One True Thing (13 page)

“Nice,” I say. We pass a modern concrete building with a sign out front. “Is that your high school?”

“Yep. Grand Junction High. Go grizzlies.”

I look at the campus with the track and the football field out back and wonder what Jenna was like in high school. “You were a cheerleader, weren’t you?”

She makes a face. “Guilty. And on the dance team.” She glances at the school. “But we made State championships three years in a row.”

I hold both hands up. “You don’t have to defend yourself to me.” I picture Jenna in a short cheerleader skirt, her panties showing as she kicks her leg up over her head and I feel a familiar pull on my groin. “Do you still have your uniform?”

“Perv.” She smacks my arm. It’s like she can read my mind.

“I’m just saying, maybe we could dig it out and you could show me some of your moves.”

She looks over at me in a way that sends a shiver up my spine. “Oh I could show you some moves all right.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?” This might not be such a bad trip after all. We turn off the main road and into a small neighborhood, with compact older houses on big lots. Back in San Francisco you can reach your arm out your window and practically touch your neighbor’s house, but here everything’s so spread out that you need one of those little ride-on tractors just to mow the lawn.

“Here we are,” Jenna says, pulling up to a red brick house with black shutters. “Chez Taylor.” She nods to the white wooden house next door. “That’s Gram and Gramp’s place. Mom lives here.”

“Convenient,” I say, opening the car door and walking around to the trunk to grab our duffle bags.

Jenna pulls out the pie that I bought at the bakery. Mom and Dad taught us never to arrive empty-handed and parents were always surprised when we showed up at their doorstep with cookies or brownies at a simple playdate. It was never said outright, but Olivia and I always knew what they meant—we had to be twice as smart and twice as polite as the other kids in our class because people were always watching. Watching and judging. You could see the change in every mom’s eyes when I handed her the plate of treats at the front door, that slight suspicion that they could never quite shake would give way to surprise and then a smile as they accepted Mom’s offering. As a teenager I hated it. It seemed like she was always going overboard, doing things that other mothers never did in order to look good, to make people like us. But now I get it. First impressions are everything.

As we walk up the path toward the door, Jenna reaches over and grabs my hand. “Are you ready?”

“It’s showtime,” I say, smiling at her.

“Jenna! Ty!” her mom says, opening the door just as we reach it. I’m pretty sure she’s been watching out the window for us. “Come in! How was the drive? Oh honey—what happened to your eye?”

She pulls us into a house that reminds me of Jenna somehow, the same faint smell of flowers.

“Ty got hit by a baseball,” Jenna says, glancing at me.

“I’ve got to learn not to catch those with my face,” I say, working the lie.

“Did you put something on that? I’ve got a few things here that will fix you up right quick.” For a split second she reminds me of my mom—she’d get all upset whenever I’d show up from practice with a messed up finger or a busted lip. I realize how much I miss her. I miss home and being in a place where I understand all of the rules.

“Mom, he’s fine,” Jenna says.

“Are you sure honey? Maybe some iodine and some ice?”

“Really,” I say. “It’s fine. Doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

“See? He’s fine,” Jenna says, handing her the pie.

“Isn’t that sweet?” Her mom tilts her head at Jenna. “You’ve never brought me a pie before.” She smiles warmly at me and I say a silent ‘thank you’ to Mom. “Why don’t you take your things to your room, honey. Are you two hungry? I know Gram is working on a mess of food next door and we’ll eat around seven. Moving Sunday supper to Saturday hasn’t thrown her at all.”

Jenna nods her head down a dark hallway, so I turn and follow her. We come to a door that has a purple J painted on it and she stops before opening it. “You have to promise you won’t laugh. Everything is still exactly the same as when I left home—it’s like a time capsule.”

“I won’t laugh.”

She looks skeptical.

“I swear.”

With a sigh she opens the door and I immediately see Jenna how she was a few years ago—the purple checkered bedspread on the white twin bed, the desk still stacked full of books, several ballet posters on the walls and a mirror with pictures stuck all around the edges. “Cute,” I say, picking up a white stuffed unicorn from the foot of her bed.

“Don’t mock Oliver,” she says, setting him back down in the very same place.

“Oliver?”

“Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No.” I shake my head. “No problem at all.” I walk over to her mirror to look at the pictures. There’s Jenna’s official cheer photo, yellow pom poms in her hands, a bunch of group shots of interchangeable girls. “Where’s all the old boyfriend pics?”

She grins. “No boyfriends. Not in high school anyway.”

I peer at the pictures again. Jenna was beautiful, even in middle school. It looks like she didn’t even have an awkward phase. “I find that hard to believe.”

Jenna walks over to join me. “Totally true.”

I glance at her, remembering what she said about not being with a guy all year. There’s no way I’m the first one. “But there have been others, right?”

“Yes.” She nods her head slowly, examining the photos on the wall. I wait, wanting to see if she’ll say more.

“A few. Only one real ‘boyfriend’ though,” she says, putting the word ‘boyfriend’ in air quotes and I don’t miss the bitterness in her voice.

I feel a mixture of jealousy and relief. “Sounds like somebody needs an ass-kicking,” I say.

“At one point, I would have taken you up on it.” Jenna turns and walks back across the room.

“Anyone I know?” I should drop the subject, but part of me really wants to know.

“No. It was stupid,” she turns to me with a wry smile. “This guy named Jake last year. A senior, on the football team. I know, it’s so totally cliché it’s embarrassing.” She sighs. “And I made the mistake of believing everything he said.”

It feels like I’m in deeper territory now but I have to know. “What happened?”

Jenna laughs. “The usual. Told me I was the only one for him…even talked about getting married at one point.”

An image forms in my mind and I’m sure he looks exactly like the kind of guy Gramps would love—big and blond, athletic and probably knows how to drive a tractor and skin a deer. The all-American boy. I feel a pang of jealousy that I have no right to own. “Sounds serious.”

“
I
thought so. But apparently I was the only one. Turns out Jake had a habit of saying the same thing to a lot of different girls in a lot of different cities.”

“Ouch. Sorry,” I say, feeling guilty already.

“Our entire relationship was nothing but lies,” she says. She laughs, but I hear the sadness in her voice. “Long story short, it sort of put me off guys for awhile.”

Jenna didn’t date for a year because of lies. And the most basic things she thinks about me aren’t true. The bedroom door is partway open, but I can hear her mom in the kitchen at the other end of the house.

“I should throw Jake a fucking party,” I say to her with a smile.

“Why?” Her face is confused, almost hurt.

“Because if he’d told you the truth, you might be Mrs. Jake right now and I wouldn’t be standing in your bedroom at this very moment.”

Jenna smiles and bites her bottom lip in the way I love. “I hadn’t thought about it that way. I guess you’re right—maybe I should write him a thank-you note.” She looks up at me and crooks her finger. “Come here.”

I bend down as she lifts her face to mine and our lips meet. We’ve only kissed a few times since that first night, and the sensation is so powerful and new. I kiss her, gently at first, and then parting her lips with my tongue as her body responds to me. In one motion, I pick her up and deposit her on the stuffed animal covered bed, one knee in between her thighs as she reaches up, lacing her fingers around my neck and kisses me back, her tongue tapping mine and darting around my lips. I can feel my erection growing as she wraps her legs around mine and locks her feet, pressing her thighs against my legs.

“You make me want to do dirty things,” I whisper in her ear.

“You make me want to let you,” she whispers back, just as her mom bangs something on the stove.

Damn. She doesn’t make this easy—there’s nothing I want more right now than to pick up where we left off weeks ago. The side of her bed sags from our weight, so I shift the two of us more toward the center. “Gonna be hard to fit on here tonight,” I tease.

Jenna smacks me in the arm. “I wish. Mom is going to set you up real good on the couch,” she says. “I’m a little amazed that she’s lifting the ‘no boys in your room’ rule.”

Just then her mother calls from the kitchen. “Jenna! Why don’t the two of you head on outside until supper’s ready? You can show Tyler around.”

“And that’s Mom’s way of getting us out of the bedroom,” Jenna says, sliding off the bed as I reluctantly let her up. I’m being good. We’re taking it slow. It’s like I have that on repeat in my head.

Chapter
Twelve (Jenna)

“Not much to see really,” I say, as we walk through the screen porch out back. It looks a little run-down now that we’re here, not like the expansive acres of grass I remember from being a kid. There’s no fence dividing the two yards and Gramps has a whole fleet of rusted-out machinery lined up next to the house. He’s not a hoarder exactly, but whenever someone gets a new tractor they call him to pick up the old one to add to his collection. As long as something can be fixed or parted out, it’s useful.

“Looks fun,” Ty says looking at the huge tree in the middle of the big yard, with the rope swing hanging from it and a wooden platform nestled into the branches maybe twenty feet off the ground. I can’t picture Gramps even climbing the ladder these days, but he scrambled up it easily when I was seven, showing me how to pound the nails and use the level to get each board perfectly straight. It was so much fun I was almost sad when our project was over. For some reason, that was the last thing we ever built together. Gramps got busy at the shop and then his back hurt too much to pound nails with me anymore. He seemed to get old overnight.

“It was.” I sit down on the swing and kick absently at the grass. Mom used to push me as high as this swing would go, daring me to kick the clouds with my feet. “All of the kids used to come over here because Gramps always built the coolest stuff and Gram had cookies or cakes or something baking in the oven.”

“Sounds like something out of the movies.” Ty grabs onto the ropes and gives me a little push. “We don’t really have a backyard,” he says, looking around at the grass as far as the eye can see. “Just a tiny cement square out back with some pots in it. I would have killed for a place like this.” On a back swing he catches hold of the ropes again, and bends down to kiss my neck. Just the sensation of his breath on mine causes shivers to course through my whole body.

“Now I’m picturing sad little Tyler running a Hot Wheels car over a patch of cement,” I say. I wonder what he looked like as a baby, or as a little boy. Maybe I can get him to dig out some photos one of these days.

“It wasn’t like that,” he says.

I must look skeptical.

“No, really. We had the whole city to play in. By the time I was eleven, we were riding busses all over the place—Golden Gate Park is huge and it was only two transfers to get to the beach.”

All I can picture is a tiny kid’s face dwarfed by the huge window of a bus as it speeds through the city. “Weren’t you scared?”

“No.” He looks like he doesn’t understand the question. “Of what?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Of getting lost. Of bad guys.”

“Nope. It’s easy to get around—by the time I was twelve I knew every inch of the city.”

“You’re braver than I’d be,” I say. Unless you count the school bus, I’ve never really ridden one in my life.

I hop off the swing and walk toward Mom’s vegetable garden to see what she’s planted so far this year. Over the years it’s expanded from one row to probably half an acre.

“What is all this stuff?” Ty asks, bending down to take a look at a pea pod.

“Vegetables mostly,” I say. “That’s garlic over there” I point to some tall plants with lacy flowers on them. “And these are peas and potatoes. Those tiny things there are corn—in a couple of months it’ll be taller than you are.”

Ty squints and looks down the length of the rows. “They eat all this?”

“Not all of it. Some Gram puts up for the winter and then they have a stand at the edge of the road down there where they put extra and people leave money in a little wooden box with a slit cut in the top.”

Ty turns to face me. “So they put vegetables out and people just leave money? Like the honor system?”