Let's Try This Again Page 11

  “I see my dream girl when I’m awake/and all I want is just to take/

  Her hand, then her heart, her very last kiss/

  I swear, on my life, that’s my only wish.”

  ***

  “Are you…fuckingkiddingME?” Molly squealed in a tone identical to Trevor’s when I had found him in the bar after Carter’s little dedication. “He sang ‘Dream Girl’ to you?! TO YOU? FOR YOU? I cannot. I can’t. Can YOU?” she screamed into her computer screen, both to me and to Ellie who sat next to her, unable to make a sound.

  “You guys…no. I have no clue what my life is. That would have literally knocked me dead when I was twelve. It almost did at twenty-two,” I replied.

  “So he’s like…in love with you then.” Ellie finally spoke. This notion had swirled around my brain from the moment Carter’s dedication had finished. Could it honestly be possible that someone like him—someone who not only had everything together in theory but also in practice—could like me? That had never happened before. Carter was smart and gorgeous, funny and passionate. He could have virtually any girl he was interested in. It just didn’t make sense that he’d pass all that up for a girl he just met, one who’s got more emotional baggage than an airport.

  “No, Eleanor. He is not.” I had resigned myself to this fact. He had sung that song because it was a classic that was going to bring every girl in that bar to their weak knees, and he had dedicated it to me because…I don’t know. Maybe because he was just a sweetheart of a man who was proud of me for singing through the show without throwing up.

  Which, I admit, had been a challenge.

  “Okay. Let’s get a little crazy here for a minute, indulge in a little fantasy.” Molly’s mocking tone was not lost on me. “And just say he sang a romantic, heartfelt song for you because he was interested. Do you like him? Now that you know him, the 3D man and not the poster boy that hung on your wall.”

  Would I be interested in dating Carter? What kind of moron would say no to that? How many girls actually get a shot at love with that someone they grew up idolizing? As a kid, of course, I would slap myself to even think about turning something like that down. But now—as much of a “grown up” as I might or might not be—would I want to jeopardize the friendship we’d started to build? Or the career I was starting to piece together? Would I want to lose that fantasy of him when we finally let each other down? Right now, it felt like relationships were only bridges from one disappointment to the next. I cared about Carter, and I didn’t want that to go away just so maybe I could French him for a little while.

  “I feel like we’re really good as friends.” I spit the annoying cliché to my best friends, who could probably sense my lie from a mile away.

  “Well maybe you should be more than that.”

  “Why? I don’t need to be in love with anyone.” I leaned back into my bed.

  “Of course you don’t need to be in love. I don’t need to eat chocolate every night, but I do it anyway. ‘Cause it’s delicious and it makes me happy. The universe makes certain things just choose us,” Ellie insisted.

  “I’m going to try this fun new thing where I don’t read meaning into absolutely everything,” I said after a moment.

  “Adorable.” Molly rolled her eyes.

  “Truly.” Ellie smirked. Molly laid her head on Ellie’s shoulder, and I felt heavy with the weight of missing them. Of not being able to snuggle into my best friends.

  Of not being able to tell them a story without the help of a screen.

  “I miss you guys,” I choked out, sucking it up before I let a tear get away.

  “Oh, thank God.” Molly perked up. “We thought you were getting way too glam to miss us folk back here in little old Connecticut.”

  “Especially with teen idols falling in love with you on random Thursday nights. We thought that was it; we’d lost you.”

  “You guys! You know I would never let a pop star get between us.” I grabbed my computer as if it were their shoulders. “Now, when I meet my first Oscar winning actor, that’s when you’ll have to worry.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Morning After

  “Okay, so we almost have enough songs for an EP,” Carter said the next morning, when I got to his place. He was walking around with his guitar, looking at everything in his house—like his coffee mugs or fake plants were going to provide some major, life altering inspiration. “We need, like, two more songs.”

  “Can you please sit the hell down? You’re stressing me out, pacing like that,” I told him.

  “I’m just trying to –”

  “Get an idea, I can tell. But let’s just chill out, something will come to us.”

  So we “chilled out” for the next 8 hours. We watched TV and ordered in. We took a nap. And by the way, I get paid for this so feel free to fucking hate my stinkin’ guts.

  “Feeling inspired yet?” Carter finally asked around 7 PM. “‘Cause all I’m feeling is inspired to order another pizza.” I yawned in response, wrapping my blanket tighter around myself, having just waked up. “And you’re inspired to go back to sleep. Great. What a team we make.”

  I turned my head groggily towards the TV, where Mr. & Mrs. Smith was playing. I groaned, at least sounding like I might throw up if I didn’t actually look like it too.

  “What?” He looked at the movie. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “So many things. So, so many things.”

  “Team Jennifer, I presume?”

  “Is that even a question?” I snapped. “Just keep her away from my husband—if I ever have one.”

  “That’s why you hate this movie?” Carter sounded pretty amused.

  “Well that, and it was the first movie I ever went to alone with a boy. Tim Something in the seventh grade. We clearly thought it would be a good compromise—guns for him, Brad Pitt’s guns for me. So young, so stupid.” I sighed.

  “You have a habit of letting people ruin things for you,” Carter observed.

  “Huh?”

  “Like the grilled cheese thing. And this movie. You let some memory or whatever take ownership of stuff so that it trashes them for you. Very uncool.”

  “Okay, sorry you have no soul. I’m sentimental. Guilty,” I joked.

  “No, seriously.” And he was serious. “It’s like you enjoy holding onto the pain. And you know why I think that is?”

  “Dying to know.” Cue mental eye roll. Yes, Mr. Boy-Bander, I purposely have never sought out professional help for my clearly fucked up, twisted issues (despite my mother begging me to do so on many occasions), but please, I can’t wait to hear what you might think about them.

  Actually, just kidding. Nothing really sums me up as a person more than waiting for a boy band member to analyze my crazy brain and possible daddy issues versus a licensed psychiatrist (I’m assuming meds would be encouraged post meeting me). So please, go on.

  “‘Cause being in pain comes from the absence of whoever it was that you lost. It implies that this person meant something to you once. There wouldn’t be the hurt if there hadn’t been the love, and it reminds you that you’re only sad because you had something so good. Something worth missing.”

  “Well, you aren’t right, because I wasn’t in love with Tim…Tim…whatever his last name was.” I laughed it off, but Tim wasn’t really the one this scrutiny of my alleged habit had brought to mind. I knew it was true—I didn’t really want to forget the bad stuff. ‘Cause, what if that erased the good things it had stemmed from? It seemed like an all or nothing situation, and I didn’t want to forget it all.

  “The kid get any action?” Carter went along with it anyway.

  “I was in middle school. The most he got to touch was my hand.”

  “Poor guy.”

  “You better stop,” I smacked his shoulder. I wouldn’t become slutty for many years to come, I had to protect my pre-slut-era self (go feminism!). “I did him a solid, even letting him do that. Don’t you remember how that used to mean, like
, everything? Now I don’t get all hot and bothered by a guy to holding my hand, ‘cause I’d rather he was holding my thigh or my ass even.” I was prepared to continue my little tangent, but Carter’s face stopped me. “What?”

  “That’s it. That’s the song.” He wasn’t even looking at me now, was piecing together some chords on his guitar, which he finally picked up again for the first time since the morning.

  “What? An ode to Tim Whatshisface from FMS?” I shook my head, not getting it.

  “That title is too Fall Out Boy, but in a way, yeah.” He strummed, picking up one tiny melody after another. When he seemed to find one he liked he looked up. “We have to write something about what it’s like to like someone as a kid and what it’s like now.”

  “Like…puppy love to grown up love?” I tossed the concept around in my head. I was into it.

  “Yes, exactly. I’ll go get us some beers.” He jumped up.

  “What? Why?”

  “Tradition. Besides, haven’t you ever heard ‘write drunk, edit sober?’”

  I hadn’t, but I was also into that.

  ***

  A couple of beers in, we had started thinking of some comparisons that we could turn into lyrics.

  “Okay, well…when you’re a kid on the playground and the boys are chasing you, your mom tells you it’s because they like you. When you’re older, boys don’t chase you and they expect you to know they like you, but we’re already conditioned to think we need to be chased to know for sure.”

  “Good one,” Carter wrote on his homemade notebook chart. “So, what turns you on?”

  “Sorry…what?” I laughed, embarrassed.

  “For research.” Carter smiled, waving his pen and paper in the air. “Once we can pinpoint the sexy parts of liking someone as an adult, we can try to find the puppy equivalent.”

  “Oh…yeah, of course.” We sat in silence for a minute. I knew exactly how to answer that question, but it was a little fucking weird to say any of it out loud to Carter. But it shouldn’t be ‘cause he was just my friend. “Hair pulling?”

  “Really…interesting.” Carter smiled and wrote. I started to feel warm thinking about my head getting tugged one way so he—whomever he might be—could get a better spot on my neck to kiss. “How does that translate into puppy? Josie? Josie, hello?”

  I had gotten a little lost in thought. “Ah, um….boys pulling your hair on the playground. Duh.” I tipped my beer towards his paper.

  “Huh?”

  “You never pulled a girl’s hair to bother her when you thought she was cute?” I asked, truly surprised.

  “No. I wasn’t into assaulting the girls I had a crush on.” Carter smirked, but he wrote it down anyway.

  “Something like, ‘playground crying when he’d pull hair out of my head/now I love it when he pulls my hair in bed?’” I proposed.

  “That’s really good. So that’s something you have a lot of experience with?” Carter jokingly nudged my knee with his, but the nudge lasted longer than a nudge. It was more of a graze, y’know what I mean?

  That kind.

  “Oh, please.” I brushed the question off, but not his knee. I would say that I barely noticed it there, but that would be a lie. When he moved it away to grab his guitar again, my knee felt naked.

  Carter started strumming a tune, singing back the words I’d strung together, jotting in one of the little notebooks that littered his house for when inspiration struck while he was walking down a hallway or grabbing cereal from a cabinet (yes, I even found one in a cereal box).

  “This is good shit, Josie. I have a really good feeling about this.” Carter sat back a little, leaning into me slightly—or was my beer-buzz brain just making that up? I tried to bring it back to the song.

  “What about staying up doing it all night? I’m into that, at least,” I said. It seemed to take him off guard a bit, which made me laugh. “Like…you don’t want to sleep for a second because you just want to be awake and see each other and touch each other. And then when you’re younger, you’re getting no sleep because you can’t stop thinking about what it might be like to be his girlfriend,” I reminisced aloud, to myself, mostly.

  “Or her boyfriend.” Carter’s voice pulled me back. And he was definitely sitting closer to me now.

  “Which turns into getting no sleep because you’re, ironically, sleeping with someone.” Carter’s hand slid closer to my thigh. “Um…how about…” Carter’s hand was now on my thigh. He wasn’t even pretending to write anymore. “‘Sleepless nights thinking of being yours/became sleepless nights of sheets getting torn.” I was sounding a little breathless by now. “Yeah, I think that’ll work, right? Let’s try it again.” I picked up his guitar by the neck, and when I turned to face him he kissed me.

  Just like that.

  He kissed me.

  I pulled back by reflex. I guess subconsciously my brain knew that kissing your boss was kinda frowned upon in most work environments. But the second my lips left his, I wanted them back again.

  “Sorry. Sorry,” I stuttered. “You just took me by surprise.”

  Carter smiled, his fingers brushing my face before his hand rested on my cheek.

  “Let’s try it again.”

  ***

  I woke up early; the sun was just a faint glow through the blinds. I blinked a couple of times, feeling totally normal. My eyes focused, and I saw walls that weren’t plastered with pictures of my best friends. Looked down and saw a comforter that wasn’t my color. I felt totally confused for a second before I remembered.

  I slept with Carter last night.

  I was afraid to roll over. Not only was my childhood crush going to see me with smudged makeup, naked in the light of day (which we all know is very fucking different than by the light of the moon—can someone invent “moonshine” lamps?), crumpled up hair, and splotchy skin…my boss was going to see me like that, too. This moment, nowadays, was reserved for guys I had no interest in seeing ever again after the casual, “I’m awake now, so you can leave.” Thankfully, but almost disappointingly, when I slowly turned to face the other way, Carter wasn’t in the bed.

  “Huh, never kicked the guy out of his own bed before,” I mumbled as I threw off the covers, no longer nervous about my fully visible, naked self anymore.

  I got dressed in yesterday’s clothes and wandered out into the living room, both hoping he would be there and hoping he wouldn’t. It’s a feeling every female in the world is familiar with—we all want you to be at the bar looking at us as we ignore you, but we also don’t want to see you out having fun with anyone other than us.

  So he had ditched me? Left me before he had to wake up next to me and feel awkward and weird about how he regretted sleeping with me? At this point, I realized how stupid I felt. Goddamnit, Josie. What if you guys have to stop working together now? You get to LA, get an incredible opportunity, and you let your vagina fuck it up again (pun intended…but I’m still mad at you, vagina).

  Then, in true feminist fashion, I started to spread the blame around a little. Why would Carter go and assume I’m one of those girls who loses her shit after sleeping with a guy one time? Even if he was the love of my thirteen year old life (Molly and Ellie and Trevor were going to freak, I had to call them). I headed for the door, getting mad now. Had he really snuck out of his own house to avoid having me follow him around with heart shaped eyes? I felt like an incredible idiot. A super idiot. If I were a superhero, I would be Idiot Girl.

  “Hey! Where you going?” The voice came from somewhere in front of me, pulling me out of a fog that had allowed me to walk down the driveway to my car without realizing where I was going. Carter shut his car door with his elbow, holding two coffees and a bag. “I just went out to get breakfast. Sorry I didn’t wake you to let you know. I’m sure cold pizza would’ve sufficed, but I was feeling a bacon, egg, and cheese urge.” He nodded back towards the house, expecting me to walk with him.

  The gesture took me off guard. Way off gua
rd. Breakfast? I hadn’t had breakfast with a guy after sex since… “I…can’t. I told Skylar I would…um. Go see that new James Franco…thing.” The words stumbled out clumsily. I couldn’t have said any other celebrity? A James Franco “thing” could be a movie, a book signing, an art gallery opening, or maybe even a space shuttle launch. Your superpowers do not include lying well, Idiot Girl.

  “Ah, sure. Well, come by later? We can work on the song some more.” He seemed un-fazed. Like he didn’t know I was lying. Or he did and he was just going to let me think I’d gotten away with it. He handed me my coffee—toffee nut white mocha with coconut milk, just like I like it.

  “Yeah…sounds good.” I did an awkward almost-turn towards my car then faced him again because he hadn’t turned when I turned, and maybe he had something else to say? Or was waiting for me to say something? He just laughed again because now it looked like I had something to say, but I wasn’t saying it. Which I guess I did?

  “Are you…okay?” He was smiling.

  “Yeah. I just…yeah.

  Idon’twantwhathappenedlastnighttoaffectyouropinionof me.

  You’remybossandthatwasreallyunprofessionalofme. I’mreallysorry.

  Itwon’thappenagain…obviously.” I sped through the obviously unprepared speech just so it would be over faster. “So. Uh. Yeah.”

  “Obviously…” Carter said, but it sounded like he was chewing it to see if he liked the way it tasted. “Sure. Whatever you want. But it didn’t affect how I see you, Josie. No worries.” He smiled tamely and walked down his driveway, waving his coffee in the air as a casual goodbye. Great. Now I had made it weird. But there was no way it wasn’t going to be weird, right? I had just gotten it out of the way quicker. Right? RIGHT?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Later That Morning

  “WHAT?” Molly shrieked—and I mean a high-pitched, dog-hearing-only type of squeal—into my ear. I drove as I called, breaking the law because I was fairly certain that if a cop pulled me over at this exact moment, even he/she would recognize that this was an emergency situation.