by Jayne Denker
“My sister is a slob,” George sighed.
“Mm,” Jaz agreed. “I was the clean one; we balanced each other out. So I appreciate your neatness while I’m out of commission.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s enough, though—just keeping the place up. I should do more. Well, you’re here and defenseless—I’ll take care of you instead.”
“But the new muscle relaxants are working really, really well.”
George smirked. “Sounds like you like them a little too much. You’d better hand them over to me. I’ll put them under lock and key and distribute them on a strict schedule.”
“Yes, Nurse Ratched. So,” she ventured, “what did you get up to last night?”
George froze, a slice of cheese dangling from her fingers, as though she’d forgotten it was supposed to go on the bread. “What do you mean?” she stammered. “Just went out for drinks. Nothing else. No big deal. Why?”
“Easy, baby. I just asked a simple question.”
“Oh.” George did her best to smile. “Yeah. Of course. It was fine.”
“Just ‘fine’? Then you’re not doing it right.”
“It was . . . nice. Fun. You know. Honestly, I kind of felt like Sera should have been there instead of me. So many of the folks who were there last night were her friends from high school, not mine.”
“She should, but she won’t.”
“Why not? Darryl was there. They were friends once. Is she staying away from everybody or something?”
“Well, that’s a special situation. But overall, it’s just . . .” Jaz thought a moment. “I guess she’s kind of sick of . . .”
“Everybody? Everything?”
Her sister-in-law grinned as she took the plate George handed her. “Kind of.”
“But they were a lot of fun.”
“I think it’s different for you. You’ve been away, you haven’t seen those guys in a long time—it’s new and different. But for Sera, who’s never left, it’s kind of SSDD.”
“Er . . .”
“Same shit, different day. For years upon years.”
“You’re lucky Sera isn’t here to hear you say that.”
“You think she’d disagree?”
“I think she’d ream you out for saying ‘shit.’”
“Oh that. Yeah, my darling can be a bit weird about that kid of ours. I like to get all my profanities out when she’s not around. Shit! Fuck! Ass!”
At the sound of the front door opening, George flapped her hands frantically. “Hush! She’ll kill you.”
But then the sound of footsteps was followed up by a male voice. “Hello?”
George’s breath caught. She knew that voice, and it made her excited and dismayed and terrified, all at the same time.
“In here. Casey?” Jaz called.
“Yeah.” He swung into the doorway, his toolbox dangling from his hand. “Sorry—I knocked, but I don’t think you guys heard it over all the swearing—? Anyway, I had some free time, thought I’d put up some new blinds in your living room.”
“Aw, that’s so nice of you. You didn’t have to do that,” Jaz said, while George stood frozen beside her.
“Well, George’s pie was so good, I figured I had to do more than just fix a faucet to deserve it.”
“Or you’re angling for another pie entirely.”
“Ah, you’ve figured me out. I’m hoping this turns out to be a never-ending tradeoff cycle. You know, chores for pie for chores for pie for . . . well, you get the idea. Although my official story is I couldn’t sleep knowing you had broken blinds in your house.”
Jaz laughed, then winced. “Ow. Stop.”
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Is it still really bad?”
“No,” she reassured him. “It’s getting better. Honest.”
“God, I hope so. Hey, Goose.”
“Hi.” It came out as a squeak.
Jaz looked over at her curiously but didn’t comment. She just asked Casey, “Did you have lunch? We could—”
“I’ve eaten, thanks. So I’ll just get started. Hey, Goose? Could you give me a hand?”
“Oh. Uh. Actually, I’ve got to . . . that is, um . . .”
But Jaz gave her as mighty a shove as she could manage, and she stumbled after Casey, who was saying, “I wanted to talk to you. About the Web.”
Crap.
He went into the living room, expecting George to follow. George did, in a kind of dazed death march. Time to face the music, but she wasn’t going down without a fight. She started trying to come up with explanations for why she’d bared her soul online. She couldn’t start with the “but I was drunk” excuse, because that didn’t deny it. And flat-out refutation was her best option at this point. Maybe she could Obi-Wan Kenobi him: “Blog entry? There was no blog entry. Move along.” Yeah, she could try that. But even if she maintained eye contact and kept her blinking-as-evidence-of-lying to a minimum, he still might not buy it. He was really smart, after all. And insightful. When it came to most things, anyway.
And then she was alone with him. She tried not to stare when he bent over to put the toolbox on the floor. She almost managed it but realized she’d failed when she caught herself zoning out so much that whatever he’d just said didn’t register as English in her cranium.
She scrambled to recover. “Sorry . . . what?”
He straightened up and did that irresistible, room-filling, I’min-charge thing, putting his hands on his hips. “I said, do you think you have time to help me?”
“Help you?”
A smile twitched on his lips. He probably thought she was just brain-fogged with a hangover, not panicking about her True Confessions blog entry. Only she knew it was a little of both. Okay, a lot of both.
“With the online stuff,” he said patiently. “I never thought about it much, but I should. I had a bunch of brochures printed up, but I can only use those locally—put them in the library, at Nora’s, in the chamber of commerce’s rack of tourist information. I need to cast a wider net, I guess you’d say. But I’m not all that Internet savvy, so I thought maybe . . .”
“Oh!”
A wave of relief washed over her. He wasn’t going to ask her about the blog entry. He probably hadn’t seen it, and she’d bet nobody told him about it, either. Maybe, she thought with a surge of hope that addled her already unstable stomach, he’d never hear about it. Hah, sure. Not in Marsden. It was only a matter of time. Actually, she was surprised he hadn’t gotten a phone call from Mrs. Preston yet. It had been twelve hours already. There should be a plane circling the valley, dragging a “George and Casey / Sitting in a tree . . .” banner behind it by now, shouldn’t there? But instead there was blessed, if temporary, silence. And until word got back to him, she could be nice, act normal, help him out, and if (oh, come on—when) he ever found out about her drunken confession, he’d be thinking more highly of her because of it, the news would go down a lot easier, and she could push her “but I was a stupid teenager/that was in the Paleozoic era” angle. Damn, that was an excellent plan, if she did say so herself.
He gave her a calm, measured look that turned her knees to jelly. “I need your help, Goose. Now tell me you’ll do it.”
She heard herself say, faintly, “Okay.”
“Good, then.” And with the flash of a brief, satisfied smile, he was back to work, pulling out a cordless power screwdriver and taking down the mangled blinds.
Chapter 14
This would work. Because he wanted it to work. He ignored the electric pulses coursing through his body and focused on the bowl of chicken salad, plate of rolls, platter of fruit and cheese slices. Too much? Too blatant? No. It was just food; George had to eat. Offering her some food didn’t give away his intentions.
But he did have intentions. He just wasn’t about to show his hand yet. She had, and that gave him the advantage. God, the stuff she’d written. She said she’d been in love with him. In love. That was huge. It was, if he admitted it to himself, a litt
le scary. Or a lot scary, depending on how honest he was going to be. Still, she’d been eighteen, and a lot of years had passed since then. Maybe she was seeing the past through a haze of nostalgia. Maybe it didn’t really have anything to do with him exactly, but because of her particular mind-set right now (what with all the crap her recent boyfriend had put her through), what had happened between them suddenly looked a whole lot better, even though it wasn’t real.
But it had been real. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d denied it, though. He hadn’t admitted it to himself, either—not for years. Then George had come roaring back into town, blasting past him and his colleagues with that car of hers, like a kid on a tricycle scattering chickens in a yard, and it all came back to him.
He hadn’t noticed her at all, at first. He’d been fifteen when he’d first moved to town, and at that age he didn’t look much past the end of his own nose. He only knew George as a pale, freckle-faced, fairy-like girl with tangled blond hair that looked almost pink in a certain kind of light. Just his new friend Sera’s kid sister, doing time in middle school and, judging by the longing looks she’d bestow on Sera and her group of friends when she thought nobody was looking, wishing she were older. Casey had thought it was sort of cute whenever he caught her peering at them from around a doorjamb, one light-brown eye and half a head of reddish-blond hair the only thing showing. He never mocked her for spying on them. Instead, he always tried to catch her eye to see that alarmed blush of hers redden her skin, starting below the collar of her shirt and creeping upward to take over her face. That was when he’d given her the nickname of “Goose”—to make her laugh (or, more likely, to trigger that blush). Funny how nobody else picked it up. He was the only one who ever called her that.
Casey had certainly never expected to have his head turned by George when they were in high school. He was happy, popular, busy (with classes, sports, and chores at home), and content with his group of friends and his sweet, pretty girlfriend Celia. When George started high school, Casey noticed she’d grown and matured, of course, but she was still a young girl, a freshman, when he was a junior.
He didn’t realize she’d gotten under his skin until he started his senior year. As a sophomore, George had blossomed into a beautiful, waiflike creature. But the only thing delicate about George was the way she looked. Inside she was all sharp intellect that could cut you at twenty paces if you weren’t careful. Having a conversation with her was like walking through a minefield—you had to have your entire route mapped out, or you’d be blown to smithereens.
Because she wasn’t conventionally attractive, the boys at school weren’t interested in her. At least, not overtly. She wasn’t flirty or giggly, and certainly wasn’t of average intelligence—she was one of the smartest kids in school. Maybe the smartest. Not part of the nerd clique, though. A free agent. She was Georgiana Down, Girl Genius, indefinable and impossible to pigeonhole, whom everyone expected to go far. So the boys ignored her in public but, Casey was sure, thought about her plenty in private. Just like he did.
So George might never have had a shot at homecoming queen, but she didn’t care. She killed on the debate team, contributed to the school newspaper and literary magazine, and each year put together a yearbook filled with more popular students’ pictures, never hers. It seemed she was always behind the scenes, yet Casey was always aware of her presence, her influence. Aware of her. And, gradually, he became more and more interested in her personal life. If she wasn’t home when he and his friends invaded the Downs’ house and raided the fridge, he wondered where she was, who she was with, what she was doing.
Casey sought her out more and more often, curious to know her thoughts about schoolwork, or a new movie, or some school- or town-based political event. Anything, really. He just wanted to know what was going on inside her head. He always looked for her, in school and out, hoping that just once Sera would let George hang out with their group of friends. (She never did.)
He felt so strongly about her back then, but he’d been too much of a coward to follow through, never getting up the courage to ask her out after he and Celia broke up. He never told her he had a crush on her. And then he had to go and ruin everything by bypassing all the social conventions and planting one on her when she’d least expected it. Yeah, that had happened. Nothing she’d published on her blog the other day had been incorrect. He had kissed her. And then he had backed off. He ran. He regretted it then, and he still regretted it now. Oh sure, he’d come up with a bunch of reasons for taking off, but when he thought about them now, they seemed pretty flimsy. He had just been a chickenshit, no two ways about it.
Now he had a chance to make it right, and he wasn’t going to blow it. He was going to woo Georgiana Down. Better late than never, and acknowledging the lost years in between with no regret. Or as little regret as possible, anyway.
He checked the floral arrangement on the round table in the middle of the spacious foyer. Was it big enough? Did it make enough of a statement to show that he was a sophisticated, gracious host who was so effectively in touch with his masculinity that he could have a flower arrangement in his home and not think twice about it? Did it convey the promise that this place would be top-to-bottom perfect one day soon? Well, if it didn’t, it was too late now. He didn’t have time to get another, better one—if there was such a thing. Hell, he’d gotten enough weird looks from his crew when he’d had this one delivered; he wasn’t about to go through that again.
What was he doing bringing in a bunch of flowers when he barely had any furniture, anyway? Did he think this was going to impress her? George Down, who brooked no bullshit, who always seemed to see right through him?
Casey picked up the vase. This was stupid. It looked like he was trying too hard. He should get rid of it. But then he heard a knock on the back door that rattled its window. Too late. She was here.
He put the vase back on the table, vaguely realizing she wouldn’t see the flowers anyway since she’d come to the back door, and rushed to let her in.
“Hey,” she said, a little breathlessly, stepping over the threshold. “Am I late?”
He lifted the straps of her laptop bag from her shoulder. “No, you’re right on time.”
“Oh good. I got stuck behind Burt Womack. I swear, he’s psychic. He gets these premonitions when someone has to get somewhere by a particular time, and he makes sure he gets on the road in front of them and screws everything up. He’s a one-man rolling roadblock.”
“Come on in.” He led her down the narrow back hallway and into the main part of the house, went down another hall to the right, and stood in the doorway of his office to let her go through first.
“So this is the nerve center of . . . what are you going to call this place? Still Bowen Farms?”
“Bowen Farms Inn and Conference Center. And, er, pumpkin farm. And Christmas tree farm. I . . . haven’t really thought it through yet.”
“Sounds like it,” she murmured with a sly look. “Bowen Farms should cover it.”
Casey put her laptop bag on his desk. “Make yourself at home.”
“I brought my computer because I wasn’t sure what kind of setup you had . . . and . . . oh.”
She was staring at his boxy computer with an expression that may have been confusion, or amusement, or horror. Maybe a mix of all three.
“It still works,” he said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of his voice.
“It’s, uh, vintage?”
“I haven’t had time to upgrade lately.”
“I’m sorry. It’s fine. I don’t mean to . . .” She sighed, putting her wrist to her forehead, and tried again. “Sometimes I don’t . . . what was that stupid saying Mr. Archer used to always use in English class? ‘Engage brain before putting mouth in gear?’ I have a problem with that. Probably from spending too much time alone, online. Typing gives me those precious few minutes to review what I’m about to say before I actually say it. You don’t get that in real life.” Then she stopped sh
ort. “I also tend to ramble once in a while. Don’t mind me. I’ll regain my social graces eventually. Maybe.”
She stumbled to a halt and that familiar blush crept across her skin, drawing his eye to the scooped neckline of her shirt. Casey wondered if she was thinking about her recent blog post.
He noticed George swiping at her forehead again, and he rushed to ask, “Is it hot in here? I’m sorry I don’t have the air-conditioning installed yet. But I can turn on a fan or two—”
He really needed to cool this place down. It was only June, and already the heat and humidity had infiltrated the usually cold interior of the high-ceilinged, drafty, shaded house. It was only going to get worse. He really had to call the central-air guy.
“No, it’s okay,” she said, pulling out her laptop and opening it up. “I’m fine.”
“Drink?”
“Water?”
“Lunch?”
George stopped fussing with her computer and looked at him strangely. Yeah, he was pretty jumpy too—they were making quite a pair.
“I mean,” he said, more sedately, “it is lunchtime. I’ve got some—”
“Yeah, sounds great.”
He let out a breath. “Great. Good. I’ll go get it.”
When he came back into the room carrying a tray full of food, he found George hunkered down behind her laptop, staring at the screen. She had an odd, intense look on her face, and Casey hesitated, not wanting to disturb her. He set the tray down as quietly as he could.
After a moment or two, he asked, “Everything okay?”
She glanced up, shook herself, and put on a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”
“Not okay?”
“It’s just . . . unusual. I was checking my blog, and there are a lot more messages than I’m used to getting. My readers send me letters asking for advice, and share stories about their bad dates and bad relationships,” she explained, and Casey didn’t interrupt to tell her he’d become well acquainted with all the different facets of her blog. He didn’t want to sound like a stalker or anything. “Usually I get maybe ten or so a day, but . . . I’ve got way more all of a sudden.”
