Lengths (9 page)

I’m aware that she probably has no idea how much she’s driving me nuts, but she seriously is. “You could have. I mean, I would have taken your call. Was it that bad, Whit? That we can’t even talk to each other? I still don’t know what the hell happened.”

“No! I mean, it wasn’t that bad. And I know you wouldn’t have minded. But, uh, I kind of deleted your number.” She grasps her hands in front of her body and twists them. “Don’t be pissed. I…I had a lot of thinking to do, and I just thought I wouldn’t be able to get anything figured out with you so…available to me.” Her big brown eyes beg me to hear her out.

I nod. “Okay. So, you’re doing okay now?” I take one hand out of my pocket.

She smiles, relief all over her face. “Yes! I’m great. It took a few days. Rocko helped so much. And your mom. I talked with her for, like, two hours one night. She must think I’m insane. But, anyway, I was actually kind of hoping you would drop by tonight. And if you didn’t, I was going to beg your mom to give me your number.” Her cheeks are a little pink on the edges.

I pull my hands out of my pockets, and the empty, howling hole that I’d been doing my best to ignore all these days without her suddenly feels like it’s about to quiet. “I’m glad to hear that.” I put one hand up against her face, rub my thumb along her cheekbone, and pull her closer, thinking that this night is about to get a whole lot better so damn fast. “So, you got things all figured out?” I smile at her.

She doesn’t smile back. Her hand closes over my wrist and she moves my hand down away from her face gently. “I did. I thought about everything. And I really like you, Deo. As a friend. I think it would be so great if you and I could be…
friends
.” She bites her lips after the last word.

I resist the urge to laugh at my stupid luck.

The girl I can’t get out of my head just waltzed back into my life, looking like every fantasy I’ve never been creative enough to dream up, told me how much she’s wanted to call me and how much she likes me…and dumps me right in the fucking friend zone.

Fantastic.

              -Ten-

Whit

“That’d be my foot,” I say.  I flash a smile, but my eyes are all stabby. I push Deo’s sparkly blue-painted toes off of my thigh, which is, you know, not my foot at all, but since we’re at his mom’s table, I decide against calling him out. It’s the third time he’s done it.

Once during the meal of Seitan tacos, once while his Mom and Rocko were debating how much hemp to put in the brownies for dessert, and just now, when his mom is busy telling me about how Deo used to work as a cabana boy. Which is, apparently, a real thing, and does, it would seem, include rich, sexed-up cougars. It’s just one more exotic notch in California’s belt, and it makes me realize all over again how far from Pennsylvania I really am. He blushes so hard when she tells me this, it’s almost like she revealed he was a stripper, and I’m tempted to ask him if the uniform required a thong.

“Sorry ‘bout that, doll.” He winks and though it was obvious before, that smirk seals the deal and proves he isn’t sorry at all.

“Not a problem,
friend
.” I put an emphasis on the word “friend,” since I know that’s what this is all about. I threw him into the friend zone and he isn’t man enough to take it.

It’s not that I don’t want Deo.

I do.

I want to be back there in that Jeep with his hands grazing over my skin like that’s exactly what his hands were made to do. Because that’s what it felt like. It was like he knew just what to do with them, and that mouth... But that’s not reality.  And the way Deo makes me feel is nothing more than magic. An illusion. Something that will disappear if I get to close to it or blow up in my face if I try to inspect it.

Reality is that you have to protect yourself from those things from the start. And Deo, Deo has this flighty bit about him. This,
I don’t need a job or anything permanent at all
vibe, which tells me that being with him would cause an explosion doubly fast. It’s better for me, right now, to stick with guys like Ryan, where everything is out there on the table and there’s no chance for failure because there isn’t anything to lose.

His cocky smirk falls at the word friend; I grin widely.

“So, friend--” he begins in a voice so low only I can hear, and so full of sarcasm, it automatically triggers an eyeroll from me.

“I ran into Cara at the farmers market the other day,” Deo’s mom says, not realizing we’re in the middle of a semi-hostile friendly discussion. I don’t know who Cara is, but Deo’s posture becomes a little stiffer at the mention of her name.

“Ah, what a coincidence. I just saw Cara earlier today. She came over to hang out, like old times, if you know what I mean.” Deo stares at me while he talks, gauging my reaction. I give him nothing outwardly, but inside I’ve hired a dozen cabana boys to give me a hot oil rub down while Deo cleans my Olympic sized pool and seethes with jealous rage.

A girl can have her exotic revenge dreams, can’t she?

Deo’s mom tosses her head back and laughs loudly, her dark hair falling back over her shoulders like millions of strands of silky threads. “Oh, cut the shit Deo. She showed me her ring.” Her face softens and she narrows her light brown eyes in his direction. “It would make perfect sense if you were upset or thrown off by it, hon. She told me how unexpected the proposal was. Part of me always thought it would be the two of you. You and Cara had your fun when you were younger playing rumple the foreskin--”

“Mom! As usual, too far!” Deo yells.

I nearly spit my coconut milk across the table, which would be a damn shame because Deo’s mom warmed it with mulling spices and I pretty much want to bathe in the stuff. This dinner is simultaneously one of the most enjoyable, sensory-rich events of my life and one of the most irritating, under-my-skin aggravating.

“Oh, please. If you were trying to keep your business private, I wouldn’t have had to clean all those rubber wrappers off of your bedroom floor. Which, by the way--”

“Mom, enough. I’m gonna go outside and have a smoke,” Deo says. He tosses his napkin onto the table and storms out.

“I thought you quit!” Deo’s mom yells after him. But he doesn’t stop. The back screen door slams loudly. And then, it’s just me. And Rocko. And Marigold. And some pot brownies. And a whole lot of silence.

Marigold flicks a soft-browed, sweet-smiled look of sympathy my way, and her voice husks low and quiet. “Sorry about that, honey. I know he’s trying to show off in front of you, and I just don’t think it’s right. He cares about you, and even though you aren’t ready to be doing the lust and thrust with him, well, that doesn’t mean he needs to be lying to you about what he’s got going on.”

Does this woman have no end to her collection of sexual euphemisms?

“Can’t you just whip up some sweet love potion and feed it to these kids?” Rocko asks, definitely only half-kidding. After this dinner party, I’m willing to believe Marigold really
is
some kind of amazing, mood-altering witch. I assumed it was just a green thumb and a lot of people willing to believe holistic healing mumbo-jumbo, but maybe there is an element of scary magic to her. And I’d rather not be on the receiving end of any of her potions in any case. “Because I can tell this shit is going to get real old, real fast. And I’ve got to work with this one!” Rocko motions to me.
              “I’ll fix it,” I rush to assure them. I push away from the table. “Thanks for dinner, Marigold.”
              “No problem, sugar.” Her long hair falls into her face and Rocko is mesmerized. I haven’t even picked up my plate to bring to the kitchen, but to them, I’ve evaporated.
              I shiver as I push through the screen door. It’s cooled off outside since I got to Marigold’s tiny beach house. I rub my hands up and down my bare arms like I’m trying to start a fire.
              “Hey,” I say. Deo is sitting in a lime green Adirondack chair that desperately needs a fresh coat of paint.
              “You cold?” he asks. Before I can answer, he’s out of the chair and pulling his hoodie up over his head. “Here, put this on.”
              I don’t object. I pull the thick cotton over my head and it’s warm and smells like it’s been dipped in the ocean and hung to dry in the salty air.
              “Thanks. Hey, I thought you were coming to smoke?” I can’t help but notice that there are no cigarettes around.
              He drops back into the chair. “Mom’s right, I quit. Along with all my other vices, it appears.”               He laces both hands behind his neck and exhales a long, sharp breath of frustration.
              I dig my feet into the cold sand, wondering how far they can sink if I let them. Could I just keep going? It’d be easier to hide from things underground.
              “Look, Deo, I don’t know what’s going on with you and Cara--”
              He rolls his eyes and gives me a defeated three-quarter smile. “Nothing is going on with me and Cara, or didn’t you catch that? We haven’t been anything in a long-ass time. I said all that because I was trying to get to you, obviously.”
              Deo’s sweatshirt instantly warmed my skin, but his words bring a fresh prickle of goosebumps to my arms. “Right. Um, why would you want to get to me? I thought things were cool?”
              The partial smile disappears, and his mouth is all sexy-stern and his eyes focus in on me, the pupils so huge in the dim light, I almost can’t see any of the golden color. “Things are great, Whit. Except I don’t know how to be friends with someone so fucking funny and gorgeous, someone that turns me on just by biting her damn lip, or making a face when she eats my mom’s freaky hippie food—”
              “I didn’t—”
              “Don’t give me that, I saw it.” His expression relaxes and he laughs, a sweet, sexy rasp that dissolves the goosebumps on my arms and makes my blood simmer.
              “I’m sorry I can’t be what you want me to be.” I’m surprised by how quiet my voice is; it barely carries over the repeated crash and suck of the waves. I sit down in the peeling yellow chair next to him and pull my legs up to my chest.
              Deo kicks at the sand. “That’s the problem, Whit. You’re every single thing I want. And for once, I can’t have it, and it blows.”
              It’s like he took the words right out of deepest, most secretive part of my heart, the tiny room that’s always locked up with the key swallowed for good measure. It’s so tempting, so very tempting, to tell him that. But I know with absolute certainty that it would be a colossal mistake, so I try to offer him a truce we can both live with. “Look, I’m new at this whole friends thing, too. But if you want, we can sort of figure it out together? I promise, I’ll be a much better friend than anything else to you.”
              “I doubt that,” he says, eyeing my legs and grinning for the first time since I followed him outside. He runs his hand across the several day’s worth of scruff on his cheeks and it sounds like sandpaper.
              “You need to shave.” He really doesn’t. It looks sexy as hell on him.
              His grin goes from reluctant to electric in a single beat. “If I shave, can we try again at sweeping the chimney?”
              “Deo!” I swat at his arm and he ducks away, and laughs deep and mellow. “ What does that even mean? And what is it with this family and their freaky sex talk?
              “I’m kidding, Whit. Yeah, of course we can try the friends thing. But I warn you, it’ll be killer trying to resist all of this.” He motions to his own gorgeous body and flashes a wide, toothy grin heavy with pure confidence. I’m panicked to realize that, despite my resolve to not get involved with anyone, especially someone as flakey as Deo, I sorta think he’s right.

********

Deo walks down the hot sand toward the water with a surfboard tucked under each arm. He stops and stabs the boards upright into the sand.
              “This ones is yours.” He points to the larger of the beat-up boards.
              “Why exactly is yours smaller? That hardly seems fair.” I put one hand on the rough board and eye it up and down, silently praying my decent amount of natural athleticism will apply to this surfing venture, and I won’t wind up totally humiliating myself in front of Deo.
              He shakes his shaggy head and winks at me. “Shows how much you know. It’ll be easier for you to learn on this one, trust me.”
              He runs his palm across the one designated as mine.
              He leans so close I can smell the throat-drying mix of aromas from his skin; part clean sweat, part sunscreen, and part cool, sexy Deo. “I just stripped all the wax off and put a fresh coat on, so you should be good to go.”
              “Aside from the fact that I have no clue what to do.” I pull my hair back into the smallest of nubs and secure it with a pony-tail holder.
              “Well, yeah, there’s that. But I’m an excellent teacher. First thing I’m gonna have you do is just watch the waves with me for a minute.” He crouches down onto the sand and like a good student, I do the same.
              “Why exactly are we doing this?” I ask, doing my best to ignore the bulge of his tanned leg muscles. “Shouldn’t you be teaching me how to paddle-up or whatever?” It’s hot, and I’d love to get into that cool water.
              “Paddle-out, doll.” He shakes his head and laughs. “Look, that wave right there?” He points out into the endless sea. “It may look small to you, but I bet it’s double-your-head high. You need to get a feel for the current. You need to watch the sets break and see where you can swim if you get into trouble.” He really knows his stuff. It’s more than impressive. Every time I’ve been to the beach with Deo, he surprises me with his passion and it’s quickly crossing the line from educational and interesting to irresistibly sexy.

I chew my lower lip hard and stomp those thoughts out. Friends. That’s what we are. That’s what makes sense. And I’m the one who recommended it, because I know how dangerously intoxicating he can be. But I can do this. We’re just friends out surfing. Totally friendly. Not at all awkward or completely sexually charged.