Stuck With Me - Melissa Brown Page 0,43

It wasn’t my proudest moment. Not at all.

I’d thought about texting him to apologize but figured he needed some time to cool down. And then, after a few days had passed, it seemed like I’d missed my moment and figured I should just let things go. And so I’d done that, fighting the urge to ask Maren and Peter how Dev was doing every single time I saw them. I was playing it cool and I was succeeding, suffering in silence.

Meeting Savita, though, took it to another level. I missed him. Good God, did I miss that man. And I hated myself for it.

Normally with men, it was very easy for me to turn off my feelings if I felt we weren’t right for each other. But this time…this time, I knew Dev and I were an absolute disaster and yet, I still ached for him. I still wanted to see where that night could have gone if not for our friends walking through that door.

Would it have lasted a night? A weekend? Would I have hated myself for hooking up with him knowing he would be going back home to Trupti? The questions swirled constantly in my mind, and now that I knew Dev had told Savita about me, the questions were starting to snowball in my already distracted brain.

“Vern, I’m going on lunch a little early if that’s okay,” I said a couple of hours later when I still couldn’t get my head on straight to focus on my work.

“Whatever,” he said, reading the newspaper with his reading glasses sitting awkwardly on the tip of his nose. “Still getting me some coffee?”

“Of course.”

After grabbing myself a grilled chicken salad and seltzer water, I found a small table in the corner of the school’s cafeteria. I had three missed text messages.

First was from Maren: Still on for drinks tonight?

I replied to her right away before moving on to the others. Yes, please!

Second was from my mother: You didn’t call me yesterday. I expect a call today, Lyra.

I rolled my eyes as I continued to the third message. This one was from Peter.

“Interesting,” I muttered to myself. Peter and I had become friends, but it was on the rare occasion that he reached out himself and not through Maren. That was just how guys were.

His text read: I really need to talk to you. Can you call me after work?

My stomach flipped a bit as I read and reread that message, wondering what he could possibly want to talk to me about. I replied to Maren, then called my mom to get it over with.

The thing about my mom was that we’d always had a relationship of the extremes. I would literally do anything for the woman. Like anything. I would lay my life on the line for hers, but when she harps on the fact that I was almost thirty and still single, I literally wanted to kill her. There was no in-between.

Did she mean well? Yes. But it was hard to remember that when she was driving me crazy trying to marry me off to any single man her girlfriends told her about.

By the way, that was not a joke. She once texted me from the house of her best friend, who was having a new refrigerator installed. She sent me picture after picture of the installer because she happened to notice he wasn’t wearing a wedding band. It didn’t matter that I reminded her I no longer lived near her in California, and that I was a plane ride away from the dude. She. Would. Not. Stop. Until she tried to sell him on her beautiful daughter who lived in Seattle. He politely informed her he didn’t wear his ring on jobs so as not to damage it.

Smart man.

“Finally,” she huffed into the phone. My mother didn’t say hello. Ever.

“Nice to hear your voice too, Mama.”

“Oh stop it, you know how I worry. You make me wait days to hear from you. Why? Why is that acceptable?”

I liked to compare my mother to Marie Barone on that old sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. She means well, yes, but good lord in heaven she can wear you down with her “love.” And at least Ray had a brother to share the load with. I was an only child. And she was really bored. With Dad busy giving flamenco guitar lessons at the local music shop and golfing whenever he had a free day, she was left alone a lot.