Exes and O's (The Influencer, #2)(15)

“Long time no see.” I force a smile, taking my seat. “Thanks for meeting on such short notice.”

“No prob,” he says.

I delay my response, expecting him to acknowledge that he’s over half an hour late. But he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he tugs the chair back, allowing the legs to scrape across the tiled floor, garnering a wince from me and everyone within our vicinity. He drums his knuckles on the wooden tabletop and just smiles at me, closed-mouthed, like he’s expecting me to speak.

“You didn’t wear a coat? Aren’t you cold?” I gesture out the window. “It’s November.”

As he plunks the helmet onto the floor at his feet, I note the layer of hair covering his arms is literally white from frost. “Nah, bro,” he says, like old-school Justin Bieber casually appropriating Black culture. “My body is a furnace.”

I cringe, casting a distressed glance at the time on my phone.

“So, you’re a nurse now, right? Thought I read that on Facebook,” he says as I chug the rest of my now room-temperature tea.

“Yep. I work in the NICU at the children’s hospital,” I explain. “I love it. It’s nice to work with patients who don’t complain.”

My attempt at humor falls flat. Instead, Jeff’s expression turns grave. “I had a buddy whose cousin’s friend’s baby died after a nurse gave it the wrong dose of medication.”

I sit back in my chair, quietly disturbed. “Oh, wow. That’s terrible—”

“That’s why I refuse to go to hospitals,” he cuts in. “I only practice holistic wellness.”

I start stress-tearing my napkin into thin strips, unable to muster the strength to defend the scientific advantages of modern medicine. The memory of dating this man is like a delayed, distorted film. While I recall snippets of being with him lazing in the courtyard, the memories fail to bring me any sense of longing or comfort.

His Hollister-model looks, pot addiction, bare-minimum personality, and staunch hatred for anything mainstream may have charmed my eighteen-year-old self, but at thirty, I just feel a bizarre maternal urge to give him my coat and some life advice.

“So, Jeff, last time we saw each other you were taking Environmental Science. What did you end up doing?” I ask.

“Dropped out junior year. Got a sick inheritance after my granddad passed. Gave me some time to figure things out.”

“Oh? Where are you currently working?”

“Nowhere. I’m really not cut out for the nine-to-five. Thinking of starting a nonprofit. Or getting into the beekeeping business.” No health insurance is my only takeaway from that statement.

“Beekeeping?” I’m not confident in my ability to feign interest in bugs, however crucial they are to sustaining the ecosystem. The universe officially has it out for me. This is just swell.

He nods. “Yup.”

Now that he’s sitting in front of me, giving me one-word answers, I do recall complaining about his poor conversation skills. He’s basically a human boomerang, bringing every topic back to himself sooner or later, which I blamed for the demise of our relationship. I began to suspect he was losing interest when he started responding to my multi-paragraph texts with Kk. I never knew whether he wanted to keep talking or if he wanted me to disappear from his life entirely. And based on the fact that he eventually stopped texting me altogether, I’d say it was the latter.

When Jeff stares longingly out the window at his Segway, like it’s his long-lost love or firstborn child, I start crushing the strips of napkin into tight balls, fantasizing about tossing myself into the nearest ditch.

We attempt some stilted conversation about the science of composting, a topic I know absolutely nothing about. When that trails off, I reach for my coat, explaining that I have to get back to work for the bimonthly all-staff meeting.

“So, I’m curious. Before we go, why did you reach out, anyway? For closure?” he asks.

“Closure?” My laughter comes out shaky as I reach for my coat. “Why would you think that?”

“You were pretty into me in college,” he declares with no shortage of confidence.

My cheeks flush. “I mean, I guess it would be nice to know why we stopped talking.”

“Listen, I’m gonna be honest.” A grave pause. “You were great. We had a lot of fun together. But you were . . . a little . . .”

“A little what?”

He bites his lip, hesitant. “Clingy. A bit of a stage-five clinger.”

“Stage-five clinger?” I lean back in my chair, clasping a weak hand over my chest like I’m in grade school, obediently pledging allegiance to the flag. Did this man really just call me clingy? The gall. The gumption.

“You texted and called me. Nonstop,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Okay, that’s an exaggeration. It’s not like I sat by my phone waiting with bated breath for you to text me,” I lie. I might have. But it seems like poor timing to come clean. And it doesn’t make me crazy. I was in love, damnit. “In my defense, you told me you wanted to get married.”

He gapes at me. “No. I definitely never said that.”

“You did. The night we danced in my dorm room to that Toploader song. You said it would be our wedding song.”

“You thought that meant—” Red-faced, he runs his hands down his cheeks. “Obviously I didn’t mean it. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t even know how to do my own laundry back then. And I was probably just trying to get into your pants.”