Her already sultry voice was raspy with sleep.
“Hey… did I wake you up?”
She giggled into the line. “Well…it’s one o’clock in the morning Avery, and I just got back from Cali today. What do you think?”
“My bad… I didn’t look at the time before I called. I’m sorry.”
“It’s ok,” she said softly, something about her tone leading me to believe she had closed her eyes again. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah… everything is fine. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Humph I’m a popular girl today, I see.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I have some time tomorrow— well, today— if you wanted to maybe have lunch or something?”
“I’d like that,” I said, tempering the little surge of happiness that burst in my chest. “Let’s say one o’clock? I’ll meet you at your sushi spot you like.”
“It’s a date.”
Don’t over think that.
We got off the phone, and I tried to settle into sleep, but I couldn’t. I found myself in my home office, first organizing paperwork, then going through my personal email, looking for a phone number I couldn’t find. Anything I could do to distract myself from tomorrow’s lunch with Tori. My eyes landed on one of the last emails I had gotten from Matched, addressed from Melanie. I remembered her being annoyed I had never looked at it, so I downloaded the attachment, and opened the file.
It took a second to figure out how to navigate the document that opened, but soon I was clicking away, through the questionnaires I’d answered, personality assessments, summaries of my dates, and finally, on a folder named ‘matches’. A list populated on my screen, with a name, compatibility score, and a picture of each woman.
My mouth dropped open at the first name on the list.
All this time…
What the hell?
All this time, she had to have known we were a match. She had used that as an excuse, repeatedly, while I was trying my best to figure out how I felt. Tori had the answer the whole damned time, and she’d kept it to herself… for what?
No more ducking.
No more dodging.
I wanted answers.
So I went and got them.
— Tori —
What the hell?
I was pulled out of my sleep by the sound of pounding on my front door. After a few moments, I closed my eyes again, thinking it was the sounds of the storm that had been raging for the last few hours, but the insistent beat told me it was someone at my door.
At two o’clock in the damn morning.
I climbed out of the bed and grabbed my pepper spray and taser from where they were still stored in my nightstand drawer. Carefully stepping around the piles of boxes and other moving paraphernalia on the floor, I made my way to the front, where I was relieved to see I had actually remembered to turn on the motion detector lights, so my front porch was already bright enough to see without giving away my presence.
When I got to the door, I looked through the peephole before I reached for the lock.
Avery?
I lifted an eyebrow, letting my confusion show on my face as I flipped on my living room light and opened the door. “Avery, hi. What are you doing… here… ?” I let the words trail off as he sidled past with no greeting or anything, just Avery, dripping wet from the rain, with no regard for the puddles he was making in my freshly shampooed carpet.
“You’re a liar,” he said, turning to me as I was digging through one of my boxes for towels.
“Excuse me?” I tossed one to him, but he didn’t move to catch it, just let it hit him in the chest and fall to the ground. Then he wiped his face with his hand. I’d never seen this Avery. Nostrils flared, rigid jaw, shoulders tensed… he was angry, presumably with me, and I had no idea why.
He took a step toward me, with his eyes narrowed, and instead of following the compulsion to take a step back — because, angry man, coming your way, get the hell out while you can— I stayed rooted to the spot. He was mad at me.
Why was he mad at me?