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Roman was there—always there, front and center, every waking moment. He hovered in her thoughts when she ate and exercised and watched television. When she showered, shopped, walked the streets. She woke up drenched in sweat, sheets twisted around her in a dramatic mess after explicit dreams that were ten times more erotic than whatever Ryan was doing down below.
Penny closed her eyes, wishing for her mistake to finish so she could go back to her lonely existence. This was all her fault, not Ryan’s. She’d accepted not one but three dates with him. Even after the first had been beyond boring and the second not much better, she’d agreed to a third. Not because the third time was a charm but because she was desperate to fill her mind with anything—anyone— that wasn’t Roman Tate.
Ryan was everything Roman wasn’t. A struggling actor in his late twenties, Ryan had booked one national commercial three years back, and he clung to those fifteen seconds of fame like a lifeboat.
Where Roman was quietly confident, Ryan was uncertain and timid. Where Roman was darkly alluring and dangerously out of reach, Ryan was delightfully boring and a little too available. Ryan was her age. He was appropriate to date. He was safe.
In falling for Roman, Penny had set herself up for failure. She reckoned he knew how to listen and when to speak. He sure as hell wouldn’t forget her name. Penny was also willing to bet that Roman Tate could make Penny forget her own name with one kiss, one touch, one stroke of a finger.
As Ryan rolled onto her, Lucky banged on the ceiling from his apartment downstairs. Ryan grinned as Lucky shouted something about there being kids in the house.
“That was amazing,” Ryan mumbled. “How’d you like it?”
Penny stared blankly at him. She wondered what he’d say if she announced that the experience had been somewhat endurable.
“It was…” She hesitated. “Yeah.”
“Glad to hear it.” Ryan grinned, stroked a thumb down her cheek. “I was wondering if I could make you breakfast in the morning?”
“Actually…”
“Sorry, I get it. Too forward.” Ryan flashed her a quick smile. “My bad. I’ll get out of your hair.”
Penny merely raised her eyebrows as Ryan skedaddled out of bed. She studied him as he moved, thinking that most women would find him attractive—striking even—with his dirty-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Yet Penny couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Ryan Anderson whatsoever.
Eventually, Ryan let himself out of the apartment with a wink. Penny gave a half-hearted wave, not bothering to get up and lock the door after him. She lay in bed until his footsteps faded. Then she sat up and thrust the window open in hopes the fresh air would wipe away the stench of sex.
Penny stared outside at nothing in particular, frustrated that even her evening with Ryan hadn’t taken her mind off the one man she couldn’t have. She’d come so close, and yet her kiss with Roman had made him seem that much more unavailable.
There was an ache inside Penny that longed to pick up her phone and call Roman for no reason at all. She wanted to tell him all the little things about her day, to share the simple things that wound up being the foundation of a real, true relationship.
Penny longed for those moments, for the teensy moments that created dazzling memories. She wanted to whisper her brilliant new ideas for a television pilot late at night as she lay next to Roman in bed. To send him the stupid memes that reminded her of him when she listlessly browsed online. To go grocery shopping with him in sweatpants before retiring to the couch with a bottle of inexpensive wine. She wanted it all. And couldn’t have any of it.
Another same-but-different niggle of guilt crept down Penny’s spine as she closed her eyes and relived the moment in Roman’s office when they’d kissed. It’d been soft, sweet. Short. Almost a mirage, and on some days, Penny found herself doubting it’d ever happened.
They’d never spoken of it again. Roman and Penny simply existed together, floating through the same plane, catching each other’s eyes now and again as a shared memory flitted between them, fleeting as a firefly, before it disappeared again. In those brief moments, the guilt vanished.
And then there were moments like these. Moments where Penny’s palms grew clammy and her stomach wriggled with disappointment. What had she done? To herself? To Roman? To his wife? The only saving grace was that Penny already had a relationship with guilt; she was no stranger to it.
In fact, Penny had all but accepted guilt—distantly, like an annoying second cousin she saw at holidays. A nuisance she’d gotten used to, acknowledged, and then dutifully ignored time and time again because if she didn’t, she’d fall apart.
Penny knew, too, that if she pushed the incident in Roman’s office out of her mind, the guilt would eventually tamp down to a manageable size. When she’d started taking other people’s things in high school, guilt had come around then, too.
But with time, patience, and a good bit of stubbornness (along with a long thread of rationalization), that guilt had subsided. It had gone from crashing ocean waves to the faint whisper of the ocean one hears when holding a seashell to their ear. And with time, their kiss would be nothing but a distant tremor, the seashell that housed it long since forgotten on a faraway beach.
For now, however, the waves raged strong and hard, fast and overwhelming. Penny gulped, found it hard to breathe. She picked up her phone and scrolled until she found her mother’s number—the one person who could center her and help plant her feet on firm ground instead of the ever-shifting sand on which Penny stood.
Curling around herself, Penny hit Dial. The evening breeze was warm, tasted of desert air and dust, stilted by floral tones from the blooming bush that insisted on surviving in the alleyway beneath her window. Penny studied it, feeling a bit like the plant herself. Left alone without much in the way of sustenance, expected to thrive amid rocky darkness. If only she were strong enough to bloom.
Amy Sands cut to the chase after a quick greeting. “What’s wrong, honey? You sound upset.”
Penny flipped a pen between her fingers. The pen didn’t technically belong to her—it was a little trinket she’d adopted from Roman’s desk. She might not be able to have him, but she had something of his. A small reminder that there was a chance. A teensy, tiny chance they’d met for some cosmic reason.
“There’s this guy,” Penny said with a sigh. “I think I’m in love, but I can’t be. He’s married.”
“Oh, honey.”
Penny felt her throat closing at the stroke of kindness in her mother’s voice. Amy Sands was a heavyset woman, each of her two hundred pounds packed with love and warmth and hominess. Suddenly, Penny felt herself crumbling toward tears, wishing her mother’s soft arms could wrap around her, protect her from the mess her life had become.
