Clarissa Lincoln is a martini glass half full type. Heck, even when she slurps the last bits of icy vodka from the glass, she'll tell you it's plumb full!
Until a disaster of a night on New Year's Eve sends the daydreaming, serial dater spiraling as...
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"I wish we didn't have to leave." Rissa looks longingly out the window as I pull out of the lodge's parking lot.
"Me too." I have a similar feeling of melancholy, with an added dash of anxiety making me as tense as I can get.
It turns out the teacher did figure it out and then found my Instagram.
She replied to two of the mystery date posts late last night. One was an innocent-so cute! The other, not so much. It was from the carriage date collage. She wrote a damn paragraph about meeting me and a "special someone" at a ski lodge. Then she had to go and say how adoringly I was looking at that someone. That was not all, though; she was smart enough to write out that she assumed all these pics must be from dates with them, with some curious emoji faces. She wondered if maybe I'm doing some feature on places to date in Minnesota, which is a decent red herring, actually.
Needless to say, Emma's text was anything but friendly about it. I have a meeting tomorrow morning that I am not looking forward to.
I've been able to hide it from Rissa, not wanting to spoil our last day here. But it was easier to do so when we were whipping down the hills one last time.
Silence fills the enclosed space as I drive back down the steep road. Rissa doesn't complain about the lack of speed this time, maybe because there's snow on the road.
She seems lost in her head, though. I noticed it last night, too.
"Are you thinking about the new job?" I ask as we reach the bottom of the hill, and I can pick up speed a bit. "Or the old one?"
"I actually didn't think about either until now." She pulls her phone out of her purse, and the screen lights up. "I wonder if everyone is talking about what happened. A few people love ranting about work. Lemme check Shawna's... nothing!"
I glance over and see her closing Facebook, and ...shit, I cringe as she logs into her Instagram.
"Conner, there are replies to the dating posts!" She sees it before I can warn her.
"I already know."
"What? Why didn't you tell me? What should we do? There are so many likes! Do you think Emma knows already?"
I sigh and hand her my phone. "She knows."
"Damn. She's big mad," Rissa says as she looks at the text. "What do we do!? Does this mean they'll say I broke the legal contract? Am I going to get sued?"
"No! Of course not. I already called Emma and explained nothing is going on between us."
The words feel so wrong ... and I only hope she doesn't hear them in my tone. I glance over to see a flicker of something in her eyes, but it's gone too quickly for me to register what it means.
The moment outside the lodge before the teacher came out replays in my head again for the hundredth time. There was something there, not just for me—something beyond the growing bond of our friendship. It's good the teacher came out when she did. I know better than to lean into these feelings. Rissa doesn't need that right now, and I need to get a better grip on my feelings around her.
