CHAPTER 19
10 THINGS GUARANTEED TO
MAKE YOU SAY WTF
ADRIAN
My phone had been deafeningly silent since last night. Nothing from Vanessa. Becky and I had some work stuff to go over so we did that until midnight while I gave Vanessa some time to sober up. Then I had her drop off Grace since Vanessa clearly didn’t want to see me.
It wouldn’t have been right for me to kiss her. I suspected she wasn’t sober enough to know what she was doing. She was too drunk to walk, for God’s sake.
It didn’t mean anything. I wish I didn’t do it.
Was she just upset? Or did she really feel that way?
Maybe both.
Maybe she was upset with me for rejecting her and she meant it. Maybe she was just drunk and did something spontaneous and the whole thing never meant anything at all.
The thought that kissing me was just some foggy-headed, alcohol- induced mistake made me feel physically ill. And now I worried more than anything that instead of me fucking things up and changing our friendship by telling her how I felt, she’d accidentally done it by kissing me for no
other reason than she’d had too much to drink.
My stomach was in knots. I couldn’t sleep last night. I wanted to talk to her, but I didn’t even know what to say after what she’d said to me. In the morning before I left for the office, I texted her.
Me: Can we talk later?
She didn’t reply for almost ten minutes. This was eight years in Vanessa time. She always replied immediately. This wasn’t a good sign.
Vanessa: I guess.
Me: Do you still want me to watch Grace tonight?
Another four-minute wait.
Vanessa: You don’t have to.
Me: I want to.
Vanessa: K. Do you want me to get Harry?
I thought this one over. She always watched him for me, but it would be weird if I saw her and we didn’t talk, and I didn’t have time to do it before work. I didn’t want to be rushed, especially considering what we needed to discuss.
Me: I’ll take him to work.
Vanessa: K
That was it. She didn’t say anything else.
Harry was crabbier than usual, like we were sharing our mood. He bit Becky three times by noon. Oddly enough he didn’t bite me, which made me feel like maybe we were on the same team for once. He slept in my lap while I worked at my desk and didn’t even growl at me when I moved him to get up to use the bathroom.
Work dragged. I kept checking my phone to see if Vanessa had messaged
me, which she didn’t. I left work early to knock on Vanessa’s door thirty minutes before she’d asked me to come so I could talk to her. I figured if she really regretted kissing me, the best I could hope for was for us to get over any weirdness and stay friends. But I guessed by her silence that the chances of that were probably low.
I felt a gnawing anxiety at the uncertainty of it. A panic at the possibility that this was all over.
I heard her chain rake across the lock, and I braced myself for our first encounter since last night. But when the door opened, it wasn’t Vanessa who answered it. It was…some guy?
He stood in the doorway holding Grace. He was shorter than me but muscular. Shaggy blond hair, tan skin. He was wearing a clunky faux fur jacket that came to his knees. It was open and he had no shirt on. A shark- tooth necklace hung around his neck.
“Hey,” he said. “You must be the babysitter. Come in.” He spoke over his shoulder. “Hey, butterfly, your sitter’s here.”
I was frozen where I stood. Rendered completely mute.
“She just had a bottle,” he said, handing me the baby. “I changed her diaper. She should be good for a bit.”
I let him put Grace in my arms right there, still standing in the doorway.
She was swaddled. It wasn’t Vanessa’s handiwork. The blanket was twisted into some weird intricate knot. He saw me looking at it and he nodded at her. “It’s an old Aboriginal wrapping method. A medicine woman
taught me.”
An Aboriginal wrapping— Who the fuck was this? What the hell was going on?
And then Vanessa came up behind him and the whole thing went from bad to worse.
She took the breath right out of my lungs. Her makeup was done and she wore a fitted burgundy dress and heels. Her hair was down and curled. She
was stunning.
She was going-on-a-date stunning.
“Hey, come on in,” she said distractedly, fiddling with an earring she was putting in—or trying to. Her fingers were fumbling. She nodded at the guy.
“This is Drake. Drake, Adrian.” She dropped the diamond stud and made an impatient huffing noise as she knelt to pick it up.
“Here, let me help you,” Drake said, putting his hand out.
She handed the earring to him and stood still while he got closer to put it in, tipping her head to the side.
“You look nice, butterfly,” he said, his voice low.
She gave him a flirty sideways smile. “Thanks. So do you.”
Hot, thick jealousy ripped through me. There was something familiar about the way he touched her. Like he’d done it before.
As soon as he was done with her earring, she pivoted to grab a small purse.
“Hey, I know we’re supposed to talk, but can we do it after?” she said to me, putting on her coat. “Drake and I need to get going. We’ll be at Vermilion.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Vermilion? They’re not open on Mondays—”
“He bought out the restaurant.”
He bought out the— ???
“Hey, thanks for watching Grace,” she said. “She’ll probably sleep for a bit. I’ll be home by eight.”
Then she edged past me out the door with Drake trailing behind her and
was gone.
He never put on a shirt.
What. The. FUCK.
Who the fuck was Drake? And why was he taking her to Vermilion? I wanted to take her to Vermilion!
I looked around her apartment, holding the baby, feeling whiplashed.
The room still smelled like Vanessa’s perfume. There were dresses on her bed. Lots of them. And shoes all over the floor. It looked like she’d tried on her whole damn closet. It was a studio. Did she try them on with him sitting there watching? What the hell?
I pulled out my phone and called Becky. She answered on the first ring.
“’Sup, boss?” She popped a bubble in my ear.
“Do you know somebody named Drake? Does Vanessa ever talk about him?”
The line went silent, and I thought I lost the call. “Why?” she said
ominously.
“Vanessa’s out with him—”
“You let her go out with Drake? Oh my God. Oh. My. God.” She let out a shaky breath. “Okay, this is going to be okay. Adrian, this is very important. When you saw him was he wearing a shirt?”
“What?”
“A shirt! Did he have a shirt on?!”
“No. Just some fake fur jacket, open in the front—”
“Noooooo! Oh God!” she wailed. “It’s worse than I thought. He’s pulling out all the stops! She’s totally helpless around his pec muscles. He might as well have brought a hypnotist with him! Did you know his chest is insured for over two million dollars? Did you? Almost as much as his biceps. Not as much as his glutes.”
She gasped for air. “I should have known. I should. Have. Known.
Mercury’s in retrograde. Your horoscope today said you were getting an unexpected visitor. This is so fucked up. I wanted you guys to get married and have a million babies, and now she’s probably halfway to Bali on a
catamaran!”
“Becky, who the fuck is he?”
I could hear her breathing heavily on the other end and for the first time, her dramatics were pissing me off.
“He’s an extreme sport vlogger. He’s got a channel even bigger than hers. Quiksilver sponsored his last surfing competition, the one where he got bitten by a shark and just kept going?
“If you’re Jesus’s Abs, Drake Lawless is Lucifer’s Penis. He’s like the final boss boyfriend that you have to fight in a video game once you’ve defeated all the lesser exes. He looks like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, only with blond hair and tribal tattoos. And sorry, but he’s, like, way cooler than you. I mean, I hate to say it, but it’s true. You won’t even get on a plane, and Drake carried her down a mountain in Venezuela wrapped in a parachute. Oh my God, they’re probably getting married by a shaman, right now. How could you let this happen?!”
I paced Vanessa’s tiny living room. “Is he her ex or—”
“Yes, he’s her ex! How can you not know this? The Drake-and-Vanessa saga was, like, the biggest YouTube romance of all time. There were T- shirts and everything! They were all crazy about each other and had tantric sex on, like, every beach in Barbados. And then she broke up with him because he had that coal-walking accident in Tibet and she told him he had
to quit doing dangerous stunts, and he was all, ‘I can’t! I do it for the children!’ Because he donates all his money to pediatric cancer research?
So she left him and he was so devastated he spent two months in a tiki hut on his private island making sculptures of her out of driftwood.” She paused. “He brought her up like three times during his TED Talk. We were
all really worried about him.”
I dragged a hand down my beard.
Vanessa never talked about him. Not once. I told her I’d watched her videos. Maybe she thought I knew already and it bothered her to bring him up so she just…didn’t?
I felt like a popped balloon. I just stood there, staring into her kitchen, listening to Becky gasp and moan about what an idiot I was for letting this happen.
“I have to go,” I mumbled, hanging up on her.
I put Grace in her swing and sat down heavily on the couch to google Drake—I got as far as typing in the first four letters of his name before Google suggested Drake Lawless and Vanessa Price. The other suggestions weren’t much of a comfort. There was Drake and Vanessa pregnant. Drake and Vanessa secret wedding. Drake and Vanessa get back together… I poked around and found the video of how they met. It was his. He was BASE jumping off a waterfall in Venezuela and Vanessa was there doing her own video blog. She sprained her ankle and he carried her down the fucking mountain, just like Becky said.
Apparently Vanessa wasn’t initially interested, because the next three videos of his were him doing grand gestures to get her attention. He followed her to Brazil and rappelled onto her hotel balcony from the roof to ask her on a date. Then he flew her to a botanical garden in Cornwall to see the corpse flower bloom—and he actually piloted the plane. I was halfway through their romantic motorcycle ride through Peru when I decided I’d seen enough.
I knew Vanessa had another life, that her current situation wasn’t what she normally did with her days. But I don’t think I truly realized how exciting her other world was, how exotic her tastes were—both in travel and men. The guy lived in a yurt, for God’s sake. And Becky was right. I didn’t even fly.
Now what we did together looked boring and sad in comparison.
Hanging out with me was probably something she did just to pass the time until she got back to what she’d rather be doing.
And I thought she said she’d never touched a six-pack before. What the fuck???
I tossed my phone on the couch and sat there feeling completely blindsided. And jealous. Ridiculously, wildly jealous.
Why hadn’t she talked to me about this? We talked about everything— except her channel. Maybe this was another topic she preferred didn’t bleed into the rest of her life. After all, it was over between them.
At least it had been before today.
Now I half wondered if she said she didn’t date because she was holding out for someone else. Holding out for him. Maybe he couldn’t stand being away from her and he was quitting stunts. Maybe this was him coming to tell her. Sweep her off her feet.
And now I was sitting here, babysitting for a woman I was in love with while she went out on a date with her ex.
And that’s truly what it was. I was in love with her.
The reality of this hit me like a gavel coming down. An instant call to
attention. A hard stop.
I was in love with her.
But of course I was in love with her. Who wasn’t?
She could have any man she wanted. Any man at all.
Women like Vanessa were muses for artists and musicians. They became famous paintings and love ballads. They danced in the rain and ran away with princes who would give up their thrones to have them. They were the sirens that sailors wrote about with voices that could lure a man to his death.
She was a beautiful migratory bird with her wings clipped. And the second she could, she’d fly again. Out of St. Paul, away from me… And probably back to him.