His words broke through the dim lighting. “Do you want to know my last name?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“Well, I figured since we had our first date—”
“It wasn’t a date.”
“Right.” I could barely see a smile on his lips. “Well, maybe if you knew my last name, you’d say yes to a date.”
“Maybe.”
“Collins.”
“The Russells are your mom’s parents.”
He nodded. “You don’t have to tell me yours. I don’t want to rush you. You can tell me when you’re ready.”
“You could always ask your grandmother.” I raised my eyebrows.
“I’m not a stalker, Leah.”
I let out a fake, exaggerated sigh of relief. “Good to know since you already know where I live. My last name is Austin.”
“Well, Leah Austin, I’m not leaving without knowing the answer to one other thing.”
And just like that, I could feel the heat of him against me. His soft lips on mine. His head tilted slightly as our faces fit together. His lips parted just barely, and mine did the same, but stopped just short of a full-on kiss.
Then he pulled away.
All of my senses seemed to have stopped working, and I blinked to regain my eyesight. I caught my breath and swallowed hard.
Drew backed away a little more. “Now I have the answer I wanted.”
“What was the question?”
“The question was: ‘If I kiss her, will she kiss me back?’”
The answer was clearly yes, but what he didn’t know was that the surprise kiss caught me so off-guard that I probably would have let it go on longer. As for what would have happened after that, he would have been disappointed in the answer. The kiss was all he was getting.
“Goodnight, Leah. Thanks for going.”
“Thanks for taking me.”
He turned and bounded down the stairs, and I watched as he followed the stepping stones from the backyard to the side of the house and disappeared. I stayed there, hearing the car start, seeing the beams from the headlights, then hearing his car back out and pull away.
I leaned against the wall and recapped what had just happened.
The whole thing had lasted just a couple of minutes, but they were the best minutes I’d had in months.
Chapter Seven
The next day was Friday, and I arrived at work before anyone else. Since I didn’t have a key, I waited outside on the sidewalk until Rebecca showed up.
“How was your date last night?” she asked as she put the key in the door lock.
“What are you talking about?”
She stopped turning the key and gave me a sideways glance. “Please. You’re a bad liar.” She smiled. “I saw you with him.”
She opened the door and we both walked in, then closed it behind us so she could lock up until it was time to open. If we left the door open, people would be streaming in no matter the hours posted on the door. And we always liked to have a few minutes to talk and drink some coffee before the day started.
“You saw me where?”
Rebecca put her bag on a shelf below the counter. “Uh, let’s see. I saw you on TV. Yeah, you guys were on TMZ last night being chased by the paparazzi.” She laughed. “Where do you think I saw you? At the sea turtle thing.”
“You were there?”
“No, but I drove by it on my way to Kyle’s place.”
I clocked in on the computer. “It wasn’t a date.”
“Hey, if you say it wasn’t then it wasn’t, but it totally was.”
I shook my head, then brushed past her as she came behind the counter to clock in, too.
“We were just hanging out. He knows I’m a marine biology major and he heard about the turtle being released so he asked if I wanted to go.”
I was standing on the other side of the counter, opening a box of sunblock to restock the case.
Rebecca looked at me with no small amount of skepticism. “So you’re not going to see him again?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“He didn’t ask?”
“No.” Which was mostly true. He’d said “maybe,” but I knew he would.
She paused as Chad and Warren came in—barely saying “What’s up?” as usual—and went to the back room, then she laid down the big question. “Did you kiss him?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
I laughed. “No, I’m not. I didn’t kiss him. He kissed me.”
“So let me get this straight,” she said, walking out to the sales floor and straightening a shelf of beach towels. “He picks you up—”
“How do you know he picked me up?”
“Because when I drove past, I saw you getting into that old truck. Nice ride, by the way. Okay, so he picks you up, you two go somewhere together, he kisses you…was it at the end of the night?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, Leah. You don’t want to call it a date? Fine. But guess what, honey. You were on a date. Why won’t you just admit it?”
The reason was complicated, much more so than she needed to know. I hadn’t told her why I had left Florida and ended up in Charleston. It wasn’t that I thought she would judge me. It was just that keeping that part of my past to myself among my new friends and co-workers was part of the process of healing. I didn’t want any sympathy or scorn, I just wanted people to know me for who I really was. Maybe there would come a time when I would feel comfortable telling people what had happened to me, but it would be a while longer.
I put the last of the sunblock in the case. “Fine, it was a date.”
“Told ya.” She forced a big smile, complete with a wide-eyed look of curiosity. “So…how was he? As a kisser, I mean.”
I shrugged. “I’ve had better…”
Rebecca didn’t buy that for a second. “Whatever. Your face is giving you away.”
I laughed, then went on to explain how the kiss had come out of nowhere, catching me totally off guard. As for whether he was a good kisser, I’d been so surprised that it was happening, I didn’t have time to judge.
Rebecca said, “Damn, it’s time to open the doors. Just when this was getting good.” She walked to the front door and turned the latch.
“You’re not missing much. He left right after the kiss.”
“Oooh. Left you wanting more, huh? Scheming bastard. I love it.”
. . . . .
After work, in the early evening, I decided to go for a run on the beach. It was something I did once in a while, just as a little change from surfing, and I knew I’d be doing plenty of that over the weekend anyway.
I was also hoping to run into Drew on the beach.
It dawned on me that despite him mentioning it, we hadn’t exchanged phone numbers so I couldn’t expect a call or a text. No big deal. He always seemed to pop up out of nowhere, and I was sure it would happen again.
But it didn’t. Not on the beach, and not when I stopped by Banana Cabana to pick up a Greek salad and an order of spinach dip and chips to take home.
The store was packed on Saturday, as was every other establishment on Ocean Boulevard—locals streamed onto the island all day joining the tourist masses as the temperature approached one-hundred degrees.
The heat of the day fired off some heavy rain and thunderstorms, and I took advantage of the weather to ride some waves for about thirty minutes until the lightning got too close. And for the second day in a row, no sign of Drew.
Later that night, I went with Rebecca and Kyle to The Windjammer to catch some live music. We hadn’t hung out much outside of work, and when we did it was just the two of us, so this was the first time I was meeting Kyle.
She suggested I ask Drew to come along, but I told her he’d probably pop up somewhere and join us. “You should text him.”
“We didn’t exactly exchange numbers.”
“He didn’t ask for yours?” she said.
“He mentio
ned it, kind of sarcastically, but I guess it just slipped both of our minds.”
A band from Orlando was playing, and the fact that they were from Florida kept putting me in the mindset of being back there myself. These were always unpleasant thoughts. I had found ways of escaping them, and the more time passed, the easier it was becoming to flush my mind clean of that pain.
Lately, Drew had been another way of not looking back, but instead having something to look forward to. That, among other things, was why I was hoping I might see him at The Windjammer that night, or maybe out on the street somewhere.
As the evening wore on, I tried to form an opinion of Kyle that was independent of everything I’d heard from Rebecca. He wasn’t very tall, maybe five-ten, and he wore a tight t-shirt that hugged his chest and showed off half of his biceps, as if he were announcing to everyone at the bar, Look at these guns. His hair was shaved close to his head, and the left side of his neck featured a tattoo of the tail of a snake, with the rest of it going down his chest, as if crawling under his shirt. He was quiet, almost menacingly so, and more than once I noticed his eyes scanning the room almost nervously. I wondered what he was looking for, but didn’t ask.
Rebecca and I did most of the talking when the music wasn’t loud. Each time she said something to him, he mostly responded by nodding or shaking his head, and a few times she even got a “Huh?” because he’d barely been paying attention to her.
At one point, Kyle went outside to smoke and I asked Rebecca if he was having a bad time.
“No, why?”
I shrugged. “I guess he just seems like he doesn’t want to be here.”
“That’s just the way he is.” She shook the ice in her glass. “I need another drink. But, yeah, he’s always like that. I mean, when we’re alone he talks more, but…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Her face twisted into an expression of bewilderment and seemed to be considering how best to say it. “Sometimes he doesn’t respond to my texts for like a day or something. And then other times he’ll call me and if I don’t answer, he texts, then calls again, like he can’t stand that I’m not there when he wants me.”
“Oh.” That sounded bad to me, like he was just using her, but I didn’t dare say it. She knew it.
“But…” she said, smiling, “I know it sounds weird, but I kind of like it.”
“How so?”
“Like I want to figure him out or something. I can’t really explain it. It’s the opposite of how things were with Connor. He was too eager and obvious.”
I didn’t spend too much time analyzing her. Mostly I was distracted by the absence of Drew.
I wouldn’t have guessed he would disappear for two days after that night. Especially after that kiss. As persistent as he’d been to get close to me, it struck me as more than a little odd that all of a sudden he was nowhere to be seen.
Late in the evening, Rebecca noticed my mood. “Missing Drew?”
Kyle was down at the end of the bar, talking to some guys, so Rebecca and I were sitting alone.
“Yeah. This is kind of unlike him.”
Rebecca turned in her seat to face me. “Where do you think he is?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like it’s any of my business, but…”
She jumped in where my sentence trailed off. “I know the feeling.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t like the thought of equating Drew with Kyle. It actually made me cringe a little, but Rebecca didn’t notice.
I’d been drinking a Coke because this place was pretty strict on checking IDs, and I no longer had mine.
“You don’t know where he lives?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“And he hasn’t told you where he works?”
“No. I’ve brought it up at least twice, at least, but he’s always found a way to change the subject.”
“Maybe he’s a drug dealer.”
I laughed. “That’s what I said one time.”
“Did he deny it?”
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “He’s not a dealer, Rebecca.”
“Okay, let’s go through this and try to figure it out.”
We spent the next several minutes talking about what we knew about Drew, and the only conclusion we could come up with was that he worked somewhere he didn’t want me to know about, which had been obvious from the start, so we’d accomplished nothing.
At one point I said, “Maybe he doesn’t work at all, and he’s stalling while he tries to figure out a way to tell me he’s a merman.”
“A what?”
“Merman. The male version of a mermaid. Maybe he has to spend a certain amount of time in the water, and that’s why he’s not around this weekend. Or maybe I’m just getting tired and delirious.”
She snapped her fingers. “I got it. Maybe he’s intimidated that you’re studying to be a scientist and he’s, like, a…I don’t know. Maybe a stock boy at a grocery store.”
“Drew’s not like that.” I noticed a defensive tone to my response and found it surprising.
Rebecca didn’t pick up on it. “He’s not like what? A stock boy?”
I laughed. “No. He’s just not the type to be ashamed of any kind of job. At least, I don’t think so.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Then what’s he hiding?”
I frowned and cocked my head to the side, wondering the same thing.
I could have asked Mrs. Russell, but she might think it was odd that Drew hadn’t told me, and if she mentioned it to Drew he would know that I’d been snooping around.
Plus, figuring Drew out was proving to be an intriguing diversion, something I really needed.
. . . . .
Late Sunday morning, I got a call from Liz. We kept in touch maybe once a week or once every two weeks at worst. She was a great friend and roommate, and I hated the fact that we didn’t talk much anymore, but separating myself from Florida meant sacrificing some of the things I dearly loved.
She always wanted to know first what I had been up to since the last time we talked. I never had very much to share. My life was mostly just working at the shop and surfing. Not that I was complaining. I liked it that way.
This time, though, there was obviously more to share. But I wasn’t ready to tell her about my recent encounters with Drew. So when I told her about being arrested for surfing, I completely left out the part about how the fine got paid, and instead focused on what it was like to be in the slammer.
“Of course you’d get arrested surfing,” she joked. “If I had to pick one person that would happen to, it would be you.”
Liz wasn’t a surfer. She had no interest in it, other than having watched me do it a few times and telling me it looked like fun. But she just wasn’t the athletic type, so watching was the extent of her involvement.
As always happened, the conversation turned to what was going on back in Tampa. And of course, she had something to tell me about Kevin.
He was still in touch with some of the guys from our group of friends, and he hung out with a couple of them a few times, but he was no longer a regular part of the group. This, I figured, was mostly due to the girls not wanting to have anything to do with him. And to their credit, a few of the guys felt the same way.
Invariably, one of our friends would occasionally run into him at a bar or a concert, and a couple of times she even told me she heard he was seeing someone. I didn’t ask who, and she didn’t volunteer the name of the girl, so maybe it was the girl he cheated on me with, or maybe it wasn’t—either way, I didn’t care.
This time, though, she had some other news about him.
Kevin got ripped one night at a party and fell into a pool. I almost laughed at the image, until Liz told me he hadn’t just fallen, he had passed out, and if a couple of girls hadn’t seen it he probably would have drowned. It was so unlike Kevin. Sure, he drank, but no more than anyone else I knew, and never to that extent. The l
ast time Liz heard anything about him, he had gotten fired from his summer internship with an engineering firm for not showing up to work twice in one week because he’d been drinking around the clock.
“What a loser,” she said. “Karma’s a bitch.”
“Yeah. Wow. No shit.” I agreed with her only because I didn’t want to admit that I felt badly for him. I also hated the fact that I had any sympathy at all for him after what he did to me. So I just wanted to leave it at that, and it worked out because she immediately raised another issue.
“When are you coming back? Classes start on August twenty-fifth, you know.”
I hadn’t given any thought to exactly when I’d go back. I had a general idea that I’d probably arrive back in Tampa a few days before classes began, but I hadn’t done anything in the way of planning yet.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, when you figure it out, let me know?”
“I will.”
“Because I’d really like to have my old roommate back. I miss you.”
It was comments like that—genuine and well-meaning as they were—that cut me the deepest and made being away even harder.
“I miss you, too,” I said, wanting to avoid this part of the conversation going any further.
Thankfully, it seemed that she did as well, because we were instantly on to chatting about relatively mundane things, the kind of everyday chatting I’d always loved to have with her.
Chapter Eight
I barely slept at all Sunday night. I kept tossing and turning, my thoughts running wildly from the report of Kevin’s recent troubles to why I hadn’t seen Drew in several days. The thoughts about Kevin ran a distant second to my curiosity about Drew, though, and how strange all of this was.
I didn’t know where he lived, where he worked, who his friends were…nothing. And it seemed odd to me that he had been so persistent in his attempts to get close to me, and just when we have a date that ends with an amazing kiss, he practically vanishes.
The cynical side of me chalked that up to guys being guys. And once again I found myself fighting the urge to ask his grandmother.
Break My Fall (No Limits) Page 6
