Holly Jacobs - Hung Up on You

Simon.

Simon Masterson.

He’d probably read the article and was back to blame her. She swung open the door, ready to take him on and give him a piece of her mind…because it was obvious he didn’t have one of his own.

She’d told him his plan wouldn’t work.

“I told you—” she started, then realized it wasn’t Simon. “Bubbi?”

“Shh,” her grandmother said. “Hurry up and let me in before they catch me.”

ARI HELD THE DOOR open as Bubbi wheeled her walker into the living room.

“Close that door and lock it before they find me. I think I gave them the slip, but who knows? They’re cagey enough to figure out where I was going.”

“Who are they?” Ari asked as she closed and locked the door.

“The home. Shady Pines. They probably sent some of their goons to bring me back. After all, they want my money.”

“What money do they want?” Ari asked weakly.

Bubbi had broken her hip last fall and moved to Shady Pines, an assisted-living apartment complex in the heart of the city.

“Money? Why, the money I pay to live there. And they’re not getting any more. I’ve run away.”

“Bubbi, you can’t run away. If you don’t want to live there anymore, we can make other arrangements.”

This couldn’t be happening.

Truly, Ari just couldn’t deal with one more thing.

Not one more.

Tabloids, her parents fighting, lost jobs, lost fiancés, and now a runaway Bubbi?

No, it just wasn’t fair.

Just one short week ago she’d thought her world was perfect and now it was perfectly awful.

“Okay, you’re right,” her grandmother admitted. “I didn’t run away, I rolled away. My walker and I rolled right out the front door, hailed a cab and came here. I thought about going to your parents, but things have been weird there since Ralph retired. So I need to borrow your guest room until I can find someplace else to live.”

“Bubbi, you know you’re welcome to stay with me, but I thought you liked the retirement community.”

“I thought I did as well. At least until that man moved in. Now, I can’t stand it. Everywhere I go he follows me, he talks to me. Why, he even asked me to dance.”

So this wasn’t about problems at the home, but about a man.

“A man,” Ari said, the statement akin to a curse.

That made sense.

Men did tend to muck up things.

Look at Simon…and Collin. They were certainly making a mess of her life, so it figured that a man was responsible for her grandmother running away from the home.

Ari wasn’t quite sure she understood the tie between running away and dancing, but she certainly sympathized with the man part.

“Problems dear?” Bubbi asked, obviously picking up on Ari’s distress.

“I lost my job at the institute, and Collin broke up with me,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry about the job, but not about Collin. I never did like him. Just like I don’t like Hiram. Taunting me by asking me to dance.”

“You ran away because a man asked you to dance?”

“Look at this thing.” Bubbi gave her walker an annoyed little shove. “Do I look like dancing material? He’s just mocking me, that’s what he’s doing. And I won’t take it. I asked to be moved to some other area of the complex, but they say there are no more open rooms. So, I’ve left.”

“Bubbi, maybe he just likes you,” Ari said.

“Likes to tease me.”

“But—”

Bubbi didn’t let her finish her protest. She simply said, “Can I stay?”

“Of course.”

What else could she say?

Ari couldn’t kick her grandmother out onto the street. And she did have a spare room.

“Fine,” Bubbi said. “You can go to the home and pack a bag for me. Give them my two weeks’ notice.”

“But Bubbi—”

“Actually, don’t just pack a bag, pack it all. They’ll probably be searching through everything, trying to decide where I’ve gone. I don’t want strangers pawing through my things. While you do that, I’m going to go take a nap, then I’ll make you dinner.”

“I—”

Again Bubbi interrupted. “Don’t tell me no, young lady. I may not be as fast as I used to be, but I can still pull my own weight. I’m cooking. No lip from you. I’m in a mood.”

“I see that, and I wouldn’t dream of talking back.”

“Good.”

Without another word, Bubbi wheeled off down the hall to the guest room.

Ari knew better than to fight with her grandmother when she was like this.

Sensing she was defeated before she’d even really started, she grabbed her keys from the hook, ready to head to the retirement home to collect her grandmother’s things.

Despite her grandmother’s order, she wasn’t going to bring everything back. Just enough for a few nights. Hopefully they’d be able to make some arrangements for her.

Thinking about Bubbi’s problems was actually much easier than thinking about her own.

Ignoring the newest issue of the Rag that Collin had left behind, Ari headed to the door. She was thankful to have something to keep her busy, something to keep her mind off her problems like being unemployed, unengaged and a sudden tabloid darling.

She realized that things just couldn’t get any worse.

The only place left to go was up.

Feeling a bit better with that positive thought, she opened the door.

Simon Masterson stood there, finger poised at her doorbell.

Her momentary optimism didn’t just fade, it instantaneously evaporated.

Things could indeed get worse.

SIMON STOOD outside the door to Ari’s South Philadelphia apartment, not wanting to ring the doorbell. Not wanting to face her because when he did he was going to have to admit he had been wrong. He hated that.

Hated being wrong.

Hated admitting it even more.

And to be honest he wasn’t wrong often so he didn’t have much experience with it, or admitting it.

But boy, this time he’d been so wrong.

Horribly wrong.

Undeniably wrong.

But maybe he wouldn’t have to actually say the words I was wrong. He’d simply tell Ari that she was right, then ask for her help.

Yes, saying she was right would be so much easier than saying he was wrong.

Sometimes semantics could be everything.

He was about to press on the doorbell when the door flew open.

Ari scowled when she spotted him.

“You,” she said, making the word sound more like a curse than a simple pronoun.

“Me,” he agreed. “May I come in?”

“No. I’m on my way out.” She walked through the door, slammed it behind her and started down the front stairs without looking back to see if he was following her.

Simon sighed as he hurried after her. She’d practically hit the sidewalk running, flying past the brick row houses and apartments.

“Fine,” he said as he caught up. “Then, I’ll walk with you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. We have nothing to say to each other. I wrote your retraction…fat lot of good it did you, or me for that matter.”

“It didn’t work. You were right.”

There. He’d said it.

He might have been wrong about the retraction, but he was right about saying Ari was right being easier than saying he was wrong.

It was fuzzy logic at best, but with the way things were going Simon would take what he could get.

Ari stopped dead in her tracks and looked him directly in the eye. “My being right makes you…?”

“Disappointed?” He suddenly knew there was no escaping it. She was going to make him say the words after all.

It was as if she’d read his mind and decided to torture him.

This might only be the second time he’d met her, but he knew that Ari Kelly was a difficult kind of woman. The kind who would enjoy sticking it to a guy who’d made one tiny, little innocent mistake.