“Then tell Luca that you want to meet him platonically. I’ll even tag along if you need a third wheel. But you need to choose between them, Gnome. You can’t be having sex with one guy while you’re thinking about the other. That’s not right.”
We hear a throat clearing behind us. I swivel my chair around to see Patrick standing there, his face redder than ever.
“I certainly walked in on the wrong part of that conversation,” he says. “Anette. Get back to work.”
“Yes, boss,” she says with a mock salute. She leans toward me and whispers, “Choose between them,” before she follows Patrick out of the room.
ChapterTwenty-Four
COME TO MIAMI
Luca
When I left Dallas, I wasn’t sure where else to go. I ended up back in San Diego. All I had were my clothes, my basic necessities, and a box full of letters from Naomi. Most of my furniture had been sold before the move, and the rest I left behind because I didn’t feel like fighting Penny over it. I was able to get my old job back. I had only been gone for a month and they hadn’t replaced me yet. Someone else had moved into my apartment, so I ended up living in Ben and Yvette’s spare room.
It wasn’t the ideal situation. Ben and Yvette had married right after college and they had their first kid nine months later. By the time I moved in, they had just had their third. There was a lot of screaming and crying, toys all over the house, and it seemed like everyone was always rushing to get somewhere. It was chaos.
I wasn’t sad about the breakup with Penny, but everyone else seemed to think I should be. It was more of a relief than anything else. I should have ended things a lot sooner.
I wrote back to Naomi as soon as I was settled into my new temporary home. I sat at the kitchen table during one of the rare moments that all three kids and their mom were napping at the same time. Ben walked into the room and did a double-take when he saw me sitting there with a pen and paper.
“Don’t tell me you’re still writing to that girl from fifth grade.”
I didn’t have to look up at him to know that he was joking. I could tell by the tone of his voice.
“Naomi Light,” I said.
“Wait. Are you serious? You still write to her?”
“I never stopped.”
“Does she still write disturbing shit about getting hangnails and losing fingers?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“You are so weird. I can’t believe you still write to her.” He sat down across from me. “What did Penny think about that?”
“She wasn’t a fan. She hid Naomi’s last letter from me. It’s kind of the reason everything blew up when it did.”
“Have you ever met Naomi in person?”
I shook my head. “Maybe one day.”
“I think it’s crazy that you’ve been writing to her for this long and you’ve never even met her. Do you still stalk her Facebook page?”
“I tried. She set everything to private. I can’t even see her photos anymore.”
“She probably knew you were looking at them and wanted you to stop.”
The newborn started to cry in the other room just then. Ben left to go check on the baby, and I finished writing my letter. I put it in the mail and waited. And waited. A few weeks went by, and the letter was returned. Undeliverable. She had moved.
I hung onto the letter for about a month before I tried again. I mailed the next one to the last address she had lived at as a teenager before she headed off to college. I hoped that maybe her parents still lived there and they would be able to get the letter to her. That one came back about a month later.
I tried to look her up on Facebook again, but her page was still set to private. There were no clues offered as to where she lived or where she worked. I didn’t even have the option to send her a message or a friend request. I didn’t want to give up on finding her, but I was beginning to lose hope. Maybe it was too late. I took too long to write back to her, and our long history of writing mean letters had finally come to an end.
I thought that maybe it was for the best. I had held that girl up on such a high pedestal that no one else I dated ever measured up. If I hadn’t been comparing everyone to what I fantasized Naomi might be like, I would have been happily married by now.
Then one day, I got a new letter in the mail. My name and Ben’s address were written with such sloppy handwriting that I would have known it wasn’t from Naomi even if the return address hadn’t been included. I stared at the envelope for a while before I tucked it away, unopened, into my nightstand.
