Love, Accidentally

  Love, Accidentally

  ALSO BY SARAH PEKKANEN

  The Opposite of Me

  All Is Bright: A Short Story

  Skipping a Beat

  Washington Square Press

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Pekkanen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Washington Square Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Washington Square Press ebook edition December 2011

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  ISBN: 978-1-4516-7434-7

  Contents

  Love, Accidentally: A Short Story

  The Opposite of Me excerpt

  Skipping a Beat excerpt

  These Girls excerpt

  Reviews

  About the Author

  About Washington Square Press

  Ask Atria

  Love, Accidentally

  ILSA BROWN’S HEAD whipped around at the sound of a woman’s scream.

  Her eyes scanned her surroundings, sweeping past the gaggle of impossibly beautiful young women at an outdoor café, the traffic-snarled L.A. intersection, the canopy of oak trees dappled gold by the early-evening July sun. Her gaze finally settled on a guy sitting on a curb a dozen yards away, clutching a brown bundle in his arms.

  As she drew closer, she could hear the man saying, “It’s okay, buddy.”

  A woman, tanned and ropy-looking as a walnut, stood on the pavement next to her idling white Land Rover, a hand over her mouth. The screamer, Ilsa surmised, noting the woman’s tennis whites and vaguely wondering if she had a matching vehicle for every ensemble. “You scared me to death!” the walnut-woman shouted. “You really need to keep better control of your dog.”

  “He’s not my—look, lady, I think you rolled over his foot. How about apologizing instead of yelling at us?”

  She extended her middle finger, then climbed into her Land Rover and drove off, catching the last second of the yellow light as she peeled away.

  “Hi.” Ilsa squatted down next to the guy. “Can I help?”

  “I don’t think so.” He looked up at her, and the annoyance lingering on his face evaporated. “Thanks, though.”

  As Ilsa’s eyes met his, she caught her breath. Something shifted within her, a flutter that felt like recognition, even though she was quite certain she’d never seen him before. To hide her confusion, she did what came naturally: She reached out with her strong, thin fingers—the two crescent-shaped scars on the back of her right hand gleaming pale and smooth—and began to examine the little mixed-breed dog. His stomach was pliant—no blood pooling there from internal injuries, fortunately—but the position of his rear left leg worried her. “Hey, sweetie, I’m going to check something,” she whispered to the dog. She pulled her hand away at his whimper. “It might be broken.”

  The guy exhaled loudly. “I’ll take him home and call around to try to find a vet. I’ve only had him for a week. Actually, I’m just fostering him. . . . It’s kind of a long story.”

  “Tell me on the way to my clinic,” she said. “We can walk; it’s only a few blocks away. We’ll take an X-ray and get him fixed up there.”

  The guy looked at her, and Ilsa registered deep brown eyes, a slightly off-center nose, and thick dark hair that looked, blessedly, as if it had never tangoed with an overpriced styling product. Ilsa’s last boyfriend had required more space on the bathroom shelves than she did—and she was a serious fan of all things Sephora.

  “You’re a veterinarian?” he said. “No kidding?”

  She nodded. “Yup. I’m Ilsa, by the way.”

  “Ilsa?” he repeated.

  “Short for Elizabeth,” she said. “My sister couldn’t say my full name when I was born, and it kind of stuck.”

  He extended the hand that wasn’t cradling the dog. “Griffin—but most people call me Grif. Are you sure I’m not ruining your night?” he asked. “Aren’t you heading out on a date or something?”

  She smiled and stood up, suddenly glad she’d applied lip gloss and changed into her favorite ice-blue linen sundress before leaving work. “Nope,” she lied. “It’s my turn to be on call. So this little guy’s timing is perfect. What’s his name, by the way?”

  Grif groaned. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”

  She raised an eyebrow as he muttered something.

  “Fabio?” She burst into laughter. “Did you just say Fabio? Like the guy on the butter commercials?”

  “It’s not butter, though apparently people can’t believe it,” Grif said, grinning. “Some woman who had a crush on Fabio named the dog after him. I didn’t know that when I agreed to foster him, by the way, or it would’ve been a deal breaker. I tried giving him manly names like Buster, but he refuses to answer to anything but Fabio.”

  Ilsa looked into the mutt’s bulging eyes and stroked his head. “Totally fits him,” she said, struggling to keep a straight face. “He’s a heartbreaker.”

  Grif stood up, and she felt it again, that little shimmer in the vicinity of her solar plexus. Physically they were opposites—she had blue eyes and hair so blond that some people asked if she was of Scandinavian ancestry. And even though she was wearing heels, Grif stood half a foot taller than she.

  “Lead the way,” he said, falling into step beside her. “Weird how things like this happen, huh?”

  She looked up at him. “What, that a veterinarian was walking by just when you needed one?”

  Grif shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “That there I was, wondering why everyone I’ve met in L.A. lately seems to be a jerk. . . . And then you came along.”

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Ilsa had changed into green scrubs, Fabio was heavily sedated, and Grif was breathing into a paper bag.

  “Don’t feel bad. It freaks everyone out,” Ilsa said, putting her scalpel down on a metal tray. Her second lie of the night; vets weren’t supposed to let pet owners into the clinic’s OR, so she had no idea how most people reacted. But it was a quiet night, and the clinic’s owner was away at a convention. Just one tech manned the front desk, and he was busy studying a thick textbook.

  Grif took the paper bag away from his mouth. “First I tell you my dog is named Fabio, then I almost pass out when you cut open his leg,” he said. “I swear I usually make a better first impression than this.”

  “Oh, you’re not doing so badly,” Ilsa said lightly. She kept her eyes on the dog’s lower leg as she encased it in a plaster cast. “We’ll keep him here so our overnight tech can monitor him, and you’ll be able to take him home tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That’s good,” Grif said. “Fabio has lots of girlfriends, but they don’t know about each other. It would be awkward if they all showed up here, like when that Chilean guy with a wife and mistress got stuck in the mine.”

  Ilsa laughed as Grif folded up the paper bag in his hands, allotting the task more concentration than it required. “So given that I’ve completely ruined your night,” he said, “can I try to make it up to you? Do you like sushi? Because I just read a review of a place that’s supposed to be great . . .”

>   “Um,” she began.

  “Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand to cut off the rest of her sentence. “You’ve got a boyfriend.”

  “No, no, that isn’t it,” she said quickly. “But I’m originally from Minnesota. Sushi isn’t really a big thing there. I love pizza, though.”

  “Yeah?” Grif said. “Me, too. It’s so much more filling than raw fish. Go figure.”

  “So do you know any good pizza places?”

  “I’m from the Midwest, too. Chicago,” Grif said. “You better believe that was the first thing I scoped out when I moved to L.A. I’ll take you to my favorite place . . . if you’re free.”

  She knew she was supposed to say she was busy to prove her desirability. But she didn’t feel like playing games, not with this guy. “Perfect,” Ilsa said.

  She turned her attention back to the dog as she finished fitting the cast. He was the color of a baby deer, with a triangle of white on his chest and floppy ears that were too big for his head.

  “Fabio’s going to have to wear a cone of shame for a week or so,” Ilsa said. “But not tonight; he’ll be too groggy from the sedatives to bother his leg. He’ll probably sleep straight through until breakfast. We’ll get him settled in a crate, then we can go eat.”

  “Shouldn’t we write something on his cast first?” Grif asked. “I think Fabio would feel better if we personalized it.”

  “What should we write?” Ilsa asked.

  “ ‘The line forms here, ladies’?” Grif suggested.

  Laughing with Grif as they used Sharpies to draw little red hearts and come-on lines on Fabio’s cast, Ilsa realized she was having a much better time than she would’ve at the elegant seafood restaurant where she was supposed to meet a stockbroker for their second date. She’d texted the stockbroker a version of the truth—that a work emergency had come up—but what she hadn’t revealed was that she wasn’t really on call tonight. She just didn’t want to let Grif walk away.

  “TALL, DARK, HANDSOME, and funny?” Ilsa’s sister Corrine walked onto her wooden deck, handed Ilsa a glass of iced tea, and stretched out on the next lounge chair over. “Now that’s just greedy. Three of those things, maybe . . .”

  Ilsa took a sip of tea, tasting fresh lemon and the sprig of mint Corrine had plucked from one of her little herb pots on the way to the refrigerator. Everything Corrine did was like this—elegant, effortless, somehow just right. She seemed to sprinkle around grace notes as she traveled through life: She remembered people’s names the first time she met them; she punctuated her sentences with a low, throaty laugh that never sounded anything but genuine; she always had a great book to lend you, or the perfect funky necklace to pull together your outfit.

  “So tell me everything,” Corrine was saying as she rubbed lotion on her long legs. “Or just skip ahead to the juicy bits.” She was thirty-two, only three years older than Ilsa, but Ilsa still looked up to her sister as much as she had when they’d been kids. It was Corrine who’d dreamed of escaping the cold of Minnesota for California. “Someday I’m going to move to a place where winter doesn’t exist,” she’d muttered to Ilsa one morning when she was fourteen or fifteen, her voice barely audible through the thick scarf covering her mouth and nose as they trudged the half mile to school. “Are you with me?” And instantly Ilsa had begun to imagine what it would be like: no more mittens or layers or ugly puffy boots. No slick patches of ice, shoveling, runny noses . . . just cut-off jean shorts and flip-flops and the coconut smell of suntan lotion.

  Corrine had attended UCLA, coming home for breaks with lighter streaks in her hair and the newfound skill of Rollerblading, and by the time Ilsa’s acceptance letter had arrived, she’d already known which dorm was the best, where to find cheap but yummy grilled cheeses on sourdough, and which professors’ classes she wanted to take freshman year.

  “We went out for pizza,” Ilsa said. “Just at this casual place, but it was really nice. Grif knew the owners, and they brought us glasses of champagne. Like they knew the night was special, too.”

  “What happened after dinner?” Corrine asked.

  “What are you doing with your face?”

  “Leering,” Corrine said.

  “Good God, stop. You look like one of those plastic-surgery-addicted women we see on Melrose,” Ilsa said.

  “You’re stalling,” Corrine said.

  “One little kiss,” Ilsa said. She could feel the goofy smile spread across her face, but she didn’t care. “At the end of the night . . . but I’m seeing him again on Friday. Corr, it was so amazing. We walked down to the beach to catch the sunset and talked. I mean for hours. He’s new to L.A.—his company transferred him about a year ago.”

  “What does he do?”

  Ilsa took another, longer sip of tea. “He’s, ah, unemployed right now. He quit his job last month. He was in sales, but it was just a job, you know? He told me he couldn’t see selling medical equipment for the rest of his life. He was turning thirty, and he said he’d made all these changes—he moved here from Chicago and broke up with a longtime girlfriend—but he didn’t even plan this one. He just drove to work one day and he was sitting in the parking lot, getting ready to unfasten his seat belt. And suddenly he saw himself fifteen years in the future, feeling that heaviness in his gut as he pulled open the door to his office. Wishing away the day so he could escape. And he put his car back into drive and took off. He said he drove like someone was chasing him.”

  “Maybe he was worried he’d change his mind,” Corrine offered.

  “Maybe,” Ilsa said. She looked at her sister. “He isn’t anything like Jones, you know. I mean, yeah, he’s not working right now. But it’s only temporary.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything,” Corrine said mildly. She tilted back her head and closed her eyes against the sun. Ilsa wondered if Corrine was remembering the night, almost a year earlier, when Ilsa had knocked on her door, mascara-streaked tears streaming down her cheeks. Jones had been her last serious boyfriend, an actor/bartender/bass player in a local band, a guy who couldn’t commit to anything: not to a steady job, not to regular credit card payments, and certainly not to the girl who’d sat on a stool in the background during his gigs. Ilsa’s pain didn’t stem from the fact that Jones had broken up with her, because in the back of her mind she’d known it wouldn’t last . . . it was the way he did it. As if she—they—had never meant much to him at all.

  Ilsa had always been there to comfort Jones when his band didn’t get hired for a gig, or when a casting director deemed him too old for a commercial or bit part in a movie (she’d noticed an uptick in his hair-related purchases after those rejections, particularly products that promised to camouflage a receding hairline). She’d pretended to like the fact that he’d swapped his first name for his last, even though she knew it was just a way for him to grab a shred of attention in a town where everyone seemed to be vying for the same too-small share. But when Jones came to her apartment to pick up his stuff and she began to cry, he didn’t hug her or even spout the tired cliché about hoping they’d stay friends. He just shoved a few things into his bag and left. As if he’d stored up all the kindness and care she’d given him and was greedily carting it away, too, unwilling to return any of it to her.

  Now she couldn’t believe she’d been so upset over losing Jones. She couldn’t believe she’d stayed with him for a full year, either, even if he did have six-pack abs, a deliciously strong jawline, and nimble fingers that turned bass notes into an almost religious experience (what those fingers did to her probably extended their relationship by a good six months after it should have been over). Already her memory of him was receding faster than his hairline.

  “Grif is a really decent guy,” Ilsa said. She pressed her glass against her neck, relishing the cold on her warm skin. “I told you why he was fostering this little dog, right? His neighbor volunteers for a shelter, and she told him it was going to be put down if no one took it, then she showed him a picture. . . . And the way he talke
d about his family. He’s really close to his parents; I could tell.”

  “Does he know what he wants to do?” Corrine asked. “Jobwise?”

  “He wants to teach high school,” Ilsa said. “He loves history. He’s saved up some money and he’s going back to school to get his master’s.”

  “That sounds great,” Corrine said. “He sounds great. Really.”

  Ilsa released the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She rolled over onto her side to face Corrine. “When you first saw Bruce,” she said, “the very first second. Did you . . . feel anything? Or did it come later, when you knew he was the one?”

  “I didn’t think about him that way,” Corrine said. “He was married.”

  “Wasn’t he newly separated?” Ilsa corrected.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know that at the time,” Corrine said. “He was still wearing a ring. And I could hardly miss it, since it was about four inches away from my eyes while he was giving me a filling.”

  “So romantic,” Ilsa teased.

  “Muzak in the background, a spit cup to my left . . . what more could a girl ask for?” Corrine said, laughing. “Do you want any more iced tea?”

  “No, I’m good,” Ilsa said.

  “How about staying for dinner? I marinated some salmon earlier. I was going to toss it on the grill with fresh corn and pineapple.”

  “Somehow that sounds so much nicer than the In-N-Out burger I was going to pick up on the way home and eat in the car,” Ilsa said. “So where is Bruce, by the way?”

  Corrine sat up, squinted at her watch, and frowned. “Good question. He went for a run but he should’ve been back by now. Maybe he stopped to get something to drink.”

  “I haven’t seen him in what . . . three weeks?” Ilsa mentally counted. “Remember? Last time I came over he was in Seattle, and the time before that he was working late.” Ilsa adored Bruce; he was the perfect counterpart for her sister. He was easygoing, whereas Corrine could be a worrier, and his spontaneity offset her propensity to overplan. Corrine had homebody tendencies, but since they’d gotten married a year and a half ago, she’d seen him challenge her sister to do things she wouldn’t ordinarily: run a half marathon together, take up golf, and hike their way through Yellowstone National Park.