Stranger Read online

  “Shelly?”

  She looked up at me.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  It was simultaneously the right and wrong thing to say. Shelly burst into braying sobs and sank back into her chair, then buried her face in her arms on top of the desk. It wasn’t exactly what I’d bargained for, though I should’ve known it was a possibility. I shrugged out of my suit jacket and hung it on the coatrack, then reached for the box of tissues and started handing her one after the other.

  “Oh…Graaaaaace,” Shelly wailed from the hollow her arms had created to hide her face.

  “Oh…I’m so…so…So!”

  I settled my butt on the edge of her desk and patted her shoulder. “So what?”

  “Confused!” More wailing.

  Shelly had always been prone to crying under stress, but it was usually a little more restrained. She blotted her face with a handful of tissues, but they did little to stop the torrent of tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “About Jared?”

  “No!”

  “About Duane?” I asked as gently as I could.

  “No. Yes. Both.” She looked up at me. “What was I thinking?”

  I handed her another tissue. “I don’t know, Shelly. That you like him? That he likes you?”

  “Yes, but…Oh, bugger.” She sat up and wiped her face. With her face cleaned of the minimal makeup she wore, she looked even younger. “I’m so confused.”

  She’d said that already, but I couldn’t blame her for saying it again. “Let me ask you something.”

  She looked up at me, her hopeful face pressuring me to make this all okay. “Sure.”

  “Are you…happy?”

  If someone had asked me that question, I wasn’t sure how I’d have answered, but Shelly just shook her head. “No!”

  “Well, doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “It tells me a lot,” she said, and burst into more tears.

  I really needed a shower and a change of clothes. And also, a beer. Or two. “Shelly, come upstairs with me, okay? I need to eat something. Not cookies,” I said before she could offer.

  “Come upstairs. We’ll talk about this.”

  In my apartment, she sobbed on my couch while I heated a frozen pizza and cracked open two bottles of Tröegs Pale Ale. I handed her one and changed into jeans and a T-shirt in my bedroom. Once again, my shower would have to wait. By the time I came out, Shelly had chugged down half her beer and managed to stop crying long enough to set my table with paper plates and napkins.

  The oven dinged just then, and I pulled out the pizza and cut it into slices. Shelly took one but didn’t eat it, while I wolfed down mine and grabbed another. With the emptiness in my stomach subsiding, I drank some beer and sat back in my chair with a sigh.

  “He’s a good guy, Shelly.” I didn’t indicate which one. It didn’t really matter. They were both good guys; I liked Jared a lot more, but then I was biased.

  “Yes.” Shelly nodded and pressed a hand to her tear-swollen eyes. “I know.”

  “Look, without getting into the details—”

  “I had sex with him!” Shelly cried. Her chin lifted, her mouth trembling, but her voice was strong. “I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I just…did it!”

  I swigged beer quickly to cover up the fact I’d gone briefly trout-mouthed. It went down the wrong pipe, sending me into a coughing fit. Shelly blinked rapidly and swiped at her eyes, but staved off more tears by slugging back her own beer. “I’m—”

  “Surprised?” she interrupted. “Why, that he’d do it with me?”

  “No, of course not—”

  Shelly thumped the table with the flat of her hand. “Guys will screw anything, Grace, and besides, I told him he’d be doing me a favor!”

  “I didn’t think he wouldn’t want to…sleep with you, Shelly.” Somehow the f-bomb just didn’t seem like the right word to use with my pretty little office manager. “Wait…favor?”

  Her chin went higher and her mouth thinned. “Yes. I told him it would be a favor. How am I supposed to know if I want to spend my life with Duane if I’ve never had sex with any other man? How am I supposed to tell if Duane’s any good in bed if I have nothing to compare him to?”

  “So…the night he hurt his ankle, you…”

  “I did.” Shelly looked hesitantly proud.

  I finished my beer while she eyed me anxiously. “And how was it?”

  A couple more tears squirted out of her eyes but she slapped them away. “Wonderful.”

  I understood very well where she was coming from. Bad enough that she’d cheated on her almost-fiancé. Worse that the sex had been so great. “You can write off bad sex. Good sex is harder to forget. Great sex? Almost impossible.”

  “I thought I’d just get it over with. Then I could stop thinking about him all the time,” she said. “That if we did it, I’d prove something to myself. And I did. But the wrong thing!”

  I bit into my pizza, chewing while I thought of how to answer her. “So what are you going to do now?”

  “What should I do?”

  “When did I become an expert on relationships?” I got up to put my plate in the cranky dishwasher. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have one boyfriend, much less two.”

  “Jared’s not my boyfriend,” Shelly answered, but it sounded automatic and not sincere.

  “And I’m not stupid, you know.”

  I turned to look at her. “I never thought you were.”

  She looked at me. “You can’t tell me you don’t have a boyfriend or someone hidden away somewhere. Do you think I haven’t figured out where you go those days you leave the office?

  What about Sam?”

  “Shelly, you really don’t know.”

  She sniffled. “You’re not going to play bingo. I know that much.”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I’m not going to meet a boyfriend.”

  “You’re going to meet someone,” she said with that same stubborn, anxiously hopeful look.

  “Yes.” That was it, no further explanation, no matter how hopefully she looked at me.

  When exactly had I become a mentor?

  “Grace, please,” Shelly said. “I really could use some advice.”

  I sat back down across from her. “Do you love Duane?”

  Shelly nodded, but slowly. “I used to think so.”

  Shit. “Do you love Jared?”

  She shook her head far too fast. “No. Of course not.”

  “Why of course not? Jared’s cute, he’s funny. He’s smart. And he’s a nice guy. You say

  ‘of course not’ like he rings church bells for a living.”

  This prompted the hoped-for smile from her. “He is cute.”

  “Shelly, I wish I had an answer for you, I really do. But the fact is…if I was going to give you some advice…” She waited. I faltered.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” I said finally, when the clock’s ticking had filled the space between us for too long. “I don’t ever want to get married or even have a boyfriend, a real boyfriend, so I’m really not the person to be giving you advice.”

  “I’ve made such a mess of things,” she said. “I can’t tell Duane. It would hurt him, and he’d break up with me.”

  “Probably. But maybe that’s what you want?” I suggested.

  If Shelly started crying again, I was prepared to break out the vodka, but she just sniffled again and hid her face in her hands for a minute. Then she got up from the table with a sigh.

  “I should get home.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  “I know I look like a Girl Scout, but half a beer isn’t enough to make me too drunk to drive.”

  I’d meant her mental state, not the beer, but I laughed anyway. “I’m just checking.”

  “Do you need help cleaning any of this up?” She waved a hand at the table.

  “No. You go on home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”