Mismatched

Ch. 8

That night, I was haunted by the memory of Riley's lips on mine. I tossed and turned, trying to force the image, the feeling, of his lips from my mind. I couldn't.

The next day, work provided a temporary distraction. Although I found myself practically sleepwalking through the entire day. And occasionally, my mind would suddenly reconjure up the idea of Riley, and I would flinch like I was watching a car wreck in slow motion, but I still couldn't make it stop.

I decided not to share the events of our walk with Lesley. I knew that she would have a field day with it, and there was no way that she would believe that I'd only kissed Riley to avoid getting caught.

I didn't want to explain myself to her, and I certainly didn't want any of the follow-up questions.

But Lesley was nosey, and refused to be left in the dark, so she inevitably started poking around and trying to connect dots that simply just didn't exist.

"I know something happened," she taunted from her position on the couch.

"Lesley, enough," I said, completely exasperated. It had been an entire hour of Lesley trying to drag any piece of information out of me.

"Aren't you going to ask how I know?"

"Nope," I replied, popping the 'p'. "I don't care."

"You're no fun," Lesley whined with a pout. She paced around the store, a stack of random profiles she was critiquing in-hand. She had made it through Judy's stack of magazines and was awaiting this month's subscriptions.

"Fine, I'll just tell you how I know," Lesley blurted, as if she couldn't contain her excitement.

"I'd really rather you didn't," I complained.

"What have you been doing all day, Nate?"

"My job," I said with an implied 'duh' at the end.

"Specifically," she continued, and I rolled my eyes.

"Creating profiles by entering questionnaire data, finding matches, contacting them to set up dates —Are you satisfied, or should I continue?" I drawled out sarcastically.

"Exactly," Lesley said, pointedly as if she had just solved the Earth's greatest mysteries.

"I think you need to start taking advantage of naptime with the kindergarteners, Les."

"Every day you come plowing in here with one mission – to find Riley's match, so you never have to see him again. You didn't even check the new profiles today to see. You loveee him and you want to seeeeee him again," Lesley sang, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

She was right. Not about the love part, but the fact I hadn't even looked to see if I could find a match for Riley today. It didn't cross my mind once. That was weird, right?

The idea of spending time with him no longer caused me to recoil in horror, and that was concerning.

But, I brushed Lesley off and continued with my day, refusing to psychoanalyze my actions to try to find some sort of deeper meaning.

The problem was, now it was Wednesday—the one day a week that Judy's store was closed. Which meant there was nothing to stop me from just sitting around reliving the kiss with Riley over and over again.

It had been three days since I'd seen Riley, and he still hadn't texted me. Even worse than that, it bothered me that he hadn't texted me. Riley was never shy to reach out by text or call.

The silence was unlike him.

Had he figured out that I was posing as his pretend match? Was he sitting and triumphantly writing the 5,000-word negative review on Google as we speak?