moments. “I don’t care; let’s just eat here. I’m fucking starving.” Cleo glared at him, which he ignored.
“You know I’m avoiding gluten anyway,” Gaby added. Then she checked her phone. “Hmm. We’re back to about fifty-fifty on those YouTube likes.” She mulled something over. “Maybe we should rebrand the video with a snappy title, a headline like, ‘Cleo McDougal Has Regrets.’”
“That’s not really snappy,” Cleo said. “That’s just a word-for-word interpretation.”
“It’s a work in progress,” she replied, swinging open the door to the restaurant, which smelled strongly of wheatgrass and something so unpleasant that Cleo almost gagged.
All she’d wanted was a piece of pizza, a slice of her old life. She considered that all MaryAnne had wanted was a fair shot, a slice of her envisioned life.
The hostess welcomed them and saw them to a table in the back.
Cleo pored over the menu in search of something that could satisfy her craving. You got what you got. Sometimes you got an egg substitute omelet when you wanted Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza. Other times you were elected to the United States Senate while your former best friend ran for country club president. Cleo wasn’t one for tears, really wasn’t prone to complaining. Still, she could see where MaryAnne had a point.
She’d much rather be eating a bacon and pineapple pie.
SEVEN
That night, Cleo was in the bath when the hotel phone rang. She never took baths back home—who really had the time for an indulgent bath as a single mother and senator?—but with Lucas around the corner at his coffee “hang” (his word, not hers) and her emails read and answered, she figured she would pamper herself. She was debating pouring in shampoo to make bubbles when the phone, conveniently placed by the hotel on the wall next to the toilet, buzzed. She sighed, her serenity disrupted, and reached for it, her arm damp and spilling water on the floor. For a moment, she envisioned herself as a heroine in a romantic comedy, taking calls while in a (shampoo) bubble bath and living a delightfully quirky life.
“Hello?”
“Senator McDougal, there’s a Matty Adderly here for you.”
“A what?” Cleo sat up abruptly, and more water sloshed over the lip of the bath. “I’m sorry, a who?” (Grammar was important to Cleo, naturally.)
“A Mr. . . .” The concierge paused, said something with her hand over the receiver. “Yes, a Mr. Adderly is here.”
“I don’t . . . What?” Cleo squeezed her eyes shut. Had Facebook developed a technology where you stalked someone on his page and then he was shown your location and just magically appeared? Or maybe Matty was the one who was stalking her? Had she been photographed entering the hotel, and he just decided to come over? Cleo knew her recognition was on the rise (thanks, MaryAnne Newman!), but this seemed a little outlandish.
“Should I tell him . . . ?” The concierge seemed as confused as Cleo, though not for the same reasons. Obviously. It wasn’t her high school boyfriend who had appeared in the lobby out of nowhere after two decades of distance.
“I guess; I don’t . . . Can you please ask him to give me about fifteen minutes? I’ll meet him in the bar.”
She heard the concierge convey the message.
“Very good, ma’am. He’ll see you there.”
Cleo stared at the ceiling, recalibrating, then stood, grabbed a towel, and pulled the plug on the drain. Goodbye, shampoo bubble bath, she thought. It would have been nice. As she shoved her arms into a violet-hued blouse (she often wore violet, as the color brought out the blue undertones in her eyes and was always her mother’s favorite) and tugged on a pair of jeans, she resolved to chew out Gaby on the plane for setting off this entire godforsaken misadventure. Cleo was not interested in revisiting her past, relitigating her mistakes, falling in love with boys she hadn’t really been in love with in the first place. Cleo was not the heroine in a romantic comedy. And frankly, given that, at last glance, the comments and likes on YouTube and Twitter were trending toward MaryAnne, Gaby should know this and shut this whole thing down.
She swiped on blush and lipstick and brushed mascara over her lashes (because she was not a monster) and let out the topknot on her still-in-need-of-highlights hair. She wondered if she looked too much like she was indeed prepared to fall in love with Matty and considered changing. The blouse was a little too romantic,