Be Good (3 page)

Angry words spewed from my mouth.
“Why? Do you want to fuck me again? You didn’t get enough last night. You want another piece?”

He dropped my arm. “No, that’s not what I meant. I just want to spend time with you.”

He was so sincere it made me want to punch him. Or kiss him. Maybe both. I decided on the former rather than the later but not in the literal sense. I didn’t have to lay a hand on a guy to give him a blow to the gut.

“What did you think was going to happen, Brett? Did you think because we fucked that I was going to be your girlfriend? There’s a reason they call it a one-night stand. It was a hook up.
Nothing more. Deal with it. You live in Palo Alto. I live here in Phoenix. We’ll probably never see each other again.”

He
looked like I had just punched him. Score a direct hit. Now it was time to make my exit.

“I may not be smart
(
Flaw 4
) and I may not be nice (
Flaw 12
) but I do know when I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“What are you talking about?” He seemed confused. I thought I was being pretty damn clear.

“I’m going back to my room.”

“I mean the flaws with numbers.”

“People aren’t shy about telling me how flawed I am. Some people aren’t shy about telling me repeatedly. I decided to make a list. I have one hundred and twenty six flaws.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “You’re really messed up.”

“I know. It’s
flaw 38
. Now can I leave?”

“Just one more thing
. How much do you remember about last night?”

Shit. I froze. I could feel my stuff fall from hands but I was physically unable to stop it from
dropping to the floor. Was I scared? I didn’t remember what that felt like. The last time I remembered being scared was when I broke my arm falling from a tree house. I was eight.

Brett
seemed to be looking right through me. I found it hard to swallow and I could feel my heart racing. How did this man manage to make me feel so many things I hadn’t felt in years?

“How much do you remember?” he pressed.

“Nothing,” I shouted. “Is that what you want me to say? Is that what you want to hear? That I don’t remember a God damn thing. There. I said it. Are you happy now?”

“No,” he said solemnly. 

The look on Brett’s face was beyond hurt, beyond pain. It was complete and utter disgust. He shook his head as if he could shake everything that happened between us away. Or maybe he was trying to shake me away? He reached down, grabbed my stuff from the floor and handed it to me.

“Maybe you’re right
.” His expression was pained. “Maybe it is time for you to go.”

I didn’t even glance back as I ran down the hallway.

I just about made it to my room before I started crying again. I flopped on the unused bed, buried my head in the oversized pillow and sobbed. I had cried more in one day being with Brett than I had in the last ten years.

When my tear
ducts ran completely dry (at least I hoped they had), I took an extremely hot shower. The water soothed my raw nerves a bit but I just couldn’t scrub myself enough to feel clean.

I never felt bad about hooking up
with someone but what I did to Brett made me feel dirty. I wished I could have remembered just one thing about being with him but I truly didn’t and it made me feel awful. It was strange to think that all those years he felt like he didn’t deserve to be with me and now I was the one who felt like I didn’t deserve to be with him.

After I dressed and packed and was ready to leave,
I noticed a note had been slid under my door. It was a piece of hotel notepaper folded in half. It had my name written on the front. When I opened the note, it said, “I’m so sorry.”

That’s it. Just:
I’m so sorry
. I assumed it was from Brett but I couldn’t be sure because he hadn’t even signed his name. I placed the note in the front pocket of my jeans and headed to the lobby.

I checked out of my room and dragged my suitcase out to my
Kia Soul. As I was placing my bag in the back, I heard a voice call my name.

I turned and saw one of the other bridesmaids, Tiffany, hea
ded in my direction.

“A bunch of us are staying for brunch if you want to join us. I tried to find you last night to tell you but you must have gone to bed early.”

Something like that, I thought. “Sure, why not.” It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I was one of the few people in our social circle who had grown up in the Phoenix area, gone to college in town and stayed in town after graduation. I lived on the other side of the Valley, about 30 minutes from the hotel. The only reasons I had booked a room was because I knew I would be drunk by the end of the night (I had to take advantage of the open bar) and the wedding rate was cheap. It was also a plus that I didn’t have to spend the night with my freaky roommate and her evil cat.

“We’ve got a large table reserved in the restaurant. You can’t miss it.
” She hurried away to catch another guy I sort of recognized from the wedding, who was a few cars down from mine. He was also putting his suitcase in his trunk.

I locked my car and headed into the restaurant. It was
eleven o’clock. Kind of in between breakfast and lunch, so the place was pretty empty. There was a large table set up in the back for about twenty people. I guessed it was set up for us. There was only one person seated at the end of the table and when I got closer, I gasped when I saw it was Brett.

He nearly leapt out of the seat when he saw me. “Anna,” he
gulped. Then his eyes narrowed. “You’re wearing my shirt.”

He caught me. I had put his shirt back on after my shower. Somehow, it had made me feel better.

“Do you want it back?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Right now?”

He was still nodding. I couldn’t tell if the nodding was just because he was still in shock from seeing me again or if he really wanted his shirt back. It wouldn’t have been the first time I was half naked in public, so I started to take the shirt off.

“No,” he yelled. “I don’t want the shirt back. That’s not what I meant.”

I wondered what he did mean.

“I like seeing you in my clothes.” The way he said it made me wonder if he knew what had actually come out of his mouth and it wasn’t something he thought.

“I like Pearl Jam,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Did you get my note?”

I pulled it from my jean’s pocket and held it up.

“Good.” 

Before I could say another word, Jason
Richards, one of the groomsmen, came up behind Brett and messed up his hair. “Hey, Clown Hair,” he joked. “Did you have fun last night?”

Brett’s eyes darted to me quickly then he looked up at Jason. “Yeah, I did.”

I eyed Jason. “I don’t know why you still call him that. He obviously doesn’t have clown hair anymore.”

Jason
glanced at me and his baby blue eyes lit up. “Hey, Beautiful. Now why didn’t I see you last night?” He gave me the once-over. “Looking hot as ever, Babe.”

Jason was hot, too, and I had hooked up with him a few times while we were in college, even though he had a pretty
steady girlfriend. In the times he and his girlfriend were
off
Jason and I got together. I thought someone told me they were
on
again. It never stopped him from flirting though.

When I glanced
at Brett, he was staring at me, his expression unreadable. He was just looking at me, like he was trying to put puzzle pieces together and figure me out. He could try for an eternity and he would probably never completely fit all my crazy pieces together.

I felt someone grab my arm. It was Tiffany. “I’m glad you came
.” She dragged me to the other side of the table. “Did you hear that Rachelle spent the night in Mitch’s room? What a little wedding slut,” she said as we both took seats. If she only knew…

Tiffany had been talking my ear off telling me gossip about nearly every person we had graduated with and what they had been doing in the year since graduation when I suddenly felt the desire to look at my watch. It was close to one o’clock. I looked down at the other end of the table and noticed that it was clearing out. Brett’s seat was empty.

He was gone.

And he hadn’t even said goodbye.

Two

When I walked into my apartment, one of my wishes came true, my freaky roommate was nowhere to be seen. I breathed a small sigh of relief as I threw my suitcase into my bedroom.

But when I went to fire up my laptop, her evil cat was nesting on top of it. Ugh. How many times did I have to tell her to keep that vile thing out of my bedroom?

I never wanted a roommate. After sharing a dorm room with Miss Perfect my last two years
of college (I had to beg my parents to let me move out because they lived so close to campus), I had enough of roommates. Unfortunately, my job as a paralegal at my brother’s law firm didn’t earn me enough to pay all of my bills on my own. Of course, my brother thought he was doing me a big favor when he suggested I move in with his law partner’s sister, Winter Raven. That’s her legal name. She told me she had her named changed the day she turned 18. She said Winter Raven was a better fit for her spiritual destiny. It sounded like a load of horseshit to me. I have no idea what her birth name was and never cared enough to ask. I called her
the freak
because that’s what she was, and I stayed away from her and her freak friends as much as possible. They called themselves Wiccans and often stayed out all night when there was a full moon. She never wore anything but black and her hair was dyed jet black to match. She also had a lot of tats and piercings. She worked at some kind of New Age bookstore. I’m sure it was because that was the only place that would hire her looking like she just stepped out of an Anne Rice convention. Did I happen to mention
Flaw 92
? I’m apparently very judgmental.

Of course,
Winter’s evil cat was all black, too. I wondered if the freak knew what a walking cliché she was. I shooed her evil cat from my laptop and she hissed at me on her way out of my bedroom. I always kept my bedroom door locked at night so the evil cat couldn’t murder me in my sleep. I heard stories about cats lying on people and suffocating them in the middle of the night. I knew her evil cat was definitely capable of such malice.

I fired up my laptop and hopped over to Facebook. As I suspected, I had already been tagged on hundreds of photos from the wedding. I wanted to carefully inspect every photo to see if it would bring back any memories of the events of the evening.

Okay, I was also dying to see if Brett was on Facebook. Not that I knew what I was going to do if I found him online. Would I actually friend him? I thought about it. Was I hoping for something more between us? I had never hoped for “something more” with a one-night stand. Hell, I never even thought about most guys I slept with after I snuck out in the morning. I wasn’t sure what made Brett so different but I couldn’t get thoughts of him out of my head.

I just kept thinking about the way he so carefully washed my face after I threw up. And the way he embraced me and comfor
ted me when I broke down and cried. I thought about Brett’s warm smile and tender green eyes—and his clown hair, which wasn’t actually clown hair anymore.

And I thought about that look of disgust on his face when I left his room. Many people had looked at me with hatred and contempt, or even disappointment. I seemed to bring those
feeling out of people on a semi-regular basis (
Flaw 11
). But the look that Brett gave me was something I had never seen before. Or maybe if felt different because the look he gave me actually hurt so much. Brett had managed to touch me in ways that no one had touched me before. It scared the hell out of me but it also intrigued me.  

Before I could stop myself, I typed Brett Conner into the search screen. Of course, thousands of names popped up because
Conner
was a common name. I decided to look through the photos of the wedding that people had posted to see if Brett was in any of the shots and if he had been tagged in any of the shots.

I cringed when I saw some of the photos of me looking like a slut on the dance floor. I certainly earned my reputation for being a
fun party girl
. I was tagged in hundreds of photos. A lot of people considered me a friend although few people truly knew me. I never let people get that close, not even my parents and siblings.

I scrolled through
the hundreds of candid photos that people had uploaded but I didn’t see any of Brett. My heart sank at the possibility that he wasn’t even on Facebook. I knew there were still a few hold-outs who didn’t have accounts.

I was just about to give up when I came across a photo
of me and Brett. It was labeled:
Beauty and the Beast
. (Okay, even I thought that was a mean label, especially in such a public forum like Facebook.) In the picture, I was sitting on his lap and kissing his cheek. His face was frozen in what looked like an uncomfortable half smile. I wondered what he was thinking at that moment. It was obvious at some point I had zeroed in on him as my target for the evening. I’m not sure why or what had sparked my interest in him. I knew myself well enough to know that once I set my sights on a guy I rarely had to take no for an answer. I always got the guys I wanted. What I couldn’t figure out is why I wanted Brett? As he said, I had never even given him a second look all the years we were in college together.

Brett had definitely grown into his body and he was kind of cute. But he was still a geek, too, although much less geeky than
in his college days. He still had shades of geek in him, though, a little
geekiness
around the edges. But something had attracted me to him. If I could just remember what it was?

My heart skipped a few beats when I noticed Brett had been tagged in the photo. He
did
have a Facebook account. I clicked on his name and was taken to his Profile page.

His profile photo was not flattering. It was obviously old b
ecause his hair was still a bit clownish. There wasn’t too much information in his public view. Just that he was state university graduate and that he lived in Palo Alto, two things I already knew about him.

I would have to friend him to get any more information. But did I
really want to friend him - that was the question? What did I think was going to happen? What did I expect to happen? What if I sent a friend request and he completely ignored it? I had to admit it would hurt.

Then it occurred to me that I was
putting more thought into deciding whether to friend Brett on Facebook than I most likely did in deciding whether to sleep with him. I had to wonder if it was just me or if it was endemic of the Facebook generation in general.

I could feel my heart beating a little bit faster when I sent Brett the friend request.

Then I sat there and waited. And waited. And waited.

Only thirty seconds had gone by and I already felt like I was going to have a heart attack. I wondered if Brett realized he was killing me.

I wasn’t sure why I was just sitting there waiting. Part of me didn’t think he’d accept my friend request. And even if he did, I didn’t think it would be instantaneous.

But it was pretty damn quick.

There is was:
Brett Conner has accepted your friend request. You can write on his wall
.

My heart
pounded even harder when I realized he could now see everything on my wall. In my desire to see his details, I completely forgot about the fact that he was now privy to all of my sordid past activities documented for eternity on my Facebook Timeline.

I quickly jumped over to Brett’s Profile again. There wasn’t a lot there but I was able to discern a few tidbits of information.

First: There were several photos of him with another female state university grad, who I vaguely recognized. I sat next to her in an Economics class my freshman year. It was a class, which my brother highly recommended I take and I subsequently flunked. I remembered that she was small and mousy, kept to herself and always got perfect scores on every quiz and test. The tag on the photo said her name Rebecca Stiller. I clicked on her name and was taken to her Profile page. She didn’t have too much public information posted except that she was a state university grad, the same year and me and Brett. She now lived in Maryland (which would fit with Brett’s story about his college girlfriend moving to the other side of the country) and she worked for a government agency in Washington, DC. I had little doubt she was his Number One.

I studied her profile photo. She looked serious and smart. She wasn’t someone you’d immediately say was attractive but she was
n’t ugly, either. She was an average looking person with straight, shoulder length brown hair and brown eyes. In the photo, she was wearing a sweater vest with a turtleneck and pearls. She seemed to be a female equivalent of Brett and in many ways his perfect match. I could see why they were together so long. In the three years they were together, I bet they never once fought or raised their voices or said a mean thing to each other. I was with Brett for one night that I couldn’t even remember and I had already done all of those things. Well, the next morning anyway.

I let out a sigh.

Was there any way Brett and I could have a relationship? I was certainly nothing like Rebecca “Sweater Vest” Stiller. If Rebecca had a complete opposite in the world, that person was me.

I went back to Brett’s profile page and clicked on his
“About” section. I breathed a small sigh of relief when I verified that he was actually single. He worked as an Aeronautical Engineer for NASA. Fancy job. No wonder he had no time for a girlfriend. He didn’t have any hobbies or other activities listed but he did have a quote:
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one and a lily with the other
. It seemed like a strange quote for a guy to have on his wall but Brett didn’t seem that much like a typical guy.

I decided to investigate his
Wall a little further. There wasn’t too much posted there. He probably didn’t have time to use Facebook much. I did notice that he had changed his Relationship Status just this past March from Engaged to Single.

Engaged?
Why did I feel like someone had stabbed me in the heart with a knife when I read that single word? Brett said he dated this ex for three years in college and they tried the long distance thing but it didn’t work. He never mentioned they were engaged and that they had only broken up a few months ago.

I felt like I was going to be sick.

Then I noticed my chat box pop up. I really didn’t like to chat on Facebook but in my rush to cyber stalk Brett, I had forgotten to close it.

Brett:
Hey, Anna. How are you doing?

Me:
Okay…I guess.

Brett:
Feeling better?

Me:
Yeah.

Brett:
I was worried about you.

I didn’t know whether to be flattered or run quickly in the other direction.

Me:
I’m fine
.

There was a pause. I wasn’t sure if he was done or thinking.

Brett:
I just wanted to let you know…

There was another pause.

Brett:
I had no idea you were as drunk as you were…

Another pause.

Brett:
If I had known, I never would have…

Pause again.

Brett:
Taken advantage of you like that. I’m really sorry.

I had to laugh. Not at the situation or his feelings about it, which weren’t funny at all, but at the fact that he felt like he had taken advantage of me. If anything, I was most likely the one who had hit on him and totally seduced him. 

Me:
It’s really not a big deal. Don’t sweat it.

Brett:
It is to me.

I could feel a twinge of sadness in my heart. All I wanted was to have fun and I rarely thought about the consequences of my actions. But I had hurt Brett and I was beginning to understand how truly shitty that was.

Me:
I didn’t mean to hurt you.

There was another really long pause. I wasn’t sure if he’d even respond. Then, he typed:

Brett:
I know. It’s okay.

I could feel a teardrop roll down my cheek.

Me:
It’s really not.

I waited. Then to my surprise, he typed:

Brett:
Did you get an invitation to Olivia and Zach’s wedding?

Me:
I’m one of the Bridesmaids.

Brett:
Again?

Me:
Yup. I think I get invited to be in so many weddings because I look good in hideous dresses and shine in wedding photos
.

Brett:
You did make that horrible dress look hot last night
.

That made me smile.

Me:
I’ll take that as a compliment
.

Brett:
You should
.

He never said if he was going to
Olivia and Zach’s wedding. It was in Tucson, so he would have to fly out for it.