A Cruel Kind of Beautiful

by Michelle Hazen

  Damn it, I’m like a grocery store slut.

  “Miss?” the cashier says, possibly not for the first time. “That’ll be $64.12.”

  Yeah, and I thought that was going to be twenty bucks cheaper. So much for a quick run to the store.

  Jacob’s head comes up. His hand twitches toward his back pocket but then he blushes and looks away.

  I swipe my card, take my receipt from the cashier, and Jacob and I step away from the counter as if we do our shopping together all the time.

  “You know, I’ve nearly blushed at my grand total a time or two, but this is definitely the first time someone else has.” I risk a sidelong glance in his direction.

  Jacob swings the cart around toward the exit doors. “My dad was Iroquois and Puerto Rican, Mom was Norwegian/Irish. Blushing is kind of a genetic lottery I lost.”

  Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve never seen anyone with such gorgeous olive skin tones be able to turn so startlingly red.

  The doors whoosh open in front of us. The sun has weaseled its way through the thick clouds for a moment, and wisps of steam rise from the damp pavement as my cart rattles its way to my VW under Jacob’s guidance. Apparently, he’s walking me out now, which is a shade more intimate than just talking in the store. I shouldn’t lead him on, but is there any non-jerkish way to repossess your grocery cart from someone?

  “I liked the vines,” he says out of nowhere, pushing the cart to the front of my car. Somehow, I’m not surprised he knew the trunk of a VW Bug isn’t in the back. “I didn’t mean to make you think I didn’t.”

  Warmth pulses in the very center of my chest and I stop next to him and use my key to open the trunk.

  “Like I said, I can’t take credit for them. But thank you.” I straighten. “A good friend did them for me. There’s something about the smoothness of the curves contrasted with the thorns that’s always caught my eye.”

  His lips tip upward, brown eyes glowing lighter out here in the sunlight, and I snap my mouth shut before I bore him half to death. Something about that gentle smile of his makes it way too easy to keep talking, but it’s not like he cares what I think about the shape of vines, for crying out loud.

  He moves before I do, turning to lift my bags into the car. I scoot to help him and the last bag is loaded in seconds. He shuts the trunk and then turns to me, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Any chance you’d let me buy you a cup of coffee, since you won’t let me work on your house?”

  No, no, no. Please do not ask me direct questions to which I must say the word no. I can only be around a man like this if I can keep him securely banished to the Friend Zone. But if he notices my attraction to him, he’s going to expect me to act on it, and both of us are going to end up an ugly kind of disappointed.

  I wrap both hands around the strap of my messenger bag, my toes curling in my leather flip-flops. “I really sh—can’t. I have ice cream in the car.”

  “Okay, but it’s rainy, so it might last a while. Besides, today, I have two hours before I have to be anywhere, which practically makes it a holiday.” He takes his hands out of his pockets and smiles, just a little. “I can’t think of a better way to spend it than with someone else who knows a towel is the most important thing you pack on your spaceship.”

  Another Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference, heaven help me.

  “I...” Say no, you idiot. No is safer.

  “It’s just coffee. If you want. And I’ll make it up to you if the ice cream melts.”

  I bite my lip. He really does seem sweet, and there’s no reason to punish him for my baggage. Hanging out is fine as long as I stick to my golden rule: I won’t change a thing about me to appease anyone’s expectations. As a friend, he’s safe to take it or leave it as he wants, and that way, I can be me without hurting anyone.

  Jacob tips his head, as if he can sense me wavering. “Please?”

  Chapter 6: Just Coffee

  The room is scented with coarse ground, dark roast coffee beans and it hums with voices. I close my eyes and inhale, my face softening.

  “What?” Jacob asks, a smile lifting his voice.

  When I open my eyes, he’s turned around in line, his back to the list of choices printed above the bar and his head bent so he can see my expression better.

  I don’t glance away when my heart picks up speed, because this isn’t a date, and I need to stop letting the sight of Jacob catch me off guard. When Jax first joined the band, I could barely do more than stutter in his presence until I got used to how pretty he was. This part will pass, and if I like spending time with Jacob after that? Then we’ll actually be friends.

  “I used to work in a place like this,” I say. “I still get a twitch when I hear the sound.”

  “What sound? The milk foamer thingy?”

  “Nope. Wait for it.” I hold up one finger and mentally count down the seconds because it never takes long. On four, we hear the vigorous thump thump thump of a filter banging against the rigid side of a trashcan and I smile. “The coffee shop percussion section.” He laughs and I sigh. “I always loved the scent, though.”

  I tilt my head up as I pretend to scan the menu I know by heart. Jacob only had his bicycle, and I was in my car, so we ended up at generic chain coffee shop across the parking lot: pretty much a carbon copy of the franchise where I worked from ages sixteen to twenty, despite Dad’s truly limitless bitching.

  “Where do you work now?” Jacob asks.

  “A bar.” I flash a self-deprecating smile. “I’m still slinging drinks, but at least I’m free of the endless mountain of used coffee grounds. What about you? Is delivering newspapers your only calling?”

  I bite the inside of my cheek after I say it, because probably he doesn’t want to talk about baseball, or why he left it. It’s just that athletes are achievers at heart. Andy was amazing but a little intimidating, too, with his volunteer work at the hospital, and his O-chem books that almost outweighed my VW, and yet he only played midfield on the lacrosse team. As the pitcher, Jacob would have been the king of the team, and PU is in the top echelon of college baseball. A guy like that wouldn’t quit anything easily.

  Then again, I quit a lot of things last year and ended up better off. I wonder if Jacob might know a thing or two about that.

  He looks wistful for a second, then scratches the back of his neck. “My calling, huh? More like a way to pay the rent. I make a few bucks on the paper route, fix people’s cars on the side—if you ever lived in the dorms, you probably saw my fliers—and then I have an hourly gig on campus whenever I’m free, with the art department.”

  The barista greets us as we step to the head of the line, and Jacob turns away to fumble his way through the vocabulary lesson necessary to order a drip coffee at a kitschy espresso joint.

  I try to keep my face expressionless as I process what he just told me. I’ve seen the art department’s advertisements, and as far as I know, the only paid position they offer is for anatomy models for the figure drawing classes.

  Clothing is not, shall we say, useful to the goals of the program.

  I barely manage to gather my concentration in time to order, and the barista’s fingers fly over the register. “That’ll be $5.90, please.”

  This time, Jacob doesn’t blush when he goes for his wallet, but he catches sight of me digging in my messenger bag and frowns.

  “Just coffee,” I remind him. “The ‘just’ implies I pay my half.”

  “When I said ‘just’ I didn’t mean for you to take it like I was cheap.” He removes a five and a one from his deeply scratched leather wallet.

  I have to smile at that, even as I enjoy a little guilty thrill at dropping my money back into my messenger bag. If I let Danny buy me coffee, it shouldn’t be a big deal to let Jacob do it once, too. The thrill fizzles when he hesitates, then removes another dollar to push into the tip jar, leaving the cash slot in his wallet empty. He quickly puts it back into his pocket.

  I step back from the coun
ter. “Hey, I should have mentioned earlier: the window is getting fixed today and I don’t actually need you to pay for it.” I dig the envelope containing his thirty-seven dollars out of my messenger bag, where it’s been sitting since he gave it to me. “The insurance company’s waiving the deductible as part of their customer loyalty program, since the house has been under the same policy for twenty years.”

  He takes the envelope hesitantly, even though I saw how empty his wallet was. “You’re not in trouble with your landlord?”

  “I am my landlord,” I say, and then our order is up.

  Jacob tucks the envelope into his pocket and picks up our drinks, passing mine over as he gestures for me to lead the way. I pick a pair of chairs tucked into a corner behind a support column. It sucks trying to hold a conversation while pretending I can’t hear the people eighteen inches to either side of me at their own tables.

  “You own that house?” He lifts an eyebrow. “All of that house?”

  I kick a glance up at him as I settle into the overstuffed cushions of the armchair. “Um, should I answer that?”

  “Doesn’t seem like your style, is all.” The glint in his eye is the only indication that he’s having trouble biting back his reaction to my bile-colored shag carpeting and décor that falls on the un-trendy side of the vintage spectrum.

  “I inherited it about a year ago.” I say it quickly, trying to dodge the squeeze in my chest that always comes along with having to explain this. “My grandma was sick and I ended up moving in and helping her for a couple of years before she got bad enough that hospice took over.”

  “Wouldn’t you have been just in high school then?” He sounds impressed.

  “It was the summer after graduation.” I tug at my shirt, a little uncomfortable because people react weirdly when I tell the story. Either they think I’m some kind of saintly do-gooder, or they think it’s nuts that my parents didn’t do it for me. Nobody ever hints at the truth: that I was good company for her, but maybe she would have been better off with real nurses. “It’s not like I was living with some old crazy lady or whatever. Granna and I were really close. Even when she was pretty sick, we’d watch The Daily Show and The Vampire Diaries together. She had a huge crush on Matt Davis.”

  Jacob smiles, a sad tilt to it that makes me wonder what he’s thinking about. He asks, “Matt Davis?”

  “An actor.” I glance down at my coffee, a smile easing some of the tightness in my lungs as I remember some of the ribald comments Granna would make about him.

  “It’s nice that you got that time with her,” Jacob says in a low voice. “And amazing you could keep up with your classes and everything.”

  I snort. “Keep up is a bit of an overstatement.” I slipped to 2.94 one semester, and my mom was convinced I was headed for a future as a busboy. “I didn’t sleep much. Bottomless coffee at work definitely helped.”

  A buzzing sound interrupts our conversation. Jacob startles so hard he almost spills his drink, then digs a phone out of his pocket. “I’m sorry, I really need to check this.” His eyes are already on the phone.

  I nod and look away to give him privacy, because he said that with the urgency of a doctor on call. Most college students treat every phone notification like a crisis, but not quite to that level.

  I turn my cup in my hand. Then again, this is exactly what people do in college. They procrastinate their homework to go hang out with new, interesting people on not-really-dates where every word of fairly ordinary conversation seems to sparkle, the tang as different from normal syllables as champagne from still water. The thought holds more than a little nostalgia for the days when Granna was still alive and Andy and I used to do stuff like this.

  “Sorry. It was nothing.” Jacob lifts up to put his phone in his back pocket, and as soon as his gaze comes back to my face, he cocks his head. “What’s that look for?”

  “I don’t know. Just...it’s been a while since I’ve hung out in a coffee shop like a regular old college kid. It’s kind of nice.” I look down, picking at the cardboard sleeve on my cup. Why did I just tell him that? Now I sound like a loner for whom going out for coffee is a major event.

  “I know, right?” His eyes warm as he starts to chuckle. “These days when I get to campus, I feel like I’m at a costume party and I forgot to dress up. If it weren’t for the tuition bills, I’m not even sure I’d still qualify as a college student.”

  “Oh, come on, you’re not that far out there.” According to Cleo, not too long ago he was at the white-hot center of social life on campus. “What constitutes normal? Playing Frisbee in the quad? Drinking beer while upside down? I bet you’re great at both of those.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m out. No Frisbee this term.”

  I raise my eyebrows, and decide not to mention the one I saw him rescue out of a tree the day we met. Then again, he wasn’t really playing. “Oh, that is a problem, then. You’re skating on the edge of weirdo territory, Mr. Tate.”

  He nods. “Warned you.”

  “I think there are alternate qualifiers for the non-Frisbee oriented. Have you, by any chance, tried to drink an entire gallon of Carlo Rossi wine by yourself?”

  “Sadly, I have, and there are pictures of me playing soccer on the roof of the Earth Sciences building to prove it.”

  I draw a tally mark in the air. “Okay, have you swam in a decorative fountain, preferably at night?”

  His mouth twitches. “Are you going to resurrect your ice cream excuse if I say yes?”

  “This is strictly for scientific purposes, sir.”

  “In that case, I may have.”

  “Okay, you’re officially a college student.”

  “Was,” he corrects. “I haven’t done any of that crap this year. But what about you?”

  “Sadly, the same.” Even if you dress like a punk rock cat lady who gives zero fucks, attending college functions makes avoiding dating exponentially harder. Plus, neither of my bandmates run in those circles, which makes it easier to forget I ever did. I lift my coffee cup in a toast. “We’re a couple of has-beens.”

  “Nah. Look at us. We’re doing a decent impression right now.”

  I take a sip to hide my smile. It’s sort of nice to know he’s feeling out of practice at all of this, too.

  Jacob takes a drink of his coffee. Looks at it with a completely straight face. Takes another sip. “This is terrible.”

  I laugh. “Come on, people come to coffee shops for the espresso and the company. You can get drip coffee at a 7-11.”

  “Good point.” He sets his cup aside. “So be good company and distract me. Tell me something really juicy, like your favorite band.”

  “I like your idea of ‘juicy.’” I grin. “But it might be quicker to ask which bands I don’t like. I don’t listen to much country, I guess.”

  “How do you not like country? The lyrics apply to pretty much everyone. Besides, it’s catchy.”

  “I’ll start listening when their instrumentation reaches the level of proficiency of their hairdressers.”

  Jacob laughs. “Music snob. I should have known. Portland is full of them.”

  “If you grew up listening to my dad’s friends dissect music, you’d start getting pickier too, I promise. And now that you’ve said all that, you know I have to ask.”

  “Nope.” He relaxes back into his chair and kicks a foot up to cross his opposite knee. “There’s no way I can tell you my favorite band. It’ll ruin this whole thing.”

  “What whole thing?” I tilt a gesture between the two of us with my cup. “This is ‘just coffee’ and you already admitted your coffee is terrible. So this whole thing is already a loss.”

  “Yes, but my favorite band is non-negotiable.”

  I hold up my hand. “If you don’t want to come out of the closet with your love for MC Hammer and One Direction, that’s fine with me. I’ll let you keep your dirty secrets.”

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  “But you at le
ast have to tell me your major.”

  He wrinkles his nose. “Can I lie?”

  I pretend to consider. “Yes.”

  “Business.”

  I make a loud buzzer sound. “Game over, try again.”

  “What? You said I could lie.”

  I laugh. “I’m in Finance. We share a building with Business, and I’ve never seen you in there.”

  “Finance? Come on, I didn’t say you could lie.”

  “Wait, are you stereotyping me?” I scowl.

  “Name five Finance majors whose living room contains a guitar, a piano, and the Beatles’ White Album on original vinyl. Go ahead, I’ll wait.”

  “Seriously? You went through my records?”

  “That one was on the top of the crate!”

  “You didn’t have time to wait to get your shoes and you had time to pigeonhole my educational choices based on albums you were ogling without invitation?”

  He winces and rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, that must have seemed really weird, huh? While you were gone, I got a call about a...kind of a family emergency. I had to go.”

  I bite my lip, glancing down at my coffee. What sort of family emergency leaves you scared enough to take off on a bike, barefoot? Maybe similar to the kind that kills your athletic career and makes you feel like an imposter amongst other students. I don’t know how to ask, but I’m dying to crack the basement door on his past, to peek inside and find if his reasons for keeping his distance from campus social life are anything like mine.

  “Though I admit, before my phone rang, I was considering braving the broken glass in my socks to check out your record collection.”

  Okay, so we’re not going there. Fair enough, I’m practically a stranger, and I know how much I hated talking about it after Granna got sick. Instead, I say, “Paige L’Marche.”