Page 111 of Blow Me Down
“I don’t know him, Mom,” she said with shrug. “I just had a couple of e-mails from him, that’s all. You know him better than me.”
“I only know him in the game,” I said slowly, a wave of doubt crashing down on me. I hated to think about it, I didn’t want to think about it, but what if Tara, in her innocence, had inadvertently hit upon a truth? Everything I knew about Corbin was from the dratted game—what if he was a different person outside of it? “Sometimes people use situations like that to role-play.”
“Yeah. I like to be a pirate. I get to be all the things I’m not really. It’s cool.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Corbin likes to role-play. He’s a very good pirate.”
“Well, that makes sense. He made the game.”
“Yes, he did,” I said, the words falling from my tongue like little drops of acid.
“And I know absolutely nothing about what he’s like in real life, outside of his pirate persona. He could be totally different. He could… regret some things.”
She eyed me as I sat like a frozen block of horror in the tub. “You’ve got a horrible look on your face, like you’re going to be sick. You want me to leave so you can barf?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” I was too miserable to make up my mind. My stomach had balled itself up into a wad of unhappiness and doubt.
“I’ll go,” she said, hopping down off the counter. She stopped at the door to give me an enigmatic look. “You’re always telling me I’m being a drama queen, but you know what? Now you’re doing the same thing.”
I made an outraged noise. “I am not!”
She nodded her head at me. “Yes, you are, too. I mean, why would he be any different outside the game? You’re the same person, right?”
My blood froze.
“Mom?”
“Er… I suppose I am the same. Mostly the same. Oh, who am I fooling? I was brave and witty and sexy and all sorts of other things in the game that I’m not in reality.” I waved the loofah around in a pathetic gesture. “He’s going to take one look at me in real life and know that my brain lied to him about the sort of person I really am.”
She rolled her eyes. “Man, and you say I exaggerate.”
“This is different,” I said, sinking down into the water, well aware that I was behaving moronically. But I couldn’t stop myself. “I have never really met Corbin. So much of an attraction between people is a chemical thing. What if we don’t mesh well? What if I’m not exciting enough for him? What if—”
“Sheesh! Get over yourself already! Why don’t you just call him and ask if he still loves you and all that stuff?”
“It’s not that easy,” I said, flicking the water, cold at the thought of what I would do if the real-life Corbin wasn’t as madly in love with me as I was with him.
“Doctor Tara’s Love Counseling Shop is now closed,” she said, leaving the bathroom, her voice drifting into the bathroom as she went upstairs. “Call him up and tell him you want to see him. It’s only a little after midnight.”
I sank lower into the water and thought about what my smart-alecky—but sometimes wise-beyond-her-years (she got that from my side of the family)—
daughter said, and by the time the water had chilled to the point where it matched the coldness inside me, I had come to a decision.
“It’s up to the man to call first,” I told Tara on the way to bed. She was lying on her stomach on her bed, watching theFriday Night Late Late Movie.She made a face at me. “There are some dating rules that are inviolable, and this is one of them. The guy calls first.”
“This is 2005, Mom, not 1905,” she quipped. “Call him.”
I closed the door on her and went to my own room, sitting in bed while the two halves of my psyche battled each other. After a half hour of dashing, daring Amy struggling with worried, confused Amy, I finally gave up and reached for the phone.
Only to realize I didn’t have Corbin’s phone number.
“Hell,” I said, then got out of bed and peeked around Tara’s door. She was still up, on her cell phone with one of her equally night-owl girlfriends while she painted her toenails a repulsive shade of purple.
“… and I said, no way, and Celie said, yes way, totally, and I said—oh, one sec, my mom wants something. What?” She covered the mouthpiece of the phone and narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re not going to go all love-struck on me again, are you? ‘Cause there is only so much I have to take; then it gets freaky.”
I pointed an admonishing finger at her. “Less attitude, please. I wanted to know if you have Corbin’s phone number.”
She grinned and uncovered the phone. “She’s gonna call him. No, not Celie, my mom. Yeah, the computer guy. I don’t know, I’ll ask. What are you going to say?”
