“But he’s single, right?”
“Yes. He’s single. His goal in life is to be single.” The words cause a little ache to spread across my chest. “I don’t fault him for that. That’s not what this is about. It’s about me knowing I have no desire to compete with other women for a man’s attention and this guy plays that game as hard as it can be played.”
Sugar and butter go into my mixer. My hand shakes a little as the vanilla is added, but I choose to think it’s because I haven’t eaten today and not from anything else.
“Fine.” It’s a simple response with no indication she’s going to argue with me. This annoys me, but I try to hide it. “Guess you’re going to have to figure out how to balance this then.”
“That’s what I said from the beginning,” I grimace, busting an egg with a little more gusto than necessary.
“You said some, what, sexier things on line than you would’ve said in person?”
“Oh, a little.” I told him I wanted him to come on my chest. “I want to die.”
Whitney adds the lemon juice to the mixer and turns it on. “But you felt comfortable enough with him to say them.”
“Because he wasn’t standing in front of me, Whit. It’s so much easier to tell him I want him to slap my ass or make me get off on his face when his face isn’t there. When I think I’ll never have to see his face.”
“You said that? I’m impressed.”
The dam is broken so I just roll with it. “I typed worse.”
“He’s probably going insane right now,” she giggles. “And I doubt he’d qualify them as worse.”
Putting a face, his face, to those words makes me almost moan in the middle of my kitchen. Typing them out was one thing when the point was to feel powerful. Knowing it was him on the other side has the opposite effect.
“I have to quit my job,” I say gravely.
“You do not.” She turns off the mixer. Leaning against the counter, she crosses her arms over her chest. “How does it make you feel to think he knows it was you who typed those things and he still wants you?”
Biting my lip doesn’t help the smile from cracking across my lips.
“It feels good, right?” she asks.
“Yes. Fine. It feels good. But he’ll tease me about it endlessly.”
“Because he’s a boy and boys do that.”
There’s nothing boy about him.
The pre-heat alert dings and Whitney glances at the oven before speaking again. “You should’ve considered this before you met up with him. I could’ve pointed that out if you would’ve told me your super-secret plans.”
I should’ve considered a lot of things before I met History Hunk. Or before I used that stupid app.
“For some really, really dumb reason, it didn’t seem like a bad idea. Yes, most of our conversations were sexual in nature, but it was good-hearted. It was fun. Our banter was great …”
My finger presses into the butter as I turn away. Just thinking of Lance and the easiness of our chats fills me with a gooey sort of feeling.
“Like your banter at work?”
“Ugh. This is not helping.”
At all. At work, Lance treats me like an intelligent, respectable, attractive woman. History Hunk made me feel downright sexy. Alluring. Wanted. They are two very different sides of … the same coin? With the same guy? Processing this doesn’t get any easier as the minutes tick by.
Digging around the cabinet and then the dishwasher, I find my nine-by-nine pan for the lemon bars.
“Meeting this guy didn’t seem like I was meeting him for sex,” I say, searching for more butter. “It felt like meeting a friend for the first time. There weren’t expectations and I wasn’t afraid, like I thought I’d be. It was just easy. Nerve-wracking, but easy.”
The butter in hand, I spread it around the pan before I turn my attention back to Whitney. There’s a knowing look aimed my way.
“I think everything between you two is easy, Mariah.” She takes the pan and sets it next to the mixer. “Don’t you see that?”
Yes, I see it. How could I not? But therein lies the problem—it’s too easy.
The boiled-down truth is sitting on the tip of my tongue. There’s a peacefulness that goes along with finding it in the rubble of everything else.
With one last reconsideration, I go for it. “Before this weekend, Lance was Lance. It wasn’t hard to compartmentalize him in a box in my head. We’d flirt or whatever at work but there was a line and it wasn’t crossed. It started at eight and ended at four. His personal life was his thing. It didn’t involve me. His conquests didn’t matter.”
“But they do now?”
I consider her question. Neither answer, yes or no, is right. It doesn’t matter because I’m still the girl from work. But it does matter because it doesn’t feel like he’s the guy from work anymore. All of that is muddied up now because the guy I told I wanted to feel his tongue on my pussy while his cock was halfway down my throat is the same guy who hugged me in front of my mother.
Whitney laughs when I rest my head against the cool counter. “You should’ve just fucked him. That would’ve eased some of this tension.”
“Right.” Standing up straight again, I go back to my lemon bars. “I’m going to have to pretend it didn’t happen. Erase this entire weekend from my brain.”
My friend looks at me like I’ve officially lost it. “You can do that?”
“I’m going to have to.” With a cup of flour balanced in the air, I look at Whitney. I should just make the lemon bars and be done with it, but I don’t. With a hefty sigh, I just stop pretending like it’s not going to happen. “Want to make some red velvet cupcakes?”
Fifteen
Lance
She’s always early on Monday mornings. It’s one of the few parts of her schedule I can predict and one the nerd in me loves. Most people struggle on Mondays. Mariah is at the school at least an hour early on the first day of the week.
While I don’t always start the week on a low note, today I was late. I could say it was the extra two minutes it took for the shower to warm up or the fact that I didn’t sleep last night. I could even situate the blame on Machlan’s shoulders for coming over and making me some rocket fuel shit that went down way too easily, but did help the story of the afternoon come together with less prompting.
Truth is, it was intentional.
The staff meeting about homecoming festivities would’ve put Mariah and I across from one another in a room full of people. On the surface, that seems like the perfect way to break the ice. Assumptions are often wrong.
The third rule of history is silence is not louder than words. When things get too quiet historically, they’re forgotten. The chaotic moments, the ones filled with passion and emotion—they’re the ones remembered. When I see her again, it won’t be in a room full of people. I won’t be forced to be silent. The words I’ll use aren’t formulated yet, they likely won’t be until the moment comes because I’ve tried to find the right thing to say since I left her yesterday and I keep coming up empty. But they’ll come. They always do with her.
“Make sure you finish this tonight,” I tell the sophomores as they gather their things. “I will take this for a grade tomorrow. You’ve been warned.”
“Have a good day, Mr. Gibson.” Two girls, who are going to cause some poor boys a lot of trouble, wave as they strut past my desk.
“Bye, ladies.”
It takes everything I have not to get up and shoo them out the door. Glancing at the clock, I have four minutes until I usually trek up the stairs and slip into Mariah’s room while she’s getting her lunch. On most days, I’d slide my phone out of my pocket and see what my inbox looks like. Today, I slip it in my desk.
I toyed with deleting the app last night. Machlan pointed out there’s a chance she could message me and if I answered that, I wouldn’t be out of line. So, I didn’t. But I haven’t checked it since the parking lot of Peaches.
My hands undergo a quick sanitizing with some gel. I’m getting up to go upstairs when I see Ollie head away from the cafeteria. Puzzled, I go to the hallway and watch him take a long drink from the fountain. The clock ticks to ‘go time,’ but my feet remain in place.
“Hey, Ollie. Can you come in here a minute?”
He spins around, looking surprised. “Sure, Mr. Gibson.”
Stepping by me, the same tattered shirt he wore on Friday hanging from his thinning frame, he stands next to a bust of President Kennedy.
“It’s none of my business,” I say. “But why aren’t you in the cafeteria?”
“I, um, I eat by myself. The cafeteria is too loud.”
He looks at everything in the room besides me. The clock flicks past another minute and I suck in a breath, knowing this situation likely just stole the moment I’ve been anticipating since yesterday.
“Okay. Fair enough. Where do you usually eat?” I ask him.
“Just wherever.” His hand goes in his pocket as resignation settles over his face.
“You can always eat with me. Even if I’m not in here, you can come in and flip on the television if you want. Okay?”
“Thanks, Mr. Gibson.”
The location isn’t the problem and we both know it. Racking my brain for a way to fix this without making him feel bad, I tap my fingers against the desk. “I had an ulterior motive for asking you to come in here.”
He gives me a lopsided grin. “What’s that?”
“I need a favor.”
“From me?”
Nodding, I try to bring this together as smoothly as possible. “I’m on a panel of teachers the school board put together to analyze the cafeteria food. It’s not something they really want spread around because of politics and stuff like that. Anyway, I’m supposed to pick a student to get a tray every day and then report back on what they think about it.”