Aroused

by Clover Hart

  She breaks off on that last word as if she doesn’t want me to know that she’s about to cry, assuming she’s not already.

  Why couldn’t I have made this call earlier? I could’ve done some damage control.

  But I already know why I waited. It’s because I didn’t want this to happen — tears, anger, a nightmare in the making. It’s like a switch has been flipped in Mandy, and I think I know what caused it — that other out-of-towner who hurt her before. The guy I promised her I wasn’t.

  I try to talk her down. “You don’t mean any of this. Just listen to what I have to say, and you’ll understand.”

  “Right. What kind of hooey will you tell me now? ‘Gee, Mandy, I gave that pitch to Barry my best shot. Really, I did. But it turns out that Cherry Valley doesn’t have enough choice pieces of tail to recommend it. We ran out of gullible girls after I fucked and ducked you.’”

  Now she’s hit a button in me. “I told you I don’t do that.”

  “That’s right. You’re not a hit-it-and-quit-it dude. Well, maybe you just think you’re not, Zach. Maybe when you look in a mirror, all you see is a swell guy who sprinkles his magic fairy dust on small towns and leaves things sparkly and fantastic. You wave your magic wand around, and guess what? It ended up in this country girl, expanding her horizons as well as her vagina.”

  Holy hell. “Mandy—”

  “You left her world a more wonderful place,” she says as her voice rises. “And now you’re done. Poof. Just like that.” Her laugh wobbles. “Well, I’ve got news for you. You’re city trash who littered our roads for a time, and the view’s much better without you.”

  It feels as if she’s gut punched me.

  “You’re taking this much too personally,” I say in the calmest voice I can manage.

  “How else should I take it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” It turns out I’m not so calm after all. “Maybe you could step off your high horse for a second and listen to me?” I don’t give her a chance to respond. “This is business. FCT had to make the most logical choice, and Cherry Valley wasn’t it. We studied the potentials, and it was the viability of the workforce that was a sticking point.”

  I probably shouldn’t have said that much.

  Silence pulls at the line, then she finally answers. “I see. It was the people, not the place.” She puts on a mock-redneck voice. “‘All us hoo-hahs are too stupid to learn to work in … what do yer call it? One of them voodoo ’puter places that makes life inta a videe-er game.’” Her laugh is full of hurt. “Typical arrogance from someone who thinks they know better than anyone who doesn’t run with their own privileged herd.”

  I can’t talk to her. She’s gone down a road that I told myself I wouldn’t lead her down again — one that another guy in another time already ruined for us by breaking her apart first.

  Her voice goes back to wavering. “I wish you’d never set foot here.”

  Something snaps in me. “You never wanted FCT there in the first place. You said you’d changed your mind, but … come on. From the very first day, you didn’t want pretentious tech assholes ruining your town, remember?”

  “Thank God we dodged that bullet.”

  “You know what bullet you didn’t dodge, Mandy?”

  I tell myself not to say it, and I grit my teeth, holding the words back. I’ve almost swallowed them, too, but then they bust out of me anyway.

  “You couldn’t dodge getting rid of me before I hurt you, just like that other out-of-towner did. You had to get rid of me before I could break your heart.”

  As the accusation ricochets around my office, I immediately want to grab the words and wrestle them back into whatever darkness they came from. But the bitter echo bounces back at me, wounding me even worse than anything Mandy has said.

  I’m just about to tell her I didn’t mean it when she speaks first.

  “Go to hell, Zach,” she whispers.

  The line cuts off, the silence sawing through me.

  I stare at my phone for a while, processing what just happened. What the fuck did just happen?

  The more I stare, the more reality sets in. It’s not as if Mandy and I even have anywhere to go from here. She made herself damned clear to me — she never changed her opinion about who I really am, and no amount of dares is going to ever change that.

  She’ll always be Cherry Valley, and I’m Silicon.

  Maybe circumstances just did us a favor by putting us back in our own worlds for good.

  Chapter 26

  Mandy

  As the days go by, I tell myself that what happened with Zach is for the best. He stabbed Cherry Valley in the back, and stupid me helped him do it.

  It’s my own fault for letting him in that easily, that completely, giving him the opportunity to screw my town over like he did. And you know what? Lesson finally learned.

  I’m not thinking about him anymore. And I’m definitely not thinking about what he said to me on the phone. When he told me that I was only looking for an excuse to push him away before he could do it to me, he was wrong. How would he know? He never really knew me, even if he got me to eat sushi and drive his fancy car around. I didn’t like either of those all that much anyway. Not really. Not when I still have food from Milton’s Diner and my own noisy pickup, which at least never lets me down.

  I sure as heck barely even think about him as I go about my days serving coffee and pie and keeping up with my schoolwork. Even when Miss Carney visits the coffee shop today for the very first time ever, the first thing that doesn’t come to my mind is Zach.

  Miss Carney, with her riot of silver hair, is the last one in line. When she gets to the counter, I see that she has a portable chessboard tucked under her arm. Under her heavy duster, she’s wearing one of her flowery housedresses, even out of the house.

  “Hello, Mandy,” she says.

  “Good to see you, Miss Carney.” I try to sound animated, even as I avoid thinking about how Zach stayed in a room in that adorable Victorian she owns. “Meeting someone here for a match?”

  “Indeed. Some boys from the Honor Roll Club expressed an interest in forming a chess club at the high school, so I’m here to advise them. For my trouble, they’d like to buy me some of that frilly coffee you sell here.” She smiles. “Let’s just not tell them it’s no trouble at all.”

  She glances at the table where a gaggle of high school boys awaits. I’ve tried not to look at them too hard, mostly because they’re sitting at Zach’s old table. And they’re all so nerdy with their glasses and geek-movie talk that they remind me of another dumb nerd who strolled in here one day.

  Not thinking of him.

  Not thinking about how he implied that I never got over what Matthew did to me and how it made me say such awful things that day over the phone to Zach …

  Miss Carney decides to wait at the counter while I prepare an Italian cappuccino and a slice of pie for her.

  “I sure do miss Zach and even that rascal friend of his,” she says.

  A pang hits me hard in my stomach. It can’t be possible that I even miss Barry being at that table across the room almost as much as I miss Zach. If I miss him at all.

  Miss Carney keeps going. “How’s Zach doing, anyway?”

  I shake myself out of my thoughts and concentrate solely on getting that pie on a plate. “I actually wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh. I thought you two were …”

  Please don’t say it.

  And she doesn’t, probably because I look so damned awkward as I fumble with the pie plate before getting it on the counter. Miss Carney has probably had her head so far into her chess games that she’s behind on the newest Left-in-the-Lurch Mandy episode, and good for her. Maybe I should take up a hobby like chess, too.

  “Never mind about that.” She sighs. “Pity Zach’s gone, though. He was a polite boy. Always had time for a quick game with an old lady, even if he wasn’t around much of the time. Some nights he’d stroll into the house with a cute
grin on him, then I’d hear talk around town the next day of how you’d taken him to Milton’s or traded cars. That was awfully nice of you to make him feel at home like that, even if he didn’t end up moving his company here.”

  I only venture a weak smile at her. I want to tell her that people like her and me were only pawns to a businessman like Zach Hamilton, but I keep my tongue mainly for her sake, because she still thinks he’s a good guy.

  “I’ll bring your coffee to your table, Miss Carney,” I say.

  She gives me a real long look. It seems that she’s about to say something else, but then she leaves.

  No one else is in line, and I hesitate to go to my computer to get some work done, because it also reminds me of Zach. It reminds me of all those ugly words I said to him because I was hurting so much after he didn’t tell me the news about FCT. Those words make me cringe even now, although his never bothering to reach out to me again after that call only confirms everything I accused him of.

  So I must’ve been right.

  I wish I wasn’t.

  After yet another sigh, I look over the heads of the customers and out the window to Main Street. The sky is cloudy, cold, dull. Everything is duller now, and I think it’s because of him. With Zach around, there was so much color and possibility. There was a horizon that always seemed to stretch just out of reach on the edge of town, where he wanted to move FCT into the old grain warehouse. Now, everything feels so boxed in and gray, as if Cherry Valley will always be stuck inside its own boundaries.

  A voice from my left brings me back to the same old country music I play all the time in the coffeehouse.

  “Buck up, Mandy,” Abby says. “It’ll rain, but then the sky will clear up.”

  I pull my gaze from the window to glance at her — Abby sitting at the counter with her spitfire-red hair and knowing gaze. The wunderkind. The town crier, although I think I’m actually the one who’s earned that title by now. There hasn’t been a night that’s gone by when I haven’t sobbed in that bed where I’d been with Zach. Even Lil, who came back to her condo a few days ago only to fly out on her own vacation to Hawaii, knew something was up with me.

  I’m sure someone in Cherry Valley told her that Mandy Burnett got worked over by another out-of-towner.

  I put on a brave front for Abby and walk over to her. “Working on another blog?”

  “After I finish this modern literature homework, yes I am. How’s school going for you?”

  I play with the edge of the counter. “Great. But I’ve been looking into transferring to the university in Marloe even before I finish my general ed.”

  “You have?”

  I nod.

  Abby’s eyes widen. “You want to go to the city?”

  Just because Zach is gone doesn’t mean I still can’t have expanding horizons. Maybe he did teach me one useful thing after all.

  “My grades are more than solid,” I say. “I don’t want to move away from Cherry Valley, but I’ve been wondering if trying something new would be good for me.”

  The door to the shop opens, and Lord help me, every time it does, I still turn to look as my heart jumps in my chest.

  But it’s not Zach. It never is.

  As my sister Penny walks in, dressed in the country version of a city wardrobe as usual, she waves to me, then to Abby. She heads to the opposite counter for a sit.

  See, even Penny is about to open her world with this new job she might be offered. She didn’t even have to get her heart broken to get the opportunity, either.

  I leave Abby and wander over to my sister. “Pie?”

  “No thanks. I’m on a diet.”

  Nothing new there, so I fetch her a plain coffee as she rests her cute beaded purse on the bar. She’s got that look on her face that tells me she’s here to complain about her constantly crappy boyfriend, but instead of being exasperated, I totally feel her.

  Men are jerks, and I can sing right along with that song.

  “What did he do?” I ask.

  She seems relieved that I’m the one who brought it up. “I looked on his phone — I know I shouldn’t have done that, Mandy, but I did — and he’s been getting texts from that new mixologist from the Acentric Alchemist. You know, the one who mixes all those tinctures behind the scenes and is all mysterious about it?”

  “Nope,” I say, “I don’t know.”

  And I hope Penny stops talking about that place soon, because my heart’s aching all over again at the memory of being there with Zach.

  My sister goes on. “Well, she’s from somewhere exotic like Spain, and it looks like Robert’s been in the Alchemist for cock and tail.”

  From Spain? I think. Another out-of-towner winner. But I say, “He’s not fit to wipe your boots, Pen.”

  She stares at me. “Usually you tell me something about animals and how Robert isn’t far from one himself.”

  I bristle, because I know she’s a millisecond away from remembering how Zach crushed me and gave me a reason to understand what she’s going through. And, right on cue, her expression softens.

  I’m not only her sister — I’m the girl the out-of-town assholes dump before they skid out of Cherry Valley.

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “Tell me where that boy is so I can cut a bitch.”

  I start to laugh like Zach is no big deal, but big sis sees right through that. Even if she does, I’m not going to let this get to me or, worse yet, define me.

  I lower my voice under the music. “It was just a fling, Pen. That’s all.”

  “Since when do you fling?”

  I shrug like maybe fling is my new thing, but Penny’s frown tells me that she’s still onto me.

  And when someone else comes in the door and my heart jumps again, I’m onto me, too.

  Chapter 27

  Zach

  “No way this is happening,” I tell Barry as we sit at a bar in the cocktail lounge of a ritzy hotel. We’ve got skyscraper views, and we’re surrounded by artistic silver plating on the walls and one-of-a-kind bare-bulb light fixtures. It couldn’t be colder in here.

  I throw back the rest of my $16 martini, loosen the necktie that matches the rest of my suit, and prepare to scram.

  “Shit, Hamilton,” Barry says, grabbing my arm. “Settle in for the night. You’re acting like I’m not doing you a favor. You’ll thank me when you see your date walk in. Guaran-fucking-teed.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to be a date. You said we were meeting yet another representative from Franklin Funding over yet another pricey meal in a pretentious restaurant.”

  “You never objected to pretentious before.”

  I almost laugh at that word — pretentious. Mandy would’ve used it to describe my life, and she would’ve been right. I’ve been sitting through too many long, dull meetings with the movers and shakers in this town while pretending that I’m totally into what they’re trying to sell me about setting up shop in Silicon Valley. I’m the very definition of pretentious.

  In fact, this bar is also the last place I want to be, and as I glance at everyone in the room, their eyes glued to their phones instead of actually having a conversation with the person they’re with, I miss Cherry Valley even more.

  I miss being in a place where it’s okay to get stuck behind a tractor when you’re driving on a country road, because there’s more to life than getting from point A to point B. I miss driving junky pickups past small movie theaters that have marquees and cruising over a Main Street whose lights either flicker or are completely out, making everything appealingly imperfect. I miss the small, comfortable room Miss Carney rents out as well as her chess games, and I miss disgustingly fun food like jellied moose nose and bull balls. I would even trade in the soft piano lounge music that’s currently playing for some twangy shit from a guy wearing a hilariously huge cowboy hat and singing about beer while fucking around in a haystack.

  Most of all, I miss Mandy.

  Barry sees me staring at all the cellphone revenants in the dim
ly lit room. “Just give this girl a chance tonight, Zach. She’s the friend of someone I met on—”

  “One of your dating apps. I get it, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to swipe past this setup and leave.”

  “So you can go home and brood?” Barry shakes his head and takes an aggressive swig of his martini. He ahhs. “Yeah, don’t mind me, but I’m gonna stay here and drink to our success. And tonight, I’m gonna spend some time peeling a tight black dress off a Pilates body. You need to lighten up and do the same, my friend.”

  I motion to the bartender for another drink, and in a fit of screw-you to Barry, I whisper, “Whiskey.” I don’t remember the kind I had that night at the Footloose Saloon, but I don’t care as I add, “The harsher, the better.”

  Barry looks horrified.

  Good. “You lied your ass off to get me here for a date. Just so you know, I’d rather be entertaining business associates than doing this. Barely.”

  “This?” Barry motions to the bartender for another martini. “Hamilton, are you pissed at me because I’m setting you up or because of what happened with Cherry Valley a million years ago?”

  “It’s only been about a week since you trashed the plans to move there.”

  Barry sits back in his seat and folds his arms over his chest. He’s wearing a crisp designer suit like mine, and he actually bothered to comb back his dark hair so it’s out of his face. “I swear, you are just like a chick.”

  I roll my eyes and grab the shot of whiskey that our bartender has kindly placed in front of me. I belligerently throw it back and gulp it down. Ahh. Damn, it burns.

  “I mean it,” Barry says. “You’re refusing a date that I set up for you out of sheer pity for all the moping you’re doing. That is some real passive-aggressive shit right there, Hamilton. You’d shoot off your own dick just to spite me for nixing Cherry Valley, wouldn’t you?”

  “Refusing a date that you’ve arranged isn’t quite the same as maiming my man parts.” I gesture for another whiskey.