Mary Robb - Down the Rabbit Hole

“Are you Bill?” she asked.

His face cleared as if he’d had the same worries she had. “Yes, yes, I am. It’s nice to meet you.” He held out his hand and she took it in one of those wimpy girl-handshakes for fear of his noting her damp palms.

She let her purse slide down off her shoulder and reached for the chair, but he leprechauned around her with a smile. “Let me get that!”

“Oh! Thank you.” She gave a faint laugh and sat, hoping the waiter would arrive immediately to take her drink order.

Bill returned to his seat, leaning onto his forearms and clasping his hands, looking at her intently. He had a glass of something with a lime in it in front of him.

“You look just like your pictures!” he enthused.

She smoothed the back of her hair down with one hand—it had been breezy outside, and she imagined herself obliviously sitting there with it beehived around her head.

“Thanks, uh . . .” She couldn’t say the same. He looked like the kind of guy who wouldn’t put on a cowboy hat if you held a six-shooter to his head and made him. “You look . . . a little different from yours.”

He wilted. “I know. It’s the hat.”

“Do you, ah, wear cowboy hats often? Are you a country and western guy?” She tried to imagine the two of them two-stepping around a dance floor.

“Actually, no.” He appeared to be blushing. “I never wear hats, and I’m much more of a classical music guy. But there was this one time . . . I went to Houston with my, my, my, well, my ex-girlfriend, if you must know, and she took the picture. So . . . I don’t know why I used it.” He tried to chuckle and shrugged.

“Oh,” she said, a picture of the situation materializing. She gave him a smile. “You looked really happy. In the picture.”

“I do?” He looked at her. “I—I guess I was. We were both—or at least I thought we both were, on that trip.”

The waiter arrived, and she ordered a red wine. Bill ordered another gin and tonic.

“How long were you two together?” Macy asked, mostly to fill the silence that remained after the waiter left.

“Almost a year.” He said it with a note of pride in his voice. “We were doing great too, until I screwed up.”

“What did you do?”

He polished off what was left of his drink and looked at her ruefully. “I canceled on some plans we made for Thanksgiving. It was the stupidest thing. I had lost my job and I wasn’t feeling good about myself—I just couldn’t meet her family like that. You know?” His face suddenly cleared. “But it’s okay, I have a job now. No worries about that!” He laughed nervously. “Doing just fine now, it was a temporary problem, a layoff.”

“Hey, a lot of people have gone through that. But good for you for getting back on your feet!”

He nodded absently. “Yeah, yeah I did. But it was too late. See, my girlfriend—I’m sorry, ex -girlfriend, she’s a great girl, but she tends to make snap decisions. That’s why we were good together. I’m the deliberate one, she’s impulsive. I thought we brought out the best in each other.”

It crossed Macy’s mind that it probably wasn’t a good sign to be talking about a guy’s ex-girlfriend right off the bat on a first date, but she wasn’t feeling any immediate attraction anyway, so she figured they might as well have a genuine conversation.

“So you canceled on Thanksgiving and she broke up with you?”

“Yeah.” He nodded to himself again. “Yeah.”

“Did you explain why you canceled?”

He took a deep breath. “Yeah, I did. But she . . . she didn’t think that was a good enough reason. I guess she thought I was being weak, or something.”

“Really? It’s a big deal to meet someone’s family. You want to be confident.”

“That’s what I said. But she said I needed to man up .”

“Man up? She said that?”

He tipped his head. “But hey, enough about me. Jeez, sorry. Tell me about you! Have you got an ex-boyfriend we can talk about?”

Macy laughed. “Sure, we can talk about me, but I have one last question. How long ago did you break up?”

“Just a couple weeks ago.”

“And you’re online dating already ?” She thought of Jeremy, online after only a couple of weeks. Then again, so was she. She held up her hands. “Sorry! That sounded really judgmental.”

He leaned forward. “No, it’s okay. In fact, I want to explain. I had thought, initially, that in order to ‘man up’ in the wake of the breakup I should get right back on the horse.”

“Hence the cowboy hat?”

“Oh, hey, I never thought of that! No, see, I got online, found iLove, and who do you think popped up in my Girls You Should Look At list?”

“Your ex-girlfriend.”

“That’s right. So I put the hat picture up as a sign. To her. A reminder that we had something, that I could be someone else for a minute. Or something like that.” He gripped his head with his hands and gave a mock growl. “Argh, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to remind her I’m still here. Like I said, she makes snap decisions. Guess I was hoping I’d be one of the ones she regretted.”

Macy thought about Jeremy’s picture. He had zillions of pictures of himself, several of them professional head shots for his job. Why had he chosen that one when there were dozens he wouldn’t have to crop? Was it meant as a signal to her?

Then she thought about his essay. It had been full of things she’d said to him, criticisms and complaints and cynical observations. She spent a horrified moment wondering if that was all she’d ever said to him, negative, complaining things. But maybe he was trying to tell her he got it . That he understood the problem she had with him.

But if that were the case, why wouldn’t he simply call her?

Because she’d broken up with him. She’d pulled the plug, suddenly and without mercy. Certainly Jeremy had no manning up to do—if he was thrown out, he would move right on.

“I’m sorry,” Bill said, the sincerity in his voice breaking through her reverie. “I’ve gone on and on about me and my ex-girlfriend. That’s like number one on the ‘don’t’ list for first dates. I’m sure you’re thinking I’m not ready to date, aren’t you?”

It took her a minute to refocus on Bill. “No, no. It’s okay. I . . . To be honest, I’m pretty fresh out of a relationship myself,” she said, thinking, I make snap decisions too . “Why don’t we treat this as a dinner between friends, huh? No pressure.”

He smiled. “You’re on. Though I may live to regret getting caught in the friend zone.”

As it turned out Bill was every bit as nice as he seemed, but he was so agreeable about everything, taking on every opinion that she had no matter what the topic, that Macy started to understand a little of what the ex-girlfriend might have had a problem with. It would bother her too, she thought, mentally putting an X next to his name. Then she caught herself. Was she being—once again—too picky?

The thought made her try harder to see him as a romantic candidate. She upped her energy level, made jokes, looked him in the eye, tried to imagine kissing him, but the more of an effort she made, the more defeated she felt. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Bill, but she was pretty sure that by the end of the evening she’d have no desire to see him again. There simply was no spark.

She was sagging under the thought when a familiar laugh caught her ear. She jerked her head to the left to see, just beyond the near table, another two-top, where a pretty brunette sat holding a glass of wine across from, and gazing into the eyes of, Jeremy.

Her stomach plummeted to the floor as her wine threatened to launch in the opposite direction. Jeremy was leaning forward, seemingly hanging on the brunette’s every word, and the brunette was eating it up. Just as Macy had, when she’d had his full attention. She wondered how long it would be before Jeremy reached for his phone, but when her gaze dropped to his belt, where the ubiquitous holster resided, she was shocked to see it wasn’t there.