Drop Dead Gorgeous

I can’t help it, I slow until I’m barely walking, putting my hands on my head so I can give my lungs room to spread out. “I. Can’t. Her. Turn.”

Sweat drips into my eye, and I shake my head like a dog, droplets flying everywhere. Trey recoils, wincing. “Fuck, dude! Stop. I don’t want your man salt all over me.”

I bend forward, putting my hands on my knees, and watch a few drops hit the concrete instead. “What am I gonna do?” I ask sincerely. “Can’t get her out of my fucking head.”

Trey, who’s stretching his calf, stops and puts his hands on his hips. “Not used to seeing you like this.”

Trey’s right.

Not to brag, though my sister would say I absolutely am and give me a solid dose of shit for it, but I don’t usually have to try that hard with women. I’m not the type that runs home with every bar bunny who looks my way by a long shot, but I realize that every serious girlfriend I’ve ever had approached me. Or we just ran in the same group and conveniently fell into each other, and damn if that didn’t make it easier. This sitting around waiting for the phone to ring is exhausting and making me itchy with anxiety.

“You really think I should call? It’s not too stalker-ish?”

“Stalker-ish would be calling her ten times a day or standing outside her office with a goddamn boombox over your head playing love songs,” Trey chides me while throwing in a decent movie reference joke. “Just don’t be creepy. Ask her out on an official date, not an ambush surrounded by dead people.” He laughs at his own stupidity, then flatly whispers, “I see dead people.”

Since I told him about hunting Zoey down at her place of work, he hasn’t quit teasing me. And admittedly, it does sound bad. But it hadn’t seemed odd at the time. I’d truly wanted the paperwork done . . . and yeah, to see Zoey again. So if that’s where she was, that’s where I was going.

“You did that joke already,” I remind him. “Got anything new?”

He pounds me in the shoulder, laughing. “It’s not fun if you ask to get roasted.”

“Sounds like you’re talking shit about Zoey, not me. And I don’t like it one bit.” My mean mug bounces off him, Trey not really giving a fuck.

“Stop selling wolf tickets, Blake,” Trey says. “This is all about you. Look . . .” Trey goes quiet for a moment, then looks at me. “Remember when I first met Serena?”

Of course I do. First time they had a date, I gave him shit with a whole workout of comments working in Kanye’s line ‘my psychic told me she’ll have an ass like Serena.’ Trey was pissed at me at first, but by the end we were having fun with it. “Still say you punched far above your weight. For reasons I haven’t yet deciphered, she took pity on your immature ass.”

And it’s true. But she did, and it’s truly an unsolved mystery how he landed her because he was a drunken frat boy who was nearly flunking out of a party school when he met her. And when he popped the question, she said yes.

Somehow, she saw his potential way down deep under the fuckboy exterior and shaped him right up over the last few years into a responsible adult and good husband. But we both still know that she’s way out of his league and he’s a lucky son of a bitch.

Trey scratches behind his ear and gives me a scrunched eye look as though he’s deciding if I’m ready to hear what he’s about to tell me. “I feel like this Zoey might be your Serena.”

I laugh. “Don’t jump that far ahead just yet. Even if you’re right, you’ll jinx shit and I’m going to be whacking off alone for the next five years or something.”

He shrugs like he believes me, but the gleam in his eye says I haven’t swayed him in the slightest. “Maybe not. But I remember feeling this” —he gestures to me— “desperate.”

Desperate? “I’m not desperate. I’m . . . interested.” Shit, that one sounded like a lie even to me.

“Interested is what you were when you realized that your dick could do things besides piss,” Trey jokes. “What you are is more hopeless than a one-legged man in a Kung fu movie.”

“Still got enough to kick your ass.”

Trey leans into the mock threat. “Good, then you should use all that energy and gusto to call her.”

The words hang in the air for long moments as I try to think of a rejoinder. But I don’t have one. Or at least, none that doesn’t make me sound like a desperate loser who’s making up bullshit to deflect from the reality of my situation.