The Dating Intervention: Book 1 in the Intervention Series (9 page)

“No. She’s locked in on that flop.”
 

“Why does she do this, Summer? Why?”
 

“I’m thinking that’s a rhetorical question,” Summer said. “But remember in junior high, when we met her? You were the sizzlin’ hot Latin lover type—”

“And you,” Josie said, “were the beautiful beach babe blonde.”
 

Summer nodded. “And Delaney—well, Delaney was always the best friend. The confidant. Guys loved her.”
 

“Like a sister,” Josie said.
 

“Right,” Summer said. “So you get the double whammy. One, she almost can’t resist a good sob story. Two, she’s lured in as soon as a guy seems to
like
her like her.”
 

For a few moments, Summer and Josie watched Delaney. Her movements were efficient as she mixed drinks, handed out beers, took orders, carried on a conversation with the dud at the bar who downed rum and Cokes like he’d rather be swimming in them.
 

“She’s totally in her element,” Summer said.
 

Delaney cracked a joke to a college kid who ordered a six-pack of beers and the friends who were crowded behind him jeered and elbowed him.

“I know,” Josie said. “She’s really good. Why doesn’t that confidence translate to the rest of her life?”
 

“I’m telling you. You’re onto something. It’s that whole I-like-you-as-a-friend thing from junior high. When the pressure’s off, like when she’s flirting with a college kid in whom she has no interest, she’s fine. But when the pressure’s on—” Summer swiped a hand across her throat.
 

Benjamin came back to the table, plunked a vodka cranberry and glass of white on the table.
 

“Thanks, Benji,” Josie said. “Do us a favor and don’t tell Delaney we’re here, okay?”
 

“Glasses, hats, a wig, for crying out loud? Frantic waving? I got it,” he said. “My lips are sealed.”
 

He started to walk away, then suddenly spun around and came back, leaning over their table.
 

“You guys might as well be holding up fluorescent We Heart Delaney signs, though. She looks over here once and she’s going to spot you.”
 

This time when he walked away, he was shaking his head.
 

“We’ve got to stop her,” Josie said.

“You don’t just want to see how this plays out?”
 

Delaney had stopped in front of the longhaired, rubber-jointed man. Again. Now she was bending down, elbows on the bar, eyes level with his.
 

“She’s looking very sympathetic,” Summer said. “Look at her nodding. Look at her eyebrows.”
 

“She’s already breaking our rules. If we don’t stop her now, when do we?”
 

“We agreed we were coming here only to establish a baseline, Josie. Remember?”
 

Summer sipped her wine, picked up her napkin and began folding it into a crane.
 

“Fine.”
 

At Josie’s use of Delaney’s new go-to answer, the girls dissolved into giggles. When they saw Benjamin look sharply at them from across the room, they slapped their hands over their mouths, becoming even more hysterical.
 

***

Sure enough, after an hour and two more rum and Cokes, Mister “Make it Two,” also known as David, spilled his guts.
 

“… and my girlfriend moved to Costa Rica with this surfer guy who looks like Fabio. Right before I was going to propose.”
 

His pale gray eyes shone with emotion, his tie lay in a coil on the bar and Delaney almost had to wipe a tear off her own face after listening to his story. She wanted to soothe him. So what if that meant unbuttoning his shirt the rest of the way and peeling off those silky black pants?

She sent a text to Summer and Josie:
Super cute guy at bar tonight. Can I flirt my way into getting his number?

Within a second, she received texts back from both of them:
No. Absolutely not.
 

She wrote back:
Why? He’s cute. And he’s a doctor.
 

***

Under attack from a fresh wave of giggles, Josie and Summer took turns wiping their eyes with Josie’s bar napkin.
 

“‘Super cute?’ She has to be kidding us,” Josie said. “Now we know what her standards are. Haven’t you always wondered, when she talks about those really hot guys she sees here all the time?”
 

“Now we know,” Summer said, nodding so hard her sunglasses fell off her face and clattered onto the table.

“Come on, Summer. We have to do something. He is so
not
cute. He is so
not
a doctor. And I can guarantee he is
so
not good for her.”
 

“What the hell. You’re right.”
 

***

Summer:
He’s at the bar telling you a sob story, right?

Delaney didn’t answer.
How did Summer know?
 

She was going to employ her mommy senses during The Dating Intervention and Delaney didn’t like it one bit. It was an unfair advantage. David requested another drink and Delaney mixed it.
 

“You’re real cute, Diana,” he slurred.
 

“It’s Delaney,” she said, charmed by his … drunkenness. “And you’re not so bad, yourself.”
 

Her phone chirped.

Josie:
Stop talking to him, Dee. Remember, we make the rules
.
 

Delaney didn’t respond.
 

“So, David. What are you doing after this?”

Her phone chirped again.

Summer:
Step away from the drunk guy
.
Hair gel, remember?

And again.

Josie:
He’s wearing cheap shoes. He’s not a doctor. My guess: he’s in vacuum sales. He probably did a demonstration right before this and is drinking away his depression right now. He sucks for a living, Dee. And he hates his mother.

Delaney scanned the bar’s seating area. Were they here? They had to be. She’d noticed the cheap shoes, the hair gel, David’s general pathetic nature. But pathetic fueled her hormones, despite the voice in her head telling her to back off. She was sucked in.

That’s when she spotted two girls at the back of the room, wearing ball caps pulled low.
 

“I’ll be right back,” she said to Ivy.
 

Why would Josie and Summer show up at Rowdy’s to babysit her? Didn’t they trust her?
This is ridiculous
. She stormed to the back of the bar, fists clenched. They should let her make her own decisions. No, Mark, Zachary and Xander hadn’t been perfect. But they’d been okay. And they were out of the picture now, anyway. She was starting with a clean slate.

She stalked right up to the table where the girls were sitting, stuck her face two inches from a pair of mirrored sunglasses and felt completely foolish.These girls weren’t Summer and Josie. They were just a couple of friends out on the town for a couple of drinks – and they looked very surprised to be approached in this manner.

“Sorry,” Delaney muttered. “Get you a drink?”

Eyes comically wide and mouths hanging open like little goldfish, they simply shook their heads. She walked back to her spot behind the bar with less confidence, then mixed another drink for David and plunked it down in front of him.

“This one’s on the house,” she said. “And after you’re done, I’m taking you home.”
 

***

Closing time. Ivy flicked on the lights and the few stragglers who hadn’t already wobbled into taxis swayed their way out of the bar. Delaney swept the floor, wiped the tables and cleared glasses and bottles. David, for his part, remained on his stool, head pillowed on his arms. He’d snored a couple of times and Delaney wouldn’t be surprised to see drool on his sleeve.
 

Her phone chirped. Another text. It was Summer again. What was she doing up at two a.m.?
 

Don’t take him home, Dee. Fight your instincts. This is a moment. Choose to be the new you.
 

Delaney rolled her eyes. Summer had said something the other night about every choice being an opportunity to move one step closer to being your new self. You could choose to act like your old self and remain stagnant, she said, or you could choose to act like your new self and move forward. She probably threw in something about the Universe, too.

Delaney walked behind the bar to put away unused glasses and dump the limes in the trash. She glanced at the top of David’s head. He had thinning hair, which revealed a big dark mole on his scalp. Up close and in the light, he wasn’t quite as cute as she originally thought.
 

“Maybe you’re onto something, girls,” she muttered.
 

David woke with a start and Delaney noticed that he had drooled all over his arm, just as she expected.
 

“Was I asleep?” he mumbled.
 

“I think so. Want me to call you a cab?”
 

He straightened up, looked at his watch, noticed the drool spot on his arm, tried in vain to brush it off.
 

“I thought you were taking me home. That’s why I’m still here.”
 

What was it about guys like David that drew her in?
 

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, infusing her voice with cheerfulness she didn’t feel. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

“Well, you don’t have to,” he pouted.
 

“Of course I don’t,” she said. “But I’d really like to. Let’s go.”

From the other end of the bar, Ivy wiggled her eyebrows.
 

The walk home was quiet and very cold. David’s conversational skills seemed to have dried up as he started to sober up. Although it was only seven minutes from Rowdy’s to Delaney’s front door, her face was numb by the time they got there. Anxiety, which had taken shape as a tiny black stone when David had woken up with drool on his arm, had developed into a full-blown boulder as they walked. She felt like she’d carried it all the way home and now her arms were so heavy she could barely get her keys out of her pocket as they rounded the corner of Oak Street.

But apparently, she didn’t need her keys. As they approached her house, she noticed the lights were on and someone was standing in the living room, a silhouette in the big picture window.

Delaney slowed to a stop when they approached her house. She knew she had turned the lights off when she left for work. This could mean one thing and one thing only. Delaney took a deep breath in an attempt to quell the panic rising in her stomach.

“Uh, David,” she said quietly, “you’re going to have to go home.”
 

“What? Why?”
 

The orange-tinted light from the street lamp cast ugly shadows under his eyes and his breath puffed out in a foul-smelling cloud.
 

“I have a visitor,” Delaney said.
 

“You don’t have a roommate?”
 

“Nope. Not a roommate. I’ll call you a cab.”
 

“Will I see you again?”
 

“Probably not.”
 

As she dialed the cab company they habitually used to send people home from Rowdy’s, she couldn’t help feeling like a teenager who’d been caught sneaking out of the house, or coming home way after curfew. She was scared and she wasn’t afraid to admit it, she thought as she gave the taxi dispatcher her address.

“See you,” she said to David.
 

Steeling herself, she walked up the path and into her front door, leaving David pale, shivering and fidgeting with his tie in the cold.
 

***

“I told you not to bring him home,” Summer said in a deadly calm voice. Delaney imagined this was the scariest mommy voice she had – the one the kids really listened to. It didn’t come out to remind the kids to put on their shoes or pick up their toys. No, it was reserved for critical situations, like when Luke came after Nate with a butter knife.
 

Delaney sat on the couch, biting her lip and examining her fingernails. Summer stood over her, hands on her slim hips, face twisted into a weird combination of concern and anger.
 

Oh, yeah. She’s definitely pulling out all the mommy stops.
 

Even as Delaney waited in fear, she noticed the dark circles under Summer’s eyes, the wisps of hair escaped from her bun. She looked exhausted. Delaney felt guilty. Not only had she failed The Dating Intervention less than forty-eight hours after its inception, but she was also the cause of her best friend being awake at two in the morning when she had to get up again at six with the kids.
 

“Why can’t you just trust me?” Delaney whined as butterflies swirled madly in her stomach. Why was she
nervous
? This was ridiculous.
 

“It’s obvious why I can’t trust you, isn’t it? Number one, you make terrible decisions. Did you
see
that guy? And number two, I knew we’d have a rocky start. You don’t like being told what to do. Josie told me how, after you shopped Saturday, you spent the rest of the day decorating. Not job hunting.”

“Well, I need a good atmosphere. You know. To
feel
like a professional. I needed a printer to print out resumes. And a suit,” she said weakly, because she was now losing steam. “For interviews.”
 

“Did you actually write your resume or print it?” Summer demanded. “No. I know you didn’t. But let’s not get sidetracked. We’re here tonight because you brought home that … that … weasel! After I specifically told you not to!”

Delaney winced. She wanted to shrivel up right there on her living room couch.
 

“What was your inner voice saying to you in that moment, Dee?”
 

“He was nice.”
 

“Tell me that’s not what your inner voice was saying. Please.”