going to make a move?” Lexi clapped her hands together and was about to launch herself off the couch and into a happy dance if he didn’t put the kibosh on this. Although not wanting to harm his relationship with Lexi was one of the main reasons he had turned Alex down flat when they were teenagers, Lexi persisted in the belief that they belonged together. Apparently, according to a fortune-teller she’d gone to see once on a trip to Vegas with an actor whom she’d only described as “not nearly as bad at poker or as good in bed as the tabloids would lead you to believe,” Alex and Will were destined to be together.
Perhaps they were destined to orbit around each other and annoy the fuck out of each other, but they were not destined to be a romantic match. Alex was a cold fish, and no one but a saint could stand to live with Will—at least to hear his ex-wife tell it. Even if they did date, they would break up. And Alex would get to keep Lexi, because she was blood.
Lexi was already doing a fist-pumping thing, which looked sort of elegant only because it was Lexi, when he stopped her cold. “No. I’m worried about her.”
That made Lexi turn into Alex’s grandmother again instead of her matchmaker. Although Lexi had been pretty laissez-faire with curfews and underage drinking under her roof, she did not mess around when it had to do with Alex’s safety.
“What did she get herself into this time?” Lexi’s question made it sound as though Alex was perpetually getting herself into trouble, when it was truly the woman asking the question who needed to be extricated from sticky situations more often. “She’s always doing things the safe way, but it’s not the safe way, if you know what I mean?”
“I have no idea what you mean half the time, but she’s not doing things the safe way now.” And then he told her about Alex’s plan to go talk to all her exes about why they’d broken up and why they’d locked down the next person to cross their paths.
“Oh, she’s definitely lost it, but I think it’s delightful. She’s finally doing something that doesn’t make sense.”
Will fought the urge to stand up and stomp around the living room. His ex had hated when he’d done that in the middle of a fight. He didn’t know why, but when he was feeling angry, he needed to move and not stay still and talk.
But he wasn’t really angry with Lexi. He was more frustrated that she couldn’t see how silly and risky this endeavor was. “What’s the point of all this? Alex doesn’t want to get married.”
He left out the part about how Alex didn’t want to get married—in part—because she didn’t want to end up getting divorced a bunch of times, like Lexi, but the older woman was shrewd. “I’m picking up what you’re throwing down here, but I think it’s good that she’s doing something illogical.”
“How is that a good thing?”
Lexi took a deep breath and looked at her water glass as though she wished it would turn into vodka. “I did the best I could do as a mother, and I failed.”
Will opened his mouth to defend her, given that she’d given him at least double the mothering the woman who’d birthed him had, but Lexi put a hand up.
“I failed, and Alex’s father was a shitty human being. He could never, ever take responsibility for his actions, and that was my fault. It was the seventies and eighties and we were all trying to instill children with self-esteem instead of telling the truth.”
Alex’s father hadn’t been around much the summer Will had come to Lexi’s house. He hadn’t asked many questions about the man’s whereabouts because it hadn’t been any of his business. Later he’d learned that Alex spent her summers with Lexi because her father was too busy to care for her while her mother was doing research abroad. Will could relate. It didn’t seem like either of his parents had put much thought into what kind of time and effort it took to raise children before having him. And he’d have been pawned off on relatives, had either of his parents kept in touch with theirs.
He’d always been able to empathize with the lost quality he sometimes sensed about Alex. Because he felt lost, too.
But feeling lost as an adolescent was no excuse for the kind of unhinged mission Alex was on. “What does Alex’s father have to do with the fact that Alex is running all over town interrogating her exes?”
“Why are you so upset about what she’s doing? It’s not as though you’re anything but unwilling acquaintances at this point.” Lexi took another sip of water and smiled at him like the cat that caught the canary. “It shouldn’t matter to you what Alex does with her time and reputation.”
“It’s not that I care about what she does. I don’t like the producer guy that I found her talking to the other day. I just don’t like any of this.” He couldn’t name why Alex’s quest made him so uncomfortable. He didn’t want to.
“Jealous?”
Will did stand up then. He wasn’t jealous of Andrew What’s-His-Name. He ran his hand through his hair. “I’m not jealous of a guy who spends his time exploiting people’s weaknesses. There’s nothing to be jealous of about that. He pries open their lives and lays them open for people to pick over in public for entertainment. There’s nothing to be jealous of about that.”
He didn’t dare look at Lexi, because he knew she’d have a shrewd look on her face. She knew that Andrew’s profession didn’t bother Will enough to cause this kind of agitation. There was something about thinking about that guy with Alex that made Will want to punch through a wall.
Lexi knew, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud at this point. She’d always known how hard she could push with Will. When Will had come to her house, he’d been a few steps away from becoming a delinquent. He’d barely passed his classes during his sophomore year in high school because he’d rarely gone to class.
When his father had moved them into Lexi’s house, Will had been half-feral and so angry that he didn’t know what to do with himself. Most of that anger had been pointed inward. And he hadn’t known how to handle all the light and color that Lexi brought into his life. But he knew that he didn’t want to disappoint the woman who looked at him as though he was something special and precious.
He’d barely left his room the first week he’d been there. After a month, he’d let Lexi buy him some new clothes. By the time they left the store, she’d made him laugh with how people fell all over themselves to help her and her response to the “starfuckers.”
And Alex was part of all that light and color. He’d never known what to do with her. Never met anyone so self-assured at such a young age. He’d both loved and feared her. He didn’t know what to do with what he felt when she was around, who lit him up inside when she laughed at something he said without realizing he’d said something funny.
When she’d kissed him—that one time before he’d put a stop to it—his whole world had shifted on its axis.
Just thinking about it now had him touching his lips.