Thursday, July 25th, 2013
Several different emotions immediately surged through me when I saw Riley standing there.
The first was, of course, surprise. Over the past week I had come around to the idea that I was simply just never going to see her again, so to find her in front of me now—not just a purely random encounter, but to find out that she was literally going to be my closest coworker for the next year—was beyond shocking.
The next was lust. Damn, she looked good. It's not like she was dressed to kill—she wore a conservative blue and purple floral pattern dress that went down to her mid-calf, with red flats—but even in her schoolteacher getup she was undoubtedly beautiful. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a single braid, showing off her long, graceful neck, which immediately sent my mind back to our night together as I recalled the sounds she made when I kissed her there.
After the lust came the pain. Objectively I knew how silly it was to have been so broken up over a one-night stand, but this girl had
hurt
me, hurt me in a way that I had never experienced before. Yes, there was much more emotional pain when Tori ended our relationship after three years together. The ache of slowly coming to realize that Amanda—the woman I had decided I was going to marry—was not, in fact, the right person for me was a deeper, more fundamental hurt. But Riley had hurt me in a way that felt like the emotional equivalent of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Not in the "here we go again" sense of it, but like I had been excited about something and then before I even realized what had happened it was gone and I was flat on my back wondering why my head hurt and my vision was blurry. Whatever the reason, I had felt something strong in my short time with Riley, and then she had disappeared. She had given me quite the emotional gut-punch, one I had just started to feel like I was recovering from. Seeing her in front of me now had all of that pain rushing back and hitting me right in those sore spots again, reopening the wounds.
Then came the confusion. My brain was whirring and heating up like an overclocked computer trying to process everything I knew about Riley alongside everything I knew about Miss Jackson and somehow combine them into the woman I found standing in front of me. Riley was fun, funny, full of life. She had come out to meet me at a bar and ended up in my bed a couple hours later. The picture I had of Miss Jackson from Tori and Melissa was a woman who was quiet, reserved, and not very social. Riley had deliberately avoided us talking about our jobs when we met. I didn't have anything on my profile about being a teacher and hadn't mentioned it, and even if I had I definitely didn't say which school, so it wasn't like she knew we were going to be coworkers. She said she had a roommate, one who had helped her set up her own profile on the dating app. But I knew from Tori and Melissa that Miss Jackson had a serious, long-term boyfriend, one that she was, in their words "practically engaged to."
Oh shit.
My pain and my confusion crashed into each other head-on and the resulting wreck came back to un-life as an enormous anger zombie. Miss Jackson has a boyfriend.
Riley
has a boyfriend.
Well, at least that goes part of the way towards explaining her disappearance on Saturday morning.
Now I wasn't even sure what I could trust from our time together. She certainly hadn't said anything about having a boyfriend on Friday night. I don't think it was even implied at all. What else had she been hiding or lying about? Sure, I hadn't come out and directly asked her "By the way, do you have a boyfriend?" but I thought that us both being single had been an assumed part of the deal when we met on a dating app and ended up in bed together. Did she actually have a roommate, or was that a reference to her boyfriend? Did they live together? If they were practically engaged then I would assume so—it's the twenty-first century, most people in serious relationships live together before they get engaged or married. But then that would mean her boyfriend had been the one to help her set up her profile on the dating app, which was an entirely different situation, one I wasn't sure improved or worsened my opinion of her actions on Friday night. For now I decided that either way it wasn't good, certainly not for me. Was this a game that she and her boyfriend played? Go pick up a guy, sleep with him, and then ditch him? Was it something less nefarious than that, just an open relationship but she decided to skip out for some other reason? Or had she actually cheated on her boyfriend with me? I'll be honest, I didn't like any of those options. Maybe they had broken up over the summer and Melissa and Tori just didn't know about it? That was the best case scenario, I guess, but she had still ghosted me.
Fuck, was her name even Riley? I had never gotten a last name on Friday, and I didn't know if she even would have been truthful about that, but given everything else at this point I wouldn't be surprised if she had used a fake name for our hookup. Jackson was obviously her real last name, but I didn't remember seeing anything that indicated a first initial. Maybe I should have taken the time to look more closely at the school website or the staff registry or something. Finding out Tori worked here was surprise enough, I guess, and I hadn't bothered looking at anything else once we reconnected. I didn't remember Tori or Melissa mentioning her first name, it was always just "Miss Jackson." Of course I wouldn't have had any reason to connect a Riley they mentioned with the Riley I had met on Friday night, but I was pretty sure that even hearing one of them say the name Riley would have triggered some sort of emotion in me that I would have remembered.
All of these thoughts and feelings ran through my head in roughly the first second of seeing Riley (
if that was her real name
). Thankfully my years as a high-level quarterback had trained me to process and react to changing situations quickly, so I recovered before she did. Riley—actually, let's stick with Miss Jackson for now, at least I can be sure of that—looked just as shocked to see me as I'm sure I had been to see her. She had looked up from her desk when Mrs. Mitchell introduced me and then froze, her jaw literally dropping. She stared like that for at least two full second before her nostrils flared and her eyes widened in what I recognized to be fear, or maybe even panic. I'm not sure if that was her natural reaction, or if she had noticed the flash of anger that I was feeling towards her.
Her fear made my anger retreat. Not fully, but it took a backseat for now. I absolutely hated that a girl could be
afraid
of me like Miss Jackson seemed to be. Hopefully it was just fear of having to give me an explanation for her behavior, and not of me somehow actually hurting her. I was a big guy and that could be intimidating, I never wanted to give a woman the sense that I would ever do something to physically harm them, so I decided to shove my anger down even further and take control of the situation. It wouldn't stay buried forever, I was sure of that, but I could at least keep it away for now. Besides, I needed to get a handle on this situation, hopefully before Mrs. Mitchell noticed something odd was happening between me and Miss Jackson.
I forced a smile to my face and strode across the room towards Miss Jackson, reaching out my hand. "Miss Jackson, it's wonderful to meet you. Mrs. Mitchell has told me some great things about you. I'm excited to be working with you this year. I'm Mr. Dillon. Ryan."
She allowed me to take her hand and shake it, but she was obviously still trying to process what exactly was going on. "Uh, yes...um...nice to meet you too, um, Mr. Dillon?"
"You can call me Ryan."
"Of course, um, yeah. Ryan. Nice to meet you. I'm Riley." A-ha! Well, at least she hadn't lied about her name.
Mrs. Mitchell laughed at Riley's awkwardness. "My goodness, Miss Jackson. I know Ryan's about as handsome as they come, but I don't think I've ever seen you this tongue-tied," she teased. She had, thankfully, missed the full range of emotions that Riley and I had each gone through and just took her reaction to be run-of-the-mill awkwardness around an attractive member of the opposite sex.
