Freakin’ awesome.
But there was no way I could tell the CFO of a multibillion-dollar company that his blind date had dumped him.
I carefully kept out of his line of sight as I returned to the table. When I told Kiley what’d happened in the bathroom, she had no problem switching seats with me. So I didn’t see when he’d left. I only know he was gone when I turned around.
*
Brady
Sunday afternoon I got that familiar buzz of excitement when I entered the stadium. Vikings home games had always been fun, even before Jensen started playing pro ball. I was damn proud of my youngest brother for getting to live his dream.
I swiped my access pass in the key card machine in the elevator and slumped against the wall with my eyes closed.
Last night’s events pushed to the forefront of my mind no matter how hard I’d tried to forget them.
After Siobhan had slammed her first two beers, she hadn’t turned into a sweet and charming Irish lass. She proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with me.
I had a superior air that made me a wanker.
My clothing style made me a wanker.
Even my hairstyle made me a wanker.
All the time she was lecturing me about the evils of money and my sense of entitlement, she ordered the five most expensive sushi pieces on the menu.
Then she ditched me.
Her ditching me didn’t affect me as much as her assumptions. After I’d demanded proof of her age, she’d guessed mine to be a full decade older than my thirty-two years. I’d looked at her at one point and wondered what I’d done to piss Maggie off so badly that she’d sic this horrible creature on me.
At first, I hadn’t noticed she’d left. I had another beer, ate more sushi and checked e-mail on my phone. So when I looked at my watch, it surprised me to see thirty minutes had passed by.
I knew it made me a jerk to feel relieved that she’d left. I was just glad that no one I knew had been around to witness the debacle. I’d lived through public humiliations from various women throughout the years and it never got any easier.
Still, I wasn’t a total dick. I’d called Maggie to let her know that Siobhan would make it back there on her own steam.
Maggie had let out a litany of curse words—then she’d apologized profusely. So I’d felt entitled to ask what she’d been thinking, setting us up in the first place. Maggie finally admitted she’d picked me because I was safe, gentlemanly and solid—meaning as bland as oatmeal—and not only would I not take advantage of her niece, chances were slim Siobhan would be attracted to me.
I’d come away from that conversation feeling worse than before.
Some men are confident in their attractiveness to the opposite sex. I’ve never been that guy. I was the shy dorky kid in junior high. It was even worse for me in high school. I stayed in that awkward stage—a long-necked beanpole with acne and glasses—until the last month of my junior year, when Jessica Lewis started talking to me. Being a clueless dumbass, I had the foolish hope that Jessica, a girl who was moderately popular and more cute than pretty, had seen beyond my wimpy, skinny, zitty outer shell. And she had seen beyond it all right—she was looking at dollar signs. Jessica wanted to go to prom in style, and who better to take her than a Lund? She insisted on eating dinner that night at the exclusive club my parents belonged to. She insisted on taking a limo to the dance.
But once we got to the dance, she refused to dance with me. She said the prom was lame and if I wanted to get with her at all, I’d invite her and some of her friends to my big fancy lake house that I’d bragged about. Hormones overcame common sense. We left the dance; she didn’t even hold my hand. The limo dropped us and eight of her closest friends off on the road in front of the lake house—a guesthouse in the Lund Compound—that was still closed against the endless Minnesota winter. But I had a key. No sooner had I opened the place up than two dozen more people appeared. Booze flowed freely after they found the liquor cabinet.
And the whole time I heard these people, who I’d gone to school with for three years, asking who the house belonged to and the response was always the same: that weird rich kid.
That weird rich kid who wasn’t even memorable enough to have a name.
So I was at my first high school party, in my own house, and I was still persona non grata.
Not cool to cry in front of anyone at age seventeen, so I went outside. But that proved to be an even bigger mistake. Someone had opened the window in the bedroom, presumably thinking blowing pot smoke through the screen would somehow mask it. It didn’t. The pot smoke and their voices drifted to where I sat alone on the back deck.
“Jessica, stop hogging the joint! You never take that many hits.”