Virtually Mine: a love story (16 page)

As she watched Dustin go, M.J. found
herself
 
pondering what Kate had ever
seen in the guy. Sure, he was good looking. He’d been okay for a laugh here and
there. But one thing was for sure: he was no Rob Galloway.

Suddenly, M.J.’s eyes brimmed. She did
her best to shake it off, but didn’t find it easy. It wasn’t just that she was
alone again, or that Dustin didn’t make good company. It wasn’t that she’d lost
her job writing parking tickets. What it was was that, for once in a very long
while, she had allowed her spirit to soar, her heart to hope. Now, she was
free-falling, and reality was a long way down.

♥   
♥    ♥

Wandering through the office pool of
Virtually Mine
, Kate
passed station
after station, checking their Operator numbers, and smiling at the average Joes
who manned them.
 
She paused to watch as
Operator 37 drew a heart on each of a stack of homemade cards. “Are those for
your clients?”

Operator 37 grinned at her. “I like to
give it the personal touch.”

Kate nodded. “That’s really nice.
 
Hey, would you happen to know where Operator
52 is stationed?
 
He’s supposed to train
me.”

Operator 37 knitted his brow quizzically.
“She taking girls, now?”

“Looks like.”

Referencing a list, Operator 37 stood to
look over the surrounding cubicles. “Operator 52, that’s Butters. He was just
here.” He turned to the next Operator. “Torkinson, where did Charlie go?”

Kate emitted an audible gasp. “Charlie
Butters is Operator 52?” As she fought to absorb the shock of it, she noticed
Eric, striding toward her from Samantha’s office.

Eric pocketed his paycheck. “So it’s
Katherine Mae? See, I thought it was Kate Valentine.”

“Shhh! It’s—yes, it’s Kate, but—oh, this
is so completely loaded. How’d you know my last name?”

Eric shuffled adorably. “Okay, please
don’t think I’m a stalker because I swear I’m not, but...I met you and you
seemed really nice and so my type, and I sort of checked out your info card at
the casting studio. Don’t hate me.”

Reeling at the turn of events, Kate
floundered. “No, it’s... I don’t know what this is.”

Eric cupped Kate’s elbow, charmingly
leading her aside. “Look, maybe it wasn’t an accident that we ran into each
other, that they put us together, you know? Maybe there could be something
here.”

Still struggling at bit to regain her
bearings, Kate pondered the notion. “Maybe. I’m... Eric, I’m kind of on
cerebral overload at the moment. It’s like a multi-car pile-up on the neural
highway. So...please, I really hope you don’t take this personally, but I’ve
gotta go.”

As quickly as her feet would carry her,
Kate bolted from the office. She had no idea what she’d say or do when she got
where she was going. All she knew was that, no matter what, she desperately had
to find Charlie.

♥   
♥    ♥

Newly educated concerning the meaning of the word
woo
, Dustin slid Kate’s unabridged Webster’s
back into its place on her bookshelf, flanking a full row of her journals.
Wooing was all about winning her heart, he realized. But why it was that Kate
didn’t think he knew her mystified him. What difference did being able to tell
her things about herself that she already knew make? Besides that, how was he
supposed to find out all that stuff when she was hardly even talking to him
anymore?

All
of a sudden, Dustin realized that those bits of extraneous information about
Kate he needed to know might be right in front of his nose, nestled beside
Kate’s way-too-thick dictionary, waiting to be discovered in her collection of
journals.

“Oh,
this is awesome!” Dustin crowed as he pulled
the first in a line of Kate’s journals
out. With a self-satisfied grin, he made himself comfortable, cracked it open,
and began to read.

eleven

♥

W
istfully,
M.J. loaded her dirty clothes into a washer at the Fluff and Fold. Soon, all
the evidence of her disaster of a day would be rinsed down the drain and into
laundry history. She supposed she could have waited till her usual washday, but
the idea of those grimy togs taunting her from the basket at the bottom of her
closet was just too much to take.

When
it came to humiliations of this magnitude, M.J. preferred to keep short
accounts. The sooner her ill-fated deeds could be put behind her, the sooner
she could pick herself up and move on with her life.

So it was, with as
much determination as M.J. could muster, she reached for her detergent. It was
then that she made a discovery. There, in her otherwise empty laundry basket,
was a hand-lettered flyer.

In and of itself,
finding a flyer wasn’t all that unusual for M.J. People hawking their goods and
services left flyers all over the place in Santa Monica. In her day as a Meter
Maid, she’d switched out many a flyer for a parking ticket on an all too
littered windshield.

Reflexively, M.J.
reached into her wash basket to toss the flyer, but its simple headline
arrested her attention:
 

No
time to do your laundry?

Call
Rob Galloway: Laundry-Doer Extraordinaire!

M.J. looked up from the page, hardly able
to believe her eyes. There was Dr. Rob Galloway, standing tall with two boxes
of washing powder.

Rob’s dimples accented his grin. “So,
were you thinking color-safe bleach or active oxygen?”

Her mind whirling, M.J. studied the
situation.
 
It couldn’t be, but it was.
“Wait a minute. Okay. You don’t do your clothes here. Do you?”

“Nope. I totally followed you.”

A light dawned for M.J. “Then you’re here
for...” Her eyes widening in disbelief, M.J. tentatively pointed to herself.

Rob shrugged playfully. “I just saw you
around, strictly in a laundry-spotting context, and thought this might be a
good way to meet you.”

M.J. nodded, taking it in.
 
A landslide grin spread across her lips. “I
grew on you, didn’t I?”

♥   
♥    ♥

Charlie sat quietly in his apartment, waiting for the other shoe to fall
crashing down in front of him. As much as he wished he could persuade himself
otherwise, he knew his cover had been completely blown. He’d slipped out of
work as soon as he heard Kate chatting up his fellow Operator, the one who had
quickly volunteered his name.
 

Kate would want to talk to him now. She
was so sensitive in that way. She would tell him how much she valued his
friendship, what a great guy he’d be for someone else, and that would be that.

The time for pouring his secret passion
into poems and gifts had passed. Mostly though, what he realized he’d miss were
the phone calls, time spent conversing with the girl who had utterly stolen his
heart.

The more Charlie thought about it, the
more he realized that there wasn’t a soul on earth that he could talk to about
any of what he was going through, certainly not Mrs. Teasdale, and least of all
Kate. He considered phoning his father, and then a wave of shame washed over
him for masterminding the charade in the first place.

How could he admit to his dad that he’d
done what he’d done when he couldn’t even tell him what V.M. Enterprises really
was? Charlie thought about how proud his father had been when he landed a computer
tech job in the big city. (That much he’d been able to share honestly.) Though
it had only been part time, it had been a foot in the door, his dad had
encouraged, a building block for better things to come.
 

There was nothing wrong in an honest
day’s work, Charlie knew, but as much as he’d rationalized that
Virtually
Mine
was just brokering harmless fantasy, he admitted that the spirit of it
wasn’t entirely harmless, let alone honest. As he sat there, he came to grips
with the truth, that behind every Imaginary Boyfriend was a real-live person,
who was connecting with another real-live person, stirring up real-live emotion
in real-live hearts.

Charlie looked up to the only One he
could bear to face when he knew he’d totally blown it. Even that took everything
in him. “I knew better, and I still...” A tear slipped down Charlie’s cheek. “I
let you down, I know. But that isn’t the worst of it,” he whispered. “I pulled
Kate into this, too. And I’m really, really sorry.”

“Charlie!” Kate called as she knocked on
his door.

There she was. She’d come to clear the
air with him, just as he’d known she would. He wiped his face, wondering if
she’d heard him.

Again, Kate knocked, this time more
insistently. “Charlie, would you please just talk to me?”

Charlie sat, paralyzed, unable to
respond.

“Charlie, I know you’re in there.”

So, she had heard him. Still, nothing in
Charlie was ready to face Kate yet. As soon as he faced her, he knew it would
be over, something that could wait just a little while longer.

♥   
♥    ♥

Dustin closed the last of Kate’s journals as he overheard Kate’s calls to
Charlie, coming from just outside.

“Charlie,
please!” Kate implored.

As
quickly as he could, Dustin fumbled to set each of Kate’s journals back in
place on her shelf.

“Charlie,”
he heard Kate continue. “I’m going into my apartment now, but please come and
see me, okay?”

Realizing
his time was nearly up, Dustin dashed out into Kate’s living room. “Prepare to
be wooed,” he exuded as he sat on her sofa, intent upon looking casual.

As
Kate entered, a look of surprise darted across her face. “
How did you get
in?”

Dustin rose. “M.J. was here.” Bursting
with excitement, he pointed to Kate’s blinking answering machine. “Okay, get
ready. That message light, that’s Wissy. And your mom called.”

Kate knitted her brow. “You listened to
my messages?”

“Well, I was here,” he explained, “and it
was on speakerphone, out loud, but anyway, you booked that commercial Wissy’s
working on, right off the tape.” Kate didn’t look anywhere near as excited as
Dustin had expected. In fact, she looked completely blasé.

“I did?”

Dustin cocked his head to the side. “Uh,
yeah.”

Kate grimaced. “Oh, great... My big break
with hygiene products.”

Clearly unenthused, Kate took off her
jacket.

Dustin followed her toward the coat
closet. “Kate, this is huge! You’re finally in the game. This is what you
want.”

“I don’t know about that anymore.”

Nothing in Kate’s response computed for
Dustin. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

Kate hung her jacket and turned back. “Dustin,
it’s just... I’ve had this kind of epiphany and—”

“No, no, absolutely not. No epiphanies
allowed. Only what’s an epiphany?”

Kate finally looked at Dustin. “It’s
just...all due respect to everybody who does it, but all of a sudden, I don’t
think I want to spend any more of my life pretending to be somebody else.”

“You don’t want to be an actor?” Dustin
blustered. “What do you mean? Who doesn’t want to be an actor?”

“I guess... I guess I don’t.” Kate stowed
her scooter. “I think I want to do something that’s more...in my own, actual
moment. Maybe teach.”

Dustin preened. There it was: his opening
to commence with his freshly informed wooing. “Well, you do have your
certificate already.”

Kate stopped. “Did I tell you that? I
didn’t think I did.”

Dustin couldn’t help smiling. This was
going way better than he’d hoped. “Hey, I know what your secret obsession is,
too.”

“You do?”

He leaned in confidentially. “Okay, I
don’t get why, but it’s using grammar good.”

Kate shook her head, a bit confused.
“It’s
well
.
 
But, yes.”

Dustin paced, impressed with himself as
he rattled on to Kate. “You went to Longwood College where you majored in
Special Ed and had your first stage role as, wait a sec...Tinkerbell, till they
dropped your wire too fast and busted your wrist—no, your foot.”

Kate’s mouth dropped. “How do you know
that?”

Dustin nodded proudly. “Oh, I know lots
more. You’ll be impressed. Okay. You fly in your dreams. Holidays make you
homesick. You love Rocky Road, but won’t touch Pistachio. You had a life-altering
crush on some TV star guy I never heard of, which is partially why you moved
out here, hoping to run into him somewhere.”

“Who told you this?!” Kate demanded.
“M.J.?”

“You doodle in the margins,” Dustin
continued. “You’re double jointed—why didn’t you tell me this before? This is
highly important data!”