Page 109 of Road Trip with a Vampire

“It’s just deductive reasoning,” Lindsay agreed.

Was I really that transparent?

“My current mental state…might be partly due to Peter,” I conceded. “Things got weird between us on the trip. I’m still trying to shake it off. “

“Do you need help burying a body?” Lindsay asked, dead serious. “We can get the Early Crew to help. There’s nothing they like better than telling a shitty man where to stick it.”

“What? No,” I said. I tried to laugh, to make light of the situation. It came out as more of an anxious wheeze. “It’s not like that. Peter didn’t do anything wrong.” That wasn’tentirelytrue,but the man still didn’t deserve to have my early-morning Gen X brigade go after him.

“If you change your mind—” Lindsay began.

“I won’t,” I insisted. I grabbed my pen again just for something to do with my hands. “I’m not going to see him again, so…yeah. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe we should have a girls’ night,” Becky suggested. “No better way to get over a lousy man than watching bad television with your girlfriends and doing each other’s hair.”

I opened my mouth to object—then closed it again when I realized I had no objections. This was actually a great idea. It had been too long since I’d spent time with my friends outside work. And it would get my mind off Peter, even if just for an evening.

“Sounds like fun,” I said honestly. “When were you thinking?”

“Scott isn’t at the hospital tonight,” Becky said. “He’ll be home with the kids. How about tonight?”

Lindsay was already checking the calendar on her phone. “The only thing I have tonight is a call with my mom.” She put her phone back in her bag. “I can let her lecture me about how I’m wasting my potential tomorrow. This would be way more fun. And much less likely to make me want to throw my phone against a wall.”

“I also have nothing going on tonight,” I said. Unless you counted moping around my apartment and being sad, of course. But I did that every night these days.

“Wonderful,” Lindsay said.

“Can you host, Zelda?” Becky asked. “We don’t want to do this at my house. There are nerf gun fights there twenty-four seven.”

“And my studio’s a disaster,” Lindsay added.

“You want to have it at my place?” I did a quick mentalrun-through of my apartment’s condition. It had definitely seen better days—I hadn’t unpacked from my trip so much as dumped everything out on my love seat when I’d gotten home—but it wouldn’t take long to make my main room presentable enough. “How about seven?”

“That works for me,” Lindsay said.

“It’s a date.” Becky was grinning at me. “This is going to be exactly what you need.”

If only that were true.

Two episodes intoRejected Proposal, the latestNetflix rom-com sensation, I had to admit my friends had been right.

Thiswasexactly what I needed.

“That guy doesn’t deserve her,” Lindsay said from her spot on the floor, pointing at the television. She was three glasses into the wine she’d brought over for tonight’s festivities and was starting to slur her words, but she wasn’t wrong.

“He’s a tool,” Becky agreed from the couch. “They better not be endgame.”

I was inclined to agree, thoughtoolwas a relative concept. The guy in question had never, for example, accepted money from a nefarious organization to go after the woman he was now interested in. Or at least, if he had, the show hadn’t gotten there yet. By episode two his only crime was having minimal career ambition while being jealous of the female lead’s professional success. So yes, a tool—but probably not in a way a good therapist couldn’t fix.

“I wouldn’t date him,” I chimed in, truthfully.

My phone buzzed with a new text just as the fourth episodestarted playing. The female lead had finally dumped the tool and was consoling herself over a pint of mocha chip ice cream with the handsome male lead. He was currently still just her friend, but I wasn’t born yesterday and knew exactly where this was heading.

“Open your eyes, honey,” I said, reaching for my phone. “He’s been in love with you since tenth grade.”

“There are four more episodes,” Becky said, adopting the tone of someone older and wiser. “They won’t get together until, like, ten minutes before the end.”

“When I am queen, I will change that trend,” I grumbled. “Everybody will get together at the beginning of episode seven and then we’ll have two whole hours of them doing nothing but happily picking out wallpaper.”