Goodnight Tweetheart (5 page)

She closed the screen of her laptop with a decisive click. Bantering and “flirting” with Mark through Direct Messages had seemed harmless enough, but making a date to take their relationship to the next level felt more than a little disingenuous.

She glanced at her
Far Side
desk calendar. It was only Monday. She had four days to decide whether or not she was going to make an appearance at the appointed time or stand up her cyberdate in favor of a real man, one who might be able to offer her more than just words on a screen.

She had four days to forget all about Mark Baynard.

Chapter Five

I
met a man online.”

Abby’s announcement might not have been so dramatic if it hadn’t been gasped out in what sounded like her dying breath. Fortunately her friend Margo was accustomed to her wheezing so she didn’t whip out her BlackBerry and start dialing 911 or leap off her own treadmill and go running for the gym defibrillator.

Using the towel draped around her neck to wipe the sweat from her eyes, Abby glanced down at the treadmill’s digital readout. She groaned, finding it hard to believe she’d only been slogging along for seventeen minutes when it felt more like seventeen hours. She much preferred taking a long, leisurely stroll in the park or
Partying Off the Pounds
while Richard Simmons shouted that she was born to be a star. She had always hated to run unless something was chasing her—preferably a hungry bear.

She shot Margo a resentful glance. Margo had the long, lean muscles and regal posture of an Amazonian queen. She ran with her head straight up, her cocoa-colored eyes fixed on some invisible kingdom she had yet to conquer.

Margo didn’t even sweat. She gleamed.

If Abby didn’t love her so much, she would have hated her.

“So I met a man online,” she repeated. “I know that probably sounds pathetic.”

“Not coming from a budding agoraphobic,” Margo replied. Although her pace was twice as fast as Abby’s and her beautifully toned arms were pumping like a pair of well-oiled pistons, she was still perfectly capable of carrying on a normal conversation, placing a stock order on the headset of her BlackBerry, or singing the opening aria from
La Traviata
. “Unless you’re into those guys who deliver Chinese food, where else would you meet a man? You hardly ever leave your apartment except to go to Starbucks and visit your mom in the nursing home.”

“Hey! I get out! I met you at the gym here today, didn’t I?”

“And how many times have you turned me down for lunch in the past three months?”

“I told you I was sorry about that. I’ve been extremely busy lately.”

Margo cocked one perfectly waxed eyebrow in her direction, her expression more compassionate than snide. “Doing what? Finishing your book?”

Abby felt her throat begin to close up as it did whenever anyone mentioned her work in progress. Or her work
not
in progress. “I’ll have you know that I just may be on the verge of my biggest creative breakthrough yet.”

“On what? The title page? The dedication?”

“Well, it certainly won’t be dedicated to
you
this time,” Abby muttered under her breath.

“Look, sugar,” Margo drawled, making Abby wince. The sweeter and thicker Margo’s Atlanta accent got, the more dangerous she became. She’d been known to make the grown men in her brokerage firm cry simply by sliding a “God love you” or a “bless your little heart” into their annual performance reviews. “I don’t mean to be so hard on you, but I’m afraid you’re only a few takeout orders away from becoming some crazy cat lady who stays triple dead-bolted in her apartment twenty-four hours a day and bakes poisoned cookies for the children in her building.”

“I believe you have to have more than two cats to qualify as a crazy cat lady,” Abby replied stiffly. “Forty-two is optimal. And you know I’m a rotten cook so the poisoning will probably be ruled accidental. Besides, if I don’t turn something in to my publisher soon, I won’t have an apartment. I’ll be pushing a shopping cart full of all my worldly belongings—and my cats—around the park.”

Margo snorted. “The mayor won’t even let you get away with that these days. That’s just going to earn you a one-way bus ticket to Boca Raton.”

“Sadly enough, that’s starting to sound like a perfectly good option. I’ve heard Boca Raton is lovely this time of year.”

Margo slowed her pace to match Abby’s—a sign that she’d begun her cool down. “So just exactly where did you find this guy—
www.EscapedConvicts.com
?”

“I met him on Twitter,” Abby reluctantly admitted.

“Well, that bodes well for a long-term relationship. At least if he dumps you he can do it in one hundred forty characters or less, which is so much better than on a Post-it note.”

“Is this a bad time to remind you that we met while speed dating?” Abby asked, referring to the dreaded urban game of musical chairs that involved answering a matchmaking cattle call, then spending three to eight minutes interviewing a potential lifetime mate before moving on to the next prospect.

It was only after she and Margo had drawn their numbers and ended up sitting across a table from each other at a crowded bar in Soho that they had realized it was a gay speed dating service. They had sat gazing awkwardly at each other for over a minute before Abby had blurted out, “I’m afraid I’m not gay. But if I was, I’m sure I’d find you very attractive.”

“I’m not gay, either,” Margo had confessed, dissolving in husky ripples of laughter. “But if I was, you sure as hell wouldn’t be my type. I’d want one of those butch chicks with the tattoos and the mullet.”

They’d spent the next eight minutes comparing dating horror stories. When the bell rang, signaling that their time was up, they’d ducked out a fire exit and spent half the night at the Back Fence in Greenwich Village listening to jazz and drinking chocolate martinis.

“Based on how
we
met,” Abby said, “our relationship should have only lasted for about seven and a half minutes instead of three years.”

“Just what do you know about this guy?”

“His name is Mark … I think,” she added under her breath. “He’s on sabbatical from his job as a college professor. His first marriage ended badly, possibly from adultery—hers, not his. He knows a lot about pop culture and classic TV. Oh, and he doesn’t get along with his mom.”

“Perfect. He’s unemployed, divorced, has mommy issues, and can beat you at Trivial Pursuit because he has nothing better to do all day than sit around and watch TV. I hate to be the one to point this out, but he doesn’t exactly sound like a candidate for Mr. Right. Or even Mr. Right Now. Maybe you should consider EscapedConvicts.com after all. You might be able to find some guy with a job, even if it’s only working in the prison laundry.”

Abby could feel her temper rising. “ ‘On sabbatical’ is not the same thing as unemployed. He’s also funny and smart and he makes me laugh—something I haven’t felt a whole hell of a lot like doing lately. And I know the Internet can create this false sense of intimacy, but it’s still the weirdest thing. It’s like I can tell him things I can’t tell anybody else. Things I can’t even tell—”

“Your best friend?” Margo interjected wryly.

Abby blew out a sheepish sigh. “He even asked me out on a date for this Friday.”

“Oooh … a tweet-up?” Margo pursed her glossy red lips, actually looking intrigued. “In a public place, I hope … with nine-one-one programmed into your speed dial.”

“Well … it’s not exactly a
real
date. I’m supposed to meet him on Twitter Friday night at seven o’clock. He’s sort of … well … in Italy right now.”

That confession forced Margo to do the unthinkable. She turned off her treadmill. Before the full forty-five minutes of her workout was over. As the rubber belt slowed to a halt, Abby briefly considered leaping off of her own machine while it was still running and making a desperate dash for the women’s locker room. But she knew she wouldn’t make it past the row of ellipticals before Margo would be on her like a cheetah on a lame gazelle.

Margo stepped off the treadmill and made a brief show of toweling the nonexistent sweat from her throat and chest, no doubt to make Abby feel marginally better about the steady stream of perspiration still trickling between her own breasts. “Honey, I know you haven’t dated a lot of guys since you and Dean broke up, but could you have possibly chosen a more inaccessible man? The only way this guy could be less attainable was if he was still married. Which, for all you know, bless your little heart, he is.”

Abby cringed. If Margo followed up her “bless your little heart” with a “God love you,” Abby was going to end up bleeding to death all over the floor of the gym.

“Look—Dean dumped me over a year ago. Don’t you think it’s time I dipped my toe back into the metaphorical pool?”

“Dean might have turned out to be a cheating scumbag, but at least he was real. This guy is like the Old Spice guy but without the towel and horse. He’s nothing but a fantasy. An empty Armani suit you can fill with whoever you want him to be.”

“Hugh Jackman,” Abby murmured, slowing her own pace to a lethargic walk. “Or Samwise Gamgee.”

“What?”

Abby shook her head. “Nothing.” She sighed, having run out of irrational arguments to counter her friend’s perfectly logical concerns. “I haven’t even decided whether or not I’m going to show up on Friday night. Maybe I should just let the whole thing drop before it gets out of hand and he wants to start naked Skyping or something.”

“Or having tweetsex.”

Abby frowned. “Is it even possible to have sex in a hundred and forty characters or less?”

Margo rolled her eyes. “If you’d dated some of the men I have, you’d know it’s possible to have sex in one hundred forty
seconds
or less.”

“Ah, speed sex instead of speed dating.” Abby turned off her own treadmill and joined Margo on the floor. “I wish I could introduce the two of you. I think he’d like you.”

Margo slung one lean, sculpted arm around Abby’s shoulder as they made their way toward the women’s locker room. “Just tell him I’m your obligatory sassy but wise African-American best friend and I’ll drop-kick his ass to the moon if he breaks your heart.”

“Should I tell him your name is Chantal or Bon Qui Qui? ‘Margo’ is a little too vanilla, don’t you think?”

“Just tell him I’m Oprah to your Gayle.”

“Hey, you got to be Oprah last week! It’s your turn to be Gayle to my Oprah.”

“You can call me whatever you like as long as they get Beyoncé to play me when they make a movie of your life.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of Kathy Griffin.”

Margo slanted her an evil look, her embrace tightening into a choke hold. “Do it and I’ll drop-kick
your
lily-white ass to the moon.”

“You’re right, God love your little heart. On second thought, maybe RuPaul will be available.” Shrugging off her friend’s arm, Abby ducked through the locker room door just in time to avoid the deadly snap of Margo’s gym towel.

Her eyes glued to the Direct Message column on her Tweet-deck, Abby took another nervous sip from the glass of chardonnay perched on the desk next to her MacBook. Given how rapidly it was disappearing, she should have kept the bottle within reach instead of tucking it back in the fridge.

She’d never felt quite so ridiculous. Not even when wearing a bunny costume and reading badly rhymed poetry to a squirming herd of preschoolers.

There was no reason for the frantic fluttering of the butterflies in her stomach. It wasn’t as if she was waiting for a knock on the door or even for the phone to ring. Yet she felt every bit as edgy as she had when waiting for Brad Wooten to pick her up for the junior prom. He had arrived right on time, posed for a few obligatory Polaroids, whisked her off to the prom in his Eddie Bauer Limited Edition Ford Explorer, then dumped her during the second verse of Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” after his pep squad ex-girlfriend whispered in his ear that she wanted him back.

The two of them had celebrated their reunion by slipping away for a quickie in the backseat of that same Ford Explorer while Abby found a pay phone and called her dad to come and get her. She’d managed to gulp back her tears until her father had pulled his battered Toyota into the back of the high school parking lot where they had agreed to meet, pushed open the car door from inside, and said, “Come on, baby. Let’s go home.”

She glanced at the digital clock in the corner of her computer screen. 6:56 p.m. A mere three seconds had ticked away since she’d last checked it. Considering how close she’d come to chickening out of their “date,” it would be ironic if Mark was the one to stand her up. He’d probably found some voluptuous dark-eyed Italian beauty straight out of a Fellini film to help him crush some grapes between his toes and forgot all about her.

Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the screen only made Abby feel sillier. She’d actually traded her coffee-stained sweats for a black silk blouse and a pair of neatly creased linen slacks. She’d loosed her wavy mass of curls from their obligatory scrunchie, applied a touch of peach gloss to her lips, and dabbed a little Obsession behind each ear.

A fitting choice, considering she’d also shaved her legs and traded her comfy granny panties for a wisp of black lace a mere fraction of an inch away from being a thong.

Groaning, she dropped her head down on the keyboard. If there was any hope of holding on to even a shred of her dwindling self-respect, she should do exactly what she knew Margo would do—close the laptop, take her de-scrunchied, perfumed, and nearly thonged self down to the nearest club, pick up the first passably good-looking stranger who asked her to dance, and bring him back to the apartment for some safe but anonymous sex.

Or close the laptop, walk to the freezer, dig out her emergency pint of Chunky Monkey, and wolf it down in one sitting while wistfully watching Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy emerge from the pond at Pemberley for the four-hundred-and-fifty-first time in the BBC version of
Pride and Prejudice
.

Either alternative beat sitting in front of the computer waiting to be picked up for a cyberdate by a man she knew so little about he was beginning to make the Phantom of the Opera seem like an extrovert.

She was reaching to close the laptop when a familiar chirp sent her pulse into overdrive.