Chapter 2
"Lies are wide and black and blue
They hide inside those big brown eyes"
Lies - The Pierces
They hide inside those big brown eyes"
Lies - The Pierces
“YOU HAD SEX WITH HIM?!” Harriet screeched into the phone.
“No. We didn’t have sex. We did other things, but we didn’t have sex.”
“But what about his girlfriend? What’s her name? Fallon?”
The guilt churned Bryn’s stomach and she felt a wave of nausea hit her, “I don’t know. I guess we just drank too much. I don’t really think it was a conscious decision to cheat on his girlfriend. It just kinda happened.”
By this point Mary had completely stopped pretending to organize the papers in front of her and was blatantly staring at Bryn with her mouth gaping open. Bryn glared at her and whispered into the phone, “Harriet, I’ve got to go. I’m at work now, and people are listening to my conversation and judging me. I’ll call you when I get home tonight.”
“Alright. You’d better call me though. I’m dying to know what’s going to happen between you two.”
Bryn hung up the phone and stole a glance at Mary. The woman was sneering at her. She decided just to brush her off and head back to the reference section to finish her work.
*****
William walked into the small apartment he shared with his girlfriend Fallon, to find her sitting on the couch leafing through the pages of a magazine. She looked up and smiled her bright smile at him, and overwhelming guilt ripped through his stomach. “Hi honey,” he kissed her gently on the lips, “Sorry I didn’t come home last night.”
“It’s okay,” Fallon was so surprisingly cool about this kind of stuff, that it made him feel even more guilty, “I figured you were drunk and stayed somewhere. I’d rather have you sleep at someone else’s house then stumble around the city on your own in the middle of the night.”
‘Why is she so good to me?’ William mentally berated himself. ‘Why can’t she be like normal women and just get pissed? It would be so much easier if she would just yell at me.’
“Did you have a good time, though?” she asked.
“Yeah. It was alright,” he lied. He didn’t want to let on that he’d had an amazing time. She might start to ask questions.
“Who all was there?”
“Just Bryn and a friend of hers. Harriet, I think,” the lies kept pouring out. Of course he knew Harriet’s name, but the less interested he seemed in the night, the less suspicious Fallon would be.
“Oh, that must have been fun! How is Bryn doing these days?” Fallon and Bryn had had met on numerous occasions and had always gotten along well, but they had never really developed a friendship. So why was Fallon so curious about her now?
“I don’t know. I guess she’s okay. You know…” He walked into the kitchen to grab a glass of water.
“What was she wearing?” Fallon called from the living room, “She always wears the best clothes.”
‘A black tunic dress just long enough to cover everything that should be covered, with a hot pink belt and pink and black extremely-high heels,’ he said to himself, but instead of saying this aloud, poked his head around the corner to the living room and raised an eyebrow, “Honey, really? How do you expect me to remember that sort of thing? I’m a guy.”
“You have no idea what she was wearing?” Fallon asked skeptically.
“It was some black thing, with some kind of pink thing,” he motioned toward his waist as he said the word “pink thing” and shrugged.
“Okay, okay. I get it. You don’t notice that stuff,” Fallon laughed.
William walked back into the kitchen, opened the cabinet over the sink and pulled out a bottle of aspirin. He opened the bottle extracted three pills and swallowed them. He knew that if he didn’t, he’d have one hell of a stress headache by the end of this day.
*****
“Well, what’s the deal with you guys then?” Harriet asked over the phone late the next afternoon. Bryn had accidentally fallen asleep as soon as she’d gotten home from the library the day before, and this was the first chance she was getting to talk to Harriet since their cut-off conversation the day before.
“What do you mean?” Bryn asked innocently.
“You know what I mean.”
“We were drunk, Harriet. Things happen when people drink too much. It’s not the end of the world.”
“So he’s not telling Fallon?”
“No. And why should he? It’s not like there’s any feelings there. It was a drunken mistake, and we both know it. I like Fallon a lot, and I don’t think there’s any need to hurt her over this one dumb little incident that didn’t mean anything.”
“You can’t possibly tell me that it meant nothing to you, Bryn. I know you used to like him.”
“That was a long time ago,” Bryn thought back to when she and Bill had first met at her first job. She walked into her first day of work at The Gap, and was told to report to Bill for training. Back then she’d had a huge crush on him that she’d disguised, knowing he had a girlfriend, and not wanting to be that crazy girl who crushed on a guy who obviously wasn’t interested in her. Besides, they had become close friends in the few months that they worked there, and often hung out after shifts, and even outside of work. Bill was a good friend and she didn’t want to lose his friendship by confessing that she had a huge crush on him. Eventually he’d left The Gap to record his CD, and they kept in contact, and still remained friends, but after not seeing him every day, her feelings began to fade. Now she just considered him a friend. An extremely good-looking friend, but nothing more.
“But this didn’t bring back any of those old feelings?” Harriet asked.
As she was about to answer, Bryn’s computer emitted a bloop noise, and she looked down at it. Her GMail messenger away message read, “Bored. What’s everyone up to tonight?” and a new message blinked from screen name billbeckett:
“No definite plans, but was thinking about heading out to a local bar near my house. You’re welcome to come if you want.”
“Harriet, can I call you back later?” Bryn asked.
“Sure, but why?”
“Bill just IM’d me about hanging out tonight. I want to see what’s going on and then I’ll call you back later.”
“Seriously? You are so not over him.”
“Shut up. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Whatever, loser,” Harriet hung up her line and Bryn closed her phone and set it down on her bed next to her.
Into the computer she typed, “which bar?”
“Conrads. It’s right around the corner from my place.”
“Who’s all going?”
“No one yet. Just me. And possibly you?”
“Can we go somewhere in between? I don’t want to drive a half hour. Especially after drinking.”
“I don’t want to drive either. Why don’t you park here. We’ll walk to the bar and you can crash on the couch at my place.”
‘Oh my God, what is he thinking?’ she screamed inside her head, ‘I can’t go over there if Fallon is there!’ “Where is Fallon? Isn’t she coming?” she wrote.
“No. She has to get up early in the morning to go to work. Why?”
“So she’s home?”
“Yeah, why?”
“This sounds weird, but I feel awkward going there when she’s home.”
It took a very long minute for him to respond, “Oh… yeah. I can understand that.”
“So lets meet somewhere in between?”
“I don’t want to drive.”
An exasperated sigh escaped Bryn’s lips, “Then why don’t you come here. Same deal. You can sleep on the couch if you’re too tired/drunk to drive.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a great idea.”
“Well do you have any others?”
“No. I guess that’s what I’ll do. I’ll stop by at around nine?”
“Sounds good.”
“K. See you then!”
Bryn snapped her computer shut, let out another deep sigh, closed her eyes, and lay back on her bed. This was just getting interesting.
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