by Jean Oram
He stepped closer, a look in his eyes that made her tense up. “Why can’t you see it?” he asked, his voice quiet.
“See what?” she asked cautiously.
“How strong you are.” He came closer again. “And that you could have anything you wanted.”
Mandy stood and crossed her arms. “Frankie, what you want and what you need are two different things.”
“You’ve got to start giving yourself some credit.” He cupped her chin and leaned closer, intense. “You are more than you know, woman.”
“Frankie,” she sighed, a raw edge to her voice. “This isn’t about me.”
“I think it is.”
She tried to ignore the way his proximity was making the blood rushing through her body go extra tingly. “You know any woman would be lucky to have a good man like you.” Her eyes pricked with unspent tears and she tugged herself out of his grip. She crouched, busying herself with wringing out the cloth.
Glancing up, she caught him shooting her that goofy, crooked grin that always made her want to comply with whatever kooky idea he had. More than once she’d found herself racing across the meadow track in her 4x4 trying to outdo one of his muscle cars after he’d shot that grin in her direction. Such a challenge lay in his expression and he knew perfectly well how well it usually worked on her.
He crouched beside her. “The same could be said about you,” he whispered. He slowly leaned in and, when she hesitated to move away, placed his lips gently over hers. He gave her a deep kiss that awakened parts of her that had been dormant for a very long time. And for a very good reason.
She shoved him away and stood up. With shaking legs she moved to the other side of the car where she’d be out of reach, leaving them both safe. The Charger stood between them, its cold frame protecting her. Frankie placed his hands on the hood and stared at her with a determination that meant he would find a way to get what he wanted.
She panicked. Panicked like her truck had lost its brakes on Bear’s Pass. Except there was no runaway lane to save her before she went flying over the edge. He knew she’d felt the power of that kiss. Knew she wanted what he did.
Her voice crept up a few octaves as she said, “I can’t do this with you, Frankie. I can’t. I can’t ruin this. I depend on our friendship. I…” I’m not good enough for you.
“We’re not done here, Mandy Mattson. I’ll be kissing you again, so brace yourself.” He turned on his heel and strode out, slamming the door in his wake.
Mandy drew in a long breath, the familiar scent of oil and gas barely making it past the choking smell wafting off her in great waves. Only Frankie would kiss her like that when she smelled like this. And only Frankie would think she could give him something she couldn’t.
She plunked down and began dabbing her face and hair with the tomato-stained rag, longing to numb herself, block out the promise of another searing kiss from the man she didn’t deserve.
Don’t think. Don’t feel. This will pass and everything will go on as it always has.
But if that was what she truly wanted, why did it feel as though she was choosing to deny them both something that could be truly great?
2
Mandy inhaled deeply, on guard for a whiff of skunk and, doffing her fleece jacket, straightened her uniform. Polyester. Could there be anything worse? She twisted back and forth on Frankie’s porch, checking her reflection in the side window.
The door swung open and Heart bounded out, ball in mouth. He nudged Mandy’s hand, releasing the damp toy so she could throw it across the yard. She gave it a toss and he raced after it, his black tail whipping the air as he skidded around the ball. After picking it up, he tore back to the step.
Frankie rubbed his eyes and blinked. She waved her arm at him. “Do I still smell?”
He paused and shrugged.
“Does that mean I’m fine?” After five days of not passing the sniff test, today had to be the day. She couldn’t afford more days off work.
“I’m sick,” he said, covering his mouth as he let out a wracking cough. “Thanks for noticing.”
Heart nudged her hand with the wet tennis ball and she took it with her fingertips, tossing it over the tiny house so Heart would have to run all the way around, giving her more time before he came back with the slobbery toy.
Frankie groaned. “I hate it when you do that. You know he runs straight through the mud.”
“Sorry.” She eyed his pajama pants. In all the years she’d known Frankie, she couldn’t recall ever seeing him in pajama pants with his hair all mussed up--it was actually kind of cute and made her mind run down all sorts of forbidden avenues. “Want me to ask Leif to send you some soup from the restaurant?”
Frankie shook his head. “I’m going back to bed. Shut Heart in the garage when you go.” He began closing the door on her.
“Wait! Maybe I should take you to the doctor. You always want soup.”
“I’m fine,” he snapped.
She held the door, studying him. He didn’t look that sick. Something was bugging him and she was desperate to cajole him back into his usual easygoing self so they didn’t have to talk about the kiss and the fact that she needed them to stay in the friend zone.
“Oh!” She brightened as she dug around in her pocket. “I have money for the tomato juice.”
He pushed away the bills. “Don’t worry about it.”
She tucked the cash in the neck of his shirt and stepped back. Instead of him looking pleased, he seemed even more miffed. He started to close the door and she desperately thrust her chilled arm through the doorway’s gap. The short sleeves of her hideous uniform exposed her goose-bumped flesh in the April mountain air.
“Do I smell? The skunk burned out my olfactory system and I can’t smell anything anymore and I don’t want my uniform to take on the smell if I do still smell because polyester never lets go of smells and then it would smell like this forever but I have to go back to work today. I can’t stay off sick any longer and I think I just said ‘smell’ about twenty times.” She gave him her best please-help-me-look as she shifted nervously. “Please? Will you smell me? Please, Frankie?”
Frankie gripped her arm with both hands, holding it in the air. Meeting her eye, he narrowed his eyes in a way that left her feeling spooked. He slowly inhaled his way up her arm, tearing her nerves apart, making her body tremble.
Way too intense.
“Frankie…” She caught herself leaning in, longing to touch him. She shook her head and took a large step back.
“You should get to bed. You don’t look well.” She zipped herself back into her fleece jacket, avoiding meeting his gaze.
Frankie turned away to cough. “You smell like vanilla.” He opened his mouth as though there were other things he wanted to say.
The dog bounded up the steps and she snagged his collar, directing him into a half-circle, his paws dropping clumps of mud. As she re-aimed him toward the garage she called over her shoulder, “Thanks! I’ll bring you soup later.”
“A thousand tomatoes lost their lives for a good cause,” he said without his usual humor. “I declare you cured.”
Mandy hesitated, relief slowly pouring through her. Frankie was back to joking. The tension that had been between them over the past few days would melt away as it always did and they’d bounce back to being good friends. He wouldn’t tell her how she could have any man or tell her to get over her ex. And she’d stop projecting her needs and desires onto him or wondering when he was going to kiss her again. Just because a door had shut with the now-married Oz, it didn’t mean she had to go looking for another one to open.
She locked Heart in the garage and headed to work, slipping in the back door. She cringed as she shrugged off her jacket, the skin on her arms tender after days of obsessive exfoliating.
She quickly checked herself over in the staff room mirror before reapplying lip gloss. These pants. She hated these pants. What on earth had Benny been thinking, giving them uniforms? This w
asn’t some awful fast food chain, it was a real restaurant and the wait staff should be wearing black pants and white shirts. Not a mandated fashion atrocity. She unbuttoned the top few buttons on her shirt, exposing a hint of cleavage. She adjusted her push-up bra and smoothed her shirt. She had lost wages to make up for and a little cleavage guaranteed at least an extra five bucks an hour in tips from the middle-aged coffee crowd, due to arrive within the hour.
Gloria bustled into the room, bringing a blast of cool, fresh air with her.
“Well, howdy do! Look at you. Feeling all better, are you?” she asked, yanking her bulky coat down on a hook. “‘Cause whatever you had, I don’t want it.”
Mandy dabbed at some wayward gloss with the tip of her index finger. “Did I miss anything?” She obviously hadn’t missed the opportunity to loll around at home for days on end, replaying all the ways her life had gone wrong since graduating high school.
“Did you ever!” Gloria flopped onto a chair, which Mandy was certain would give out from the abuse someday soon and send Gloria sprawling. The woman, using both hands, heaved off her boots, plunking them onto the floor before snatching her stretched-out shoes from under a broken table. “You missed Mary Alice’s birthday bash!”
Mary Alice’s parties usually led to enough in tips that she could come away with at least one item from her favorite designer’s sample sale in the city. Last year, she’d come away with a lovely calfskin handbag and the leather jacket--which she’d had to throw away after last week’s skunk incident.
“Mary Alice got in the rum.”
Poop and double poop. Oh, karma was a cruel little biddy.
Gloria nudged Mandy out from in front of the mirror so she could begin the daily process of fluffing up her hair and tsking at it as if the sounds would somehow transform her bad haircut into something better. “Don’t worry, there’s always next year. Besides, it’s not like you don’t have enough clothes, anyway.”
Mandy sat down and sighed. Next year. Three hundred and sixty-five days of the same-old same-old. She’d end up here forever like Gloria, or even worse, like her mom who had nothing but a brain-dead job and her soap operas.
Mandy watched Gloria fuss with her hair and tried not to stare at how the pinched uniform stretched over the woman’s serious junk in the trunk.
“Gloria, is that the same uniform Benny gave you when you first started?”
Gloria smoothed her hands over her hips. “Still fits, fifteen years after the fact!”
“What do you think about black pants with a white shirt instead of the uniform?”
She turned to face Mandy. “And why would we want to wear that?”
“Because, um, well, we could wear whatever we wanted and mix it up a bit. Aren’t you tired of the same old uniform?” She stood and rubbed the thinning material of Gloria’s sleeve.
The waitress let out a laugh and began her ritual of applying way too much lipstick, then paused to scrunch up her nose. “Can you smell that? Smells like skunk. I can still smell it in the square, too. I tell you, if they made a perfume with that kind of staying power, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. Think of all the money you’d save if you only had to apply it once a week.”
Mandy slowly tucked her arms at her sides and eased away. Evidently, even Frankie had lost the ability to smell skunk. He probably smelled it everywhere, as she did. And now, here she was. Out in public, stinking up the place.
Gloria reached into her shirt and adjusted her bra strap before going back to stabbing at her lips with bright red. She met Mandy’s eye in the mirror. “You know, wearing our own clothes to work is a bad idea, Mandy. I fought for these uniforms. When you have young kids of your own, you’ll be thanking me.” A pause for another couple of jabs and stabs with the lipstick. “Polyester cleans up nice and easy and dries fast. White shirts are awful. You go through five of ‘em a month because of stains. Plus, cotton needs to be ironed and never looks as crisp as these.” She shot Mandy a warning look and capped her lipstick. “It’s a single mother’s blessing, that’s what a uniform is. Free clothes to wear forty hours a week.”
She pointed her lipstick at Mandy. “I know you have Benny’s ear, but don’t try and sway him on this one or you’ll have me on your tail.” She waited, eyebrows raised, until Mandy sighed and tossed up her hands in resignation.
“Fine. Maybe we can update the mismatched décor instead.” Realizing that she’d likely released skunk scent by moving her body, she quickly lowered her arms and stalked out of the room. How was it that this life, which had seemed perfectly fine a week ago, now felt stifling, unfulfilling and boringly predictable?
She flicked on the dining room’s lights and cruised the large, mismatched room, eyes peeled for sticky fingerprints on chairs, spilled salt, and the like. Gritting her teeth, she noted all the sugar and salt shakers were low. Napkin holders--ditto. Why was she the only one who made sure those kinds of details were taken care of? No wonder Benny paid her a little extra per hour. The place would fall apart without her.
And where was Gloria’s pride? How could she act so complacent? So satisfied with being some small town waitress and nothing more?
Mandy plucked three sticky menus from the pile and smacked them on the counter. She bent over and sucked in a couple of deep breaths, wondering where her sudden, body-shaking anger had come from.
She would never allow herself to become like Gloria.
And she would never, ever become her mother. It was a knockdown fight worth the energy and struggle.
She would do more with her job. Just as she had when Oz had dumped her the first time.
Oz.
That greedy, selfish man.
Eight years.
Eight long years of leading her on and then dumping her. How had she let herself get sucked into thinking it was real? That he loved her? That she loved him?
She took another angry breath.
What kind of man did that to a woman?
And what kind of woman let it happen?
And why was she wishing she’d taken a chance on Frankie instead?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Mandy splashed cool water on her face and pushed through a few cleansing breaths. Much better.
Okay, not at all. She was a blink away from slipping down the slope into Gloria’s life or her mom’s and she didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
She shoved her way out of the washroom and took another deep breath, steeling herself as she returned to the dining room. She needed to pull up her polyester pants and find a way to return the color to her own cheeks--not leave it up to someone else. It was all on her to prove she wasn’t a dried up old nothing. She still had a chance to make something of herself. All she had to do was figure out what it was and go for it.
She forced a smile, hoping her brain would get the message and order up a trainload of dopamine to help lighten her mood. She snatched sugar shakers off the empty tables, trundling them to the small table near the front doors and register.
First step: carry on like nothing was wrong.
Second step: keep her eyes and ears open for a way to become something more.
Anything more. Greedily more.
Third step: find the confidence to pursue it. Step out there.
She uncapped a row of sugar shakers, thinking. What she really needed to do was completely dissolve the awkward business that had been going on between her and Frankie since their kiss.
Oh, but that kiss. Her eyelids fluttered shut as she lightly touched her neck, remembering the intensity of emotion that had swept through her when they’d connected.
The window banged beside her and she jumped as if she’d been goosed.
Her mother waved as she walked by, laughing at Mandy’s expression.
She must have looked like a lovesick dork. She needed to get a grip. Her fantasies were getting out of hand. Okay, okay, not fantasies. More like…totally inappropriate daydreams in which she was enjoying her best fr
iend’s body in a more-than-friends kind of way.
Thank goodness exes didn’t get married every day or she’d be completely out of control.
That was it! She’d challenge Frankie to a race around the meadow after work. He had that old beater with the 440 Magnum engine he’d been itching to race against her beefed up 4x4 truck on the dirt track. After a week of hot-and-cold spring weather it would be a fabulous, challenging bog with bits of firm, frozen sections interspersed with muck. That would remind them both that more-than-friends didn’t do that kind of stuff. Couples didn’t go for the adrenalin of racing in the dark and trying to outdo each other.
His car had better have good tires.
She entered the kitchen to get sugar and salt to refill the shakers, the grills sizzling hello as Leif prepped them for later.
“Hey!” she called.
“Mandy! You’re back.” Leif, a former police officer who’d decided he’d rather have the stress of running a kitchen than dealing with bad guys, came over and gave her a quick, one-armed hug, his cologne just about choking her while his barrel chest knocked her away. At least he wouldn’t be able to catch her scent over his own. Small miracles, she thought as she gave a little cough.
“Gloria was gloating about you missing a big tip night.”
“Yeah, she already got in her digs.”
He glanced at her, raising his eyebrows at her exposed cleavage. “Well, you should make up for it fine. If Benny doesn’t try and stop you.”
Mandy gave him a playful smack on the shoulder, feeling sheepish that her motives were so transparent.
He laughed, moving back to the protection of his grill. “You’re so cute when you get embarrassed.”
Mandy put her hands on her hips. “It’s a woman’s right to flirt…and stuff.”
“I never said anything!” He raised his hands in defense.
