Rylee crawled back into the bed, turned out the lights.
“You’ll be okay,” she whispered.
“I know,” Presley whispered. “I didn’t mean to fall in love.”
“No one ever does.”
Thirty-Six
The following day, Presley went through all of the motions that had been her life with the energy of a half-drunk zombie. But she did it with a smile on her face. The good news was she was so tired when she got home, she went to bed and didn’t wake up until the next day. She went to the three-day management course she’d been promised countless times over the years. She threw herself into it, absorbed everything she could, took notes, jotted down ideas, networked, made connections, maybe even some possible friends.
When she got home to her apartment after those few days, she thought she’d feel different. Since she didn’t, she took a long shower and crawled into bed.
Rylee showed up early the next day and, best friend that she was, brought not only pizza but more ice cream. There were no food rules when it came to breakups.
“Hey. How was it?” Rylee asked, putting the pizza on the counter and grabbing spoons for the ice cream.
She handed Presley a pint and took the other for herself. They went to the living room and sat down on the gray sofa Presley had picked out three years ago after painstaking research on couches. She shook her head at herself. It was just a couch. More time she’d wasted. Her notebooks mocked her with their ideas between the pages. Dreams and plans and goals. She’d spent three days at a seminar she’d dreamed of going to and didn’t have one thing to add to her notebooks. Not for the hotel anyway.
Rylee waved her spoon in Presley’s face. “Hey. Zombie. How was the conference?”
Presley’s lips wouldn’t move into a smile. She tried, but the truth was, she’d pasted it on for the last few days, and with Rylee, she didn’t have to pretend.
“It was everything I hoped it would be. If Ms. Twain actually gives me a promotion, I definitely feel prepared to take it.”
“Good. I’m glad it was good. How areyou?”
Presley shrugged. “I met several people who gave me their cards. Existing management who work outside of Michigan. Some bigger places right here in Great Falls.”
Rylee fixated for a moment on getting a clump of cookie dough out of the hard ice cream. Once she had it, she popped it in her mouth. “Oh yeah? Any in, say, northern Michigan?”
Presley decided it was a great time to do her own cookie dough dig. She stared at her ice cream.
“Avi and I broke up,” Rylee said.
Presley scrunched her nose. “I didn’t know you were still seeing her. Your first date was over a month ago.”
Rylee shrugged. “Yeah, so? Anyway. It didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry. What did she do?”
“The usual. Accepted me as I was, didn’t put pressure on me to spend more time with her. Was great in bed.”
“The horror. Who wants that?”
It was usually a running joke, Rylee’s string of wonderful partners, women and men, who could have been the one if only Rylee believed in happily-ever-afters for herself. As a child who’d sat on the sidelines watching her parents go through a nasty divorce, she’d always said she didn’t care who she dated as long as they knew forever wasn’t an option on her menu. More than once, Presley wished she had her friend’s resilient, wandering heart. But this time, she wondered if maybe Rylee was opening herself up to more.
“You do, sweetie.”
Presley looked down. “This was about you. He hasn’t texted. It’s been five days.”
“That’s rude. And he left your texts on ‘read’?”
Presley scooped up some ice cream. Sometimes the only way to get to the good part was to weed through the okay part. No one really bought cookie dough ice cream for the ice cream. They should just make and sell bags of the cookie dough in the freezer section.
“I didn’t text him,” she mumbled around her bite.
“He could be sitting on his couch right now, with his best friend, pretending to like cookie dough ice cream for more than the cookie pieces and saying the same thing.”
