Betting on You(7)
“Oh my God!” I said, half-surprised he’d called me “relatively attractive” when he seemed irritated by my existence, and half-outraged by the absurdity of his words. “You are so wrong. Not all guys are Neanderthals.”
“No, I’m a guy—trust me on this.” He lowered his voice and said, “I mean, I’ve already pictured every relatively attractive human female on this flight naked two or three times, and we aren’t even close to landing.”
“Oh.My.God.” My mouth dropped open and I couldn’t bring myself to close it. Was he seriously that big a pervert? Also—did guys really do that?
“And before you say, But my friend Jeff is in a happy relationship and we hang all the time,” he said, plucking the straw wrapper from his tray and folding it into tiny triangles, “know that little Jeffy will slowly unfriend you because his girlfriend will be pissed if he doesn’t. She’ll wonder why he needs you when he’s got her. And truthfully, part of him probably does want you too, so he’ll either make a move on you and totally screw the pooch, or he’ll save you for his spank bank and remain true to his girl. Either way it will always be there, making friendship a complete impossibility.”
My mouth was still hanging wide open, the same as if he’d just confessed to murdering his parents. I stared at his self-satisfied grin and couldn’t believe he’d ever had a girlfriend.
“And the bottom line is that none of it really matters anyway.” His voice was sure as he dropped the paper and said, “Relationships are doomed to fail. The odds are greater that you’ll be diagnosed with a deadly illness than live happily ever after with the love of your life.”
“You might be the biggest cynic I’ve ever met,” I said, hating that a tiny part of me worried he was right about relationships being doomed to fail.
“I’m a realist.” He looked very matter-of-fact as he pointed to my tray and said, “Are you going to eat your garlic bread?”
“Take it,” I muttered, praying a good tailwind would push us toward Nebraska a little faster.
I couldn’t wait for the flight to be over so I would never have to see Mr. Nothing again.
CHAPTER FOUR ONE YEAR AGO
Bailey
The next time I saw Charlie was at a movie theater. I was there with Zack, my boyfriend, and we’d just paid for our tickets when we heard clapping from the lobby area by concessions.
“Want to check it out?” Zack looked at his phone and said, “We’ve still got five minutes before the movie starts.”
“Sure.” I smiled at his handsome face, and he grabbed my hand, leading me toward the fray. I was head over heels for Zack, the cute and oh-so-smart debate captain. He was everything I wasn’t—confident, charming, extroverted—and he technically could’ve led me into fire, and I probably would have followed.
“It’s a promposal.” Zack pointed just to the left of the popcorn stand, where someone had hung a fake movie poster. Instead of a title, it said “PROM?” Across the top there was a picture of a dude with a hilarious questioning expression on his face.
It was charming and clever, and just as I narrowed my eyes and thought, That guy looks really familiar, I saw the couple. They were standing in front of the poster, smiling as a movie theater employee took their picture. The girl was petite, blond, and pretty, and the guy was tall, dark, and kind of jacked.
Oh my God—Mr. Nothing!
The guy from the airport was right there, at my suburban movie theater. What in the actual hell?
“Cool idea,” Zack said about the promposal, and I nodded and came back to myself.
“Supercute,” I muttered, flustered, and at that moment Mr. Nothing’s eyes connected with mine, and my stomach dropped to the floor. We shared total eye contact for a second before I looked away and said way too enthusiastically to Zack, “We’d better go.”
I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I didn’t want to have to share conversation with Mr. Nothing and Zack; it seemed like too much.
Which made no sense. The dude was just a stranger that I’d sat beside on a long flight. There was no reason whatsoever that I should be anxious about running into him.
Still, I was.
I very nearly dragged Zack into the theater, and chose seats that were far away from everyone else. We were seeing a revival of The Good and the Best, my all-time favorite movie, but once it started, I found I just couldn’t get into it.
Seeing Mr. Nothing left me… unsettled.
Maybe it was his tie-in to the shitty time in my life when my parents fell out of love, we moved to a strange place, and my dad stopped caring about me. I still couldn’t listen to the Taylor Swift album that’d been popular at the time, because it made me cry.
Every. Single. Time.
Hell, the day of that flight, just before I’d slid into line behind Mr. Nothing, I’d cried my eyes out in the airport bathroom.
No wonder the sight of him was accompanied by a general sense of dread.
“Are you hungry?” Zack whispered. “I’m going to go get popcorn.”
“No,” I said, glancing at him and thinking he was even hot in the dark. It was still surreal that we were together, if I was being honest. Not that I didn’t believe in my own self-worth, but we were two very different people from two very different leagues.