My phone lit up with another text and I smiled.
Reed: Give me five minutes to call in this order, and I’ll call your phone.
Me: You’re the best.
Reed: I know. ;)
There was no doubt in my mind that Reed Luca really did think he was the best.
Bizarrely, I was starting to think it, too.
I hung up with the restaurant and picked up my landline phone again to dial Lola’s number.
Turns out old habits die hard and all that, and since the moment I’d stopped texting Lola about her needing a rescue, I’d completely lost track of what I’d done with my cell phone. I also didn’t really understand all the fancy “smart” things about it and had instead used my old system for locating the number for Marlowe’s—a menu, buried under a stack of other menus, in my junk drawer.
Considering that I was way better with words than numbers, it surprised me how well I’d remembered her number. I guess mooning over it for the first couple of nights after I’d entered it into my contacts and talking myself out of using it all the time had paid off.
Who am I? This is pathetic.
“Hello?” she greeted between the first and second ring, and just like that, I forgot all about questioning why Lola made me feel the way she did and how much I couldn’t understand it. Instead, I laughed, a picture of her face conjuring perfectly in my mind.
“Phone was in your hand, huh?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she confirmed.
“It’s that bad there?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice dropped in volume and changed tones—this one consoling. “I completely understand.”
“There’s an emergency here. And according to the restaurant, it’ll be ready to come to a head in about twenty minutes.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, feigning shock. “Are you sure you can wait that long?” she asked in a near panic. Chuckles rolled continuously like waves in my chest.
“I’ll leave now,” I offered.
“But I’m here with my friends—”
I understood immediately what she was getting at, and my chest puffed out in confidence. There was nothing I could handle better than distracting a group of people from an awkward encounter by making it even more ridiculous. I reminded her of the same. “Don’t you worry, LoLo. This is your best friend Reed you’re talking to.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
“Looking forward to it,” I told her honestly, and she hesitated.
I waited, and it was worth it when her response finally came. “Me too.”
My hand paused before leaving the receiver as I hung up the phone. She hadn’t argued with me or herself about our friendship status.
Maybe it’s just because her friends are there?
I shook my head to clear the questions and moved—into my room to grab a pair of socks, to the chair at my desk to swing on my jacket, and over to the door to pull on my boots and grab my keys and wallet.
It was a short walk down the block to my old Toyota Corolla that I never used—I preferred walking and public transportation on a daily basis because of the entertainment value they provided—and thankfully, it started up on the first crank—something it didn’t always do.
I actually knew quite a bit about cars. A little pang of a memory sounded in my chest—rebuilding the engine to my dad’s 1967 GTO with my friend Brandon while our other friends were at parties in college. We’d had our share of beer while we were doing it, but I wasn’t about getting wild. And neither was he. We didn’t fit. We didn’t conform.
At least, not until graduation. As my dad liked to put it, Brandon had matured. He had a steady job and a steady family, and I hadn’t talked to him in three years.
I wonder what he’s up to?
But tonight wasn’t the time to employ my mechanical skills, and it wasn’t the time to get lost in old memories.
I had a woman waiting on me, one whose friendship was still alive and growing.
Lola’s group wasn’t hard to find when I got there—it was the rowdiest table in the place. Three men hovered over the seated women, flirting and inserting themselves into their night mostly seamlessly. But there was one flaw in the stitch, a tiny thread popping when it should have laid flat: Lola.
In a half-seated, half-crouching tiger, she had her right leg hooked back at an awkward angle, and her toe dug into the floor. She looked like she was ready to bolt.
I hadn’t personally met Jen or Abby yet, but Lola had spent part of our time in Golden Gate Park earlier that day telling me about them. Perky. Pseudonormal. Intelligent, talented, and pointedly organized. The way she talked about them made them seem like one person most of the time, but I knew they had to have some differences once you skimmed below the surface. I already knew enough about Simone not to bother.