Chapter 11

My cell phone was ringing when I got back to my room, and I reached it in time to discover that Lisa was calling.

“Hey, you, how are you?”

“Tired! I just did 40 minutes on the treadmill at a slow jog. I wanted to be able to show you I could do it when you get home, but now I’m, like, dead!”

“Well, hey, 40 minutes is outstanding! Good for you!”

“Thank you!” I heard the smile in her voice. “So how’s Phoenix? You didn’t answer your phone when I called a little bit ago. Were you on a hot date or something?”

Lisa and I had developed a relationship where we could talk about pretty much anything, although she had been giving a lot more than I had up to that point. As well, I know she’s got a couple “and then I got naked” stories about intimacy gone wrong, so impulsively, I decided to answer her.

“Well ... sort of. Didn’t end well. You remember the story you told me about that one guy who got dressed and walked out when you came out of the shower and dropped your towel?”

She paused. “Yeah...” she answered slowly. “What about him?”

“Well ... for what it’s worth, surprise fake leg beats surprise stretch marks.”

This time the pause lasted so long that I checked to make sure the call hadn’t dropped, until I heard, “I ... think you better explain.”

There was an undercurrent of anger and hostility in her tone that surprised me, and I found myself responding to it. I hastily explained about the headache, the chair massage, the offer for what I thought would be a longer therapeutic massage, and Diana’s cougar act gone wrong.

When I finished, she said, “So ... nothing happened, then?”

“No.”

“Do you still want something to happen?”

I wondered where this question was coming from. As my mind pondered that question, my mouth engaged of its own volition to answer hers. “You know ... not really. I mean, I’m a guy, so from that aspect ... but ... no. She’s not really my type.” I also wasn’t sure I liked the idea of being revenge sex, but that was a separate conversation.

I heard a sharp intake of breath ... followed by a long silence ... and a very slow release of breath on the other end. There may have also been a few whispered profanities. After another, shorter silence, a jumble of words finally came out at once: “You’re lucky I’ve seen how spacy you are after a migraine or I’d really be pissed.”

The thought of Lisa having a romantic interest in me hit me so suddenly, and from so far out of left field, that it took me a minute to realize that she had just confessed to having a romantic interest in me ... and that, she would have viewed me sleeping with Diana to be a betrayal.

“I ... Lisa ... what? I ... I think...” I stammered before I paused and silently cursed myself for how dumb I sounded at that moment. After mentally slapping myself on the face, I asked, “What are you saying?”

Her voice trembled a bit as she whispered, “I’m saying ... God ... I’ve been trying not to ... but I’m falling for my workout buddy.”

I found myself overloaded at that moment. The headache, the semi-rejection because of my disability ... again ... the fact that I was still kind of hungry, the fact that I was loopy from the Imitrex, the fact that I was exhausted, and the fact that the one woman who had seemed unattainable to me for the last several months just suddenly became eminently attainable ... all caused the headache to intensify.

“I ... listen, don’t take this wrong, but my head is killing me again. Can I talk to you tomorrow?”

“Of course,” she answered soothingly. “Get some rest.”

The next morning, Friday morning, the day of my scheduled return home, I woke up feeling refreshed and relatively pain-free, which is a little unusual following a migraine. I briefly wondered if the entire previous night was a dream ... until I saw Diana briefly at breakfast. She blushed, gave me a quick half-wave, and then practically ran out of the seating area.

My interactions with the trainee team were somewhat limited on Fridays. My schedule had me in the office from 7:00 to about noon, after which I would leave for the airport and the long flight back home.

Of the five hours at the Phoenix office, two and a half were spent auditing the work that my trainees had done over the past couple of days, with the remaining time spent going over those audits, making recommendations for improvements ... and, in Katherine’s case, pretending to ignore her rolling her eyes at my every critique.