She's With Stupid Read online

  “Well, I was happy to help.”

  Emilie warned herself to shake off the trickle of irritation that ran down her spine at the patronizing tone of his voice.

  “Any time, you know.” Leo put his hands in his pocket and kicked the leg of a desk a few times before continuing. “So, I was actually thinking…”

  “Yes?”

  She must have spoken too sarcastically because he abruptly looked standoffish again. Not about to let the last six weeks of hard work and patience go down the drain, Emilie forced herself to smile sweetly and wait for him to continue. You would think he was about to deliver a State of the Union. Since she was unfortunately used to dating men who had to be coaxed into action and speech, Emilie made a valiant effort to hold on to her temper and wait him out.

  Leo cocked his head and looked at her for a full minute before replying. Finally, he shrugged and scratched his jaw. “Anyway, I thought maybe you’d like to go out with me this weekend. We could have dinner or whatever.”

  Though she was a little put off by his less than gallant delivery of the long-awaited dinner invite, she quickly forgave him when he gave her that adorable puppy dog look that always made her smile.

  “Oh!” she said in what she prayed was a teasing, nonchalant tone. “Well, sure. Dinner would be lovely, Leo. I thought you’d never ask.”

  A catlike grin spread across his face as he said, “Good things come to those who wait, eh? So, I’ll pick you up Saturday night at eight.” With a faintly superior wink, he abruptly turned on his heel, leaving her room just as quickly as he had entered.

  Emilie waited for the satisfaction she had expected to receive from finally getting her wish to manifest itself, but all she felt was puzzled. Somehow she had expected that when he finally succumbed to her charms he would be a little nicer about it.

  Also, she had imagined there would be kissing and possible manhandling.

  But this was still a good thing and she had no intention of quibbling over a few minor details. She could ignore his slightly pompous tone, and she could pretend that she found his rhyming of “wait” and “eight” to be cute instead of obnoxious. He had, after all, finally done was he had been hinting at for weeks.

  Emilie decided to be happy. No more waiting around for her future to start. No more questioning why her life felt like it was missing something important. She had taken matters into her own hands, and now her future was looking bright.

  ***

  A few days later, Lana was finally ready to move into Emilie’s apartment. She had managed to harass her disgruntled band mates into shipping the rest of her stuff back to New Bern and, since Veteran’s Day meant that Emilie and Kate had no classes, the girls were using the free time to get Lana fully moved in.

  At the moment, Lana was attempting to lug the last of her boxes into the apartment, which was on the third floor of a Tudor-style building three blocks from the village square. Lana still grinned whenever she walked into it. It was so Emmy-like, and she must have gotten a great deal on the space because it was much larger than Lana had expected a teacher’s salary could provide.

  After passing through a small alcove you reached the inner sanctum of the apartment, where the dark paneling of the entry niche gave way to the spacious living room, painted a dusky shade of blue. Hardwood floors and dark wood furniture were buffed to a shine with some kind of citrusy oil, heavy shelves filled with every kind of book imaginable lined two walls, and a large bay window framed the autumnal scene outside — New Bern was particularly lovely in the fall, with pumpkins and cornhusks lining every doorstep and red, yellow, and orange leaves carpeting the sidewalks as if by design.

  The rest of the apartment was just as inviting. A low, customized shelving unit surrounded the butter yellow kitchen, dividing it from the living room and hall. The two bedrooms were situated down the long hallway, separated by a sparkling white bathroom, complete with a claw-foot porcelain tub and nearly every makeup product, beauty tool, and scented lotion imaginable stacked neatly along the counter, lending bursts of color to the otherwise white room. If the classy digs hadn’t confirmed it before, Lana knew when she saw that department store-caliber makeup counter in the bathroom that living with girly-girl Emilie was going to have some distinct advantages.

  Because the apartment was so nice and tidy, Lana had been making every effort to unload all of her bags and boxes in a somewhat orderly fashion this morning. She was on her final trip up the elevator now, and she was definitely feeling out of breath from all the exertion. Lana reached the open door of the apartment and bent over, roughly shoving the last box through the alcove when she heard an ominous crash.

  She cringed, hesitant to see what had fallen. Emilie was a very sweet person, but Lana didn’t think breaking things on her first official day as roommate was going to score her any brownie points. She peaked around the box to survey the damage, only to find Stupid Will standing behind the couch giving her a really creepy smile.

  Fighting the urge to smack his greasy face, since that would mean she’d actually have to touch him, Lana tried for the umpteenth time to figure out what Kate saw in the guy. His hair was a muddy brown, his clothes smelled as if they hadn’t been washed in a year, and his beady eyes reminded Lana of one of those raptors in a dinosaur movie. She felt uncomfortable just being in the same room with him, and she had every intention of issuing a formal complaint to Kate and Emilie for leaving her alone with the freak for the last half hour.

  They had gone to retrieve Lana’s new mattress and left Will here to “help” unload the rest of the stuff out of her new used car. So far all he had done was hang out in front of Emilie’s flat-screen, drink all of her apple cider, and offer Lana unsolicited advice about how to “lift with her legs.”

  Lana practically growled when he surveyed the broken vase that had fallen from the table in the alcove and smirked. Vaguely recalling that the vase had been purchased on Emilie’s trip to Ireland, Lana winced and hoped it wasn’t priceless Waterford crystal. Quirky Emilie had a tendency to frown on the breakage of inordinately expensive things like that.

  Just to make her day complete, Will felt the need to put his snarky oar in again. “Emilie is not going to be happy about this. She hates it when you break her stuff — she once banned me from this apartment for a whole month when I spilled cream soda on her living room rug.”

  He leered at Lana and took the last swig from the jug of apple cider. Eww cried Lana’s inner snark demon. The fact that he seemed vastly pleased by Lana’s predicament merely confirmed what Em had already told her. Stupid Will was a total weasel.

  “I’m pretty sure she’ll be more forgiving with me,” Lana muttered. “I’ve known her longer.”

  “Yeah, right.” Stupid snorted at her confidence. “She’s just about the most unbending chick I’ve ever met. I can’t figure out why Kate is friends with her.”

  Wow, he really was the dumbest person alive. What was Kate thinking? Before she could drop a really heavy box on Will’s foot, he announced that it was time for him to leave for work.

  Lana refrained from reminding him that Kate had asked him to help unload the mattress later because, frankly, she could not wait to be out of his presence. Not only was he lazy and dim-witted, he was also seriously lacking in the personal hygiene department. Much to Lana’s dismay, Emmy had been right about that, too — Stupid Will did smell like cheese.

  After he left and Lana had managed to clean up the glass from the vase, which luckily turned out to be small and of the non-Waterford variety, she began to survey the boxes strewn around the living room and hall. It occurred to her that a twenty-eight year old woman should have more to show for her life than a few ratty boxes filled with clothes and, for the most part, a lot of junk she really could not care less about. Looking around Emilie’s very grown-up apartment, Lana decided that she must have skipped school on the day they told you how to become an adult.

  Briskly shaking off her gloomy thoughts, Lana looked at her watch a
nd wondered what was keeping her friends. They had left ages ago, and the mattress place was only a couple of miles away.

  Just as she was debating whether or not to call Kate’s cell, she heard a loud horn blaring outside. Lana rushed to the window and was tickled to see a sight she had never thought to see: Emilie, looking decidedly irritated, sitting in the passenger seat of a very old, very beat-up, green pick-up truck.

  Emilie had been horrified to discover that not only had Kate somehow borrowed a rusty truck from Stupid Will’s even stupider friend, but she also expected Emilie to help her load it up with the new mattress they had purchased for Lana’s use.

  Though Emilie had been more than willing to help retrieve the mattress when Kate had asked for her help last week, she had been envisioning help in the form of paying a delivery man rather than the performance of actual manual labor. Instead, Kate had convinced her to haul the mattress and box springs out of the store and heft them into the bed of this wretched conveyance.

  The mattress was now perched precariously on the back of the truck because Kate had somehow missed the memo about tying dangerously unwieldy objects down when you take to the open road with them. To add insult to serious injury, the truck was also missing its mirrors, which meant that Emilie was forced to crane her head out of the window and act in their stead as they navigated their way from the store to her apartment building.

  Throwing occasional glares at Kate for putting her in this ignominious position, Emilie kept sinking further down into her seat, trying desperately to become invisible and telling herself that God would not be so cruel as to let anyone she knew see her in this truck.

  “This is the most decidedly hick thing I have ever done,” Emilie hissed as they pulled up to a stop light and an unsavory looking fellow in the car next to them, who seemed to have forgotten his shirt when he began his jaunt to the local pony keg, gave her a wink and a grin. She rolled her eyes. Awesome.

  “Stop being so prissy!” replied an undaunted Kate. “This was the quickest way to get it to your place. Plus, it’s fun. Try to think of it as an adventure.”

  “An adventure in what, exactly? Death by mattress?”

  The light changed and Kate turned left onto Emilie’s shady street. “Oh, come on! You are getting way too uptight in your old age. And anyway we’re here, so it’s almost over.” Kate pulled into a spot directly in front of Emilie’s building. “Ooh, let’s honk for Lana and Will!”

  Before Emilie could protest the honking, which was sure to draw unwanted attention from her neighbors, Kate was laying on the horn and laughing like a banshee. Emilie shook her head and grinned reluctantly at Kate’s antics.

  A few seconds later, Lana came staggering out the front door, nearly doubled over with laughter and pointing her finger in Emilie’s general direction.

  “What—The—Hell?” Lana managed to say between gasping giggles.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Emilie glared at her friends as she got out of the death trap Kate called a truck and retreated to the safety of the sidewalk. “It was all her idea.”

  Kate was still chuckling at Emilie’s expression. “I just wanted to see how you would look slumming it in a pick-up truck, Em. For the record, you look perfectly ridiculous.”

  “Ha bloody ha.” Emilie lost her battle to remain annoyed with Kate, and she joined the two of them in a laugh over the absurdity of her predicament. “You guys suck.”

  “Yes, but you love us anyway,” said Kate. “Now let’s get this thing unloaded. Where’s Stu…uh, I mean, Will?”

  It was Emilie’s turn to laugh at Kate, who was gritting her teeth at her slip.

  “He left about five minutes ago. Thank the Lord,” Lana muttered under her breath.

  “What do you mean he left? I told him to stay here until I got back.” Kate’s hands were on her hips and her frizzy blonde hair was flying around her face as she huffed with irritation.

  “I guess you haven’t properly trained him yet, Katherine,” said Emilie.

  “Grr. He is getting a lecture when I get home tonight.”

  “This is all fascinating, truly, but do you think we can get back to me?” Lana eyed the mattress dubiously. “Exactly how did you plan on getting that thing up to the third floor? Because there is no way it’s going to fit in the elevator.”

  Kate bounded onto the sidewalk and slapped Lana and Emilie on the back as she all but shoved them towards the bed of the truck. “We are going to carry it. Obviously.”

  And so, amidst various curses, giggles, and threats to Kate’s life, the girls alternately pulled, pushed, and heaved the mattress up the three flights of steps to Emilie’s apartment. When they finally shoved it into the apartment, narrowly avoiding another vase catastrophe, and collapsed in a heap on top of the mattress, the girls were exhausted and rather proud of themselves. Who needed men, anyway?

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I need a drink,” declared Kate.

  “I second that motion,” said Emilie.

  “Bring it on,” Lana sighed happily.

  An hour and two margaritas later, Lana and Emilie were busy unpacking boxes and hanging clothes in Lana’s new closet while Kate blended up another batch of drinks in the kitchen and teased Emilie about how hilarious her apartment was.

  “It’s just so perpetually neat,” she declared for the third time.

  “I don’t know what you’re razzing me about, Kate,” Emilie called from the bedroom. “Your apartment was clean as a Spartan’s before you’re icky future ex-husband moved in.”

  Kate sighed with deep regret. “I know. I really miss that.”

  Lana raised her eyebrows, but resolved not to poke fun at Will any more tonight. They had spent a good part of the last hour doing just that, and Kate had seemed to be at her breaking point.

  “But as I was about to say,” called Kate. “It’s so clean and organized until you notice the books. Then, what at first appears to be a well-ordered life swiftly turns into a bookstore in Notting Hill.”

  Wandering back towards the kitchen with Emilie, Lana looked around and had to agree with Kate. There were books everywhere, stacked high on each of the large bookshelves in the living room and tucked carefully behind the curtains in every other room. Even the bathroom held some children’s picture books about fish and other sea creatures stacked along the windowsill next to the bottles of bubble bath.

  “I don’t get you sometimes, Em.” Kate shook her head with exaggerated disparagement as she herded them onto the kitchen chairs and happily poured them all another drink in the snazzy margarita glasses Emilie had procured on a recent trip to Mexico with her mom. “You have all these books full of amazing adventures, and yet you insist on staying home most every night instead of having adventures of your own. What gives?”

  “You want to talk to me about adventure? Seriously? The most exciting thing you’ve done lately is update your Facebook timeline to include your thrilling trip to the comic book store with Will last weekend.” Emilie pointedly sipped her drink to avoid outright calling Kate a hypocrite.

  “Please! I’m marrying the guy.” Kate leaned back against the kitchen counter and tossed her hair out of her face. “If that’s not a risky venture I don’t know what is.”

  Lana and Emilie both rolled their eyes. “It’s certainly scary, I’ll grant you that,” said Emilie. “And for your information, I have a date on Saturday.”

  Emilie, Lana noticed, was looking very pleased with herself, but Kate merely gasped in mock astonishment at this news. “Ooh, stop the presses! Leo finally made his move,” Kate drawled before downing another gulp of her margarita.

  Lana absently thought that it was perhaps time to cut her off. Her ears had perked up at the mention of a new man, though. “Who’s Leo?”

  “Leo,” Kate said in a distinctly sarcastic tone, “is the Frog Prince. All he can talk about with Em is frogs and their mating habits, but for some reason she is still completely obsessed with him.”

  “Th
at is so not true!” Emilie cried, though her expression seemed to indicate that it was, in fact, mostly true. Throwing up her hands in exasperation, Emilie turned to Lana for support. “He’s a biology teacher at my school, and we had some mildly intense gazing going on for a few weeks, so I finally asked him about frogs for a project to break the ice, and that is the only reason he talks about frogs a lot. It is not in any way indicative of an amphibious fixation.”

  Kate snorted. “I cannot understand why you’re basing an entire relationship on the power of someone’s ability to win a staring contest. Why would you want to be with a creeper? He sounds like he might be scared of you anyway. You can be very intimidating to guys who aren’t named Ethan.”

  Emilie glared at Kate. “I am not intimidating,” she said in a slightly hurt voice. “And what would he even have to be intimidated by? My face? My mind? My inability to remain on my feet in his presence? That’s not intimidating. Pathetic, yes. Intimidating, no.”

  “Chill out.” Kate gentled her tone slightly and moved into a seat at the table. “I’m just worried that he might be yanking your chain, or laying the ground work for you to yank something else.” She winked suggestively and grinned at Emilie’s thoroughly unimpressed expression.

  “I really don’t know why you’re wasting time with Frog Boy,” Kate said breezily. “Ethan is finally getting out of the Marines in a few months, and he already has some kind of security analyst job downtown all lined up for when he gets back that’s supposed to pay big bucks. Then he can be all yours and keep you in the style in which you are obviously never going to become unaccustomed.”

  “Ugh,” said Emilie.

  Her friends burst into laughter at the look of loathing on Emilie’s face.

  “I kind of miss Hot Ethan,” Lana said with a smile. The girls had christened him with the nickname the summer he turned fifteen and began to look exceptionally smokin’ without his shirt on.

  Lana hadn’t seen him since Kate’s graduation party two years ago, and even then it had only been from afar — loyalty to Emilie had forced Lana to maintain a distance of thirty feet at all times. She glanced sideways at Emilie, and her friend’s shifty eyes and blushing cheeks gave her pause. Hmm.