Chapter Twenty
Caitlin grimaced when the coffee she’d purchased at Zeke’s Deli scorched her tongue. Blinking in the bright morning sunshine, she checked her phone again. Nothing. Not that she’d expected Taylor to contact her after she’d cut him off at the knees like that, but somewhere deep down, she knew the churn in her belly was disappointment.
The last text was from Jane just after midnight, asking her to come by the shop first thing this morning instead of heading straight out to her first client, Beau. Walking two doors down to Animal Attraction, she swallowed hard. What if Taylor had fired them? Jane would freak out, since Taylor’s bosses were the ones who funded Animal Attraction.
The bell on the door jingled as it closed behind her. The soothing, familiar smells of dogs, cats, shampoo, antiseptic, and floor wax wrapped around her like a balm, and she took a deep breath to calm her nerves, but it didn’t work.
“Well, you don’t look like a woman who just spent the weekend getting laid,” Jane said from the doorway behind the counter.
Shit. Jane was the last person she wanted to discuss this with right now. Fiona had backed down and stopped asking questions yesterday when she refused to talk about it, but Jane would be relentless. She’d been a lawyer before opening Animal Attraction, and once she started a cross-examination, she wouldn’t let up until she got answers. Only Caitlin didn’t have any answers.
With a sigh of defeat, she slumped onto a sofa in the waiting room, cradling her coffee between her palms and feeling more alone than she had since that flight back from Georgia.
“Oh.” There was a long pause before Jane continued. “Oh, Caity.” And rather than launch into an interrogation, Jane surprised her completely by sitting next to her and pulling her in for a hug. “I figured something was up when Taylor called last night to say he’d be dropping Beauregard off this morning for boarding.”
Stunned, Caitlin looked into her friend’s sympathetic face. “Taylor… Beau’s coming here?”
“He dropped Beau off an hour ago. He’s with us until the end of the week.”
Until Taylor’s move to Boston. Her heart plunked down to her feet.
Jane squeezed her tighter. “You okay?”
Caitlin nodded. What was there to say, really? This was how she’d wanted it, right? She’d told him she didn’t want to see him again. But somehow knowing she really wouldn’t—that he had dropped Beau off to make sure they couldn’t bump into each other, even by accident, stung. He must have been really angry to go without his dog for a week in order to avoid her.
“You want me to get someone to cover your day?” Jane asked.
With a deep breath, she stood. “Nah. I’m good. Thanks.” She wasn’t good. Not even a little bit, but she would be. Work would do the trick. With what she hoped was a passable attempt at a smile, she headed toward the back of the store to see Beau.
“Okay, hold it right there,” Jane ordered. “You can’t go moping off to talk to a dog when you haven’t talked to me yet. That’s Fiona’s M.O.” She patted the spot on the sofa Caitlin had just left. “Besides, she’d be pissed if I let you leave this waiting room before she gets here.”
“Fiona?”
Jane patted the spot on the sofa next to her again. “Yep. You’ve qualified for a genuine girl posse intervention, complete with chocolate.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t need an intervention. This was ridiculous. She made a grumbling sound and flopped onto the sofa, careful to not spill her coffee.
“So, dish. Start with the minute he came by to get you to the moment you got to your apartment last night. Don’t skip a single thing—well, skip some things, but not anything that won’t require bleaching my brain.”
The bell on the door jingled as Fiona came in, dark hair pulled in its usual tight knot on the back of her head. As always, she wore sneakers, scrubs, and a white lab coat. She had a green reusable grocery bag in one hand and a box from the bakery, Cupcake Love, in the other.
“Hey.” Fiona put the grocery bag on the counter and brought the bakery box to the coffee table. “I figured something named Chocolate Doom was a good choice.” Without meeting their eyes, she opened the lid and placed the box of delicious looking confections on the coffee table. Fiona was one of the smartest, kindest people Caitlin had ever met. She was also the shyest. As a little girl, she would take her toy, plush cat, Mr. Mittens, with her everywhere. When she’d feel overwhelmed, she’d talk to Mr. Mittens, asking him to speak for her. “Tell Caitlin I like her dress.” Or “Ask Jane if she knows the answer to problem thirteen.” Extreme shyness had always been a part of who she was. Something that made her seem mysterious and special when they were kids growing up, but her parents hadn’t thought so. Because she’d always seemed to communicate with animals more easily than people, being a vet seemed a perfect fit for her.
“What did I miss?” Fiona asked, taking a cupcake out of the box.
“Nothing. There’s nothing to tell,” Caitlin said, pulling out a cupcake and licking the icing from her finger. Dark chocolate, heaven bless the woman. She may be timid with strangers, but her cupcake choice was bold.
“Yes, but you see, Caity, ‘nothing’ isn’t the reason your eyes were red and puffy when you made it to our apartment last night,” Fiona said in her gentle voice.
“Or caused a client to drop his dog off uncharacteristically,” Jane added.
She didn’t know whether to be flattered they cared so much or irritated. “It was just a weekend. I pretended to be his fiancée and that’s it.”
“Sex?” Jane asked.
“Wait. What?” Caitlin sputtered, spilling a few drops of coffee on her jeans.
Jane and Fiona gave each other a knowing look. “Yep,” they said in unison.
“Start from the beginning,” Jane said, lifting her cupcake from the box. “And make it good. It’s too early for bullshit.” She took a big bite of her cupcake and crumbs spilled down the front of her silk shirt. “Oh my God. It’s not too early for chocolate, though.”
Or friendship, Caitlin thought. This is what she’d so desperately needed when she’d been isolated by Gary. Someday, she’d need to fill her two best friends in on the details of that, but for now, she’d settle for describing the weekend. And so, fueled with chocolate and caffeine, she launched into a recounting of her weekend, from the stuck ring; to texts from multiple women, including Felicia and her wayward panties; to snowball fights; to CliffsNotes-style vague mentions of kisses and non-specific allusions to their scorching hot night in bed together; to her decision to rip the Band-Aid off as quickly as possible; to his request to keep seeing her; to her “no,” which resulted in the meltdown on the stairs last night.
“He’s moving,” she said in closing. “So, a fling is perfect. Easy, clean, over.”
Fiona and Jane gave each other pointed looks, the meaning of which flew right over her head.
“What?”
“Remind me again why you can’t be together?” Jane said, running her finger though a bit of icing on the cellophane window of the box and licking it off her finger.
Caitlin tamped down her outrage. Had they not listened at all? “Other than he’s leaving?”
Fiona closed the lid of the box and took it to the trash can. “Yes. Because that’s not a real reason. You said you weren’t sure the move was permanent, and Boston’s not really all that far away, especially since he’ll probably be coming back here on and off because Anderson Enterprises is headquartered here.”
“Stop it,” Caitlin said, pushing to her feet. “He’s totally wrong for me.”
“Oh, yeah. Tall, hot, and gainfully employed. Totally wrong,” Jane said, replacing a clip in her bright blond hair.
“Right,” Fiona added. “Nobody likes a guy who treats his dog like a family member and adores his grandmother and little sister. Completely and totally wrong.”
Caitlin picked up her bag, ready to storm out of the waiting room, but then realized she had nowhere to storm…and really no reason to. Her friends were trying to help her, but she’d made it too hard. They knew nothing about what had happened with Gary.
“He’s not wrong for me. I’m wrong for him.”
Both of her friends moved back to the sofa, and for the next thirty minutes, she told them about her co-dependent relationship with Gary, her isolation, and his affairs. And it felt good. So good to tell her friends about her mistakes and fears. She should have done it years ago. But she’d been embarrassed, and her pride had made it seem like a secret she should keep to herself.
But despite the fact she felt better, she knew she couldn’t go through another broken heart. Taylor’s work came first. She suspected it always would. And based on the texts from Deborah and Felicia, she had competition. She couldn’t go through it again. She wouldn’t.
But, the worst part—the part she wouldn’t share with her friends, was deep down, she wanted to. She wanted to call Taylor and ask him to come over, her heart be damned, because she’d never felt the way he made her feel. Strong, smart, desirable. But she couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
“Okay,” Jane said, finally. “I get your reluctance now.”
Fiona sighed and patted her knee. “Too bad Gary screwed you over so bad. Taylor seems like a great guy.”
He was a great guy. Maybe the best. “He’s leaving,” she said again, more to herself than her friends.
“Yeah, you’ve said that,” Jane said.
“About a thousand times,” Fiona added.
A man in running clothes with a poodle wearing a rhinestone harness strode into the waiting room, door jingling in their wake. All three women stood.
“Hi, Mr. Perkins. Please sign in,” Jane said, taking her place behind the counter.
Fiona crouched down to scratch the perfectly groomed puffball of a poodle. “Hello, Brutus. How’s the ear infection?”
“Seems to be better,” the man said.
“We’re all about making things better.” Jane pushed a sign-in sheet toward the man while staring straight at Caitlin.
“Thank you,” Caitlin mouthed as she passed by her to go back to the kennel to fetch Beauregard for a walk. Her life may have turned upside down over the weekend, but dogs needed walking and she needed to stay busy. Otherwise, like last night, her mind would return to the weekend and her decision to cut it off cleanly with Taylor, which, at that moment, felt like as big a mistake as running off with Gary—and that said something.
…
Taylor grimaced at his rumpled, unshaven reflection in the elevator door and pushed the button. He’d dropped Beauregard off at Animal Attraction to make it easier on Caitlin, but regretted it already. Maybe if they’d seen each other again, she’d change her mind.
But where would that get him? Laid a few more times? He shook his head. No. It would get him in a tough place. He’d finally found someone he wanted to spend time with right as he was leaving. Maybe she was right and cutting it off cold turkey was the best way. It sure didn’t feel right. It felt fucking horrible.
He smelled his grandmother’s perfume the second the doors slid open on his floor. Shit. This was the last thing he needed right now. He turned to re-enter the elevator right as his apartment door opened. He froze.
“Don’t you dare,” his grandmother said. “Don’t you dare run from this.”
The elevator door slid shut and whirred to life as it sped away from him. She knew.
“You look surprised. It would take a fool—or your parents—not to notice.”
Like a kid about to be grounded, he shuffled into his apartment and went to the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee Grams had brewed. It was way too early for this.
“You look awful,” she remarked as he took a seat across from her at the dining table. The ring was in the center next to the wooden bowl where he’d left it last night. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“So am I.”
He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He’d never lied to her before, and even though his intentions had been good, his fake engagement to Caitlin was still an outright lie.
“So, what are you going to do about it?” she asked.
He slid the ring across the table to her. “Give this back to you.”
There was a long, painful silence as she took a sip of coffee and stared at him over the lip of her cup. She didn’t touch or even look at the ring. She set her cup down into a saucer with a clink of china. She always drank her coffee out of frilly painted teacups. Delicate, beautiful, and timeless, like her marriage to his grandfather had been. Staring at his own cheap NFL commemorative mug, his stomach churned. He shouldn’t have lied to her. Not about love, anyway.
She rotated her cup so that the little pink flowers on one side faced her. “You can’t possibly be that stupid,”
Evidently, he could, because he didn’t have a clue in hell what she meant.
“Where’s Beauregard?”
“I dropped him off at Animal Attraction so Caitlin wouldn’t bump into me again.”
She leaned back in her chair and glared at him. “Okay. I take it back. You are that stupid. Off-the-chart stupid. Obviously somebody switched you at birth, because there’s no way you’re related to me.”
“She said she didn’t want to see me again.”
“And people always say exactly what they mean. She couldn’t possibly have said that to protect herself.”
“She said no. No is no. She didn’t want to see me.”
She stood. “You are full of prunes, Taylor. So is she. Have you called her?”
“No.”
“Texted?”
“No. She said she didn’t want to see me.”
“Is texting seeing?”
He ran a hand though his hair. “It’s not that simple.”
“See, but it is. You’re the one making it complicated. I watched the two of you all weekend. She’s crazy about you and you’re one step off of in love with her.”
He slumped against the back of his chair. He was pretty sure he’d closed that step sometime during the last night in the cabin, or maybe the following morning. Or maybe it was when she opened up to him about her asshole of an ex on the train and he got a good glimpse into who she really was. “I’m moving this weekend.”
“So what? Your grandfather and I were from different parts of the country when we met at Rock and Attie’s wedding. We made it work. And that’s before Skype, or the internet, or sexting.” She grinned. “We would have had a lot of fun with today’s technology.”
Taylor couldn’t help but smile. Still, she was wrong. Caitlin needed someone who was present. Someone who would put her first. “I’m not at a point in my life where I can do a relationship, Grams, no matter how awesome she is. I just got a promotion.”
She leaned forward in her chair and wagged a finger at him. “Step one, admit you have a problem. Step two, find a way to solve the problem.”
“I don’t have a problem.”
“Yes, you do.”
“What? A pain-in-the-butt nosey grandmother?”
“That’s your best asset, not a problem. Your problem is the trees.”
“Senile much?”
She laughed and threw a wadded-up napkin at him. “You can’t see the forest for the trees. All you see is your job and your immediate future. Look around. Look at the forest, Taylor. There’s a woman who loves you and a life that’s more than whirlybird propellers and money. What’s the point of all that hard work if you don’t have somebody to share the good times with? Hell, at this rate, boy, you won’t even have any good times.”
The weekend with Caitlin had been good. Really good.
“You know what I think?” she asked.
He didn’t answer because he knew she’d tell him what she thought whether he wanted to hear it or not.
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I think you’re scared, and you’re using that job as an excuse to not get attached.”
No way. That’s… His gut churned with unease. Well, fuck. That’s not far from the mark.
Her voice softened. “Do you like Caitlin?”
“Yes.”
“Wanna see her again?”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts. Find a way, Taylor. Trust me on this one. Find a way or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.” She stood and pushed her chair in. “I know special when I see it. What I saw between you two was special. You can always get another job. You can’t get another…special.” She shoved the ring back toward him. “Stop being stupid.”
Stunned, Taylor watched her put on her coat and leave, locking the door behind her with a decisive, metallic snick.
For the longest time he sat very still. The only sound was his breathing and the ticking of the clock in the kitchen. The apartment seemed abandoned and hollow without Beauregard. He looked over at his empty leash hook by the door, and his eye was caught by the ridiculous, glitter covered broom pole he and Caitlin had won. He folded his arms on the table and put his head down with a groan.
“Special,” he muttered under his breath. “Stop being stupid,” he said in a high-pitched imitation of Grams.
His phone by the coffee pot and his computer dinged simultaneously. His heart surged, hoping it was Caitlin. Squinting, he stared across the room at his computer screen. The text was from Jane.
Who the hell is Felicia?