Sway (9 page)

“Don’t criticize my taste in gifts. I never got to eat these as a kid, and when I saw your wallet open and ready, well… My only regret is that I didn’t make you buy me two bags.” I lick my fingers, more than aware that if my mother could see me now, she’d probably faint. Maybe that adds to the appeal of the worms, maybe not. I love my mother, but sometimes she’s too focused on the sour to enjoy the sweet.

These worms are definitely sweet.

At least until we pull into the parking space in front of my apartment, and then everything turns bitter. Lucy is at the front door, struggling to make her key turn in the lock. She pulls it out and whacks it a few times, then promptly drops it into a planter filled with last summer’s now-dead fern. Watching her drop to her knees is more entertaining that I should admit. Seeing dirt fly as she digs through the planter makes me want to grab popcorn and kick back in my seat. If I wasn’t harboring any leftover resentment toward her for leaving me at the bar with a psychopath, I might jump out to help. As it is, I let her fumble, consoled by the knowledge that she likely has the world’s worst hangover wrapped in a treacherous headache.

“Looks like your roommate made it home,” Caleb says, with a hint of amusement in his voice. I turn to look at him, glad to see that he’s finding the situation as entertaining as I am.

“Looks like it.”

“Think we should get out to help her?” Lucy stands and jabs the key into the lock again. Her hair looks like a tangled mass of cobwebs, she’s wearing one shoe, and her sweater is on backwards. I wonder if she even knows how awful she looks.

“Probably. But I’m not going to,” I say.

“Good answer. Because I’m not going to either.” He smiles, but then seems to think better of it. “Not that I’m not a gentleman, because I really do believe in helping women out and—”

“If you set one foot out of the car to give her a hand, I’ll kill you.”

He laughs and runs a hand across the steering wheel. “I’ll admit my life could be better, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so I think I’ll sit here for a while.”

“Good decision.”

We sit in silence, which isn’t uncomfortable as long as we have Lucy to entertain us. But then she walks into the apartment and closes the door, and the reality that we’re completely alone descends inside the car like a wild-eyed monster. Suddenly, I can’t think of a thing to say, even though my mind is shooting off ideas like a ranger blasting silver bullets.
Talk about the weather. What about the stock market? Ask him if he likes football.
But I hate football, so what would I follow it up with? Frantic and frustrated, I move on to the benefits of wearing sunscreen, my doubts about Global Warming, the outrageous price of milk.
The price of milk?
It’s at this point that I’m fairly sure I’m insane. I’ve been with this guy for—I check my watch—nearly four hours now, and I choose
this moment
to get nervous.

“Are you finished freaking out over there? Because I swear I won’t bite. Not even a little,” Caleb says.

I look at him, trying my best to appear clueless. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m certainly not freaking out.”

He shifts in his seat to get a better look at me. “In the short time we’ve known each other, I’ve managed to pick up a couple of things about you. First, you’re a terrible liar.”

I open my mouth to protest, but Caleb silences me with a look. “Your aunt has cancer? Give me a break.” I promptly close it as he continues to point out my shortcomings.

“Second, you’re a germ freak.”

“I am not!” At the exact same time, we both eye a package of wet wipes not-so-discreetly hanging out of my purse. Without a word, I slip it back inside.

“Third, you have awful taste in Christmas trees.”

I can’t let that one go. “Who doesn’t like fake snow? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” But he doesn’t listen, just keeps talking.

“Fourth—”

“This is more than a couple.”

“…and I’m not sure you’re even aware of this,” he continues, ignoring me, “when you’re working out something in your head, you use your fingers to count off the options.”

“I do not!” Still, I look down at my hands, wondering if it’s true.

“A minute ago, you held up all five, one at a time. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure you were trying to come up with conversation starters.” He gives me a slow wink. “Am I right?”

I close my eyes and swallow, so embarrassed that I’m that transparent. Why can’t I be one of those mysterious girls that make guys crazy with curiosity? Like Lucy with her eager string of one-night-stands. Like every other female on the freaking planet. “So what if I was? It’s kind of hard to think of things to say now that we’re not eating or shopping. It’s not like you were doing any better, leaving me over here sweating and unable to come up with anything—”

“Then have dinner with me.”

“What?” It’s so abrupt, I’m not sure I heard him right. But I find myself really hoping I did.

“Tonight.” His mouth tilts in a lazy—yet hopeful—smile. “Have dinner with me. Sit across from me at a table for a couple hours in a nicer place than Cracker Barrel, and maybe we can come up with a few more things to talk about.”

“Tonight?” I immediately chastise myself for sounding so uncertain. Of course I’m not uncertain. I’m flying inside.

For the first time, Caleb looks worried. “Unless you have something else to do…”

“No!” I practically shout the word, then try to recover by picking a piece of invisible lint off my yoga pants. “I mean, I have some homework, and I need to do laundry, but I suppose it can wait until tomorrow.” Something tells me I didn’t quite pull off the aloofness I was going for.

When Caleb grins at me, I’m certain of it. “If you’re sure the dirty t-shirts can handle lying there another day.” He fiddles with a knob on his stereo. “Pick you up at seven?”

Flying. Soaring. So high in the air I feel lightheaded. I manage to shrug. “Seven sounds okay.” There.
That
sounded aloof. I open the door and climb out of his truck before a thought occurs to me. “What should I wear?”

“Anything is fine. I’m pretty sure no matter what you wear, you’ll still look like a princess.” And with that, he drives away.

Leaving me standing in the parking lot, wishing for a fairy godmother.

Caleb

“Learning To Breathe”

—Switchfoot

I
never knew my father. Not even his name.

The story goes that he spent every day in the hospital with me when I was born, checking my heart monitor, asking to hold me. I was premature by two months. Two months of medical bills added up to a whole lot of debt. I guess the money got to him. After a while, he stopped coming. Why should a man be expected to pay so much for a kid he doesn’t even know?

By the time I was released, he’d made his decision to leave. No one knew, not even my mother. He picked us up, smiled for a couple of pictures, wheeled us out to the car, stuffed balloons and flowers in the trunk, and drove us home. After an hour, he left to pick up dinner. He never came back.

When my mother checked his closet later that night, it was empty. All his clothes, gone. All his shoes, gone. All his money, gone. What was left of it, anyway. Most of it had been spent on me.

Turns out the saying is true; history does sometimes repeat itself.

The end of our relationship was premature, too.

Dinner with Kate turned into lunch the next day, followed by a movie later that night. And even though I know I should’ve played it cool the way I’ve always done in the past, something hasn’t let me. Of course, it didn’t help when she emerged from her apartment that first night in a pair of tight jeans, brown leather riding boots, and an oversized cream-colored sweater looking more like a Greek goddess than a princess. With those golden locks and bright eyes, a crown of glory hovered over her the whole evening.

I straighten in my leather seat, gripping one edge of the steering wheel. This girl has latched onto my mind, my soul, my body—and worst of all, a big part of my heart, too. I still haven’t kissed her, but not for lack of wanting to. It’s pretty much all I think about when I’m not wondering how these feelings could consume so much of me in three short days.

Who falls this hard for a girl in three days?

It’s precisely why I’m telling myself to back off now. It’s time for another reality check. A lowering of expectations. A big, fat dose of Kathryn withdrawal. My cell phone sits in the cup holder and screams at me to pick it up and dial her number like I did yesterday, but I won’t. I ignore the way it jumps up at me, practically convulses its way across the gearshift toward my lap, and so far I’m doing a pretty good job of snubbing it. After all, I’ve lived twenty-four years without letting a girl under my skin—the last five not even letting one into my bed. There’s no way I’m going to do an about-face on that now and give up everything I’ve worked for. I reach for the phone and toss it into the backseat. There. Done. It has no power over me.

Easy to say. Easy to believe.

Still, it’s what I tell myself as I drive to work Monday morning. It isn’t until I exit Interstate 35 onto highway 77 that I realize I’ve been humming “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” for the last five minutes, thinking of Cinderella and Snow White and a dozen other beautiful Disney characters I remember from my early childhood. In that moment, it hits me that I’ve officially morphed into the world’s biggest pansy. Even the frilly pink robe can’t top this.

And that’s where the trouble lies, because I’m not sure I want it to.

It might have looked stupid on me, but I sure liked the heck out of that robe.

*

“You want to tell me why you’re not answering your phone? I’ve only called you a dozen times in the last hour.” Scott walks into my office and plops down into the chair across from me, propping his feet up on my desk. It occurs to me to slap them off, but it won’t do any good. It never does.

“I guess I left it in the car by accident,” I lie. Three days. Only three days, and I’ve leapt backward to a time when lies rolled off my tongue like lime juice after a tequila shot. I don’t like this new side of me. “Scratch that. I tossed it in the backseat of my car. Don’t ask me to go find it.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t feel like digging around to—”

“No.” Scott studies me with a wary expression. “Why did you toss it in the backseat? Usually that thing is glued to you like an extra appendage. What gives?” He reaches into my candy dish for a peppermint and pops it into his mouth. My candy dish is supplied by my secretary and refilled nightly by the cleaning lady. It doesn’t cost me anything. I reach for one and unwrap it, too.

“Because I don’t want to hear it ring.” It isn’t the ringing that bothers me; it’s the person who might be doing the calling. I’m not stupid. One look at Kate’s name—which I’ve saved into my address book as ‘Princess’ because I’m already a whipped idiot—and I’ll cave. This isn’t the time for caving. This is the time for playing it cool.

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Scott frowns. “You’ve never had an aversion to—oh my gosh. It’s the girl.” He stares at me like he just solved the world’s hardest crossword puzzle, which for Scott isn’t a stretch, because he’s a nerd and actually
masters
them. “You like her. You took her home the other night, and now by some way only you can manage, you wound up liking her.” He stretches his hands behind is head like a smug Mob boss and smirks at me. He just needs a fedora and a cigar to complete the look. “What’d you do, ask her out?”

My gaze darts to the side before I can stop it, the clear sign of a lie. I learned that on
20/20
when I was a teenager. How can you tell if someone’s lying to you? Watch their eyes. They dart to the left? Lies. All lies.

“We had breakfast.”

“Just breakfast?” Scott asks.

This time I look straight at his face. I might as well confront the stupid truth. “And dinner. And lunch the next day. Followed by a movie…” By this point, I want to laugh at my own self. But why bother when Scott is doing such a swell job for me? He throws back his head and howls.

“Oh man, what has happened to you? You rescue a damsel in distress and appoint yourself her knight in shining armor. Caleb Stiles with a girlfriend. Who would’ve thought?”

“She’s not my girlfriend. Don’t say it like that. It sounds ridiculous.”

He pulls his feet off the table and sits forward. “It is kind of ridiculous. Although I can’t say I blame you. That girl was hot. Even passed out cold that much was obvious.”

“Hot? Did you say hot?” It’s my turn to laugh. “I’ve never heard you say that word before unless you were talking about the weather or Mrs. O’Hare’s flashes.”

Scott’s face turns serious. “That woman won’t shut up about her personal issues, and for some reason, I’m the one she’s chosen to describe them to. Just last night, she was telling me about the bunion on her left foot. I’m twenty-two! I don’t want to hear about bunions!”

Mrs. O’Hare is my secretary and the only woman in the human race born without an internal filter. Some people give daily weather reports. She gives updates on bunions, warts, sinus infections, and leaky appendages. But only to Scott. Lucky guy.