“You’ve known her for two minutes,” I said.
He looked so pathetic in his attempt at making puppy-dog eyes that I figured this must mean a lot to him. Besides, I didn’t think he had any chance with her after seeing her reaction to him so I decided that it probably wouldn’t cause any harm.
“Wilson,” I said. “Megan Wilson.”
“Thanks, you’re the best!”
We finished our lunch and I was grateful that Matt didn’t mention Ms. Wilde again. Afterward, he said that he might go to work. I shook my head and wondered how my stepbrother’s business was running so well when he was hardly ever there.
* * *
Once I was home again, I made some tea and turned on my apparently outdated computer with the intent of working on an article I was writing for a literary magazine. First I checked my emails and saw that I had one from Matt, which he’d sent five minutes earlier. I opened it and read:
What was her last name again?
I chuckled and wrote back “Bilson.” That ought to teach him to pay better attention when he learned a girl’s name. Maybe it was a little mean, but I had every intention of giving him the real name later…possibly.
I wonder if Ms. Wilde is on the Facebook?
No, it was definitely better not to look. I couldn’t figure out why I even cared, and yet before I knew it, I was creating a profile for myself and logging on. I told myself it was probably a good thing to look at her profile, to see what sort of person she was. It would help me decide whether I could trust her not to tell anyone that we had slept together. All in the name of protecting myself, of course.
Her profile picture was not at all what I expected. She was dressed up in a Halloween costume—or at least I hoped it was a costume, and not one of her strange outfits. She looked just like a 1950s housewife in a red dress with white polka dots and an apron. Her hair was curly and she had on red lipstick. She was giving the camera a demure but flirty smile and I could faintly make out other people in the background. The photo looked like it was taken at a party. She probably went to plenty of those.
As I perused her profile, which was, thankfully, public, I saw that she had lots of other pictures. The albums labeled with the names of cities and countries around the world were by far the most interesting and I looked through all of them: Ms. Wilde in London on a bridge, looking out over the water as if she didn’t know she was being photographed. Ms. Wilde in Brazil, holding a parrot, an old man with a large mustache next to her, both of them smiling. Ms. Wilde in front of the ruins of a castle in Scotland.
Does she always travel alone? No—then who would be taking the pictures? How can she afford this?
I looked at her personal information and discovered that she was as young as I had thought, namely twenty-two, turning twenty-three this year. From the dates on her pictures I could see that she had done most of her traveling after high school and figured that this was why she was slightly older than her classmates. Not that it made a difference.
My eyes almost popped out of my head when I saw her relationship status: “It’s complicated.”
It’s complicated? What’s complicated? Is she seeing multiple people casually? Why am I asking myself all these questions?
I looked at her recent status updates. She had written Yoga with the girls and then classes a few hours ago. Scrolling further down the screen, my heart started racing when I read her status update from last night: Sometimes a boring Tuesday night becomes fun out of the blue.
Is she talking about me? Am I the fun she’s referring to? Does she actually think I’m fun to be around?
She was probably talking about going to Matt’s bar. A lot of her friends had commented on the update, wanting to know what it meant. I held my breath as I scrolled to the bottom and saw that she had answered them with a smiley face. That was all, just a smiley face. I let out my breath and logged off the Facebook. It seemed that Ms. Wilde hadn’t told anyone about spending last night with me, at least not her girlfriends or her online friends.
That’s a load off my mind. Now I can forget that it ever happened and things can get back to normal.
Chapter 6
But they didn’t. By Friday afternoon, I was a complete nervous wreck, knowing that I would have to see Ms. Wilde in class. I was sitting in my office trying to mentally prepare myself when my colleague and friend Brian came in. He sat across from me, giving me a strange look.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You look…different.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Did you get your hair cut?”
“No, it just looks like this when I don’t touch it after I’ve towel-dried it,” I said, wondering why we were talking about my hair. We had never discussed my appearance before.