Page 60 of Hot Mess

And the one voice that mattered, Nick’s, was too quiet.

My phone rang with Isaac’s ringtone.

“Yeah?” I answered, leaving it on speaker phone, so I could continue to drown my inadequacies in instant noodle soup.

“You have a fitting in the morning. Grace will be here. You’ll like her, she’s not a bitch. Be here at ten.”

I put down my spoon and stared at the phone. “We have an event tomorrow? But Nick is still at the shoot.”

“No, he’s not.”

My heart sank at Isaac’s words. Nick was back in LA, and he hadn’t told me?

I put the bowl down on the coffee table. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

“Oh, okay. So Grace isn’t going to act all shocked when I show up with excessive boobs and a big butt?”

Isaac laughed. “No honey, Grace is not. She knows exactly what to do with your figure. See you in the morning.”

I hit the end button for the call. I stared at my bowl of soup. I had been hungry and feeling sorry for myself. Now I just felt sorry for myself.

The phone rang again, this time I stared at the caller ID. I really did not want to talk to Jessie. I had done a pretty good job of avoiding her since that disastrous lunch a month or so earlier. I let the phone ring. Jessie could leave a voicemail if she really wanted me to call her back.

The ringing ended. With a sigh, I picked up my bowl and slurped in a few noodles. They were still warm, but they didn’t offer any comfort. I settled back into the show I was watching.

Fifteen minutes later, at minimum, my phone rang again.

“Geez, what is it tonight?” I looked at the ID. I had to answer this one.

“Hi, Mom.” I said I held the phone to my ear. She wasn’t a speakerphone kind of person. If I really thought about it, conversations with Mom were safe for anyone to overhear. Not that I had eavesdroppers in my little house. While Isaac was rarely fit for public consumption, yet I always put him on speaker phone.

“Your cousin called me.”

“Great, what did Jessie want?” I asked.

“How did you know I meant Jessie?”

I closed my eyes, crap. “Well,” I started. “Educated guess. Gabe never calls.”

She made a harumph noise. “I guess you have a point. Don’t you want to know why your cousin called me?”

Not really. I grimaced and winced. I did not want to be having this conversation. I couldn’t believe that Jessie, wait, no. I could believe that Jessie would call my mother on the other side of the country to tattle on me because I wasn’t talking to her on the phone.

Jessie was my age, and she was acting like she was five.

“What did Jessie need, Mom? She hasn’t left me any messages.”

It didn’t matter that I knew Jessie never left messages, she expected a call back. But I was old fashioned, Mom raised me to be so. And that included leaving a message if she really needed something. Jessie never really wanted anything other than to be a pain in my backside.

“Apparently, you aren’t calling her back. But” Mom sighed. “If she isn’t leaving you a message, I guess how would you know? Who is this Nick person?”

“What?” I coughed. “Nick? He’s my boss…s’s client. I’ve been doing some projects for him. How did you know about him?”

“Your cousin mentioned that you seem to be spending a fair bit of time with him and wanted to know if she needed to be aware if there was anything going on between the two of you.”

I hated that Jessie knew about Nick. There was nothing I could do about that; I was here to be seen with him at events. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Jessie called you to gossip on me. You know what she’s doing? She’s putting ideas into your head, trying to freak you out that something is going on when there’s nothing.”

“Freak me out? What kind of talk is that? You know better than to use slang. I hope you don’t speak around your clients that way.”

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