Yes, she did know all that because Edie Higgins was many things. Unfortunately, stupid was not one of them.
“Let’s phone a friend.”
“Now?” he asked, glancing at the narrow aisles, the wretched Saturday-night card shoppers, and the monkey bookends that grinned at him from their perch above the stacks.
“Yeah. You’re going to have a real, honest conversation with another woman.” She pulled a notebook and pen out of her Save a Plant, Kill a Vegan bookbag, and started to write. “I’ll get you started on what to say, you improvise, and then we’ll do a postmortem after you’re done.”
In Tyler’s line of work, postmortem was never a good experience. “Do we have to do that?”
“It’s the best way to learn.”
Well, yes, but the patient was dead, so ergo, Tyler had failed. However, Edie didn’t realize that Tyler didn’t like dwelling on his shortcomings, and she seemed to like dwelling on his shortcomings, and frankly, if they were going to talk about his shortcomings, he was glad they were confined to a simple phone conversation. “Okay,” he agreed.
“Who am I supposed to call?”
“Do you remember Passion from the other night?”
“She was one of the dancers,” Tyler guessed.
“Exactly,” she responded, beaming.
“Why are we doing this?”
“Practice.”
He didn’t need practice.
“How are you going to start?”
“Hello?”
“That’s good,” she told him. “And then?”
And then things got muddier.
“How are you?” he said.
“Nah. Don’t ask how she’s doing. Then the conversation gets bogged down into the minute-by-minute minutiae of the day, and you want to avoid that. Instead, surprise her.”
“How do I do that?”
“Ask her something unexpected, or tell her something unexpected. Tell her that you saw a woman on the street, and she reminded you of her.”
“I should lie?”
“It’s not a lie,” Edie assured him. Edie, who was not party to the pigginess that inhabited the male brain.
Med school had been so much easier.
“I didn’t see a lot of women today,” he said.
“Okay, let’s find something else.” Her eyes scanned the cards in front of her and then she grabbed one from the stack. “How about ‘I was thinking about you.’”
Stubbornly Tyler shook his head, unwilling to compromise his values any further, and also because he wanted to ditch all the emotional hoodoo and discover if Edie was wearing a bra.
It was at that moment, as Tyler was remembering the exact color of Edie’s nipples, that she handed him a piece of paper. “All right. Here’s her number. Go ahead and call and just go with what you feel.”
Go with what you feel? Oh, God. It was hell. This was hell.
Unfortunately, Edie looked so innocent, as if he was capable of emotional hoodoo, and he didn’t want her to think that. Or that he was an emotional coward. He could do this. He could.
It was easy.
Determined to overcome such shortcomings, Tyler got out his phone and dialed.
“Hello.”
“Tyler?”
“Hi, Passion.”
“Tyler, this is Austen. Your brother.”
“I know. This is Tyler. I wanted to call and hear your voice,” he told his brother while grinning happily at Edie.
He was a pig.
“Why are you calling me and why are you calling me Passion? Who is Passion?”
“It was a long day today,” Tyler started, and then noticed Edie shaking her head in warning. Minutiae. That was minutiae. God forgive him, he was a relationship failure.
“Is there a woman there? Are you trying to shake her? Faking the call back home? I don’t even do that, Tyler. Are you drunk?”
“I was just thinking how great you looked.”
“Tyler, men don’t talk to people this way. Are you being mugged? Is this some freaky code that I’m supposed to understand? Let me know if I need to call 911.”
While Austen was spiraling into a panic, Edie was scribbling in her notebook. She shot him a dark look and then showed him the page.
In order to get laid, an insidious voice corrected her.
Did that make her a bad person that she was enjoying his torture? Possibly, but in between the twitchy frowns, he would watch her steadily,
knowingly,
and Edie had the acute feeling that Tyler Hart was aware of what Edie was doing. Such really smart awareness tickled her in sexual places. Mind games, that’s what they called it. If she spent a lot of time analyzing her prior relationships, which Edie didn’t, she might have noted that most of them were with dim bulbs, men who were a few tokens short of a full fare, but Tyler was different. Tyler was smart, and this whole undercurrent of crazy tension kept her senses tingling and alive.
Mind games could be fun.
At first.
While she watched him talk on the phone, he watched her listen, and his conversation grew even more uncomfortable, and not so much fun. After each robotic interchange, his twitchy frowns grew even more twitchy, until at last, she was ready to pull the plug. Needing to look somewhere else, she stared down at the berber carpet.
“I can’t do this,” Tyler said to someone, and whether it was Passion or Edie, she didn’t know. Her head shot up, meeting his eyes.
“Of course you can,” Edie whispered urgently, and she could feel a twitchy frown of her own. Seeing the intent look in those undim eyes, she suspected he was about to do something to mess with Edie’s status quo, and Edie was desperately fond of her status quo.
“I’m talking to my brother. Not Passion,” he told her.
Edie’s frown grew even twitchier, even as she could hear the shouts emerging from his phone: “No, Tyler,
no!
”
A man with an overpowering cologne and too much hair product brushed past her to peruse the graduation cards. Tyler edged away from Graduation and into Thinking of You.
Seeing no choice, Edie followed.
Smartly ignoring the warnings from his brother and stupidly ignoring her growing panic, Tyler stuffed his phone in his pocket and everyone’s twitchy frowns stopped. On his face there was something new and even more dangerous. Resoluteness. Firm resolve, and the little hearts and flower cards beckoned behind them.
“I didn’t feel right about talking to another woman.”
“In front of me? I can respect that. I didn’t mean to encroach on your personal space. I do that a lot, jumping into situations that really don’t concern me, and usually people don’t mind, because usually I can fix things—”
“Edie,” he interrupted.
“What?”
“It has nothing to do with privacy.”
“Oh. Well, you struck me as a very private person, and I thought—”
“Edie.”
“Yes?”
“That’s not it.”
“What is it?” she asked, not liking his guessing game, not liking the hearts and flowers showcased behind him, not liking the whole dangerous trend of this conversation.
“Do you have to ask?” he said, raising one supercilious brow at her, which normally would have ticked her off, but now it only scared her. She didn’t need to ask why because Tyler Hart wouldn’t do rascally things like flirt with another woman in front of her, even though she told him to, and she wished he were a little more squeevy so that she didn’t have to…
Respect him so much.
Everything would be a lot easier if he were like all the other guys who had to use meaningless lines, or mooch her for a few bucks, or drank too much in order to ditch responsibility at the door. But Tyler didn’t do anything of those things. Not. One.
No, he had to be
honest.
He wanted her, she reminded herself. That was the Why of all these actions.
He was no different than any other male.
And why was her brain not okay with his honesty thing?
What was the big deal? It
was
a big freaking deal, that’s what it was, because the Tylers of the world were upstanding, good-hearted. They didn’t tell lies…comfortably. They were the very sort of men her parents would approve of.
Damn. It.
“Do you want a drink?” asked Dudley Do-Right.
“Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked hopefully.
“No.” More of that honesty thing. Edie struggled to push her hair behind her ear. Tyler reached out and did it for her, and it wasn’t a sexy, come-hither touch. It was a comfortable touch, an easy touch, and Edie could feel the panic welling in her stomach, pushing up through her throat. “I don’t do relationships,” she stated, firmly meeting his gaze.
“You’ve said that many times.”
“Sex is it,” she affirmed.
“Yes, you’ve said that, as well.” The perky salesclerk started flirting with Mr. Cologne, and exchanging meaningless lines, and Edie considered edging closer to that conversation, because frankly, it was easier. But Tyler, perhaps sensing her extreme uneasiness, perhaps due to the nervous tic in her eye, picked up a pink card and examined it with more attention than the damned thing deserved. “‘You make everything sweeter.’ What’s wrong with that?”
And now they were back in her comfort zone, critiquing overwrought sentimentality. “Oh, come on. Do you really have to ask? What is sweeter? Sweeter than what? Good grief, too much sugar makes people throw up.”
“Actually, it’s more intolerance or malabsorption. Fructose can in fact be used as an antiemetic.”
“Then that’s what’s wrong with it.”
“Have you ever sent a greeting card to anyone?” he asked casually, carelessly.
“My father,” she said casually, carelessly.
Tyler didn’t look at her, instead he studied the stacks of cards in front of him and began randomly picking some out. Edie wasn’t sure why he was overindulging in greeting cards, but they weren’t talking, and her eye tic wasn’t bothering her anymore, so she played along.
Apparently Tyler wasn’t a meticulous shopper, because he had a stack of about thirty cards when he approached the clerk and asked to pay.
After that, they walked out into the night, and headed for a bar in the next block. Secretly, Edie approved. Sure, he had a year’s supply of greeting cards, but if she were lucky, they were going to order a few shots, and critique the hell out of all of them.
His phone rang and he looked at the display and then swore.
Instantly, Edie was on alert. “Cynthia?”
He shook his head, pressed the button to ignore. “No.” He pulled open the bar’s heavy wooden door, and she followed him inside.
It was an old-style place with wooden floors and three long mahogany counters that outlined the packed room. Behind the bar, there were photographs of average Joes who likely frequented the place. In less than a second, Tyler had found a newly vacated table.
“How did you know they were going to leave?” asked Edie. She hadn’t seen any of the usual signs: empty drink glasses, rolled-up napkins, or a leather folio with the bill.
Tyler shrugged. “I gave them a fifty.”
“Very creative. You don’t usually see that much imagination from out-of-towners.”
“I don’t like to wait,” he explained, sitting down at the table, and laying out the greeting cards in front of him. A waitress introduced herself as Tessa and took their drink orders. Tyler asked for a diet soda. Edie asked for tequila. He looked at her expectantly, and slowly, reluctantly, she changed it to soda. “With lots of ice, please,” she added, lest he think that she was one of those lemming sort of women who needed a man to tell them what to do.
While she sipped her soda, which was mostly ice, she watched as he studied the cards, then pulled a Swiss Army knife from his jacket pocket and began to cut.
At first she assumed it was random mutilation, and there was a second when she worried that she was now sharing drinks with a very nice, very polite sociopath, but then an order began to emerge, ransom-note style:
As the pile of paper letters began to grow, she noticed the confidence in how he worked, the edges remarkably neat, which was no shocker because he probably handled precise edges every day at the museum. In fact, she liked his graceful movements, watching the way his fingers displayed an easy efficiency. Very few men had such talented hands.
A few minutes later, those very deft hands laid out the second message on the table.