Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(91)

She was officially insane. It was probably what happened when you were on the brink of having hair-raising, toe-curling, mind-numbing rebound sex with a hot guy but then were abruptly deprived of the opportunity just when your body had kicked into high gear. Inopportune-sex-cessation-induced psychosis.

She could open her own sex-ailment clinic, where they would treat inopportune-sex-cessation-induced psychosis with psychically linked kissing. She would be the first patient. The doctor would say, Nurse, this patient presents with the severest of symptoms. We’d better act quickly. They’d make her change into a thin slip of a hospital gown behind an inadequate curtain hung on a half circle from hooks and chains. She’d step out of the curtain and there would be a knock on the door and Sad-Eyed Guy would step in, in a white coat. And nothing else.

Yep, insane.

Mostly, her social-media campaign had yielded dead ends.

Sorry, can’t figure out who it might have been.

Did you say his friend had long red hair?

Did he have a guitar with him?

She had chased them as far as the elevator, taken another car down, and lost them. It was as if they’d never existed, like some kind of crazy Cinderella transformation where the form they’d taken when they stepped out of the elevator was unrecognizable. Pumpkins and mice. Or, you know, Clark Kent. She guessed they must have somehow beaten the rush and run straight into the backseat of a waiting cab. Vanished into thin air.

She held out some hope that he’d be looking for her, too. He’d said that his friend Owen was the friend of a friend of a friend who’d gotten some Facebook invitation that had been passed along. Surely…

But if he’d wanted to be found, wouldn’t he have asked her name before he fled? Wouldn’t he have found some way to wait for her? Or to come back and find her?

The thing was, even if those fifteen minutes had felt like a lifetime, they’d only been fifteen minutes. She was probably deeply delusional, the result of bad rebound juju and too many pink and blue drinks. And even assuming she’d felt what she thought she had, there was no reason to think he’d felt the same way. What was she basing her convictions on, anyway? Lustful stares, wry glances, tidbits of conversation whose content she couldn’t remember—only the sparkle and joy she’d felt, which could very well have been the result of seeing things through girly-drink goggles.

Could she remember anything he’d said to her?

“Mother of God.” When he’d tasted the cheese. Although the words were kind of secondary to the look on his face: total abandon. The thought had crossed her mind, of course, that she would like to put that look on his face for other reasons.

“You’ve got that part dead wrong.” Again, the expression, not the words.

“You looked great to me.”

“Wow.”

“Really hot.”

Hardly William f*cking Shakespeare.

Had he said anything else? Or had she just talked? Had she babbled at him, all high on Blue Lagoons and Cotton Candies or whatever the bartender was calling those things?

Possibly she’d manufactured the whole experience—certainly the whole buzz—off nothing at all.

So Nora moved the email into her Sad-Eyed Guy folder and gave up.





Chapter 4


Almost a year later


On a perfectly ordinary Friday night right after Thanksgiving, unexceptional in every other possible way, Nora’s phone pinged with a Twitter notification. That, too, was not unusual and brought with it no hike in adrenaline or sense of urgency. She picked her phone up from the coffee table where it lay. Swiped it open and had a look.

Her heart processed the tweet before her brain did, a rush of excitement off “friend” and “midnight” and “New Year’s Eve,” and she had to reread it several times before she understood that the scruffy blond guy, Owen, the one who’d been at the party with the Sad-Eyed Guy, had somehow found out who she was.

@Noramal This is going to sound psycho, but is there any chance you kissed my friend Miles at midnight at a New Year’s Eve party in a 1/2

@Noramal in a twenty-second-floor apartment down by the Charles in Cambridge? 2/2



She sat down on the well-worn couch in her living room and tried to catch her breath.

She supposed a more careful person would probably not respond to the tweet, especially given the barrage of awfulness that had resulted from her last attempt to use social media to solve her New Year’s Eve mystery. But it had been a long eleven months. She’d gone on many insufferable dates. Her friends had fixed her up with a musician who appeared not to have any notion of dental hygiene and an English professor who was an aggressively bad kisser. She’d gotten pizza with a disheveled-but-cute guy who’d picked her up in the T, but he’d gone to the bathroom before the check came, and he never returned. She’d gone on several Match.com dates. Nice guys, no chemistry. Or smart guys, too much ego. A few nice, smart guys who weren’t interested in a second date.

When dates went wrong, she sometimes missed Henry, but more often she missed the guy whose name she didn’t know. She missed his minimalist conversation style, the intensity of his eyes on her, his dry sense of humor, and his kisses.

She missed liking him. In fifteen minutes, with no good reasons at all, they’d actually enjoyed each other’s company. It was shocking how hard that was to achieve in dating. She tried to think whether there’d been another fifteen-minute interval, on all the ten-plus dates she’d been on in eleven months, when she’d believed that she and her date were both having a good time.