Oh, La-la!

Chapter 12. Ash

For the six years that Beth and I had been together, Fridays were always date night. It was a chance to get out of the house, have a good meal, and reconnect. Or so I had thought. We even took ballroom dance classes and went dancing several times.

I should have realized that sitting home alone on Friday would be a challenge.

I sip my scotch and play with my phone. I want to call Kayla, but figure she’s probably out having fun with her friends that aren’t lost causes. Maybe just a quick text, I think before rejecting that idea, too. If she’s out living her life and I call or even text, it’ll just bring her down.

Instead, I try scrolling through my social media accounts. There are too many people asking me about Beth and why I’d updated my status to single. Conversations I don’t want to have, especially in the dark mood I’m in. A picture of Beth smiling from ear to ear wrapped in Trent’s arms as she holds out her hand with her new engagement ring is too much, and I toss my phone to the other end of the couch. It’s an ugly ring.

I try watching TV, but nothing can hold my attention for more than a few moments, and everyone’s too f*cking happy. I grab a book off my shelves at random and flip it open, but reading is hopeless, too. The words float around on the page and make little sense. My thoughts keep intruding and the story escapes me.

With a sigh, I decide maybe it’s better to give up and just go to bed, try to get some sleep, when my phone rings. Caller id makes my heart jump, and I fumble to answer quickly. “Kayla?”

“Oh! Umm… yeah, hi,” she sounds surprised and a little frantic. “Sorry, I didn’t think you’d pick up.”

Ok, that’s a little weird. “Is everything ok?”

“With me? Yeah, of course,” there’s a sound in the background that sounds like a door closing. “I was just thinking about you. You were so quiet today, and I wanted to check that you’re doing alright. Are you… ok?”

I let out the breath I was holding. “Yeah, I’m hanging in there,” I tell her. “Fridays were always date night, so it’s weird, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that,” she says quietly. “So, what have you been doing to keep yourself busy?”

“Nothing,” I snort, maybe I should’ve tried harder. “I was thinking about going to bed,” I say as I open a bottle of wine and pour a generous amount into a glass.

“Oh, right. Sorry, I should have… what time is it?”

I glance at the clock. “9:45.”

“Oh sh*t, sorry! I didn’t realize it was so late,” she says in a rush. “I shouldn’t have called you. I’m really sorry, I’ll let you go.”

“Kayla, wait! I’m not tired. Just nothing else was working and I… are you still there? Kayla?” the silence on the phone has my heart sinking. I shouldn’t have said I was going to bed. That was stupid.

“I’m still here,” her voice is quiet, almost shy, and I imagine her sitting in her living room, under the light from a single lamp as she tries to understand why she called me in the first place.

“What have you been doing?” This is the distraction I’d been looking for all night. Someone to talk to. No, not just someone, a tiny voice says in the back of my head, Kayla. She’s who you wanted to talk to.

“Not much. Working,” I can hear liquid splashing into a glass and I smile as I sip my own wine. “I had some time in the studio tonight.”

“Are you working on your next collection?” I ask.

“Mmm… sort of. That was the plan anyway, but… I don’t know. It’ll come eventually, I just… Everything I worked on tonight seemed so… sad,” I wince, feeling responsible for her down mood. She sighs, “It’ll come eventually," she repeats and I wonder if she's trying to convince me or herself. "I guess I just wasn’t really in the right mood. I was going to read to settle down, but dialed the phone instead. I’m really sorry, I didn’t realize how late it was.”

Desperate to keep her on the phone for a little bit, I gloss over her worries. “What are you reading?”

There’s a pause before she says sheepishly, “I don’t want to tell you.”

“Oh, now you definitely have to tell me!” I grin. “I’ll tell you what I’m reading.”

She laughs and it makes my smile stretch wider. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

“Something like that,” I chuckle.

She sighs and I can practically hear her roll her eyes through the phone. “The new Nora Roberts book.”

“Romance?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Well, a little, yeah,” I admit. I always pictured women who read romance books as being desperate housewives who were looking for something to fill a void in their lives. Kayla is anything but that. “Aren’t romance books a little sappy for you?”

She pauses to think about it, and I know she’s either chewing her bottom lip or tapping her fingers with her thumb. The idea makes me smile again. “They always have a happy ending,” she says finally. “No matter what the characters go through, no matter how crazy or sad or scary the situation gets, you are always guaranteed a happy ending.”

I’ve never thought about it that way before. It would be nice to have a similar guarantee in real life.

“So, I showed mine,” she teases, “it’s your turn, stud.”

I nearly spit out my wine. “Stud?”

“Trying it out. Doesn’t sound quite right,” I can hear the smirk in her voice. “Come on! What are you reading?”

“Java script,” I say in my most innocent voice.

“That doesn’t count!” she laughs.

“Of course it does! It’s a book on writing Java script. I’m reading it,” it’s impossible to keep the laughter out of my voice.

“Java Script for Dummies is for work,” she says. “Doesn’t count.”

“I didn’t say it was For Dummies,” I point out.

“It is, though, isn’t it?”

“You think you know me so well,” I laugh. “Ok, ok, I picked up Stranger in a Strange Land tonight to reread. Does that count?”

“Yeah, that counts,” she concedes. “Heinlein, right?”

I can’t help being surprised. This girl, though. “Yeah, you’ve read it?”

“No,” she admits. “It’s on my list, but I find those old sci-fi’s to be a little heavy on the misogyny side. I have to be in the right mood.”

“You should read it sometime, it’s not as bad as you think,” at least I think it’s not. “I’ll loan you my copy if you’d like.”

"Ok, after you’re done rereading it, maybe.”

“Oh, I had to put it down,” I say, the sadness creeping back into me. “The words all started running together.”

There’s a pause while I try to think of a way to lighten the mood again. I don’t want her to hang up because I depressed her again. Before I can think of anything, she blurts out, “Tell me something about yourself that you haven’t told me yet. Something totally embarrassing.”

I know what she’s trying to do and I’m so very thankful for it. “Hmmm… let’s see. I didn’t eat cabbage for five years when I was a kid,” I say.

“Doesn’t count,” she scoffs. “What kid likes cabbage?”

“Yeah, but it’s why I didn’t eat it that’s embarrassing.”

“I’m listening,” she says and I chuckle at the obvious eagerness in her voice.

“My aunt sent me into the store to buy a head of cabbage,” I explain. “No one had ever called it a head before. My mom always just said ‘cabbage.’ The idea of eating a head of anything put the idea of brains and zombies in my head and… well, I thought if I ate a head of cabbage, I’d turn into some sort of cabbage zombie.”

By the time I finish, she’s giggling uncontrollably. “What about lettuce?” she asks between bursts of laughter. “Did you eat that?”

“Yeah, thankfully no one referred to it as a head of lettuce until after I outgrew the fear,” I tell her. “I still avoid cabbage, though.”

I smile as she starts giggling again. Ok, possibly the cabbage story isn’t my most embarrassing story, but I’m not sure I’m ready to tell her about the time I got a boner in math class because Mrs. Jenkins liked to wear those tight, knee length skirts that made her ass look amazing. The same sort of skirt Kayla often wears to the office.

“You’re going to bring me cabbage at lunch now, aren’t you?”

“No, no, I promise,” she pants as she tries to catch her breath. “I was just thinking of… what were those dolls called? The Cabbage Patch Kids?”

“Hey, in my defense, those dolls freaked me out even before the whole head thing,” I laugh. “I mean, children popping up out of plants? And you have to adopt them? Not buy, adopt. Where are their parents? Are the plants their parents? And that brings up a whole bunch of other questions.”

“You’ve thought about this way too much,” she says with another giggle.

“Probably,” I agree. “But yeah, that’s kind of how I thought cabbage zombies would look.”

“The toy aisle in the stores must have been traumatic for you,” she teases.

“Nope, I only had to go down the boy aisle,” I tease back. “There’s nothing down there that can eat your soul like in the girl aisle. Just skeletons and dinosaurs. You know, normal, not scary things.”

“Sure, that makes sense. Just monsters and ghouls, not babies and Barbies,” she laughs.

“Ok, don’t get me started on Barbie!” I laugh with her and it feels good to relax. I sip my wine and kick myself for not calling her earlier when I wanted to. Although, she did say she was working in the studio, so maybe it was better this way.

“Alright, I don’t want to give you nightmares tonight about killer dolls, so…” she pauses and I can tell she has something she wants to ask about so I stay quiet and wait. “Can you tell me a little more about this picnic next weekend?” she asks.

I groan. The annual company picnic. I’d almost managed to forget about it. “Yeah, it’s… tedious,” I decide. “The only redeeming feature is they usually get it catered with pretty decent food. But yeah, mandatory have fun while doing lame team building exercises is not my ideal way to spend a Saturday. Although last year was kind of funny. Faiyaz and Cho were in charge of the games and they chose one where we had to wear the name of a celebrity on our foreheads and everyone was supposed to give you clues so you could guess who the celebrity was. Except all of them were Bollywood and K-pop stars! No one but Faiyaz and Cho had any idea who they were!”

“Oh no! They must have been so embarrassed!” Only Kayla would have her first reaction be one of concern for the shy people in our office.

“At first, yeah, you know how quiet those two are,” I admit. “But by the end we were all laughing so hard, even they had to admit it was pretty funny.” I chuckle at the memory. Usually, the company picnic was a bore that we all suffered through, so it was a welcome diversion when anything unexpected happened to make it a little more interesting.

We continued talking for hours about nothing in particular, avoiding anything that seemed too serious. I did my best to make her laugh, loving the musical sound of her giggles in my ear as I lay in bed and imagine her next to me. Sometime after midnight she begins to yawn. “Sweetie, I hate to hang up,” she says in an adorably sleepy voice, “but’s it’s passed my bedtime and I have a class tomorrow at eight.”

“Eight in the morning? On a Saturday?” that should be illegal. “I had no idea you were a masochist.”

She laughs quietly. “Yeah, pretty much. Working on glazing techniques. I can’t quite wrap my head around it. And I’m not sure yet how, or if, I’ll use any of it, but the knowledge is good to have.”

I feel bad keeping her up so late when she’s got an early morning wake-up call. “In that case, you should get some sleep. Thank you for entertaining me.”

“I think I’m the one that had the most entertainment. Goodnight, Ash.”

“Goodnight, Kayla,” I hang up the phone and lay in bed thinking about her. We’re just friends, I remind myself. Although, I can’t deny the flirting we were doing. I can’t remember a time when Beth flirted with me, even when we first got together. In fact, I can’t remember a time I ever stayed up into the wee hours of the morning talking to anyone before. With Kayla it’s all so easy. We just talked for hours, and although I know she had to get to sleep, I feel like I wasn’t quite ready to let her go. I sigh at my stupidity. Just friends. I’m going to get it tattooed across my eyelids so I don’t forget.