the nightstand. “Hi,” she said, pulling the quilt up over them both. Her bare feet brushed his, smooth and cold.
Colby gulped, every single nerve ending in his body open and alert all of a sudden. “Hi yourself,” he managed to say. Then, as she slid one hand up under his T-shirt: “Is this okay? I mean, is your mom . . . ?”
“She’s at the store,” Meg promised, rubbing her sharp nose along his collarbone. “We have, like, twenty more minutes at least.”
Colby grinned.
At the salon, he sat on a pink suede chair and flipped through a couple of wrinkly Us Weeklys while she went and got her hair done. He scrolled idly through apartment listings on his phone. The place on Cypress was still available, and he was imagining making Meg breakfast in the tiny galley kitchen when all at once it rang in his hand—Doug, said the caller ID, and Colby swallowed.
“I’ve gotta take this,” he called to Meg, though he didn’t think she could hear him over the sound of the hair dryers. He stepped outside into the busy weekend morning, early-summer sunlight prickling on his arms and legs.
“Colby,” Doug said when he answered. “I got your message.”
“Hey,” Colby said. The salon was in the middle of a little shopping district, people pushing strollers and walking their chocolate labs and drinking lattes. He could see a farmer’s market set up by the commuter rail station at the end of the block. “Yeah, I was just calling to see when you wanted me to start.”
“Colby, I actually offered the job to someone else.”
Colby blinked. “You did?”
“Yeah,” Doug said. “When I didn’t hear from you, I figured you weren’t serious, and construction is supposed to start in a couple of weeks, so . . .”
“Oh,” Colby said. Oh, fuck, he felt stupid. He could feel it growing inside him, expanding like an overfull water balloon, like his whole body was made of cheap plastic and couldn’t accommodate the stretch. “Okay.”
“Hey, I’m really sorry, Colby. But I called you twice—did you not get my messages?”
“Uh,” he said, his whole body prickling with embarrassment. He thought of all the times Meg had asked him if he’d followed up yet. He thought of all the times he’d blown her off. The rush of regret was hot and shameful in the moment before it turned to anger: He’d been worried about the rug getting pulled out from under him, hadn’t he? And sure the fuck enough, he’d been right. The guy hadn’t said anything about a time limit, or about having somebody else lined up if Colby didn’t move fast enough. Where the hell did he get off? “No, I got ’em.”
“I wish you’d called me back, buddy.”
Don’t call me buddy, Colby barely managed to keep himself from saying. “Yeah, uh. Well. Thanks anyway.”
“Colby—”
“Okay. Uh. Bye.” Colby punched the screen to end the call.
For a moment, he just stood there, staring blindly out into the traffic. So that was the end of that, he guessed. This was why it was stupid to get your hopes up about stuff in the first place: because people were generally full of shit, and they inevitably let you down, and then—
He glanced down at the phone in his hand, his brain shorting out for a white-hot second as he caught sight of the date on his calendar app:
May twenty-fifth.
Holy shit, today was—
And he hadn’t even—
And he wasn’t—
“Hey,” Meg said cheerfully, coming out of the salon behind him with her hair in a fancy updo, tucking her wallet back into her purse. “You ready?” Then her eyes narrowed for a moment. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Who was on the phone?”
Colby hesitated for a moment. There was no fucking way he could tell her—about Doug or his dad or the anniversary, any of it. He could not believe he had to go to her rich father’s wedding right now. “Sure,” he said finally, jamming his phone into his jeans pocket. “Let’s go.”
Thirty
Meg
“Are you sure everything is okay?” Meg asked for what felt like the twentieth time since this morning, sitting rather miserably at a big, round table in a fancy seafood restaurant while her dad and Lisa swayed to a song by the Cure.
She could tell it felt like the twentieth time to Colby, too. “Everything is fine,” he said, which was obviously a lie. He’d been in a terrible mood since he’d gone with her to get her hair done this morning, sullen and withdrawn and generally crabby.