Free Absolute Beginners (Absolute #1) by S.J. Hooks Page A

puppy-dog eyes that I figured this must mean a lot to him. Besides, I didn’t think he had any chance with her after seeing her reaction to him so I decided that it probably wouldn’t cause any harm.
    “Wilson,” I said. “Megan Wilson.”
    “Thanks, you’re the best!”
    We finished our lunch and I was grateful that Matt didn’t mention Ms. Wilde again. Afterward, he said that he might go to work. I shook my head and wondered how my stepbrother’s business was running so well when he was hardly ever there.
    * * *
    Once I was home again, I made some tea and turned on my apparently outdated computer with the intent of working on an article I was writing for a literary magazine. First I checked my emails and saw that I had one from Matt, which he’d sent five minutes earlier. I opened it and read:
    What was her last name again?
    I chuckled and wrote back “Bilson.” That ought to teach him to pay better attention when he learned a girl’s name. Maybe it was a little mean, but I had every intention of giving him the real name later…possibly.
    I wonder if Ms. Wilde is on the Facebook?
    No, it was definitely better not to look. I couldn’t figure out why I even cared, and yet before I knew it, I was creating a profile for myself and logging on. I told myself it was probably a good thing to look at her profile, to see what sort of person she was. It would help me decide whether I could trust her not to tell anyone that we had slept together. All in the name of protecting myself, of course.
    Her profile picture was not at all what I expected. She was dressed up in a Halloween costume—or at least I hoped it was a costume, and not one of her strange outfits. She looked just like a 1950s housewife in a red dress with white polka dots and an apron. Her hair was curly and she had on red lipstick. She was giving the camera a demure but flirty smile and I could faintly make out other people in the background. The photo looked like it was taken at a party. She probably went to plenty of those.
    As I perused her profile, which was, thankfully, public, I saw that she had lots of other pictures. The albums labeled with the names of cities and countries around the world were by far the most interesting and I looked through all of them: Ms. Wilde in London on a bridge, looking out over the water as if she didn’t know she was being photographed. Ms. Wilde in Brazil, holding a parrot, an old man with a large mustache next to her, both of them smiling. Ms. Wilde in front of the ruins of a castle in Scotland.
    Does she always travel alone? No—then who would be taking the pictures? How can she afford this?
    I looked at her personal information and discovered that she was as young as I had thought, namely twenty-two, turning twenty-three this year. From the dates on her pictures I could see that she had done most of her traveling after high school and figured that this was why she was slightly older than her classmates. Not that it made a difference.
    My eyes almost popped out of my head when I saw her relationship status: “It’s complicated.”
    It’s complicated? What’s complicated? Is she seeing multiple people casually? Why am I asking myself all these questions?
    I looked at her recent status updates. She had written
Yoga with the girls and then classes
a few hours ago. Scrolling further down the screen, my heart started racing when I read her status update from last night:
Sometimes a boring Tuesday night becomes fun out of the blue
.
    Is she talking about me? Am I the fun she’s referring to? Does she actually think I’m fun to be around?
    She was probably talking about going to Matt’s bar. A lot of her friends had commented on the update, wanting to know what it meant. I held my breath as I scrolled to the bottom and saw that she had answered them with a smiley face. That was all, just a smiley face. I let out my breath and logged off the Facebook. It seemed that Ms. Wilde hadn’t told anyone about spending last