And suddenly I’m thinking of my own average night three years back, when Ben followed me home from the set. I was hurrying up the walkway to my apartment, rushing so I could catch the end of ER—ironically enough. It was a taping day, and it had left me bone-weary, which was probably why I never knew what was happening until Ben’s knife came down on me, even though I’d seen him loitering outside only the day before. I’d seen him and been frightened enough to consider calling the police, but then decided I was overreacting, and chose to ignore the way he lurked there on my street corner.
That thought drives me back into myself, hard. “Your pizza’s ruined,” I observe, wiggling my hand out of his. Frantically, I begin scooping the errant toppings back onto our decimated pie: anything rather than meeting his probing gaze. See, I’m more than willing to talk about his pain, so long as we don’t turn the lens on me. For a moment, he seems taken aback, kind of just blinking at me in stunned silence.
“I’m really sorry about all this mess,” I rush to say, and hope he’ll know I mean far more than the pizza.
“Nah, we’ll make it work.” He gathers up wayward pepperoni and sausage and a random onion that’s dangling from the box lid. “Five-second rule.” He laughs, a little too cheerily, working to cover the sudden wall of awkwardness that’s fallen between us.
But I don’t quite get the joke, so he explains, “It’s a parent thing. With little kids, most everything hits the floor. You just dust it off, and hand it back all over again. We always called it the five-second rule, though I guess this is more like thirty.”
What a nice tenet that would be for the rest of life; if something ended badly or didn’t work, we could simply declare, “Five-second rule!” and start all over again—well, if only all those “average days” weren’t potentially out there lurking over the next hill, ready to change our destiny.
“Maybe we could say that about the past few minutes,” I suggest hopefully, rising to my feet. “You know, five-second rule about all the awkward stuff since I got here.”
“That’ll work,” he agrees, though I see wistfulness in his golden eyes. He smiles again, giving me an appreciative once-over, gallantly ignoring my stained dress, as he announces, “Great outfit! Very…Reese Witherspoon.”
And this time, smiling so broadly that I feel the numb side of my mouth pull a bit, I answer, “Thanks for the compliment!”
“You know, Rebecca,” he says, rising to his feet, “never thought there’d be anything good about this weekend. But you’ve managed to change that.”
I turn to him, surprised, and he gives me a winning smile, one that’s quirky and sexy and a little ironic without even meaning to be. When Michael Warner smiles, it reveals a world of intelligence, even when he’s silent. His expression changes, becomes curious, and then I realize I’m standing there, pizza stain and all, gaping at him.
“Good,” I say, brushing at my dress. “Now if we can just keep all those average days on our side, we’ll be doing all right.”
***
Five seconds after sailing through my office door on Monday morning, I’m still feeling a happy buzz from my date with Michael. That is, if it was a date, and I’m not entirely sure on that point. It’s the bisexuality thing rearing its ambiguous self again, which always leaves me wondering if maybe our whole deal isn’t only friendship. And once I go there mentally, then a host of additional anxieties come popping out from nowhere, so I prefer to be in my happy place, at least temporarily.
We’re going to the Dodgers game with his group of friends later this week. This seems like a fairly big deal, to introduce me to his circle—a crowd I know used to knot neatly around Alex and him—but I’ll choose not to be intimidated by that fact.
“My friend Casey’s got an extra ticket,” he explained, standing with me out in the drive last night. “Would you want to come?” Some part of my algebraic mind easily deduced that this “extra ticket” in Casey’s season package used to belong to Alex once upon a time, but I just smiled and said I’d love to tag along. Then there was an awkward moment when I sensed that he really wanted to kiss me goodnight, but neither of us could quite seem to make it happen. So we stood there, him scuffing his loafers on the concrete and me chattering too much about the Dodgers. Could we do a better imitation of being thirteen?
It’s not even 9:00 a.m. yet, but down the hall I can already hear Ed storming at someone on the telephone. As head of development at our production company, Ed rarely talks quietly. He projects. He furies. He dominates. At least two hundred and seventy-five pounds, and a solid six feet two or more, he’s one of the biggest teddy bears of a man I’ve ever met. His office is filled with so much cigarette smoke that it’s more like an incense-filled temple, and my eyes never fail to water whenever I enter.