What You Wanted Read online

  What You Wanted

  Mina V. Esguerra

  It's the classic one-night stand: Beach wedding, bridesmaid, groom's friend. When Andrea and Damon meet, sparks fly, and they give in to the attraction. Sounds simple, but Andrea's still getting over someone, and Damon thought he'd be hooking up with another person that night. It could still be simple, really, if they chalk it up to a weekend tryst and move on.

  But one night becomes lunch the week after, and then dinner the next weekend...and before they know it, Andrea and Damon are still together, dealing with the feelings they know they might still have for other people. How hard can it be to get exactly what you want? How do you even know what it is?

  Chapter 1

  So, what do you say to a guy you had a one-night stand with, the next time you see him?

  The right answer is nothing because you should never see him again. And yet less than a week later, I was seeing Damon Esquibel again. It was his invite, because clearly the guy had the wrong idea about what “one night” meant.

  Not that we had ever talked about it, or defined the number of nights that...never mind.

  I was nervous. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to show up at this restaurant all fresh and fabulous, fierce new haircut with risky but ultimately worth-it fringe. I was wearing my third new outfit of the week, because it was also my third day at this new job. When I needed any kind of confidence boost, I did it through my outfits, and new ones. I was brand-new that day from head to toe, practically.

  The game plan was to be new. And confident. As if I did this all the time. As if I picked up guys at my sister’s wedding, slept with them, and then met them for lunch a block from my workplace a few days later.

  All the time.

  Damon was already there, when I stepped into the Greek restaurant he had picked for us. He...he was wearing a suit.

  Damn it why are you wearing a suit. It wasn’t as formal as the one he had worn in Batangas on Saturday. This was more casual, more appropriate for business Wednesday, gray underneath a charcoal coat, and black pants based on what I saw under the table. It all looked good with the dark hair. He stood up as I neared him and smiled. He was still, apparently, just as handsome. Maybe even more, because I could see him clearly, without the mood lighting that forgave so many imperfections when at an evening wedding reception out on the beach. This was harsh, noon light, in noisy Makati, and it didn’t reveal bad hair, bad skin, bad anything.

  Damn it, don’t smile.

  I smiled back. “Hi, Damon.”

  “Hi, Andrea.”

  Damon looked happy to see me. He had wanted to meet even earlier, like Monday, but I was able to negotiate him down a few days. Not that those two days made this any less conventional. The rules of playing hard to get didn’t apply here, not that they ever did for me—or for him.

  That harsh noon light would have been on me as well, and if he had been disappointed by what it revealed, he didn’t show it. He only said my name but his entire body moved like he was welcoming a friend, or someone more than that. That smile was not for strangers, the way his hand readily curved around my elbow was not so casual.

  It was good, all good. When I first met him he was in attack mode, all stiff and guarded, but later, much later, saw a more relaxed side to him. It was like that now. The attack mode was off. He laughed a little as he bent to kiss my cheek, and I was ready for that. I wasn’t sure if he’d go in for the cheek or the lips, and told myself not to flinch either way. It would have bothered me more, I guess, if he hadn’t done anything.

  A kiss on the cheek was perfectly fine.

  He smelled great. I knew what he smelled like. Sometimes you can know this about someone, and realize that you don’t know much else. Well, I did know that he worked at the same office as my brother-in-law, doing finance and watching markets.

  His hobby involved guns and shooting competitions.

  He hooked up with women but only seriously considered a relationship with the person who hadn’t yet given him the time of day.

  He was an excellent kisser. Thorough, but without the slobber. He had a great move with his hand—

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said. Right, because that was the excuse for this. The job I just started was a few blocks down from his own building, and he asked to see me again as a way of “welcoming” me to this part of town.

  Nobody did that, right? There was no such tradition. But I liked Damon. We spent hours in that resort villa talking, between the sex, and it was a shame to have the person completely disappear from my life. And he worked practically next door.

  “So,” I said, “you’ll never guess what happened a few days ago.”

  He put both elbows on the table and that brought his arms really close to mine. “That’s easy. We met. We did stuff.”

  “I mean after. Thad texted me.”

  He frowned and lifted the menu. “Can we order first? Before we start talking about douchebags.”

  We decided to share an osso buco and olive oil pasta. As I settled into my seat, and the anticipation of the new meal, I remembered why I liked talking to this guy. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know Thad. Everyone I was friends with, that I could have talked to in any way that would have been helpful to me, knew Thad, which made me unable to talk to them about him.

  Thad was one of my closest friends. I had fallen in love with him. I thought he had done the same. I was wrong.

  “So what did he want?” It could come across as territorial of him, using that particular tone, but I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted someone to be on my side. Damon knew he had no right to be jealous, and I had no reason to think that he would react with jealousy about anything I’d share. But the loyalty was to me. Finally. Thank God.

  “‘To apologize.’” I said, putting that in air quotes with my fingers.

  “That all he said?”

  “No...he also said he feels guilty about what he put me through, that he should have been more up front with me, that I deserved better.”

  “That’s big.”

  I nodded. “It is.”

  Damon’s hand moved, and I felt the glass of water between us move closer to me. “Is it what you wanted?”

  Is it? I always thought it was. That I wanted even just an apology from Thad. For leading me on, for making me feel special, and then, eventually, for making me feel used. Now that I had it, it felt...empty.

  I shook my head. “It’s not.”

  “Now that you mention it, something weird happened this week too.”

  I bit my lip and did my best to be flirty. “You mean after we did stuff?”

  “Yeah. Geraldine dropped by the office and talked to me.”

  Ah, Geraldine. She was at the wedding as one of Anton’s friends. She knew Damon socially through that, and from how he told it, they’d been flirting in this weird off and on way for two years. She was the one he was actually planning to sleep with at the wedding. Geraldine was supposedly a frosty type, who barely acknowledged him in public, but made advances of her own in private. I saw a bit of it happening at the wedding, when seeing us together made her the tiniest bit possessive. Geraldine was of course the kind of beauty who could afford to string a man along and frustrate him.

  If she were at all jealous of me? Little old me? Oh that was interesting.

  “That’s new,” I said.

  Damon nodded. “I know. It’s another of her mind games. She was texting and calling in Batangas all weekend. I thought she’d be back to cold, but when I saw her, it was like nothing happened. And we had an actual conversation.”

  “You ignored her calls? But you were supposed to be her ride that weekend.”

  “The last message I sent was to tell her that I’d arranged for ano
ther person to drive her back.”

  “So you didn’t double-book your weekend after all.”

  “I don’t do that.” He hesitated, and when he looked at me again, he seemed slightly apologetic. “I mean, I know what it looks like. Since you know who I thought I’d be with, over there.”

  Look, I was going to cut him some slack about that. It was unexpected, what happened between us. And since I was the one who showed up at his room when I could have just gone back to mine...

  I cleared my throat and closed that conversation thread. “So what did she talk to you about?”

  He shrugged dismissively. “Some movie that’s showing right now. Nothing mind-blowing. But I was surprised.”

  “Is that what you wanted?” I asked him. “You think she’s not playing games with you anymore?”

  Damon leaned back. I felt his shoe nudge mine under the table, leather tip to leather tip. “I think her game’s only beginning. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Interesting that this happened after we met. After we spent time together.”

  What did we get, exactly? Nothing but the satisfaction of winning a small victory over two people who’d made us feel worthless.

  How much was that worth?

  “Maybe we should spend more time together,” I said. “I mean, imagine what else could happen.”

  “We could end up getting exactly what we want,” Damon said, “from Thad and Geraldine.”

  “There’s no logical or scientific basis to this at all.”

  He shook his head. “No. Do you care?”

  I suppressed my giggle. “No.”

  Chapter 2

  My sister didn’t know about the Thad thing.

  Even though Julie was older, she didn’t date much. She didn’t date at all. The guy she married on Saturday was her first ever boyfriend, her first everything. On the other hand I was the flighty younger sister who had to choose among several possible prom dates, kissed guys on the first date, lost her virginity at nineteen. It might have made her stand up as everyone’s “manang” with more conviction, seeing how freely I lent my heart out and took it back.

  But I had no regrets, so she couldn’t have said that she was a virgin as a response to me, because she never saw me sad.

  I didn’t regret any of it. Well, just the one.

  She didn’t know all the details of that yet because I couldn’t tell her, for a long time. She probably had an idea, because she was a smart one, and would have figured out the pattern of weirdness: together every day, and then not at all, then away together, and then the wedding invitation that I ignored and never spoke of again. Also, come on. The dynamic between me and Julie was this: I gave the dating advice. I told her to wear shorter skirts and taller shoes. I told her not to sleep with guys on the first date. I knew how to deal with men.

  Julie was on her honeymoon, so I couldn’t bother her with this. She didn’t know about Damon either.

  A text from Shayla: You looked great at the wedding, girl. Want to meet for drinks tonight?

  Not tonight, I texted back. Need to stay late to do something.

  She replied: It’s your first week. You don’t need to be so intense.

  I want to make a good impression. Where are you hanging out? Who will you be with?

  Bellvina across the street from here. Yel and Kris are coming. Join us please, we miss you.

  I only asked where so I would know where I shouldn’t be.

  Yel, and Kris, and Shayla...were friends of Thad too. Because we were all friends. They were “after-work drinks” buddies with Thad and his new wife Naomi. They probably didn’t know what happened on our lost weekend, a few weeks before Thad and Naomi met, when I headed out to Batangas on a hiking and diving trip, and Thad was there with me. He didn’t tell them he was there with me.

  In the months that followed, there was that sudden meeting Naomi, and dating Naomi, and marrying Naomi. I pretended to be busy helping Julie with her wedding, and then I changed jobs. My friends didn’t notice anything wrong with me. Not that I gave them the chance to notice, because I barely showed up.

  Nothing was wrong with me. I got screwed, that was all.

  The ground floor of the building of my new workplace housed several restaurants. There was a Mexican-themed “healthy food” place, a popular coffee shop, a twenty-four hour convenience store, and a 1920s-themed bar that opened at four pm. I had been going there every day, once I clocked out at six pm. I liked their fruit juices.

  I didn’t drink all that much. But this place was dark, and the patrons kept to themselves, and I knew for a fact that Shayla and everyone else wouldn’t be here.

  “You again.” The lady behind the bar couldn’t have been older than me. We were the same height too, which was cool, because I could look her in the eye. “Not that I’m complaining. Do you want to try the grape this time?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Whatever. Jumbo size.”

  “I’m Karen,” she said, while slicing something just out of my sight.

  “Andrea,” I replied. “I work in the building. Just started this week.”

  “Okay, and now you’re a regular. Thanks.”

  “I like your place,” I said, and I wasn’t just being nice. “And you make great juice.”

  “Which office did you move to?”

  “Advertising. Small one upstairs.”

  She must have gotten the idea that I wasn’t going to share too much about that, so she smiled and dropped fruit into a blender. “Well, thanks for hanging out here.”

  The blender whirred, and I watched it. I mouthed “You’re welcome” because she wouldn’t have heard it anyway.

  ***

  Text from Thad: How are you? Happy Friday.

  Seriously?

  Never mind that this was nearly identical to his texts from years ago, so it shouldn’t have bothered me. Thad and I met through some common friends in high school, hung out, stayed friends throughout, watched while the other dated other people. We’d always been flirty, but respected for the most part the line that we couldn’t cross, for so long.

  I would be the first to admit that I handled that wrong. I had been attracted to him, his stupid floppy hair and his lean beautiful neck since I first met him, but ruled him out as a “serious guy.” I was a kid at the time, come on. I stayed away from steady, back then.

  Julie told me to be careful about this. That a “good guy” could misinterpret my dating habits, and keep his distance, even if he could be great for me. I told her, “If he were so great then he wouldn’t step back like that. Come over here and fight for me.” But that was Manang Julie, always thinking that I had to wait, that I had to look before I jumped off a cliff.

  I got that text on a Friday afternoon, while I was writing something for work, and decided not to reply. As far as work went, this job wasn’t so difficult. It required writing, creativity, presentation skills, all of which came easily to me. But if I chose to, I could dive deep into this and not think of anything else, and I did. I hid the phone, stepped away from the work laptop, and holed up in a free meeting room to storyboard my next presentation by hand. This workspace was small, but new, and designed to make us “creative types” feel at home. There was a television playing an entire season of a TV series the whole day. Bean bags in the pantry, because we were encouraged to eat and recline. Someone on the other side of the room managed a daily playlist, and while nothing was too loud, I needed quiet. And there were soothingly colorful rooms for that too.

  When I came back out, it was after six, which was probably the best time to reply.

  Me: Happy Friday!

  There. We were friends again, like he wanted.

  My next text was to Damon: Did anything interesting happen to you just now?

  Damon’s reply came within seconds. Yes. We should talk about it. Pick you up from your lobby in ten minutes?

  Julie was probably enjoying herself silly in Tokyo but her voice was still in my head. “Are yo
u doing this? Are you throwing yourself at this guy to forget another one?”

  Huh. “For your information, Imaginary Julie, the thing with Thad, that you don’t know about, happened a long time ago. I don’t care that he’s married. I’m just angry. I want to stop being angry.”

  I replied to Damon, See you in ten minutes.

  Chapter 3

  “I can't believe it's been a week.”

  “Too long or too short?”

  Damon sort of huffed, like he was offended that I didn't know what he meant. “Too long. But maybe it's the hell week at work. I'm taking over Anton's accounts, while he's away.”

  Right. Damon was in the same team as my brother-in-law, Anton. He was the only guy from work to have been invited, because apparently Anton didn’t have a lot of work friends.

  But he had a lot of friends.

  If I had been in a better mood at the wedding, I would have paid more attention to the fact that the group that represented “Anton's friends” were ridiculously good-looking. Julie had said something before about them. All executives, models, business owners. Extroverts with wardrobe budgets, company cars, dealing with clients and stuff like that, but that was bull. They weren't sweet-talking pretty people; they were the dangerous kind of attractive.

  Anton, since I hadn't mentioned it yet, was indeed dangerously good-looking. A “hide your daughters under the bed” kind of good-looking. He was the bachelor that most guys wished they were, and then he went off and fell in love with my sister. Because people did that, I realized. Some people got tired of the game, of needing to keep up, and when they found someone they didn't need to play a game against, they felt comforted. I knew that because many guys I'd dated found that someone, after dating me.

  Thad was just the latest and most painful one.

  Damon already knew this. It was one of my darkest thoughts, and I'd told him before telling any of my actual friends. Because he had to know, in case he wanted to settle down with Geraldine sometime in the future. Dating me was going to be the fastest way to get it done. Haha. Bad joke.