Saving Sofia

by Linda Seed

  She gave him a half grin. “I’d consider the next room to be near me, so yes. We share a house.”

  He blinked. “All … what … four of you?”

  “All four of us. We inherited our parents’ house, and Bianca, Benny, and Martina all wanted to live there.”

  She’d conspicuously left herself out of the sentence.

  “And you? You wanted that, too?”

  “I wanted …” She hesitated. “I guess I just didn’t want to be left out.”

  They’d been chatting less than an hour, and already, Sofia had mentioned or alluded to her parents’ deaths three times. That was three times too many for her taste, especially with someone she barely knew. She didn’t even like to talk about them with her sisters.

  When Aldo and Carmela had died, Sofia had taken the pain and the grief and sealed them inside a box that she tried never to open. She hadn’t shed any tears, and she hadn’t fallen apart. She’d just closed the box and put it away. She wasn’t about to open it now.

  It was time to turn to a lighter subject.

  “Do you get up here to Big Sur much?” she asked. They were settled in at the Ragged Point Inn wine bar, her with a glass of chardonnay and him with a pinot noir.

  “I’ve made the drive on Highway 1 to Carmel a couple of times. Other than that, no. I keep telling myself I need to explore the area more, but I never seem to get around to it.”

  She wanted to know how he’d come to live in Cambria, and he told her he’d moved to the Central Coast a couple of years before to take the associate professorship at Cal Poly. He’d lived in San Luis Obispo at first, to be close to his job, but he’d visited Cambria one weekend and had decided to relocate as soon as he saw the peaceful, quaint beauty of the town.

  “San Luis Obispo is nice. I like it, I really do. But Cambria is special,” he said.

  “It really is.”

  If they had nothing else in common, he thought, at least they had that. It was something to build on.

  When they’d finished their wine, they walked down the path that led to the dramatic, rugged cliffs of Big Sur, with the surf pounding against the rocks far below.

  He wanted to hold her hand as they walked, but he wasn’t sure this was a date, and if it wasn’t, any hand-holding would be unwelcome and inappropriate. To resist the urge, he kept his hands in his pockets, where they couldn’t offend anyone.

  They stood at the railing overlooking a steep and treacherous path to the water.

  “You want to try it?” She gestured toward the path.

  A sign at the trailhead warned of possible injury or death and asserted that the inn could not be held responsible should someone be maimed.

  “Ah … would it be okay if we didn’t? You’ve already had to rescue me once. If it happened again, I don’t think my self-esteem could take it.”

  She laughed and put her hand on his shoulder. “Sensible. Fine, we’ll stay up here.”

  He wanted to be a gentleman. He wanted to focus on her as a person and not on how much he wanted to kiss her. But her hand on his shoulder, just sitting there as though it were made to touch his body, made it damned hard to think about anything else.

  She was saying something about his job—about teaching—but he wasn’t hearing more than every third word. She deserved better than that. She deserved to have his full attention. So, despite the fear that he might be making a serious misstep, he decided to be completely honest.

  “Ah … Sofia. I really want to kiss you. I understand that you might not want me to kiss you, and if that’s the case, I fully respect that. Of course. But I just thought I’d put it out there, because I’m distracted by wanting to kiss you, and you’ve probably noticed I’m distracted, so—”

  And then her lips were on his and he wasn’t distracted anymore. In fact, his attention was focused with laserlike intensity on the way her mouth felt and tasted.

  He was glad he hadn’t died at the beach or going down the trail, because he never would have experienced this.

  Sofia hadn’t been planning to kiss Patrick. In fact, she’d planned to keep her hands and her lips—and every other part of her—to herself for the duration of the date.

  But he’d charmed her with his pronouncement about kissing and distraction and wanting. He was just so damned cute, and his yearning was so … palpable. She was kissing him before she’d even known she was going to.

  And then, once the kissing was actually happening, he didn’t seem cute after all. He seemed so much more than cute.

  It had started out simple and chaste, a mere touch of her lips to his. But in an instant, she was pressing herself against him, her body melting into his, her mouth devouring his.

  Had she really thought he was shy? He didn’t seem that way now. He kissed like a man who knew how.

  She could have lost herself in that kiss for days, weeks. In fact, it was only a few moments before he pulled away and rested his forehead gently against hers.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She would have said more, but she seemed to have lost any eloquence she might otherwise have had.

  “Thank you for that.” His voice was a little ragged. “For kissing me, I mean.”

  “It’s part of the service,” she whispered. “If you almost die on my tour, you get a kiss.”

  He smiled, and it was more than the curve of his mouth; he smiled with his eyes, too, in a way that made Sofia feel all warm and soft.

  “I’ll have to do it again soon, then,” he said.

  Later, when he dropped her off in San Simeon so she could retrieve her bike, she didn’t want him to leave. That was new. Lately, it seemed like she couldn’t wait for her dates to be over.

  She mounted the bike, put on her helmet, and rode home.

  When she came in the front door, her sisters were gathered around the kitchen island sharing a pizza. They looked up as a unit when she came in.

  “You’re late,” Benny said.

  “I didn’t know I had a curfew, Mom.” Sofia hung her helmet on a hook by the door.

  “You know what I mean, smartass. You’re usually home sooner, that’s all. Didn’t your last tour end at three thirty?”

  “Yep.” She didn’t offer any information. Instead, she went over to inspect the pizza. Vegetarian, for Martina. To Sofia’s mind, no self-respecting pizza would be caught dead without pepperoni, or at least some Italian sausage. Still, she reached over Bianca and grabbed a slice. She’d thought about extending her outing with Patrick to include dinner, but that seemed like a lot for their first date. He’d been so nervous, she shuddered to think how he might have suffered if she’d kept him to herself any longer. The thought made her grin.

  “You seem … different.” Martina looked at her carefully, scrutinizing her with a thoughtful expression.

  “I’m not. What I am is hungry.” She sat on an empty stool and took a bite of pizza so she wouldn’t have to talk.

  “Hmm,” Bianca said. “What aren’t you telling us?”

  Sofia sighed and put her pizza down on a paper plate. “You guys are relentless. I had a good day, that’s all. Remember the guy who almost died? Well, he came back today, and he kayaked, and it went really well, and I was proud of him. So we went for a drink after.” She shrugged. “That’s all. No big deal.”

  The other three exchanged looks while Sofia pretended not to notice. Bianca’s eyebrows rose. “You went for a drink with him?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “To congratulate him on not dying,” Martina clarified.

  “Well, that and the fact that he really got the hang of it this time. I mean, it was brave of him to try again! That’s all I’m saying.”

  And that, literally, was all she was going to say. She picked up her plate, added another slice to it, then took her food into her bedroom and closed the door to get some peace and privacy.

  She didn’t know why she was being so secretive about Patrick. Maybe it was because her sisters tended to hound her ab
out every man she got involved with. Maybe it was because Patrick wasn’t like the guys she usually dated, and she knew her sisters would grill her about it. Or maybe it was because today had felt … different. Special.

  She didn’t want to share that with anyone—not yet.

  She wanted to keep it for herself a little while longer before letting the rest of the world in.

  7

  Patrick wasn’t sure what to make of everything that had happened. Was it really possible that she’d kissed him? And, if so, was it possible—was it anywhere within the boundaries of rational thought—that she’d felt the same way he’d felt when she did it?

  He wasn’t completely inexperienced with women. He dated. On occasion, it even went well. But he’d observed other men over the years, and he knew he wasn’t like them—at least, he wasn’t like the ones who usually thrived in the areas of love and romance.

  For one thing, he didn’t look the way he should, from the standpoint of conventional attractiveness. He was too pale. His skin tended to freckle. His eyelashes were so light in color that they almost appeared to be absent. And his features were too angular: his nose was too narrow, and his lips weren’t as full as one might consider optimal.

  His body was okay, he supposed. He did get a fair amount of exercise. But he didn’t have the definition that some other men had. He was too thin.

  He was too much of some things, and not enough of others.

  Much of the time, these things didn’t bother him. He was an academic, after all—not a bodybuilder or an underwear model. But logic told him that Sofia, looking the way she looked, could date anyone she wanted.

  It was hard not to wonder whether he was enough.

  Some of these issues came up when he saw Ramon at the college on Monday.

  They were sitting in Patrick’s office with Ramon in the visitor’s chair, his feet up on the desk. The office was tidy, with the books neatly shelved according to category and the student papers either carefully filed or stacked precisely on one corner of the desk.

  Patrick wanted to ask Ramon to take his shoes off the desk, but it seemed imprudent to make demands of someone whose advice you wanted. Ramon was no expert on women, but he was married, so that had to count for something.

  “How’d it go with Sofia?” Ramon asked, as though on cue.

  “Well … now that you mention it … there was something I … You see, the thing is … she kissed me.”

  Ramon didn’t say anything for a moment. He appeared stunned, his jaw slightly slack, his eyes wide. When he recovered, he seemed to think he’d heard incorrectly.

  “Sofia? The extremely hot kayak chick?”

  “That would be correct. Um … yes.”

  “Dude. You are my hero. Seriously.”

  Patrick was simultaneously uncomfortable and gratified. Which seemed to be the case so much of the time.

  “The question is, now that it’s happened, what do I do next?”

  “What do you mean, what do you do next? You ask her out on a second date. I’d have thought that would be obvious.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Patrick squirmed a little in his seat. “But it just seems … I don’t want to annoy her.”

  Ramon was looking at him as though Patrick were either crazy or stupid, which, in this context, he might have been. “She asked you out the first time, right?”

  “Yes. She … yes.”

  “And she’s the one who kissed you.”

  “Yes.” He blushed a little at the memory.

  “Then it’s definitely your move. You have to ask her. If you don’t, she’ll be offended, and once a woman’s offended, it’s game over.”

  Patrick nodded. What Ramon was saying made sense. The only problem was that now, he actually had to pick up the phone and make the call. Which seemed impossibly frightening.

  “Maybe I’ll just wait a bit.”

  “The kayak thing was Saturday?” Ramon asked.

  “Yes. Saturday.”

  “Then you can’t wait. Nope. No can do. It’s already been forty-eight hours. Two days without contact is okay, but if you go any longer—three days or, God forbid, four—she’s going to get increasingly pissed, wondering why a guy like you thinks he’s too good for a woman like her.”

  This was a surprise. “Really?”

  “Really. You can ask Lucy if you don’t believe me.”

  Lucy, Ramon’s wife of five years, was a lovely, warm, vibrant woman. Given the fact that she’d surely married beneath her, Patrick had to wonder how much she might really know about the fine points of dating.

  “Besides,” Ramon went on. “If you had the guts to go kayaking again when it almost killed you the first time, calling a woman should be no sweat.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Patrick said for the second time in the conversation.

  He went through the rest of his workday distracted, thinking about Sofia. He taught two classes in the morning—the first, an introduction to Shakespeare’s tragedies, and the second, a section of English 101—and held his office hours in the afternoon.

  He’d hoped to find time during office hours to call Sofia, but a steady stream of students came in, asking questions or wanting to talk about the syllabus.

  Patrick didn’t believe that men were inherently better students than women; in fact, many—perhaps most—of his best students over the years had been female. So he could never understand the steady traffic of young women into his office asking questions about things he thought should be obvious.

  Today, he’d met with a freshman who wanted to know the best place to buy the works of Shakespeare (anywhere books were sold, really, though Amazon was the easiest); a junior who wanted advice on whether her paper should be single-spaced or double-spaced; and a grad student curious about why she’d lost one point on her paper—one point. All were women. It baffled him.

  The last one—the grad student—was just leaving when Ramon stopped by the office on his way home.

  “I don’t get it.” Ramon plopped down into the visitor’s chair once the student had gone.

  “You don’t get what?” Patrick was glad Ramon had dropped by, because it allowed him to procrastinate on his call to Sofia.

  “You and the girls,” Ramon said, as though that should have been clear. “I mean, you’re okay-looking, I guess, but you’re not exactly movie star material.”

  Patrick suddenly felt as though Ramon had started speaking a language he could neither understand nor identify. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ah, bullshit.” Ramon waved a hand dismissively. “ ‘Oh, Professor Connelly, can you help me with my paper? Oh, Professor Connelly, what font should I use? Professor, I couldn’t possibly write about the major themes in King Lear without a big, strong man like you to help me.’ ” Ramon was speaking in a high, singsong voice that, one assumed, was supposed to mimic the average female college student.

  Suddenly, it occurred to Patrick what Ramon was saying, but the idea was so absurd that he couldn’t imagine there was any validity to it.

  “They’re not flirting,” he said. “Of course they’re not. Why would they?”

  “They are,” Ramon said. “As to the question of why, there are mysteries that mere mortals will never solve.”

  Patrick, a bit stunned, sat at his desk and considered what Ramon was telling him. “They’re flirting?”

  “Good God, man, you’re hopeless. Don’t you think they could figure this stuff out on their own? That last one is an honors student.”

  “But … why?” He was genuinely puzzled, considering the fact that he’d never imagined himself to have any skills with women.

  “That’s the question,” Ramon agreed. “I think it’s that helpless, boyish thing you’ve got going on. It’s that I’ve got a 140 IQ, but I need a good woman to make me whole kind of thing.”

  “I don’t have a 140 IQ,” Patrick said. It was 145, but he saw no need to say that.

  “W
hatever. If I had that, it wouldn’t have taken me five years to get Lucy to marry me.”

  Could it be that Patrick had actual magnetism that appealed to women? Was that why Sofia had asked him out and then, ultimately, kissed him? If so, that was a heartening prospect. It might mean that he had a chance with her after all, despite objective evidence to the contrary.

  “Well,” Patrick said, digesting it.

  “Have you called Sofia yet?” Ramon asked. “If you haven’t, you’re an idiot.”

  He might, in fact, be an idiot when it came to women. If so, that was beyond his control. The least he could do was not be a coward.

  Sofia had not been waiting for Patrick to call. So what if she’d been keeping her phone nearby at all times with the ringer turned to top volume? She always did that. Well, she didn’t always do that, but she should. There was no telling what kind of important calls she might miss.

  It was her night to cook dinner, so she was in the kitchen boiling a pot of water for pasta and defrosting a container of Bianca’s meat sauce when Patrick finally got around to calling.

  For a moment, she considered letting it go to voice mail. She didn’t want to appear too eager. But she felt a rush of excitement at the thought of talking to him. The excitement was alarming—she liked to play it cool this early on—but there it was. In any case, she was too mature to play games, so she picked up the call.

  “Patrick.”

  “Sofia. Hi. Uh … good. It’s you. I was expecting to get your voice mail.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at his adorable ineptness. “Nope. It’s me. In the flesh.” And, yes, she was teasing him a little with that last bit. So what? What was the harm?

  “In the …” He cleared his throat. “Right.”

  “How are you?” Maybe a little light chitchat would relax him enough that he could say whatever it was he’d called to say.

  “I’m well, thank you. The reason I called”—the throat-clearing again—“I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with me on Friday night. Or Saturday. It wouldn’t have to be Friday or Saturday, now that I think of it, considering that Saturday and Sunday are work days for you. It could be any day that fits into your schedule. It doesn’t have to be dinner, in fact. It could be lunch. Maybe coffee and a muffin ...”