“Oh, you’re not being rude. I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“We should— Maybe we—”
Abigail smiles. “Yes,” she says. “We probably need to talk about last night.”
“Yes,” Wes says. Except he has no idea what else to say. Calling it a mistake might offend her, and Abigail is the last one he wants to piss off. But that’s what it was. A big mistake.
“Everyone’s upset around here,” she says. “Including both of us. The situation with Tanner and Bianca has been so difficult.”
“Absolutely.”
“And we had been drinking. Probably too much.”
“I know I did,” Wes says. He had passed out quick, too. When he woke up, she was gone.
“Wes, we’ve worked together for years,” Abigail says. “I don’t think either one of us wants this to turn into a big thing.”
“I agree.”
“And neither of us wants this to be a problem.”
No. A problem isn’t what he needs or wants—not with Abigail and not at work. “No. There’s no reason for that,” he says.
“Good. Then let’s just write this off as a moment of temporary insanity. Or a night of temporary insanity.”
She smiles, which makes him feel a hell of a lot better. Given that she’s back in the sales department—technically, as the administrative assistant—this could’ve turned into the worst possible thing he had done in his career. He’s lucky that she wants to forget about it as quickly as he does.
Can’t blame her. Given the amount of alcohol he had, it’s a miracle he could have sex at all. And it couldn’t have been good. Well, not bad, but less than great. Slightly.
“Agreed,” he says.
“Good.” Abigail stands up, all six feet of her, and towers over him. “Now both of us need to get back to work.”
Thank God one of them is mature about this. Wes is totally okay with it not being him.
* * *
—
Finally.
Finally.
Heath is back.
Red hair sticks out from under his baseball cap, freckles cover every inch of his skin. Even his ears. He’s wearing khakis, T-shirt, loafers. When they were young, he wore black-rimmed glasses. Not long ago, he got Lasik. Still looks like a teenager, though. Even at thirty. If that kind of magic could be bottled, he’d be a billionaire.
“So what the hell?” he says, waving his arms around. Beer sloshes out of his bottle and hits the concrete patio. They’re at Ivy’s apartment, several drinks into the night, and he has just finished telling her all about his work in Oregon. “What was up with all those messages last week?”
“What do you think they’re about?” she says.
He rolls his eyes, takes a swig. No reason to say Wes’s name.
Heath knows a lot about their relationship, has heard about it over the past ten years, and Ivy has told him everything. Almost.
She gives Heath the abbreviated version of what happened this time, starting with when she first went to the police. Heath listens without interrupting, nodding at times, looking a bit shocked at others. She skips the real reason why Karen is looking into them and finishes the story with Wes’s ghosting, followed by the woman who picked up the phone two nights ago.
He waits a second before saying, “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You haven’t done anything since?”
“Not a thing.”
Heath sits back a little and sets his beer down on the table. Starts scratching at the label. Maybe thinking about what he’s going to say, which words to use. Unlike her, impulsiveness has never been his style.
“Say it,” she says.
“Let’s recap this, shall we? Before I left town, you ran into Wes at that party.”
“The engagement party. Yes.”
“And you started talking about how much you missed him,” he says. “Then Wes stalked you, even followed you, and took pictures, and you went to the police. Which, I have to admit, is one of the sanest things you’ve ever done.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Because then you got back together with him, which is completely insane.”
Ivy says nothing.
Heath shakes his head at her. “Unsurprisingly, he dumped you. Again.”
She glares at him.
“The truly shocking part about this story is that he ghosted you and you’ve done nothing since,” he says. “Then a woman answered his phone, and you still haven’t done anything?”
“Correct.”
He finishes off the beer and walks inside her place. He returns with two more and plunks them both down on the table. “I don’t know how to say this without calling you a liar,” he says. “But I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I’m not lying. Every word is true.”
“Then there must be more to the story,” he says.
“Nope.”
“Nope? Seriously?”
“After giving it some thought . . . No, after giving it a lot of thought,” she says, “I’ve come up with a theory.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know I always get a little . . . dramatic,” she says. “And so does Wes.”
“Understatement. But continue.”
“So what if this ghosting thing Wes is doing, which is so weird and so out of character for him, what if this is a grand gesture?”
Heath stares at her.
“No, seriously,” she says.
“Ivy.”
“Yes?”
“Have you been watching rom-coms again?”
“I’ve seen them all,” she says. “But this isn’t about movies. The grand gesture is a real thing.”
“Every time Wes does something ridiculous, you call it a grand gesture.”
“Because it’s true. You can have more than one. There’s no limit on them.”
He gives her a look that almost makes her feel crazy. But not quite.
“Let me ask you something,” he says.
“Go ahead.”
“For one week with Wes, was it worth it?”
Yes. A billion times yes.
She has tried to explain this before, tried to make Heath understand what it’s like when she’s with Wes. A day, a week, a month. Maybe a minute. It’s always worth it. She has tried so many times to find the best way, the best analogy, to explain how it feels. But it’s never quite right.
She usually goes back to the night she met him in college, at a frat house, when Wes told her about the downstairs bathroom. That was the last she saw of him at the party.
Eventually, the night escalated to the point where everyone was too drunk, too high, too disconnected. Including most of her friends. She left alone, walking the few short blocks back to her dorm. Davis was a pretty safe place, all things considered, and she wasn’t scared until a guy stepped out from behind a tree.
He wanted money. This guy was trying to mug her on a college campus. Not the brightest criminal, but he was the one standing in front of her. Ivy, who didn’t have much money and wasn’t about to give up twenty dollars, refused to hand it over. On principle. And alcohol. The guy moved forward, trying to grab her.