Page 4 of Penelope in Retrograde

Chapter 2

I’m in the upside down.

That’s the only thing that can possibly explain my current predicament. I, Penny Elsbeth Banks, have somehow managed to be sucked into a cruel alternate universe where kind and spicy romance authors are not only forced to attend Thanksgiving dinner as spinsters begging their family for money, but also forced to ride in cars with their ex-husbands. I’m basically one janky string of Christmas lights away from going full-on Winona Ryder.

“Smith?” My mouth goes dry. “Why are you standing in front of my rideshare?”

“Your rideshare?” He smirks in a way that I’m pretty sure most people would describe as charming. “I thought it was mine.”

He taps on the leather mailbox-shaped carrier slung over his arm. A graying fuzzball of a Pomeranian pops her head out of the carrier and starts to pant. Instantly, my heart melts.

“Harriet!” I squeal. “Oh my god. I can’t believe you still have her. Let her out. I need to hold her.”

Harriet is Ozzie’s littermate. We adopted them in what I now realize was a Hail Mary to distract ourselves from the fact that we had no business being married. We filed for divorce a few weeks later. Thankfully, the dogs lasted longer.

Smith slides into the captain’s seat next to me and carefully pulls Harriet out of her carrier. Her little butt starts to wiggle a hundred miles an hour as he places her in my lap.

“Careful. She pees when she’s happy,” Smith warns me.

“So do I.” I nestle into her as she showers my face with kisses. “I’ve missed you, little one. Both of us have. Ozzie, look. It’s your sister.”

I lower Harriet to Ozzie’s crate, unsure of how the two will take to each other. Ozzie’s a big, dopey goofball that loves everyone. Sometimes he loves them a little too much. He’s a recovering excited humper. But, like me, Harriet might be less than thrilled with having relatives shoved in front of her snout after a plane ride.

She gives him a little sniff through the crate before launching into a complete love fest. They yip, whine, and piddle with delight. I open Ozzie’s crate and watch as two old dogs become puppies all over again.

“Looks like they’re all caught up.” Smith’s gaze shifts from the dogs to me. “I guess now it’s our turn. How the hell have you been, Penny?”

“Uh. Fine?” I chuckle nervously, suddenly acutely aware that I’m sitting less than two feet away from my ex-husband.

He somehow looks the same way I remember him, but also so different. His chestnut brown hair is short, the way it was when we were in high school, minus the early 2000s frosted tips. There are a few streaks of gray around his temples and a little peppered into his beard. The beard is new. It changes his face in a way that isn’t bad, just unfamiliar. It makes him look more serious and brings a hardness to his expression that doesn’t exist in my memories. At least not the memories of Smith I choose to revisit. Smith always had this light in his eyes, a the-world-is-my-oyster and glasses-are-half-full sort of way about him. They lit up his whole face. That light’s a little dimmer now than it is in my memories. I guess life has a way of doing that.

Part of me is curious what he’s thinking about me. How closely do I match the memories of me that he’s kept tucked away? My physical appearance isn’t all that different. Same coppery red hair with a mind of its own. Same freckles that his mother used to say reminded her of constellations. Jeans and a flannel shirt like I wore all the time when it was just the two of us and I wasn’t worried about trying to impress anyone. I’m sure I look the same to him on the outside, but if he could see me on the inside now, I’m not sure he’d recognize me.

“Geez, it’s been what, ten years? Who would’ve thought after all this time we’d meet up like this?”

A romance author or the devil himself, would be my guess. Both get their kicks out of torturing folks, although romance authors at least have the common courtesy to promise a happy ending.

“Beats me,” I reply.

“Where are you living now?”

“San Francisco,” I say. “You?”

“Phoenix is home. Though I’m barely there.”

It’s the kind of statement that normally begs a follow-up question of Why’s that? But I don’t need to ask because I already know the answer. Smith’s a nomad at heart. He could wake up in a new city every morning and be perfectly content. I’m the exact opposite. I need a home like a surfboard needs a wave.

“San Francisco is a great city. Expensive as hell. One of my clients lives there, and he told me he pays thirty grand a year for preschool.”

“It costs a lot.”

“Oh.” He looks somewhat surprised. “Do you have kids?”

My stomach free-falls into my Birkenstocks. I didn’t mean to imply that I had kids or that I had the slightest idea of the going rate for preschool. I meant that San Francisco in general is an expensive place to live.

“No.” I shake my head. “No kids.”

“Me neither.”

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