Cheating on Myself

CHEATING ON MYSELF

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2013 by Erin Soderberg Downing

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission of the author.

Cover Design by The Killion Group

OTHER BOOKS BY ERIN DOWNING

For Young Adults:

None of the Regular Rules

Kiss It

A Funny Thing About Love (Three Book Collection)

Drive Me Crazy

Prom Crashers

Dancing Queen

For Tweens:

Best Friends (Until Someone Better Comes Along)

Juicy Gossip

For my amazing husband, who always makes me laugh.

PROLOGUE

When I was fifteen, the year my mom died, I made a checklist of my life’s goals.

Kissing Trent Sloan was at the top of that list. The list wasn’t meant to be in order of importance. But even if it had been, there’s a decent chance Trent would still have been in that top slot. He played center on the hockey team and had a perfect, un-ironic mullet that just
worked
. After Trent came the usual things: stellar high school GPA, get the hell out of Nowhere, Iowa, college plans, a reliable job, travel to interesting-but-safe places, a good husband, and a wedding dress so classic I could never regret it.

(Give me a break. I was fifteen. These things mattered then. Some still do.)

It was a long, ambitious novel of a list. I really dug in to some categories, expanding my goals to cover critical items like dorm room color palettes and what style of bed I would buy for my first apartment. I made things intentionally difficult for myself in some cases, mapping out the preferred location to experience my first college campus kiss and the song that would be playing when I finally had sex.

Call me anal, but I had a plan. And that plan helped me get through the grief of losing my mother. It was a plan I felt good about, and it represented a life I knew would make my mom proud. (Except maybe Trent. Mom always thought he was a little greasy, and there were allegations that he’d once kissed my friend Carrie’s mom. I don’t believe everything, but that wasn’t such a stretch. Carrie’s mom got around.)

When I’d finished the list, I was confident I had plotted out a perfectly achievable and idealistic life, complete with adventure, romance, and true love. I’d sighed happily, tucked the list inside my freshman yearbook, and called Trent Sloan.

When I kissed Mr. Mullet a few weeks later, I found out his mouth tasted like school cafeteria tacos (and I later learned he had slept with Genelle Henderson right before she found out she had genital warts). It didn’t matter, because the kiss was all I needed to check off the first box on my list.

In the twenty years since, I’d escaped the confines of my small-town upbringing and proudly marched my way through the rest of the boxes. Until I’d checked all but one.

Unfortunately, the last thing on my list wasn’t falling out of love.

But I guess it should have been.

CHAPTER ONE: AUGUST

“
Do my boobs look uneven in this shirt?” Lily Sparrow studied her reflection in the dirty glass of our office microwave. Her dark chocolate-colored hair fell in perfectly cascading waves around her slim shoulders. She turned, fixing her emerald green eyes on me. I swallowed, despite the fact that Lily shouldn’t and couldn’t intimidate me. Nearly everyone else at Centrex Corporation feared her, but I was immune to her intensity. Even still, the expression on her drop-dead gorgeous face was somewhat terrifying.

“Can you stop looking at me like that? Hardcore Lily freaks me out.” She grinned at me, displaying a mouthful of mostly-perfect teeth. Lily’s only imperfection was the tiny chip in her left front tooth—a permanent reminder to always check to make sure they used pitted olives in every martini before taking a bite. “And what do you mean by uneven?” I asked.

In the ten years I’d known Lily, I’d learned to expect random questions like this to pop up out of the blue. We’d been talking about spreadsheets mere moments before, but the topic-shift didn’t faze me. I sipped from my latte and stood sentinel in the door of our office’s twelfth-floor coffee pantry. This was our regular midday routine, and I’d come to look forward to some sort of random Lily conversation right around two every afternoon.

“Balanced. You know, does one look bigger than the other? Are they wonky?” She unbuttoned her conservative gray suit jacket, but stopped before taking it off all the way. “Anyone coming?”

I peeked my head out and looked both ways down the hall of cubicle walls. “Coast clear.” Lily slipped her jacket off and I shook my head when I saw she was wearing a two-sizes-too-tight jeweled tank top. Most people at the office knew Lily as a conservative Marketing Director with a zero-tolerance-for-stupidity policy. But I knew Lily’s carefully groomed image was just her way of managing office politics, since the Lily I was familiar with conjured up images of tight, tiny tank tops and cocktails. But I’d known her for more than ten years, and she’d spent a lot of time grooming her work image since our entry-level days. I guess there was a reason everyone was afraid of her—she just kept that side of herself away from me. She knew I wasn’t going to fall for her shit.

“Hmm. They appear to be straight. Very sparkly and perfectly symmetrical.”

“Do you think they
feel
even?” Lily pulled her Lean Cuisine meal out of the microwave with one hand, while threading the other arm back into her suit coat.

“You want me to touch your tits?” I tucked my latte-free hand into my dress pocket, just in case that’s what she was getting at. If James Davis—VP of Marketing and the Captain of Inappropriate Comments—were to walk by while I fondled Lily’s chest in the pantry, I was pretty sure all hell would break loose at the marketing summit later that week. “Why the breast obsession today?”

“Interns. They make me feel insecure. And the one with the red hair—Charlie, Chirpie, or something?—she has a chest I’d pay money for. I’m seriously considering it.” Lily murmured.
Then she pulled her Blackberry out of her suit coat to check for emails while forking up a steaming bite of pasta and something that looked like broccoli. The bite made it to her mouth without her ever looking at the food. It was obvious she didn’t bother to taste it before swallowing, either. Lily’s eyes were fixed on her tiny Blackberry screen, her face a mix of emotions as she scrolled through the dozens of emails that had probably come in while she heated her food and obsessed over her chest. She shook her head as she thumbed through an email.

“Fucking James. He’s making me prep the interns for this week’s marketing summit. Stella, I hate interns. They come floating in here every semester with their tight little business school bodies and their smug attitudes, and I’m supposed to pretend I love teaching them everything I know.” She stopped to blow on her next bite, finally looking up when she dropped her Blackberry back in her pocket.

I swallowed the last of my latte and smiled as Corinne Andrews and Greg Kling from HR walked by. Corinne trilled out, “Hello, Stella. See you next week at the on-site off-site?” A blast of cigarette stench wafted through the hall as they breezed past.

“You bet!” I chirped. I noticed Corinne and Greg’s fingers brush together as they turned the corner at the end of the cubicle hall, and realized there was a little something more than smoking motivating them to take their breaks outside. Fascinating. Who would date a coworker?

“Lil, interns are a fact of corporate life.” That was true, but the other truth was, I disliked interns just as much as Lily. Anyone in their late-twenties (or, um, mid-thirties) who pretended to enjoy an onslaught of young, up-and-comers was a big, fat liar. I mean, let’s face it: women like me have finally gotten to a place in our careers where we’re not faking every decision, and suddenly,
kaboom!
, some twenty-four-year-old with long, shiny hair and fresh “Managing Change” expertise pops up and “makes suggestions.” Who likes “suggestions” in the workplace? No one. “Suggestions” just lead to “rethinking” which leads to “explorations” which lead to a whole lot of busy work. I can finally do my job (very well, I might add) in just over forty hours a week, but when interns pop up and start trying to meddle in a perfectly mediocre organization, middle-management marketers like me take the brunt.

Oh, and more to the point, my boyfriend thinks all interns are “adorable.” That worked out in my favor when
I
was an intern and he first asked me out, but I can’t help but wonder if interns are part of the reason Erik refuses to grow up and commit already. It’s like he thinks we’re still the know-it-alls we once were, and if we just freeze time and commitment where we were when we were twenty-three and twenty-four, we’ll never get old. Well guess what, Erik? Your hair
is
going to fall out, you’ve
already
up-sized the waist-size of your jeans, and you aren’t even very good at texting. You’re getting older, buddy, like it or not.

“Lily, we were both interns once. So they can’t all be bad.”

“Exactly.
We
were interns. That’s how I know just how smart they all think they are. And how stupid they think
we
are. Well, they’re probably not begrudging you, but they’re surely eyeing my job.”

Lily was a VIM—James’ acronym for Very Important Marketer. That meant Lil sat on Centrex’s marketing council, made important decisions, and got to sit in an office (Centrex was opposed to doors on offices, but still—she had real walls). I, on the other hand, was one of James’ “Bears.” Technically, my title was Senior Marketing Analyst, but the other people in my pod were told to call me “Share Bear.” I earned that adorably moronic name when I was honored with a spot on the task force responsible for morale and team spirit at Centrex. “The Bears” don’t make any important decisions. Instead, we sit in nubby cloth cubes, and are required to smile a lot. There’s no room at the Inn for a bad attitude, even when everyone around you is acting like an idiot. Marketing is
such
bullshit.

Lily jabbed another mouthful of pasta between her lips. This time, she took a moment to chew. “This is disgusting, you know. I blame the interns for making me eat this crap.” She tossed the rest of her microwave meal in the trash and dug through the reusable lunch bags in the fridge that were carefully labeled with other peoples’ names. I guess she thought Eve Overstreet wouldn’t miss her Strawberry Yoplait, since Lily seemed perfectly comfortable stealing it.

“I don’t see any interns holding an Econ textbook to your head and insisting you have to eat cardboard to stay slim. You’re a big girl. An important girl. Need I remind you that you have the intelligence and cash to buy whatever you want to eat for lunch?” I raised my eyebrows.

Lily knew I wasn’t going to get into a ridiculous discussion about whether or not she was fat—and we both knew that was where this was headed. Of all the reasons to hate interns, their looks and slim hips were at the bottom of the list. But even worse, there was nothing I enjoyed less than talking to Lily Sparrow about cellulite, chubby thighs, or love handles. Like I said, Lily was perfect. She just didn’t realize it. The good thing about Lily’s lack of self-awareness was her blindness to her friends’ shortcomings. I think she truly believed my size twelve thighs looked just like her size four thighs, the only reason for the difference in pant size being that my legs were longer.