Perfect Match

Perfect Match (4)

Delia nodded. “We’re leave on the twenty-first and we’ll be gone for two weeks.”

“That sounds awesome,” Cari said. “I haven’t been on a good vacation in ages. I’ve saved up a good bit of money for a nice one. I’ll have to go soon. I want to go to all of the places that I want to visit for a few days each, just so that I can say I’ve done it.”

“That sounds like a perfectly good idea to me,” Delia said. “You should do it.”

“I will, when the time seems right,” Cari said. “I don’t want to plan it, you know?”

“Spontaneity is always fun,” Delia said.

“Exactly,” Cari said. “I want to go when I need to get out of here. I’ve got loads of vacation time saved up here, and if I finish the covers I have standing, I can take a break from my designing as well.”

“Go when you need to get away,” Delia said. “I totally get it.”

“Precisely,” Cari said. “I need it to be something that I do when I need to clear my head and look at things differently, and that time hasn’t come yet. I’m sure it will eventually, but I’m not going to rush it.”

“I wouldn’t,” Delia said. “So life is good then?”

“It is, yeah,” Cari said. “Things have definitely changed for the better over the past few weeks.”

“That’s awesome,” Delia said, smiling.

Cari smiled back. “Yeah, it is.”

Delia held up her water bottle. “Here’s to things staying that way.” She took a sip from it and grinned.

Cari did the same with her own drink. “Here’s to that.”

After a quiet shift at the bookstore, Cari went home. In a fit of nostalgia, she found her high school yearbooks on her bookcase and flipped through them, grinning at the pictures that had immortalized some of her experiences with Ria. Despite the fact that Ria’s hair had been much shorter and Cari’s much longer while they were in high school, they didn’t look much different as seniors than they did as twenty-three-year-olds.

After a while, she went into her bedroom and changed out of her work clothes. She settled herself in front of her computer and began to draw on her tablet, adding color to a cover. It took her almost two hours to finish it, and she started on a second cover once she was done. Just before seven, she saved her work and shut her computer. She plucked her key ring off the hook by the door and stuffed her phone into the pocket of her jeans, and then went down the hall to John’s apartment.

She knocked on the door and stepped back to wait. A few moments later, John opened it. He greeted her with a hello and a quick kiss, and then gestured for her to walk past him into the apartment.

She smiled and moved past him to wait as he shut the door.

“Eddie and Holly should be here any minute now,” John said. “We can wait in the living room until they arrive though. He’s always late, despite Holly’s best attempts to make sure they’re on time.”

Cari laughed. “Well, that hasn’t changed then. He was late to everything when we were in high school.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” John said. “Old habits die hard, I suppose.”

“So it would seem,” Cari said.

“How was work today?” John asked.

“It was good,” Cari said. “Things were quiet, which was nice. How was the lab?”