Ew. Gross, get a room. I scuffled out of the kitchen with my coffee, blushing. Hopefully, they didn’t see me and Missy would be done soon enough and would join me downstairs. She was my friend and that meant that I was
happy for her but for the love of God.
They had just gotten engaged which meant they were probably going to move in together soon. If not with the engagement, then definitely with the wedding. How long were they planning to draw the engagement out? Hopefully, since moving in together was inevitable at some point, we were going to get a real office.
I loved it here and our operations weren’t big enough to necessitate a separate office, but to spare me from ever having to see her and her fiancé like that again, I was hoping she would consider it.
What we used as an office space was initially intended as a family living room but Missy lived alone. Rather than that type of setup, we had a large table with two computers at it for both of us to use. In the room, we had shelves filled with fashion magazines and a comfortable seating area off to the side. I sat at one of the computers and settled down to start working.
I tried to ignore it but I couldn’t. Here I was trying to get into work but I couldn’t stop thinking about Missy and Easton. Right upstairs was a happily engaged couple engaged in God knows what. It was a little hard to give them privacy when their lovenest was also my workplace. I wasn’t just a little jealous anymore, I was a lot jealous. It came in waves.
It was happening more and more these days, this weird feeling of isolation that I felt deep in my chest. It was like the air immediately surrounding my body was extremely cold. I knew it was loneliness but I didn’t know why I was feeling it.
Actually no, I took that back, I knew exactly what I was feeling it. As much as I wanted to blame Missy and Easton upstairs for making me feel extra single today, it wasn’t their fault. It was Toby’s fault.
I couldn’t blame him though. I was the one who propositioned the man and he gave me plenty of time to change my mind that night but I never did. Why did I do that? Was one night really worth it? Even as I asked him to take me home, I knew that that wasn’t what I wanted. It had been so long since I had been in a relationship and the first man I approached, I decided to choose the lowest stakes kind of relationship with the worst returns.
I had had a lot of fun that night, Toby was a spectacular lay, but I didn’t want to just pump and dump guys for the rest of my life. I wanted what Missy and Easton had. What Brenna and Charles had. What Eddy and Niall had too. They were all happy and committed, some of them even with kids. All I had was a drunken story about the hook up with Easton’s coworker. At the best of times, it was a little bit embarrassing, at the worst of times like now, it was painful.
I watched my computer start up feeling pathetic and small. It really didn’t matter what I wanted since I wasn’t going to get it. I had had my shot and I blew it. I never should have been that open and vulnerable. That had allowed somebody to hurt me in ways that I didn’t think I would recover from. I never wanted to allow that again. Sometimes, my resolve weakened. I thought about how lonely I felt and whether putting myself at risk for heartbreak would hurt less, but then I come to my senses. Certain things in this life were just not worth it.
Toby might have had the right idea. Have sex with women but keep none of them around. If you kept a steady enough stream, you didn’t have enough time to be lonely. Men were so much more… tedious though. I had gone a long time without any sexual contact before the hook up with Toby. No relationships of any kind, no serious dating, and guess what? I didn’t die.
No amount of horniness or loneliness would ever be enough to kill me so that right there was enough of a reason not to do anything stupid. I had learned my lesson the hard way and I knew that other methods of fulfillment were just going to have to be it for me from now on.
If I was a crazy cat lady at sixty, no kids, and never-married, it was going to be better than being a divorcee who had let someone make me believe in real, fulfilling love only to trick me later.
Missy walked into the room which allowed me to take a break from my depressing thoughts. Work, friends, hobbies; that was what I was going to use to fill my life up, so at some point, I wouldn't even notice that I didn't have anybody to share it with.
“I haven't kept you waiting, have I?” Missy asked, taking her own seat at the computer across from me. Her face was flushed, and I couldn't help wondering what she and her fiancé got up to after I left the room. Right, as if they even noticed that I was there in the first place.
“No, not at all.” I waited for her to quickly look at her phone and turn on her computer.
“Ready to start?”
“As always.”
“Wonderful, I have good news. We have a job.”
“Really?” I asked. It was unusual that she came to me with news about a job since, as her assistant, I was usually the first point of contact between her and prospective clients.
“Yes. It’s Easton. He and Toby have been approached by a major financial magazine about a cover story. They want to do a shoot, a full spread for the magazine and their website. He wants us to do the styling.” That sounded good. Probably the perks of having a professional stylist as a fiancé.
“Interesting.”
“It gets better. They're shooting on location. They want to do it out in Colorado, in the mountains.” That did make it interesting. That meant we were traveling.
“A wilderness concept for a tech company?”
“They want rugged and wild, you know? Like a Frontiersman feel I suppose. Don't worry, we won't be camping or anything. We will be at a very, very nice resort, Easton has assured me.”
“Good of him to make sure.”
“Absolutely. Won't it be nice to get out of the city while the weather changes?”
The weather was the least of my concerns. I was thinking about the trip. Planning the trip was not going to be a problem. It was going on the trip. I quickly cycled through all the ways I could possibly get out of it. Toby was Easton's partner and the co-founder of their company. That meant he was going to be there.
The whole point of a random hookup was you weren't supposed to see that person again. Under normal circumstances, I could have avoided him, but now I was likely going to have to face him again.