Down the Rabbit Hole

Her mouth dropped open. She hadn’t downloaded that. What, were apps just self-installing now? That’ll be the day, she thought, when she used a dating website. It was scary enough going out with someone you’d already laid eyes on. Setting yourself up on a blind date was an idea beyond horrifying.

She closed the application and deleted it.

CHAPTER THREE

Macy’s phone rang again and she nearly threw it against the wall. All day the phone had been ringing, and not once had it been Jeremy.

“Macy Serafini.” She tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear, identified the caller and pulled up the account file on her computer. She was nodding over the client’s points when her coworker April appeared in her doorway. She held up a finger.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “yes. We can try that.” She waved April in. “Let me put something together on that and I’ll email you Monday, how’s that?”

April settled herself in the armchair across from Macy’s desk and began examining her fingernails.

Macy leaned her head back on her chair and gave a silent scream as the client droned on about things they had discussed multiple times already.

Bud Forester, she mouthed to April, identifying the client who drove them all crazy. April smirked.

If StockSolutions weren’t such an important client, she’d hand the account off to her assistant.

As usual, the conversation went on way too long. Also as usual, he finished by asking her out—even though she’d told him multiple times she was seeing someone. The fact that she wasn’t anymore was something she didn’t even consider telling him.

“I’m sorry, Bud, but I have plans with my boyfriend this weekend. Let me know how the concert is, though, okay?”

He took the news as he always did—with cheerful resignation—and they hung up.

April drew her long blonde hair around her shoulder and twisted it with one hand. “Didn’t you break up with your boyfriend?”

“Yes.” Macy frowned at the phone. “And it seems to have stuck.”

April dropped her hair. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d hear from him.” She swiveled her chair and put her hand on the computer mouse, opening up her work email.

“Why?”

She glanced at the list of impersonal messages, not one of them from Jeremy. “Well, because I was kind of abrupt about it.”

“No kidding.” Deadpan.

Macy grimaced and closed the program. “I know, it’s stupid. I just thought he might call. God knows he’s never very far from a phone!”

“What, to chat about the breakup?”

“No. But you’d think he’d want to know what brought me to that point, since it obviously took him by surprise. Why wouldn’t he want to know that? Did he really not care?”

“So you dump the guy out of the blue and you’re upset because he hasn’t called you. Isn’t that considered having your cake and eating it too? Why don’t you call him, if you’ve got something you want to explain?”

Macy shook her head, rested her elbows on her desk and put her chin in her hands. She felt so tired. It was exhausting not thinking about Jeremy, and she’d been at it for a week now. “No, don’t you see? That would defeat the purpose. I was going for shock and awe, but he didn’t even notice.”

“I understand. You were going for the quick fix. Don’t you know you should never break up with a guy unless you really mean it? Otherwise, karma makes it so that the next time you see him he’s with some ridiculously hot chick.”

Macy’s throat closed at the thought. She picked up a pen and tapped it on the desk blotter. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Jeremy’s perfect when he’s paying attention. Unfortunately that’s only about forty percent of the time. The other sixty you spend watching him look at his phone.”

“That might be enough for some women.”

At the mention of cell phones Macy picked hers up, slid her thumb across the screen to look for texts or messages, and found nothing yet again. Yep, Jeremy was just fine with the breakup.

“And yeah, I see what you mean,” April said drily.

Macy put her phone aside. “Sorry. I was just checking . . . See, if he’d called me it would mean he’d woken up to the problem, or would be open to hearing what the problem was. But if I call him it’ll just be me telling him one more time that his constant distraction bothers me. And that hasn’t worked.”

“Which means it was a good thing you broke up with him. If this is all the notice he’s taken of it he was probably done anyway, right?”

The blunt words struck her hard, and she picked up her phone again. She looked at it blindly a moment before something penetrated. “What the heck? I thought I deleted this.”

“What?” April leaned forward.

The pulsating yellow icon was back in the bottom right corner of her screen—iLove. She pressed the icon and held it with the intention of deleting it, then changed her mind.

“Wait a minute.” She cancelled the delete function. “Have you ever heard of a dating site called iLove?”