Page 133 of Happiness for Beginners

I shook again. “I really didn’t.”

“You didn’t call me on purpose,” he said.

Then it hit me. My eyes got wide. “Not—”

He gave one nod. “A pocket dial.”

“That fucking phone.”

“Yep.”

“Please tell me it was just static.”

“Nope.”

“What was it, then? Tell me!”

“It was you. Singing.”

That had been after dinner. I’d been washing the dishes. I’d been singing with that particular kind of abandon you only ever use when nobody’s listening. I squeezed my eyes closed and smacked my head against the elevator wall.

“Careful,” Jake said, looking around like I might jog us loose.

“How long did this go on?”

“A good, long time.”

I put a hand over my eyes. “Was I off-key?”

“Often. But in a cute way.”

I peeked out.

“At first, it was ‘Proud Mary.’ But then you couldn’t really hit those high notes, so you downshifted to like, a whole medley of things. Some Dean Martin. The Beatles. Earth, Wind & Fire. At one point, were you doing Weird Al Yankovic?”

I stood up a little straighter for authority. “Okay, ‘Eat It’ is a better song than ‘Beat It.’”

He tilted his head to contradict me.

“‘Get yourself an egg and beat it’? Come on. That’s genius.”

He shrugged.

I frowned. “You shouldn’t have eavesdropped like that. You should have hung up.”

“I couldn’t hang up. It was too awesome.”

I gave him a look, likePlease.

“I seriously couldn’t hang up. I didn’t want to hang up. I realized I would rather listen to you than do just about anything else in the world. I realized that even if you can’t stand me, and even if you deserve someone a thousand times better—and healthier—and even if the only decent thing to do was leave you alone, I had no choice but to come after you. Next morning, my Land Rover just kind of drove itself back home.”

I paused. “What about the whales?”

“I’ll still make it. It’s not for three days.”

“You’re going to drive back to Denver?”

“Sure. In a day or two. But I needed to talk to you first.”

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