*
Tori stared at her television, wishing one of her favorite comfort movies—Armageddon—was enough to distract her from wondering how Max’s date was going.
She was nervous for him and now she wished she’d urged him to make a reservation in the city. Even though it meant quite a drive for Nola to meet him, it would have been better than eating in a fishbowl. If he made a wrong move, all of Whitford would know by lunch tomorrow.
When her cell phone rang, she snatched it off the table and smiled when she saw his face and number on the screen. “Hello.”
“You said to let you know how it went. It didn’t occur to me until after I hit the call button that you might have meant tomorrow. Or some other day.”
She paused the movie. “Now is good. I’ve been thinking about you tonight, wondering how it went.”
“It was nice.”
Nice? “Is that a good nice or a bad nice?”
“There’s good nice and bad nice?”
She laughed and stretched out on her couch. “It’s a very blah word that needs voice inflection to really have meaning.”
“It was a pleasant nice.”
Ouch. That translated to boring in Tori’s mind, but she didn’t say so. “So what kind of things did you talk about?”
“She likes tennis.”
The way he said it, even filtered through the phone as it was, made it clear he didn’t share that interest. “And you said something nice about tennis, right?”
“I did. We talked about a lot of things and I complimented her and she blushed. It was very nice.”
Tori grimaced. Maybe she’d been wrong about Nola. The date sounded so bland, he might have been describing a business meeting. Of course, some of that might just be Max, but it definitely wasn’t her kind of date.
“Do you think you’ll go out again?”
“Possibly. I said I’d like to and she said that would be nice and that I know where to find her.”
“Everybody needs to stop using the word nice. It’s not a very exciting word.”
“But it’s the good nice.”
At this point, Tori was leaning toward the bad nice but, again, she kept that opinion to herself. She didn’t want to discourage him when he was feeling good about how his date went.
But she was going to get together with Hailey and try to come up with some more possible dates for Max. The idea of him and Nola being nice for the rest of their lives depressed her.
“I’m glad you had a good time.”
“Me, too. I’m going to watch TV for a while and then head to bed.”
The bed with the soft green comforter and the light taupe sheets. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to shake the image, but it didn’t help. “Do you have big plans for tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
He said that as if it explained everything. “Oh! Sunday. Right. Big game?”
“Not big. Just a game. But that’s what we do on Sundays.”
“Enjoy the game, and I’ll talk to you soon.”
Once they’d hung up, she resumed Armageddon and sighed. It had gone well. Maybe it wasn’t her idea of a great date, but Max and Nola had enjoyed themselves and that’s what mattered.
She should probably leave Hailey out of it. Between the diner and the library, she and Hailey knew pretty much everybody in town by varying degrees and she was sure they could come up with more single women. But if Max was content with Nola, she should leave it alone.
Her phone rang again and she looked at the screen. Her dad. With a heavy sigh, she paused the movie again and answered it. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hi, doll.” He’d always called her doll. Her mother had always hated it, but it had made Tori feel special and treasured. Now she wondered if that was a lie, too, and he called her that just to annoy her mother. “I know you’re probably working, but I haven’t talked to you in a while. What have you been up to?”
She smiled. “Work. Between the diner and the computer, I haven’t had much time to do anything else.”
Except hang out with Max, but there was a zero percent chance she was going to tell either of her parents about him.
“You can’t work all the time. You need to relax, too, or you’ll end up old and gray, like your old man.”
“Rumor has it I’ll eventually end up old and gray no matter what I do, so I’ll work hard now and play hard later.”
“That’s my girl. I have a small favor to ask you.”
Here it came. Even though she’d expected it from the second she saw his number on the screen, the disappointment hit her hard. Every single time, she let herself hope this time would be different. That the worst was over.
“I can’t find my collapsible fishing rod, and I think it’s in the garage. Your mother won’t let me in and refuses to look for it. I was hoping that, the next time you visit her, you could poke around for me?”
“Sure, Dad,” she said, because it was the easiest thing to say.