Starting with the Unexpected (2 page)

On the plus side, she’d refrained from sharing my rendition of Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” from the same evening, so that was something.

The odd hours made Sunday nights particularly difficult for me, though it helped that Jordan basically had the same schedule I did. Unfortunately he also had the same propensity to stay up far too late on my days off, despite the fact that he worked seven days a week.

When I stumbled into the station carrying two cups of liquid caffeine, my evil bitch cohost—who I adored, incidentally—was waiting for me.

“You look like shit,” Kat said gleefully as she took the caramel-mocha-whatever she always made me get her.

“I love you too,” I growled. “Got anything interesting to talk about this morning?”

Research into local news, current events, and interesting bits we thought the listeners would enjoy took up a good portion of our working hours. As much as I would have liked to have been able to tell people we made everything up on the fly, it just wasn’t true. We spent a lot of time throwing ideas back and forth, writing out notes, and scripting funny bits that we thought we really ought to have scripted. I was just grateful we no longer had to run the content of the show by our boss.

“A couple of things,” Kat answered. “How was your weekend?”

I started to answer her with my usual “fine” when the brokenhearted girl from the other night popped into my head. I took a sip of my chai latte to give myself a few moments to figure out how I wanted to word my answer. “I have a funny but kind of sad story about my weekend that we might be able to work into the show, but it might cause a bit of a stir,” I admitted. Discussing the need to burn your ex’s things could potentially be hilarious, but could also be polarizing if people who’d had their things burned were still upset about it. But then, really, everything was polarizing. We’d gotten hate mail over an episode where we joked about rubber duckies, for God’s sake.

“Would the stir be from the boss or from the public?” Kat asked, arching an elegant eyebrow as she peered over her coffee cup.

“Public,” I told her. “See, it started with these random texts….”

And so, when five o’clock hit and we welcomed everyone to “Kat and Zach in the Morning,” Kat started off the show by asking me how my weekend had been.

“Well,” I said slowly, “I got a very interesting set of texts from the wrong number. That leads me into our first question of the morning. If you discovered your lover sleeping with your sibling, would you feel justified in having a nice little bonfire with the crap they’d left at your place? We have a poll up on our website, and at the end of the show, we’ll let you know the results.”

“I’ll admit that cheating is a pretty messed-up thing,” Kat said. “But what if it was an accident?”

I snorted. “What, like they were both accidentally naked and she tripped and accidentally impaled herself on his—”

Kat grabbed the bike horn we used to censor each other and cut my words off with a loud honk. “Point made. Never mind.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket, but I wasn’t about to check it while we were on air. “Not that I’d know what’s impossible between a man and a woman, of course, but it seems pretty unlikely to me.”

That was one of the fantastic things about working for the station I worked for. I went into my interview fresh out of college and announced to them that I was very gay and very out. My boss had seen that as a draw, and our tiny station had gained a devoted following of listeners from the LGBT community thanks to the gamble he’d taken in putting me on the air after telling me to just be myself. The previous year, Kat and I had even been asked to join the Pride Parade, and we’d already been invited back for the next year’s events. It was another reason we got hate mail, but our supporters far outnumbered our adversaries. We were too small a station to cause a huge stir.

The topic shifted, and we followed our notes until the first commercial break, at which point I pulled out my phone to check my messages.

Oh my fucking God, I rage-texted Zach Blaise??

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And then I sighed and hoped I wouldn’t have to change my number. I’d been on the wrong end of “oh my God, you’re a local celebrity” before, despite the fact that I wasn’t really that well-known, and I didn’t care to deal with it again.

You did. Now that you know my name, can I get yours?

It took a little longer than usual before I got a response, and for a moment I wondered if I was going to get an answer at all.

When my friends want to piss me off, they call me Marian.

If it pisses you off, why give me that name?
I asked. It seemed weird to give someone a name you didn’t really want to go by.

Like I’m going to give someone I don’t know my real name, even if you are Zach Blaise.

Smart,
I told her.
In that case, when my friends want to piss me off, they call me Ollie. Can I call you Mari?

Only if you pronounce it MAHR-ee, and not like Mary. Why Ollie?

Middle name’s Oliver
.
Commercial break’s almost up. Enjoy the show.

I grinned as I put my phone away. Mari had spirit, and I could see us being friends. Who couldn’t use more friends? Maybe I’d end up setting her up with Jordan after all, once she was over her ex. She was definitely our kind of people.

The commercial break came to an end, and I put it out of my head and focused on the next segment of the show.

S
UNDAY
MORNINGS
were a bit of a tradition with Jordan and me. See, Jordan delivered newspapers. He graduated college, same as I did, but he still wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do with his life, and he tended to hate interacting with the general public anyway. There was a studio apartment above the garage that brought in a small income when he had a renter, and delivering papers kept him from having to deal with too many people. It was a win-win situation, really.

This sort of delivery was no longer about kids riding bikes for after-school jobs. The average routes were geared toward adults with cars, and it’s not an easy job. Jordan had more than one route—around five hundred houses—and all the newspapers had to be assembled and bagged before they could fill the back of his SUV. On top of that, our local paper also distributed nationwide papers, so Jordan kept a long list of houses on a clipboard on his dash. He had to keep going back to it to remember who got what. Really, the entire thing was a logistical nightmare.

So, when two o’clock Sunday morning hit, you could usually find me unloading stacks of papers into the garage of the house his bitch grandmother had left him. (The only reason she’d left it to him was that she knew it would piss off Jordan’s mom, her daughter. To say his family was dysfunctional was a bit of an understatement.) After destroying our backs getting everything moved and stacked, we would spend a good two and a half hours sitting on an ancient sofa that looks like the 1970s threw up on it, assembling papers and getting them bagged. Once we were done and the papers were loaded up, we’d crawl into Jordan’s SUV and go fling them into driveways (or if the client was a real asshole, into the gutter) for another three hours.

All of this may not sound entertaining, but it was one of my favorite parts of the week. Jordan and I had the most hilarious conversations at the crack of dawn, and they tended to end up on my Twitter feed. I was lucky I worked for the station I did, because any other station would probably have fired me for some of the things I posted. No one so much as raised an eyebrow the morning I started tweeting about how we’d decided to start a punk band called Psychic Sushi and how our first hit single was going to be “Silly Putty in Your Vagina.” I’d made the mistake of referring to the bags that we put the papers in as “paper condoms”—as in condoms for the papers. Jordan immediately started wondering aloud what would happen to a condom made
of
paper, which had led to the phrase we used for the song title. I learned far more than I ever wanted to know about female anatomy that morning, and I’m pretty sure I was traumatized for life because of it.

The best part of our Sunday morning antics, though, was that Jordan liked to buy me breakfast when we were done. So on that Sunday, the week after Mari sent those first texts, we dragged our tired asses into our favorite twenty-four-hour diner, not caring that we looked like we’d just crawled out of bed. Since we were pretty much a permanent Sunday fixture, the early morning server actually knew us on sight, and she smiled when we walked in. It was busier than usual, and I frowned as I looked around, hoping we’d be able to get a decent table away from the crowd. I hated crowds.

“If you guys drank coffee, I’d say you need it,” Gloria commented as she motioned to another server to grab a couple of menus. “Sorry, there’s some sort of event going on at the university this weekend, so it’s kind of busy. Marcus will take care of you. Be gentle with him, he should have gone home around four.”

Considering that the guy who took the menus from Gloria was exactly my type, my brain went somewhere completely different with the “be gentle” comment. He was maybe a little taller than me and all lithe muscle. His short brown hair looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, in an impossibly sexy way, and I was grateful to be having eye candy for breakfast. Jordan must have recognized the look on my face, because he smirked at me and smacked my arm as we followed the server—Marcus—to our booth.

The booth was right behind a family with three small children. We were doomed.

By the time Marcus brought us our drinks, I’d been subjected to two screaming tantrums and one little shit standing up on his seat and yanking at a handful of my shoulder-length hair. Hard. I got that it’s unusual to see cotton-candy blue hair, but that didn’t make it a fucking toy.

“What’ll you have this morning?” Marcus asked, giving us a sympathetic look. The kid who’d grabbed my hair started shrieking as his mother, in a voice that made it clear she didn’t really care whether he listened or not, told him to behave.

“A deep and abiding hatred for humanity in general,” I growled.

“I hear you,” he said. He lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “Don’t worry. They’re almost done. I gave them their bill on my way to get your drinks.”

“Thank God,” I sighed and proceeded to order my usual. Marcus took Jordan’s order too and then paused as if he had something on his mind.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’re Zach Blaise, aren’t you?” he asked quietly. “From the morning show at Wave 97.”

I nodded. “Are you new here?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you before.” And God knew I sure as hell would’ve remembered someone that good looking. He would have already been starring in my fantasies. “Sometimes I’m here before I go to work.”

“Just started Monday,” Marcus confirmed with a polite smile. “I transferred from the shop across town.” He turned his attention to Jordan and grinned. “You must be the infamous ‘J.’”

I never used Jordan’s full name on air or on the Internet. He was either “J” or “my roommate.” I’m sure people could figure out who he was easily enough if they really wanted to, but it was my way of giving him that little bit of privacy everyone deserves.

“So, did you really get beaten up by a ‘Save the Dolphins’ girl outside of Trader Joe’s?” Marcus asked him, that adorable grin on his face deepening, showing off a set of dimples. He had dimples. I’d officially died and gone to heaven.

Jordan groaned, and I raised my hand. “That was my fault, actually. And he didn’t get beat up so much as she took a swing at him with the clipboard that was holding her petition.”

Marcus looked like he was holding back a laugh, and it made his eyes sparkle with mischief. I was
this
close to begging him for mercy. The man shouldn’t be allowed to get any more attractive. “Okay, I have to ask. How did that happen?”

“I wanted an avocado,” I mumbled, feeling myself start to blush. Granted, the story was funny as hell, but it was also kind of embarrassing.

“You what?” He paused, shook his head, and looked at his order sheet. “Wait. Let me go put your order in. I get to clock out after I do, and I don’t think Gloria would mind if I joined you before I head home.”

“Fine with us,” Jordan said, grinning at me, and I could have kissed him. All right, not really, but I’d probably have been willing to bake him a cake or something.

True to his word, Marcus returned minus his apron and sat down next to me. I could feel my face heat up again, and it was probably extremely obvious considering my natural paleness. Ghosts would look tan next to me.

“Now then,” he said. “Story time. Tell me what actually happened.”

“The last avocado out of the four-pack I bought went bad before I could eat it, and I really wanted avocado on my sandwich,” I admitted after I cleared my throat. “So we went to Trader Joe’s to get another pack. As we were walking out, some girl got in my face—”

“Pretty close to literally,” Jordan interrupted. “She almost knocked him over.”

I nodded. “Right. So she almost knocks me over and demands to know if I’m ready to save the dolphins. And I kind of—completely without thinking about it, mind you—said ‘no thanks, already have one saved for lunch’ as I walked away.”

Marcus’s mouth fell open in surprise, and he stayed like that for a second before bursting into a fit of giggles. Oh dear God, he
giggled
.

“I mean, all I wanted was an avocado, not an environmental forum.”

Marcus dropped his head onto his arms on the table, laughing harder.

“And it wouldn’t have been so bad, except that’s when Jordan started applauding. That’s why she went after him with her clipboard.”

“She actually had to be removed from the premises,” Jordan added gleefully. “It was beautiful. So the moral of the story is ‘never get between Zach and his avocado.’”