The Reality of You (3 page)

Halfway down the
block, Kara quit laughing. “You should have seen your face. You were about to
vomit or scream.”

I marched ahead of
her. “Zip it.”

She caught up with
me far too quickly. “Really, if you think the guys we had drinks with tonight
were egotistical, Reese Jordon is the king of egotistical.”

“Oh yeah?” I said,
getting angry as we came to the corner. She kept trying to shred my fantasy to
bits. But come on. I needed something to look forward to each day. “Do you
personally know the man?”

She went to the curb
and raised a hand for a coming cab. “Everyone, and I mean everyone, who knows
anything about him knows he thinks he’s God’s gift to women and that none of
them are good enough for him.”

I frowned. “How
cliché.”

“Sometimes cliché is
true.”

Feeling stubborn, I
glanced down the block. Reese was helping legs into a limo. “There’s another
cliché saying. If the shoe fits…”

Kara whipped open
the door of the cab that had stopped. “Trust me, Naomi. Give up the daydreams.
I would say he’s out of your league. However, the truth is, the shallow ass
isn’t good enough for you. The man goes through women like I go through shoes.
Three weeks tops—that’s the extent of his dating window. Wine, dine, and
wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. That’s him.”

Getting into the
cab, I sadly watched the limo pull away. I didn’t want to relinquish my
fantasy. It kept me going sometimes.

Chapter 3

Over
the next week, Kara interrogated me about my lunch routine. I tried to lie, but
my roommate was a human lie detector. In retaliation to my lunch stalking, she
showed me web pictures of Reese with various women or articles about Reese with
various women or tweets about Reese and various women. I ignored her and the
plethora of female flesh. Fine—he dated. A lot. She had become obsessed with
breaking me from my habit, felt that it was holding me back from reality. I had
become obsessed with keeping it. Lunchtime remained the best part of my
day.
 

Thursday night of
the second week of her hate-Reese barrage, I was in the kitchen, mashing
avocados for my spicy guacamole when Kara stormed into the apartment late from
work. Dressed business-suave in a black skirt and a gauzy, cream blouse, her
hair in a blond bun, she didn’t look like she fit into our eclectically decorated
apartment. Well, it had gone from coolly modern to eclectic once I’d moved in
with my stuff, which included a snow globe collection. The collection had gone
into storage once I’d gone off to college, but moving here, I’d seemed to need
it. Kara claimed that I was regressing in maturity as a defensive mechanism.
Whatever. Shaking them and watching the ‘snow’ swirl brought me a touch of
happiness.

“
Hola.
You’re looking mad sexy today,” I
said in between mashing.

“You’re not going to
believe this!” she said, pushing the door closed and not even returning my
compliment.

I paused my
pulverizing and gave her a sardonic look. “Reese Jordon is going out with a
girl from Mars?”

“Ha, ha.” She
dropped her purse and slim briefcase on the table behind the couch then yanked
off her coat and gloves to toss them on the back of the couch. “But my news has
to do with him. And really, you’re not going to believe it.”

I
lifted the bowl in a one-armed hug to smash the avocados better. “Don’t try the
gay thing. After seven months, my gaydar hasn’t registered a thing.”

She flicked off her
pumps on the rug under the dining table before stepping into the tiny,
triangular-shaped kitchen. “Your gaydar stinks. Remember Ryan Cross?”

“That man was so
fine that my gaydar shut down.”

She rolled her eyes.
“More like your defenses are so out of whack that you ignored your gaydar and
asked him out. Or maybe your defenses were so in tune that you knew he would
shut you down.” She hauled out a bottle of tequila from the freezer. “Anyway,
non-gay
Reese sent us a request for a
temporary secretary. A full week. Puerto Rico. To research a new resort that
wants to hire his advertising agency.”

“He’s going to be
gone in Puerto Rico for a week?” A week without visions of him?
Say it isn’t so!
Last time he’d been
gone, I’d devoured a smut book a day. Even my online gaming had suffered.

“Apparently,” she
said, squeezing past me to dig out more booze from the cupboard above the
stove.

“That stinks, but
what does it have to do with me?”

 
“He wants someone young and athletic who will
be willing to participate in the resort’s activities.” She jerked her head from
the cupboard, looking at me pointedly and dragging down two bottles to make
margaritas. “You have last year’s vacation week and two for this year.” She
swung the bottles of liquor in some strange jogging, hip-swaying celebratory
dance. “You could go with him.”

“Huh?”

Since Kara worked in
a placement firm and had gotten me my initial interview, she knew every aspect
of my job, which was irritating. This time, I was too clueless to be irritated.

She pointed a bottle
of liquor at me. “
You
can be the
secretary.”

My eyes rounded on
her for about two seconds before I dropped the bowl of almost guacamole and
green gunk splattered all over. In my face. On the floor. On the cupboards.
Across the fridge. Even the ceiling was not immune. Luckily, the bowl didn’t
break.

Far enough away not
to get splattered, Kara burst out laughing.

“You. Are. Nuts,” I
said, wiping green glop from my face.

She threw me a wet
paper towel. Then the whole roll of paper towels. “Nope. This is perfect. A
week with that man should cure you of your ridiculousness. Damn. I can’t
believe I used to try to get you to talk to him. Had I known it was Reese…”

“Kara! Other than
rumors and gossip, you don’t know him.” After wiping my face off, I worked on
scrubbing a cupboard.

Even before Reese,
Kara had had a weird fascination with New York celebrity gossip, but now that
she knew I watched him, it had soared to a ridiculous level.

“Yeah?” she asked in
challenging tone.

“Yeah!”

“That much gossip
can’t be wrong, but here’s your chance to prove me wrong.”

I shot two gunky
paper towels one after the other in the bin.
Score
.
Score
. Thank you very
much. “I’m not impersonating a secretary, you nut.”

“You don’t have to
impersonate anyone. Just be you. It’s not like he knows your name, and with a
minor in computer science, you have enough tech knowledge to pull off
secretarial work. Besides, it will be like a vacation. Like I said, he wants
someone willing to participate in resort activities.”

“I know nothing
about advertising. I’m a techie, as in technical support.” My major was in
coaching, but I’d backed it up with a computer minor because, though an
athlete, I’d always been a bit of a nerd too.

She waved a hand.
“Not needed. You’ll be a temp.”

“Besides the fact
that secretaries do more than you think, it’s still wrong.”

“How so?” she asked,
twisting off the cap of the tequila.

I had moved to
wiping the front of the fridge but paused to frown at her. “Um, maybe the part
about you giving me the job so I can see if he’s an ass?”

She waved a hand
again and filled two glasses full of ice. “He wants a competent worker. It’s
not like you won’t be competent and athletic. You’re crazy athletic. I always
send him three choices, and I’m positive he’ll choose you if you’re in the mix
once he sees that you went to college on a soccer scholarship.”

I frowned at her,
long and hard, then snagged a new bowl from the cupboard. “Did you lose your
moral compass on the way home from work?”

“He’ll get a
secretary.” She started slicing limes on a cutting board. “You’ll get a free
trip to a tropical oasis and a new lease on life. Because I’m betting more than
your crush being gone. You won’t be able to stand him after a week. What’s
wrong with that?”

I reached for a new
avocado. The ceiling would have to wait. “Nothing is wrong with that because I
am not buying in to your harebrained idea.”
 

“Harebrained?” She
shook her head. “It’s an awesome idea.”

 
A knock sounded at the door. Kara smiled
evilly—I was beginning to hate that smile.

“Let’s see what
Jules thinks.”

Great. Pushy Jules
would join in pestering me all night. I needed about six of those margaritas.

Jules flew in the
apartment, threw her leather coat on the couch, and dropped her purse on the
table in three seconds flat. At thirty-seven, the woman had more energy than
Kara and I put together. With her brown highlighted and layered hair,
calf-hugging boots, short skirt, and long sweater, Jules looked closer to my
almost twenty-five than her age. No one, and I mean no one, dressed better than
Jules. She lived a few brownstones down, and Kara had met her prior to my
moving here, but right away, we’d all become friends. Single and aiming to live
life to the fullest, Jules was always up for an adventure.

Strolling past me,
Jules lifted up a to-go bag. “Enchiladas,” she said, setting them on our tiny,
triangular island.

“Huh,” I said,
frowning. “I have guacamole, bean dip, and fresh salsa. You didn’t need to
bring anything.”

“Listen, honey,” she
said in a patient tone. “Though delicious, your dips do not offer enough
substance to match Kara’s margaritas. Meat. We need meat to go with tequila.”

I scowled at her while
Kara said, “Naomi’s going to—”

“I’m not going,” I
said, cutting her off and gesturing to my green-encrusted jeans and top. “I
need to change.”

Kara handed Jules a
drink, giving me a wry look. “Go ahead, but you’re not getting out of this.”

My glare at Kara was
pissy.

Jules paused in the
middle of her long gulp of margarita, eyes wide on Kara. “Do tell.”

Kara’s sly grin had
me running down the hall.

Inside my tiny room
filled with books and more snow globes, I considered crawling into bed and
playing sick for the night. Instead, I tugged on a clean pair of jeans and a
baggy T-shirt.

When I entered the
kitchen, Jules sternly gazed over her margarita glass at me. “Why wouldn’t you
go? An exclusive resort? And a gorgeous man too?”

“Oh, I don’t know? Because
the entire idea is unethical?” I sarcastically replied, heaving out a stack of
multicolored plates from a cupboard.

Jules waved a wrist
adorned with a bracelet sparkling from a cascade of tiny diamond stars.
Something one of her many ‘suitors’ over the years gave her. “Unethical,
smethical. You’ve been watching this man for seven months. Seven months! It’s
time to make a move.”

“I watch him. So
what?” I took a long fortifying sip of the margarita Kara had just handed me.
Then another.

“Hmmm,” Jules said,
an index finger on her chin. “Let me recall some of your descriptions of the
man. There was ‘Mr. McGriddle, cover that man in sticky maple syrup.’ You also
described him as ‘tall, dark hot chocolate—give me two cans of whip cream.’ And
let’s not forget the eloquent, ‘Superpants, able to make women come with a drop
of his drawers.’”

I guzzled the rest
of my margarita. Okay, my mouth and imagination had let loose a few times over
the last seven months while uninhibited—more like inebriated. Maybe I should
have Kara pack me some margarita in a lunch thermos. Then my imagination would
run wild on that bench. Yet I’d bet my lips would be locking on something else
entirely than his lips in my mind.

“After such devotion
and creativity,” Jules said, reaching for another lime to plop in her drink,
“you deserve tropical beaches and hot sex.” She went to take a sip but paused,
giving me a glossy-eyed look. “Maybe sex
on
hot, sandy beaches.”

At the thought of
having sex with Reese on a beach, a rush of heat hit every part of me. I choked
on lime and tequila. Kara hit my back while I coughed.

Jules’s brow stayed
up until I started breathing normally again. “From what I’ve heard about him,
you two will be doing the horizontal in no time.”

My mouth fell open.
“Really? The
horizontal
? And how do
you know about him?”

She gestured a
silver-colored nail at my roommate. “Kara told me all about him.”

My eyes narrowed on
the gossip whore before I towed out
the
poker chips and cards from a drawer in the island.
They both continued their onslaught while I set up stacks of chips
on the table. I drank lime-flavored tequila on the rocks, made sure all the
piles of chips were equal height, and ignored them.

Another knock on our
door produced our second neighbor for poker night. Instead of two brownstones
away like Jules, Avery lived on the fourth and top floor in a one-bedroom
studio of our once huge brownstone townhouse turned into apartments. Avery’s
live-in boyfriend of four years went on business more than he stayed home, which
made her kind of like me, except she got sex every two weeks or so.

Avery set another
tin pan on the stove. While Kara handed her a margarita and filled her in on
their latest bullying tactic, I peeked under the tinfoil. Wet beef burritos.
Probably from some dive or taco truck. Avery was obsessed with the idea of
cheap gourmet food.

I liked preparing
food for my friends. Okay, my culinary skill simply ranged from toast to dips,
but dips were good. Dips were filling. Dips used chips. And what was better
than fried tortillas? Nothing. Well, except Doritos. But they were fried
tortillas with cheese-flavored dusting.

“Naomi!”

“What?” I snapped
down the tinfoil. “I was just looking.”

Avery faced me with
her hands on her hips. “You have to be kidding me?”

I stepped back,
pointing to the burrito pan. “I didn’t pick at them or anything.”

“You’ve been mooning
over this guy for seven months and you’re not going to take this opportunity?”

There had to be
something in the water on our block. Something that hadn’t affected me yet.
Something that warped people’s brains.

I turned toward her,
nonchalantly resting my hands on the counter behind me. “So you’re thinking hot
sex on the beach too?”

She pushed a hunk of
curly, black hair behind her ear as her blue eyes widened. “I’m thinking that
you find out he’s a jerk, or maybe you two will actually connect!” she said a
little breathlessly. Avery was the dreamy romantic in our group. “But really,
why wouldn’t you do it?”