Happily Never After

“SO IF YOU let me know when you’re going to be at your parents’ house, boom—I’ll ‘surprise’ you with a FaceTime call. Just all casual like, ‘Hey, I’m at Von Maur and can’t remember what size shoe you wear.’ And at nine a.m. on a weekday, when my boss is doing her coffee walkabout, you can ‘spontaneously’ FaceTime me to tell me a funny story about your drive to work.”

It was very possible that Sophie was some sort of a robot. Not only was she firing on all twelve cylinders for an early Sunday morning, basically giving me bullet points while we jogged the downtown streets, but she was freakishly fast and didn’t even sound winded.

“We can literally talk about whatever because the only thing that matters is that they see us FaceTiming, right?” She looked pleased with herself, though her eyes were covered by sunglasses, so I couldn’t see that twinkle of victory she got whenever she thought she was right. “And super-casual things, like picking up a pair of shoes for you, suggest intimacy without confirmation.”

“I actually need a new pair of dress shoes, so if you find yourself at Von Maur, buy me the shoes.”

“Size, please.”

“Fourteen.”

“I’m going to be mature and not make a penis joke.”

“You’ve already said penis, so why stop now?”

“Well, I just assumed that since you nearly aspirated your water when I mentioned sex yesterday, you might have a widow-maker right here on the sidewalk if I talk about your junk.”

I looked down at her, and she was smirking up at me like she’d just made some sort of power move.

“No, I’m actually fine with it. I’m not a creep, but if you want to discuss, fire away.”

“I think we both know I cannot,” she admitted around a grin. “I’m far too HR to joke about genitalia in public.”

“But in private?”

“Just try and get me to shut up about dicks.”

I lost it at that, and it was fucking hard to run while cracking up. But Sophie was funny as hell. She came across as pretty type A (aside from her night of Twinkie tossing, but that had been tequila and grief induced), but she was quick with the jokes.

“Starbucks is a block away,” she said, the morning breeze playing with the blond strands that’d come loose from her ponytail. “So maybe we should stop and take some sort of an action shot to post.”

She’d tagged me on Instagram last night, just as I was getting home, so we now followed each other. And yes, I’d crept on her page again, but it’d only taken a second. Because unlike most people—me included—she hadn’t gone back after her breakup and scoured her ex from her account.

No, she’d just stopped posting entirely.

So her feed was still filled with pictures of Stuart, of selfies of them together, only now there was a picture of me right at the top.

Like a statement.

Which gave me some sort of satisfaction that I couldn’t explain as anything other than insane attraction to the first person I’d kissed since Lili.

That’s what I’d decided when I’d been unable to sleep last night because Soph was all over my mind.

Yes, she was gorgeous and funny and absolutely worthy of feelings.

But the feelings I had weren’t for her so much as they were for getting back out there. I hadn’t touched a woman in two years, so jumping right into the kissing-up-against-a-building end of the pool—zero to a hundred—was bound to make me a little short of breath.

I stopped when she did, but I shook my head, breathing hard. “I don’t think a sweaty picture is necessary—stop that.”

The little shit took a picture of me without warning.

She looked down at her phone and immediately started laughing. Hard. A big belly laugh that had her throwing her head back.

“Let me see,” I said, reaching for the phone.

She jerked away. “No.”

“Soph,” I warned.

“One second,” she said, messing with her phone as I tried taking it from her. “Max, stop.”

She turned her back to me, basically boxing me out like we were playing basketball, and I caught a whiff of something fruity as her blond ponytail smacked me in the face.

“Sophie Dickhead Assbag Steinbeck, you give me that phone this instant.”

“Look,” she said suddenly, her mouth sliding into an enormous grin. “Already posted.”

She held up her phone, and though it was hard to see the display in the bright sun, I squinted and saw—oh, that little shit.

She’d posted a picture of me dripping with sweat, my mouth half-open, with the caption Someone couldn’t keep up with me. #winded.

Such a little shit, and she was beaming like she’d just single-handedly won the World Cup. “Delete it.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, her nose crinkling as she looked up at me. I could see my reflection in her Ray-Bans, and I looked grouchy.

And so damn winded.

“Delete it or I will,” I said, reaching for her phone.

“Nooooo,” she yelled, and started running.

The bad thing for her was that my legs were much longer than hers. I think she could kick my ass and outrun me any day long distance, but it was going to be easy to catch up to her.

She was squealing as she ran away, which made it hard to run because I was laughing, but I was still on her in three seconds. Instead of grabbing her phone, I wrapped my arms around her waist and lifted her off the ground so she couldn’t get away.

“Max!” she screamed, laughing and squirming in my arms.

“Give me the phone,” I said calmly.

“Never,” she yelled, holding it out in front of her.

My arms were also longer than hers, so it was almost like she was offering it up to me. “Thank you very much,” I said, and grabbed the phone before carefully setting her back on her feet.

She turned around and looked up at me, and suddenly I thought, What a good fucking morning. Because there I was, on a warm summery morning, surrounded by the slowly awakening city, and her pretty face was smiling up at me.

Good fucking morning to me.

I reached out with my free hand and removed her sunglasses, almost like my hand was working independently of the rest of my body. Warm brown eyes, with a hundred shades of freshly baked cookie speckled inside, squinted up at me as her smile settled into something small and content.

“I like your eyes,” I said, my mouth now joining my hand in functioning separately from my brain.

“Thank you.” Her gaze dropped down to my lips and she said, “Maybe Larry was right.”

“Larry?”

Her eyes met mine again and she said, “I told him about the whole kissing-for-me thing, and he called me a stupid asshole.”

“Larry did?” The little old man she lived with?

She nodded. “He said that I was going to go HAM on your mouth every time I saw you . . . or something like that.”

I heard a roaring in my ears, but I said, “Do people still say HAM?”

“No,” she said quietly, giving her head a shake. “I told him that.”

I cleared my throat and couldn’t help but notice her long, graceful neck—the ponytail left it exposed. “Of course you did.”

“But he said that we wouldn’t be able to stop ourselves from doing it again. And again.”

“Yeah?” I pushed a tendril of blond hair behind her ear with my knuckle, her sunglasses in my fist.

She nodded again. “Obviously we have self-control and he’s wrong, but every time I look at your mouth, I want to do it again.”

“Same,” was all I could manage, realizing that it hadn’t been the red lipstick that had made me nuts. It was apparently just her lips.

“It seems like a bad idea, though.”

“Does it?” I asked.

“Self-indulgent,” she said, but the words came out so softly, almost like a breath. “Decadent.”

“It is that,” I agreed.

“So we should probably chill.” As if a switch was flipped, she cleared her throat, and she was back to all business. “Let’s go get our coffee.”

I held out her phone and sunglasses, which she took and put on, and we started walking in the direction of Starbucks.

“I can’t believe you told Larry,” I said, almost more to myself than her. Yes, he was a progressive dude, but he couldn’t be younger than seventy-five. “About your oral experimentation.”

“First of all, ew, never call it that again,” she replied. “But he’s actually super easy to talk to. I think I tell him everything.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “I’m fairly certain he’s my best friend—apart from Asha—which may or may not say something about me.”

“That you’re not ageist, maybe?” I suggested.

“We’ll go with that,” she said as she approached Starbucks and grabbed the door handle. “I actually like that a lot. Thanks, Maxxie.”

“You’re going to have to stop calling me that.”

“I enjoy what it does to your face, though.”

“Explain,” I said, following her into the café.

“It’s like this,” she said, stopping and making me nearly run into her. She took off her sunglasses, and her entire face scrunched into an enormous scowl. “This is what you look like when I call you Maxxie.”

“I can assure you, I’ve never looked that ridiculous in my entire life.”

“Really?” She turned away from me and walked up to the counter.

“Really.”

“Can I please get a Venti Pike and a Venti Americano with a splash of cream?” she said to the barista. I was surprised that she remembered my order from the last time we’d been at Starbucks.

“Can I get a name for the cups?” the barista asked.

“Sophie for the Americano,” she said. “And the Pike is for Maxxie.”

And then she whipped around and took a picture of my face.

“What are you doing?”

She looked down at her phone, and her face split into a huge grin.

“Look,” she said, throwing her head back and laughing while holding her phone out to me.

I glanced down at her phone and saw the photo she had just taken of me, looking like a grade A asshole.

So I took her phone, stuck it in my pocket, and moved down to the pickup spot.

“Excuse me, sir,” Sophie said, still giggling, following me and bumping her body into mine on purpose. “I think you might’ve accidentally grabbed—”

Her voice trailed off and the smirk disappeared as she looked at something behind me. In a split second, a storm crossed her face and the sun was gone.

She looked like she’d seen a ghost.

I turned around, and for a minute, I had no idea what she was looking at.

But then I saw him.

It was that fucker ex of hers, Stuart, walking in our direction with a cute redhead. He looked smug as he headed for Sophie, whereas she looked completely frozen.

Which was surprising because she saw the guy at work every day, didn’t she?

I had no idea what their dynamic was, but I didn’t like the expression on her face.

“Stuart.” I shifted my weight to one foot and looked down at the guy, who had to be a good six inches shorter than me. He was wearing “running” gear, the whole shiny Nike ensemble right down to the marathon fanny pack with two bottles of water, and I hated him on sight.

His friend was also wearing a running outfit, but I didn’t know enough about her to care.

Stuart glanced at me, obviously wondering how I knew his name, and then he did an actual double take.

“That’s right—I’m the guy you took a cheap shot at during your wedding.”

Stuart swallowed and glanced at Sophie.

“I’ve kind of been hoping I’d run into you,” I said, even though I hadn’t.

“Let’s go,” Sophie said, wrapping her hands around my arm.

“But, honey,” I said, wanting to fucking pound him for making her cry and destroying her life. “Stuart just got here.”

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Come on.”

I glared at Stu as she pulled me toward the door, and as someone who’d now punched a total of one person in my life, it was absurd that I wanted to beat the shit out of him with every fiber of my being.