“I haven’t changed the subject. If Lee and Sharon can go from zero to engagement in a matter of weeks, the least you could do is admit that you want to date Ian.”
A fine mist broke out on Rachel’s forehead. She picked up a coaster and fanned herself. Maybe Lynn wasn’t the only one starting menopause.
“How many dates have you two been on?” Lynn smiled as if she knew a secret. “Two? Three?”
“None,” Rachel said flatly. She fiddled with the coaster.
“I’d say at least two.” Ann ran the tips of her fingers back through her hair, smoothing flyaways into her ponytail.
“Those weren’t dates,” Rachel defended.
“But you have been seeing each other,” Lynn clarified.
“I wouldn’t call it ‘seeing each other.’” Rachel over-exaggerated the air quotes. “I just helped serve food at the soup kitchen where he volunteers because they were shorthanded one day and he couldn’t find anyone else to fill in. And, sure, I happened to stand next to him the entire time because he was serving potatoes and I was serving peas—”
Ann held up her index finger. “Date Number One. Didn’t it last like four hours?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
Lynn’s tone was speculative. “Four hours of chatting…over food…sounds like a date to me.”
“Yeah, because most people on dates wear hair nets and plastic gloves.”
“Did he pick you up and drive you home?”
Rachel ignored Ann’s pointed question. “Then he and his partner Garcia volunteered to help as security on the night of the school’s Christmas Festival, but that’s only because Yolanda Martinez asked if anyone from the precinct could be on hand to help with parking and traffic and he said yes—”
Ann interrupted. “And then Garcia invited you to stop in at her family Christmas party afterwards, where you sat in a corner and talked to someone for the entire night—oh wait, who was that again?”
“Ian Smith, wasn’t it?” Lynn clarified, obviously enjoying herself.
The traitor.
“Enough.” Rachel sliced her hand through the air, annoyed as much with them as she was with herself for rising to the bait. “Those weren’t dates.”
Ann coughed a word that sounded suspiciously like denial. At a sharp look from her sister, she shrugged. “Whatever you say, Rachel.”
“Look.” Rachel rummaged in her bag. She pulled out her Resolutions Notebook, flipped to the first page, and held it outward as if she were a librarian conducting story time. “What does this say?” Her tone had gone razor thin. Had any of her students been in Stu’s Diner, they would have had the sense to duck and cover.
“Resolved,” Ann read aloud, squinting. “To stop reading into situations and creating groundless, alternate storylines in my head.”
Lynn pushed her hair from her forehead. “But Rachel, this isn’t in your head. Ian Smith has told you repeatedly that he likes you.”
“False!” Rachel cried.
The two women stared at her.
“He only said it once,” she said in a small voice.
Ann sighed and threw up her hands.
Rachel swiped sweat from her upper lip. “And that was way back when we first met. Before I acted like a crazy person.”
Ann snorted. “Which time?”
Lynn shook her head. “Ann, that’s hardly helpful.”
Ann leaned back in her seat and signaled for the check.
“Listen,” Rachel said. “I’m done operating on assumptions. You two should know better than anybody. That sort of thinking never gets me anywhere.” She slapped the notebook shut and slid it back into her bag. “Aren’t you always telling me not to assume things? Well, here’s one thing I will not assume. Until the day Ian Smith has ‘the talk’ with me, I will not assume that there’s anything more between us than friendship.”
“Boo,” Ann commented.
Lynn tilted her head, studying Rachel thoughtfully. She pulled her wallet from her purse and counted out her portion of the bill. This she handed over to Ann. “I don’t know, Rachel. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I think you’re misapplying your first resolution in this case.”
Rachel shrugged. Only time would tell.
~*~
On the first Sunday of the new year, Rachel settled into her seat and opened her Bible for the sermon, giving herself a mental pep talk. She would pay attention, take notes, and stay focused—no matter what. She pulled her Resolutions Notebook from her bag and opened to a fresh page, scrawling the words Sermon Notes across the top.
Of all the resolutions, this seemed the most straightforward and achievable. It was certainly the easiest to track. At the end of the year, she would hand the notebook to Lynn with a smile, watching as her friend flipped through pages of detailed sermon notes. She could almost taste the triumph. Caught in her vision of glory, Rachel missed the text. “What did he say?” she hissed to Lynn’s husband Alex.
“We’re in John 14 to start,” Alex murmured, “but Galatians 5 is the primary text.” He gestured toward the front of the sanctuary, where Rachel noticed the texts prominently displayed on a screen above the pastor’s head. The title of the new sermon series starting that day blazoned across the top of the screen: The Work of the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Believer.
Ignoring Alex’s pitying tsk-tsk sounds, she happily scrawled her notes, thrilled at the serendipitous timing of a new series the very day she instituted her resolution. She didn’t want to read into anything, but this couldn’t be coincidence.
In books there are always signs: symbols, warnings, portents, and foreshadowings. She’d often felt disappointed that life didn’t follow such patterns. Now, however, in seizing control of her personal growth and seeking real change, anything seemed possible. Even signs.
These resolutions were going to work. She would change, and that change would bring results.
3
Rachel’s phone buzzed, working its way sideways toward the edge of her nightstand. She rolled over and peered through one squinty eye, inwardly berating herself for forgetting to switch it from vibrate to silent before falling asleep. She palmed the phone and tilted it sideways.
Fortunately, it was a text alert rather than a phone call, which meant this likely wasn’t an emergency. Whatever it was, she could deal with it in the morning. Peering to see if the text came from Ann, Lynn, Lee, or even—heaven forbid—her boss, Yolanda Martinez, Rachel saw instead that the text came from an unknown number. Pushing up on her elbow, she disconnected the phone from its charger, drawing it close to her face. She shut her eyes for a moment against the blue-white glow. Then she rubbed her eyes, opened them as tiny slits, and peered at the message.
Hey girl.
Ugh. Stupid wrong number.
Or wait—was it a wrong number?
She sat up. It really could be anyone. What if—
No. She wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t. Not so soon after making the resolutions.
Fighting against every instinct in her body, Rachel swiped her thumb across the screen to delete the text.
This message thread will be deleted, her phone informed her. Are you sure?
Of course she wasn’t sure. But still. The Resolutions must be honored. It had to be done.
Rachel deleted the text, activated the silent mode, double-checked that the phone alarm was still set for her early-morning workout, and rolled over. She shrugged into the duvet and worked to jettison the text from her mind.
~*~
Ann arrived at the gym Monday morning and announced that today was bound to be entertaining, since Rachel had decided once and for all to master the flying teep.
“I haven’t decided to master it.” Rachel clarified, hoping to manage expectations. “I’ve decided to try to master it. Big difference.”
“Let’s check the exact wording of the resolution in the notebook.”
“I don’t have it with me.”
Coach Donovan rubbed hi
s hands together as if Christmas had come early—very early, considering that it was just now January.
She had to head this off. She rounded on him, arms folded. “I did an internet search, and I couldn’t even figure out if a ‘flying teep kick’ is even a thing. I found something called a ‘straight kick,’ and something called a ‘flying front kick,’ but the girl doing that one was kicking a lot higher than we do—”
Donovan nodded, looking pleased at this show of interest. “Sounds like you saw the Muay Thai and Wushu versions. We’re combining them. We’re hoping to land our straight kick on the chest”—he demonstrated on Ann in slow motion—“but with the added forward momentum of the jump for maximum power.” He lined up with a heavy bag hanging against the wall, took two quick steps, hopped into the air, drew a knee toward his chest, cocked his hips, and slammed his right leg forward, sending the bag jouncing on its chain. He landed in fight stance like an action hero, falling immediately into a boxer’s shuffle and holding his guard as if he expected the bag to put up a fight. Pivoting toward Rachel, he jiggled his eyebrows and motioned for her with a tilt of his head. “Go to it.”
This was exactly what she’d been trying to avoid. There’d be no wiggling out of this now. She’d really have to try. The last time she’d worked hard to master something at the gym—the agility ladder, in point of fact—she’d fractured her ankle, precipitating the three most disastrous months of her life.
Rachel said as much to Ann and Donovan. They looked unimpressed.
“Come on, Rachel.” Coach Donovan pulled out a kick pad and hugged it to his chest. He slapped it twice in invitation. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I could break my other ankle?”
Ann grinned. “At least you already know how to use crutches.”
~*~
Just before the bell rang to start first period English that morning, no one was more thrilled than Rachel to watch Jessica Potts slide back into her customary seat, glossy blonde hair flipped back over her shoulder, eyes clear, bright, and perfectly made-up.
Only Jessica Potts could take two months off from school to attend intensive therapy and come back looking as if she’d spent the time getting spa treatments. Then again, who was to say she hadn’t done both. This was Jessica Potts. Rachel almost envied her, until she remembered that such an intensive need to achieve had nearly driven Jessica to take a swan dive from the rafters last semester.
Chris pin-balled through the doorway, Alice in his wake. On her way toward her seat in the rear of the room, Alice walked down Jessica’s row. Alice didn’t say anything, but as she passed, she trailed her fingers along the side of Jessica’s desk. Momentarily, the hard, bright edges of Jessica’s face relaxed.
Well.
“Miss Cooper. What exactly is this?” Chris held a small, thin booklet between two fingers. On the cover, a man dressed in hose and doublet had slung a woman over his shoulder and was in the process of carting her out of the frame. The woman, clad in a red velvet robe and matching wimple, seemed intent on escape.
“That, my dear, is our focus of study for the semester.” As if on cue, the bell rang. “It’s called The Taming of the Shrew.”
“I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but it seems this one might promote domestic violence. Are you sure this is the sort of literature you should be exposing our innocent minds to, Miss Cooper? What would Ms. Martinez think?” Chris blinked up at her, doe-eyed.
Rachel half wanted to laugh and half wanted to drop a paperweight on his head.
Todd Perkins cleared his throat. “We studied Romeo and Juliet last year,” he reminded Chris as he scrunched his nose to push up his glasses. “People got stabbed or poisoned on, like, every page. You really think this one’s going to be worse somehow?”
Chris had hated every part Romeo and Juliet but the sword fights. “I don’t know how anything could be worse.”
Shayla turned sideways in her chair to glower at Chris. “You shut your mouth.”
At this, Alice Claythorne lifted her gaze to make direct eye contact.
Rachel smiled. “Yes, Alice?”
Everyone turned in their seats to stare toward the back.
“Romeo and Juliet’s a tragedy,” she said, her voice soft and low, “and The Taming of the Shrew’s a comedy.” Her gaze flicked toward Chris, and the tiniest smile crimped one edge of her mouth. “So it’s probably not going to be worse.”
“Depends what you mean by worse,” Carl muttered.
Chris twisted all the way around, hands gripping the seatback. “Are you sure Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy? Because I’ve always been on the fence about that, and I know what Miss Cooper says, but I think the play’s actually sort of hilarious—”
“Enough!” Rachel thwacked her hand against her own copy of the script, bringing the room to heel. Spines straightened, heads lifted, and all eyes swiveled to Rachel. “Now. Let us begin with The Taming of the Shrew. It’s a story of love and hate and the fine line between them. It contains courtship and flirtation and love triangles and mistaken identities—”
“And misogyny,” Jessica muttered.
Rachel hated interruptions, but since these two words marked the first sign of life she’d seen from Jessica thus far, she let the moment ride. “This is the story of how one opinionated, headstrong woman falls in love, and how that love changes her—for better or for worse.”
Chris rolled his eyes. “Sounds thrilling.”
Rachel smiled. “You’d be surprised.”
~*~
The morning crawled by. Finally, with her fourth period class dismissed and headed noisily off to lunch, Rachel settled down at her desk with her sandwich and some classical music. She screwed in her headphones (careful to insert the left earbud in the left ear and the right in the right), fired up her Bach mix, slipped off her low heels, and lifted her legs to prop both feet across the top of an open desk drawer. Although her ankle was more-or-less mended, it still tended to swell on school days.
The first day of each new semester constituted one of the only ones during the entire year that Rachel didn’t have a pile of grading stacked in her in-box. She reclined in her swivel chair and mused over her morning.
If she were honest, she would admit that The Taming of the Shrew wasn’t her favorite. It was still Shakespeare, of course, and therefore worthy of study, but she always found herself troubled by the central couple. One couldn’t get much further from the romantic ideal than Katherine and Petruchio.
Besides, she really was a sucker for tragedy. Unless someone clutched a knife and dripped blood by Act III, the plot didn’t seem worth getting worked up over. However, the school curriculum called for a balance of comedies, tragedies, and histories. Rachel’s hands were tied.
It could have been worse. They could have been studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It would almost be worth it, just to see Chris’s reaction to Bottom.
Rachel’s phone buzzed. She set her sandwich in her lap, reaching for her cell with one hand and a napkin with the other. Then she glanced at the screen and almost dropped her phone onto her lunch.
4
The swivel chair rocked as Rachel bobbled her phone and broke into a full-body flush. She lifted her feet from the drawer and eased them to the floor, anchoring herself to reality and welcoming the coolness of the tiles against the soles of her feet. Was she having a hot flash? She should check with Lynn on symptoms. Then she re-read the text and began sweating in earnest. OK, so this wasn’t a hormone-induced hot flash. Not exactly.
Busy this afternoon? I could use some help.
Her gaze flicked from the message to the name at the top of the screen. What would Ian Smith want that she could possibly help him with?
Rachel set down the phone, lifted her hair from the back of her neck, closed her eyes, and expelled a deep, slow breath. She couldn’t fall into old patterns. Worrying about what he might want would only be a waste of time. The best way to figure that out was to a
sk him via a light and breezy response.
This was it. A chance to show the resolutions who was boss.
Twenty minutes later, while sitting at her desk with her shoes off and her lunch still half-eaten, and just before the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, Rachel finally hit send on a message that had taken entirely too long to compose, all things considered.
What do you need?
~*~
Rachel pulled into a space in front of the Palmetto Park Garage, furtively dabbing at her upper lip with one hand as she jammed the car into park with the other. She couldn’t blame the film of sweat at her temples and the damp patches under her arms on being outside for car line, either. Considering how mild Florida temperatures still were mid-January, she shouldn’t be sweating this much. Or, really, at all.
So embarrassing.
It wasn’t as if Detective Ian Smith hadn’t already seen her at her worst. That was sort of the point. He’d seen her flustered and bruised and battered and overwrought. From this point on, she’d been hoping to make a better impression. Not that she’d planned out exactly what it would be like if she were ever to see him again. But still. She hadn’t pictured it quite like this.
Rachel flipped down the sun visor and checked her reflection in the pocket-sized mirror. She almost wished she hadn’t. All the sweating had caused her mascara to migrate south. Half of her hair sprang sideways while the other half lay flat, and damp curls clung to her neck. With a shrug of sangfroid, she swiped her fingers under her eyes, flipped up the visor, pushed the sticky coils behind her ears, and hoped for the best.
Not a moment too soon. Here he was.
Ian Smith ducked his head as he slid into the passenger’s side. She hadn’t realized how much space he would fill until his left arm brushed hers. She shifted in her seat, removing her arm from the center console and placing her right hand on the gearshift in preparation to reverse.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to take you in to the station,” she barked in what she hoped was a fair approximation of an old-timey policewoman voice. She glanced out of the corner of her eye, hoping to see his eyelids crinkle.
Unbreakable Page 2
