Starting with the Unexpected Read online

  Copyright

  Published by

  DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Starting with the Unexpected

  © 2015 Andi Van.

  Cover Art

  © 2015 L.C. Chase.

  http://www.lcchase.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-63216-926-6

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-927-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930657

  First Edition May 2015

  Printed in the United States of America

  This paper meets the requirements of

  ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  For the real J, who’s made of dangerously high levels of pure awesome (and sushi). Someday we’ll get the tank we’ve always hoped for, along with the pizza delivery strippers. Unless I’m in the cell next to you, I will always post your bail.

  Also for Mom, who has not only been my biggest fan since the day I was born, but also has no problem nagging me until I’ve written more for her to read. (Oh, and thanks for not letting Dad murder me over the freezer incident. I swear I’m a better driver now.)

  CHAPTER 1

  FUCKING CHEATING bastard.

  The shit you had here is in boxes next to the dumpster.

  If you don’t fucking get it, the garbage men will.

  Hope my skanky whore of a sister was worth it, jackass.

  Fuck off and die.

  I sat there staring at my phone as the text messages flashed up in rapid-fire style, and it’s safe to say I was feeling somewhat perplexed. I wasn’t dating anyone, let alone anyone at the number I didn’t recognize, and I certainly wouldn’t have been sleeping with someone’s sister. Ew.

  When the shock wore off, I thought about it for a moment, shrugged, and started a reply. If nothing else, the poor girl needed to know her ex had no idea his things had been left by the dumpster. She was far more polite than I would have been in the same circumstances—I would have left his things in the dumpster and made him crawl in after them.

  Pretty sure you’ve got a wrong number, hon. The last thing I want to do is sleep with someone’s sister.

  Wanted to let you know, so your ex doesn’t give you grief about his shit.

  Either that or I’m being dumped by someone I had no idea I was in a relationship with.

  I can’t decide whether that would make me awesome or pathetic, to be honest.

  I hope the cheating bastard and your skanky whore sister give each other crabs.

  “I suppose this means I’ve done my good deed for the day,” I mumbled to myself as I tucked my phone back in my pocket. It was kind of a weird good deed, but a good deed nonetheless.

  “What’s that?” my housemate and best friend Jordan Walker asked as he joined me in the living room.

  “I just got dumped,” I told him. “By a girl. Apparently I cheated on her with her sister.”

  Jordan gave me that indescribable look he always gave me when I said something that completely confused him. It was hilarious, really. It was also part of his charm, much like his ability to belch the entire alphabet in one go. “What the fuck?”

  I tossed my phone to him so he could read the messages for himself. “Wrong number texts,” I told him. “I feel kind of bad for her, to be completely honest.”

  Jordan scanned through the messages, shaking his head as he did. “She handled it better than I would have. I would have torched his shit in a massive bonfire. I mean, think about it, it’s perfect timing. A bonfire to start off the new year would be awesome.”

  “That’s just because you had so much fun doing it when Tyler dumped me,” I told him with a grin. Tyler had dumped me nearly six years before, in a painfully public way that I’d prefer to forget but had never really been able to. That night, while I was sobbing on Jordan’s shoulder, Tyler was fucking someone Jordan and I had been good friends with. Obviously we weren’t friends with him anymore. When Jordan and I got home from that ill-fated weekend, we’d bundled up the few things that Tyler had left in the apartment Jordan and I shared at the time and had taken them to the beach as bonfire fodder. Granted, it hadn’t been the middle of winter when we did it, but it was still quite satisfying.

  “Well, her number’s local,” Jeff said as he tapped my phone against his chin. “If she really does live nearby, we could offer to burn the shit for her.”

  “You’re just hoping she’s cute and looking for a rebound,” I shot back and got a grin in response. I sighed and grabbed my phone from him. “Fine, I’ll at least tell her you said she ought to burn the stuff. Maybe it’ll make her smile.” Like I said, I felt bad for her. I’d been in that sort of situation, and the only thing that had kept me sane was Jordan’s weird sense of humor. “Don’t think this means that I’m going to try and get her to hook up with you, though. The poor girl’s obviously devastated.”

  My roommate says you should just torch your ex’s shit in a massive bonfire, by the way.

  He offered to do it for you, but I think he’s just hoping you’re cute and on the rebound.

  Or possibly he just wants an excuse to roast marshmallows. I can never tell with him.

  “Happy now?” I called after Jordan, who’d headed into the kitchen.

  “I’d be happier if I didn’t have to go to work,” he answered. “You still feel like helping tomorrow night?”

  “Sure. You still buying breakfast afterward?”

  “Yeah. Looks like I’m also buying pizza right now,” Jordan said as he came back out of the kitchen, frowning. “Nothing in the fridge. Want to split an order?”

  “No olives on my half,” I reminded him, like I did every time we ordered pizza. Maybe I thought he’d forget between orders or something, despite the fact that we’d basically grown up together. “I’ll pay for the pizza. I’ll even go grocery shopping tonight if you want.”

  Jordan came back into the living room, dropped onto the couch next to me, and rested his head on my shoulder. When I glanced down at him, he fluttered his eyelashes at me. “Best housemate ever. Doesn’t steal my girlfriends, keeps me company at work, and does the grocery shopping. If I were at all interested in men, I’d marry you.”

  “Uh, no,” I said, smothering a grin. “Because that would mean I’d have to have sex with you. Just…. No. Ew.” I already teased him about how he was my mom’s favorite son. It would’ve been like having sex with a sibling or something.

  “Yeah, okay, that’d be a bit too much like incest,” Jordan agreed.

  “Right. So order us some pizza like a good boy and quit
grossing me out.”

  Before he could say something smart back to me, my phone started to chime. Jordan practically pounced me to get at it, and I ended up with a lap full of roommate. “Is it her?”

  “Good lord,” I sighed, pushing him off me. “Seriously, she just got dumped. Don’t be such a dog.” I held my phone out of his reach and glared at him. “Pizza. Go. Now.”

  “You’re no fun anymore,” Jordan grumbled, heading back to the kitchen where he would likely dig through the latest specials from our favorite pizza place. When I was sure he was occupied, I read the messages.

  I’d say awesome and not pathetic.

  You guys have made me smile for the first time in over 24 hours. Thank you.

  So sorry you got blindsided by my rage texts. Thanks for letting me know and for having a sense of humor.

  Tell your roomie I’m flattered but not looking. Roasted marshmallows sound good though.

  We’d made someone with a broken heart smile. Mission accomplished.

  By the time Jordan and I had polished off our pizza, written down a shopping list, watched an extremely bad and unintentionally hilarious movie involving sharks, and said good night when Jordan left for work, the heartbroken girl was forgotten.

  Little did I know that she wouldn’t stay forgotten for long. Those wrong number texts were about to make some big ripples in my life.

  DESPITE THE popular trend to automate radio stations, the tiny one I worked for couldn’t manage that. Some days I was amazed we were on the air at all. Because we were so small and underequipped, the morning show had to be recorded live during drive time, which meant my workday started around three in the morning. This also meant that, during one broadcast when my cohost was feeling particularly evil, there had been no way for me to stop our entire audience from hearing her play a recording of me singing “Material Girl” at the top of my lungs after a night that involved far too much alcohol. Obviously there was a downside to recording live.

  On the plus side, she’d refrained from sharing my rendition of Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” from the same evening, so that was something.

  The odd hours made Sunday nights particularly difficult for me, though it helped that Jordan basically had the same schedule I did. Unfortunately he also had the same propensity to stay up far too late on my days off, despite the fact that he worked seven days a week.

  When I stumbled into the station carrying two cups of liquid caffeine, my evil bitch cohost—who I adored, incidentally—was waiting for me.

  “You look like shit,” Kat said gleefully as she took the caramel-mocha-whatever she always made me get her.

  “I love you too,” I growled. “Got anything interesting to talk about this morning?”

  Research into local news, current events, and interesting bits we thought the listeners would enjoy took up a good portion of our working hours. As much as I would have liked to have been able to tell people we made everything up on the fly, it just wasn’t true. We spent a lot of time throwing ideas back and forth, writing out notes, and scripting funny bits that we thought we really ought to have scripted. I was just grateful we no longer had to run the content of the show by our boss.

  “A couple of things,” Kat answered. “How was your weekend?”

  I started to answer her with my usual “fine” when the brokenhearted girl from the other night popped into my head. I took a sip of my chai latte to give myself a few moments to figure out how I wanted to word my answer. “I have a funny but kind of sad story about my weekend that we might be able to work into the show, but it might cause a bit of a stir,” I admitted. Discussing the need to burn your ex’s things could potentially be hilarious, but could also be polarizing if people who’d had their things burned were still upset about it. But then, really, everything was polarizing. We’d gotten hate mail over an episode where we joked about rubber duckies, for God’s sake.

  “Would the stir be from the boss or from the public?” Kat asked, arching an elegant eyebrow as she peered over her coffee cup.

  “Public,” I told her. “See, it started with these random texts….”

  And so, when five o’clock hit and we welcomed everyone to “Kat and Zach in the Morning,” Kat started off the show by asking me how my weekend had been.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I got a very interesting set of texts from the wrong number. That leads me into our first question of the morning. If you discovered your lover sleeping with your sibling, would you feel justified in having a nice little bonfire with the crap they’d left at your place? We have a poll up on our website, and at the end of the show, we’ll let you know the results.”

  “I’ll admit that cheating is a pretty messed-up thing,” Kat said. “But what if it was an accident?”

  I snorted. “What, like they were both accidentally naked and she tripped and accidentally impaled herself on his—”

  Kat grabbed the bike horn we used to censor each other and cut my words off with a loud honk. “Point made. Never mind.”

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, but I wasn’t about to check it while we were on air. “Not that I’d know what’s impossible between a man and a woman, of course, but it seems pretty unlikely to me.”

  That was one of the fantastic things about working for the station I worked for. I went into my interview fresh out of college and announced to them that I was very gay and very out. My boss had seen that as a draw, and our tiny station had gained a devoted following of listeners from the LGBT community thanks to the gamble he’d taken in putting me on the air after telling me to just be myself. The previous year, Kat and I had even been asked to join the Pride Parade, and we’d already been invited back for the next year’s events. It was another reason we got hate mail, but our supporters far outnumbered our adversaries. We were too small a station to cause a huge stir.

  The topic shifted, and we followed our notes until the first commercial break, at which point I pulled out my phone to check my messages.

  Oh my fucking God, I rage-texted Zach Blaise??

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And then I sighed and hoped I wouldn’t have to change my number. I’d been on the wrong end of “oh my God, you’re a local celebrity” before, despite the fact that I wasn’t really that well-known, and I didn’t care to deal with it again.

  You did. Now that you know my name, can I get yours?

  It took a little longer than usual before I got a response, and for a moment I wondered if I was going to get an answer at all.

  When my friends want to piss me off, they call me Marian.

  If it pisses you off, why give me that name? I asked. It seemed weird to give someone a name you didn’t really want to go by.

  Like I’m going to give someone I don’t know my real name, even if you are Zach Blaise.

  Smart, I told her. In that case, when my friends want to piss me off, they call me Ollie. Can I call you Mari?

  Only if you pronounce it MAHR-ee, and not like Mary. Why Ollie?

  Middle name’s Oliver. Commercial break’s almost up. Enjoy the show.

  I grinned as I put my phone away. Mari had spirit, and I could see us being friends. Who couldn’t use more friends? Maybe I’d end up setting her up with Jordan after all, once she was over her ex. She was definitely our kind of people.

  The commercial break came to an end, and I put it out of my head and focused on the next segment of the show.

  CHAPTER 2

  SUNDAY MORNINGS were a bit of a tradition with Jordan and me. See, Jordan delivered newspapers. He graduated college, same as I did, but he still wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do with his life, and he tended to hate interacting with the general public anyway. There was a studio apartment above the garage that brought in a small income when he had a renter, and delivering papers kept him from having to deal with too many people. It was a win-win situation, really.

  This sort of delivery was no longer about kids riding bikes for after-school jobs. The ave
rage routes were geared toward adults with cars, and it’s not an easy job. Jordan had more than one route—around five hundred houses—and all the newspapers had to be assembled and bagged before they could fill the back of his SUV. On top of that, our local paper also distributed nationwide papers, so Jordan kept a long list of houses on a clipboard on his dash. He had to keep going back to it to remember who got what. Really, the entire thing was a logistical nightmare.

  So, when two o’clock Sunday morning hit, you could usually find me unloading stacks of papers into the garage of the house his bitch grandmother had left him. (The only reason she’d left it to him was that she knew it would piss off Jordan’s mom, her daughter. To say his family was dysfunctional was a bit of an understatement.) After destroying our backs getting everything moved and stacked, we would spend a good two and a half hours sitting on an ancient sofa that looks like the 1970s threw up on it, assembling papers and getting them bagged. Once we were done and the papers were loaded up, we’d crawl into Jordan’s SUV and go fling them into driveways (or if the client was a real asshole, into the gutter) for another three hours.

  All of this may not sound entertaining, but it was one of my favorite parts of the week. Jordan and I had the most hilarious conversations at the crack of dawn, and they tended to end up on my Twitter feed. I was lucky I worked for the station I did, because any other station would probably have fired me for some of the things I posted. No one so much as raised an eyebrow the morning I started tweeting about how we’d decided to start a punk band called Psychic Sushi and how our first hit single was going to be “Silly Putty in Your Vagina.” I’d made the mistake of referring to the bags that we put the papers in as “paper condoms”—as in condoms for the papers. Jordan immediately started wondering aloud what would happen to a condom made of paper, which had led to the phrase we used for the song title. I learned far more than I ever wanted to know about female anatomy that morning, and I’m pretty sure I was traumatized for life because of it.