“So today, operations manager; tomorrow, CEO?”
“It’s more like a ten-year plan, but yeah, basically.”
It depressed me to think about how following that path would lead him right out of Baton Rouge, so I dropped the subject. “Thanks for helping my mom out. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Sure I did.”
“Because you’re trying to impress me?”
“A little. But mainly because I wouldn’t be the man my dad raised me to be if I didn’t.”
Okay, that impressed me.
“I’m going to get on the road. See you Sunday?”
“Definitely.”
He walked to his car, and I cringed the second his back was turned. Definitely? I didn’t even know what I meant by that. It was something you said when you wanted to flirt, like if someone asked if you were going to a party or something and you said “definitely” because you wanted them to know you were going to be there for them.
Ugh. He was so confusing he was making me subconsciously flirt. I watched him drive off. If he could read minds and he had half a grain of common sense, he should be running as far and as fast as he could from the train wreck of conflicting needs happening inside my head.
Wait. Maybe he just had.
Good!
Then why did I feel so bad?
Chapter 12
Thursday on my lunch break, Kate called. “Can you talk?”
“Yes. Is Ignatius okay?”
“He’s fine. We’re calling him Jellybean right now. What are you doing? Do you have students in there?”
I glanced over at Kiana on one of the classroom computers in the back of the room, and a small knot of my honors students huddled around a cell phone watching anime. “Yeah, but they don’t need me right now. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I’m feeling a teeny bit queasy and looking for a distraction, so I thought I’d see what you’re up to.”
“Max. He’s all up in my head.” I kept my voice low so my kids couldn’t eavesdrop on my love life.
Kate’s voice took on the tone she got when Dillard’s clearance went an extra fifty percent off. “What kinds of thoughts are you thinking, Lila Mae? Thoughts about how much you want to kiss his face?”
“Thoughts like how he’s probably already out of patience with me. I don’t even make sense to myself right now. I told him to give me time to think, and then I’m totally bummed that he did. Oh no.”
“What?”
“I sound like every third conversation I hear in my classroom at lunch time.”
Kate burst out laughing. “How about you and I go to dinner tomorrow night, and you can tell me all about it? We should probably fix you.”
“I’m not broken.”
“You are, but don’t worry. I know what to do.”
“Tell me? I’ll do it.”
“You need Maximum exposure!” She laughed harder when I groaned.
“I’ll pick you up at six tomorrow, but no puns.”
“Yay! Take me somewhere with garlic bread. That’s what Jellybean needs.”
We hung up, and I spent the rest of lunch marking papers and keeping a tally of every time I caught myself thinking about Max. I was up to thirty-seven by the time I packed up to leave for the day. I’d kind of hoped seeing the hard evidence of how ridiculous my brain was being would make me stop, but by the time I got home, I’d easily doubled that number.
My phone went off as I was parking. It was Max, and my cheeks burned even though he couldn’t know how much he’d been on my mind. I almost let it go to voice mail to prove that I could, but I picked up on the last ring possible instead. Because . . . Max.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey. I want to run something by you. I know you are a popular woman who is highly in demand, who would never be sitting at home on the weekend, but are you free tomorrow night? Because I found a venue we should check out.”
“On a Friday night again?”
“Best time to see the place in action.”
“I do have plans already.” Although Kate would kill me for keeping them if she knew Max had called.
“Oh.” He sounded the way my tire had looked after the riverboat last week, but he didn’t stay down for long. “How about Saturday?”
“I can do that. Which venue?”
“It’s a surprise. Can I pick you up and drive you over?”
No. Terrible idea. “Yes. Sounds good. What time should I be ready?”
“How about seven thirty?”
I agreed, and we hung up, but it seemed kind of late in the day to be checking out venues.
I spent Friday making tally marks for Max thoughts. By lunch, my Post-it full of hash marks looked like I’d been counting down every day of a twenty-year imprisonment on a dungeon wall. I accepted that he’d staked out a long-term rental in my brain’s real estate and threw the Post-it away.
Kate didn’t help over dinner. She tried to Facebook stalk him on her phone. “He’s set to private. Jaimie says he’s hot. He was always cute though. I want to see him. Why aren’t you Facebook friends?”
“We’re barely real-life friends.”
“Take a picture when you go out tomorrow.”
“We’re not going out. We’re checking out a venue.”
Kate set her fork down and stared at me. It was the only reason her chicken alfredo didn’t disappear in world-record time. “All right, let’s be real here. Do you want to date him?”
“No.”
Her stare didn’t waver.
“I don’t! He’s leaving soon.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know. When he gets a new assignment for work.”
“And you don’t know when that is? Maybe that’s in a year.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s in three years. He’s leaving, and I never will. And I don’t see a point to getting involved.”
Kate went back to her alfredo, but even though her mouth was too busy for words, her expression still said lots of things. She swallowed and let the words out. “Forget if he’s leaving, forget that he was a punk teenager. Based on Max in the here and now, everything else factored out of the equation, do you want to date him? Just based on how you feel when you’re hanging out with him, nothing else.”
She would see right through a lie, so I didn’t bother. “Yes.”
She took another bite, and this time her face was purely about the cream sauce.
“That’s it?” I asked. “You’re not going to lecture me or get on my case about it?”
“No. I’m going to let you think about that for a while.”
“I don’t want to.”
“But now that you’ve admitted it to yourself, you will. So, really, I don’t need to do any work. You’ll do it for me.”
“I don’t like you right now.”
“You love me. And I’m right. You don’t know that he wouldn’t stay here for you, so you may as well see where this all goes.”
Kate would never try to talk to me about leaving Baton Rouge for Max because she wouldn’t have done it under any circumstance either. I had a lot of doubts, an eighteen-wheeler full of them, as to whether Max would ever stay here. No, I didn’t even have doubts. I had an absolute certainty that he wouldn’t.
That wouldn’t matter if we dated a few times and fizzled out, but the spark between us scared me. Ten years ago, that had ended in public humiliation. Now the spark was bigger, and so was my fear. It was like when I’d gone cliff-jumping with some cousins on a Lake Powell vacation one summer. The first two days had been a blast until a boat had pulled up and this old guy had told us about his grandson who had been paralyzed while he was cliff-diving. I’d stood on the edge of the cliffs for the rest of the week with a different perspective, the sure knowledge of how fun it would be to go soaring off the side tempered by the awareness that pain wasn’t an abstract possibility.
Jumping into something with Max was bad odds.
I went to bed wondering if Kate
was truly seeing the whole situation more clearly than I was, and I woke up without an answer. I saw more warning flags flying than at Biloxi Beach in hurricane season.
Mom was working on her magnolia when I came downstairs at seven thirty, this time with Bonnie Raitt playing in the background. It had been one of her and Daddy’s favorite albums. She glanced up at me, the familiar fog back on her face, and gave me a vague smile that made my heart sink. But then she blinked, and her gaze turned sharp. “You look good. Going out with Max?”
I’d curled my hair and put on a gauzy shirt and my best jeans. “It’s just conference stuff.” The doorbell rang, and I snatched up my purse and stepped out onto the veranda, shutting the door firmly behind me so she wouldn’t try to call him in to grill him. “Hey,” I said, smiling at him. “So where are we headed?”
“You’ll see.”
“I feel like that might be what kidnappers say when they lure victims into their car.”
“Hang on.” He did a quick one-eighty and ran back up the porch steps, stuck his head in the door, said something to Mom, disappeared into the house for thirty seconds, and came back. “Your mom knows where we’re going. And I paid my tax,” he said, tapping his cheek to show where he’d kissed her. “Do kidnappers do that?”
“Guess not.”
“How’d your week go?” he asked after we’d gotten in the car and he was steering onto the main road leading out of the neighborhood.
“It was good.”
He shook his head. “I know I keep saying this, but I really admire what you do.”
“I bet I’d think your job was hard too. Doesn’t it wipe you out sometimes?”
He shrugged. “The stakes aren’t as high. What you do matters. Me? Not so much.”
“Then why do it?” I asked. This was a conversation I’d had with my brother Logan, who was majoring in business. He’d talked about people who were mission driven versus task driven or something like that. The gist was that there were people who felt lost when they didn’t see a greater purpose for their work, some way in which it made the world a better place. That was me.
Logan saw work as a means to an end, and as long as he found the process satisfying, it didn’t matter if it changed the world or the community. To him, there was honor in a job as long as he could provide for a family. That was where he felt he’d do his changing the world.
“Why do it?” Max’s tone was thoughtful. “I like a challenge. I like going in each day and figuring out how to untangle a puzzle, how to make an objective happen. There’s a certain amount of winning and losing that happens in business, and I like to win. Sounds shallow, huh?”
“Not really.” It might have without my conversations with Logan. “Maybe if you’d said you liked making money or something, that would sound shallow. But liking a challenge doesn’t sound shallow.”
“I like making money too,” he said, a slight smile on his face. “It’s one way to measure how well I’m doing what I do. Every raise, every promotion, it all points to one kind of succeeding. But in my mind, I separate the paycheck from success. That’s something my dad taught me. The pay will reflect how well I’m doing my job, but success is about something else.”
“Like what? What’s success to you?”
“Probably the same thing it is to you. Comes down to family, really. Right now that’s about the family I was raised in. Maybe someday it’ll be about raising my own family.”
“Maybe someday? Sounds so far away.”
“I know.” His smile fell away, and I felt like I had stolen it.
“Sorry.”
“No big deal. So Baton Rouge is a lot different than when I left it. Does all the change bother you?”
I accepted the change of subject. “Some of it. I don’t like how the newer neighborhoods squeeze the houses together, but I guess that’s the same everywhere. And every time I see a new shopping center open, I get a little depressed. Most of the changes are good though. I wish more change would happen in the areas that really need it, but I’ll take progress over being stagnant.”
“Why would a shopping center depress you?”
“Watch up here, when we get through this light. Look at the shopping center on your left.”
As we crossed the intersection, Max studied the area I’d pointed out. “What about it?”
“That’s probably about twenty years old. See all those empty stores? And whoever owns the property doesn’t try to keep it up or modernize the look. I wish people would think, because once you cut down a bunch of trees and slap up a bunch of buildings, they’re never going away. It’s not like you can be like, ‘Oh, I guess this shopping center isn’t working. Let’s put everything back the way it was.’ You changed it, and it stays changed—no do overs. Run-down strip malls isn’t progress.”
“But when it works, it means jobs and tax revenue. Don’t you think cities need developers to take risks so they don’t rot?”
More scenery slipped by, mostly tall expanses of trees broken up by turn-offs into subdivisions. “Maybe we shouldn’t change until we’re uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. Like getting to the point where every time you go to the store, they’re almost always out of what you need because everyone else needs it too. Maybe that’s when you say, ‘We need another one of these.’ But I don’t think building something so it’ll be a mile closer for a few people to drive to is a great reason.”
“Then define good progress.”
“New schools, libraries, police stations.”
“That’s a very public-school-teacher thing to say,” he said, and I heard a smile in his voice.
“Yeah. But those are new things that are always needed, and there’s never going to be enough of them. That’s what I mean to say: I don’t have a problem with Baton Rouge changing, but I wished we focused more on developing neighborhoods that need it, not building more bright, shiny things where everyone’s doing all right anyway.”
He smiled again as he moved into the turn lane. “I kind of like the way you see things.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I turned to look out my window for another change of subject and wrinkled my forehead as he pulled into a parking lot. “This is the movie theater. This is where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Where are people supposed to dance?”
“Let’s go in, and I’ll explain what I’m thinking.”
We walked in with the rest of the Saturday-night crowd, but instead of asking to speak to a manager, Max steered us to the ticket line. Something didn’t smell right here. “Max.”
“Yes.”
“You’re trying to sneak a date past me ninja-style.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Really? What are we seeing?”
“Swipe Right.”
That was a new romantic comedy. “That’s a date movie.”
“For other people. For us, it’s the movie showing in the theater I want us to check out.”
Uh-huh.
He got in line for refreshments.
“We don’t need popcorn to check out a theater.”
“Shh. We’re doing this incognito. I want to see what the service is like when they’re not trying to win an extra theater rental from us. We need popcorn to blend in.”
“We don’t. We can go sit like we’re going to watch the movie. Lots of people do that without popcorn.”
“Only weirdos don’t get popcorn at the theater. I don’t want to blow our cover by making people ask questions.”
Five minutes later, we walked away from the counter with a heaping bucket of popcorn, two sodas, and a box of M&Ms. I held a soda and watched him juggle the rest. “You spent $4,000 on movie food. Can you make rent this month?”
“It’s worth it if it keeps up the disguise.”
I shook my head but followed him to the theater printed on our ticket. He climbed halfway up the stadium seating and took a seat in the middle of the row. I stayed in the aisle and waited for him to notice.
>
“What are you doing?” he asked when he realized I hadn’t followed.
“Checking out the theater. What am I looking for? It’s an auditorium. Verified. Now what?”
He walked back to me. “Now you sit and get the full experience. I picked the best seats in the house. Please, enjoy one.” He took my hand and pulled me down the row. Hand holding now? Busted.
He sat, but I stayed standing, which forced him to let go of my hand. The lights dimmed for the previews, and I could see him frown. “It’s about to start.”
“I’m not sitting down until you confess that you’re trying to ninja date me.”
He stood again, so close I had to look up to meet his eyes. The theater went swirly, and I gulped.
“If I tricked you onto a date, I would be dead meat, wouldn’t I?” His voice was soft, but the people in front of us shushed him anyway.
“Yes.”
“Then this is definitely not me tricking you. Sit, watch the movie, think about the theater, and I’ll tell you my idea for it afterward.”
“Shhhhhhh,” the woman behind us said.
I couldn’t blame her.
I sat and watched a couple of the previews in silence. When the opening credits for the movie came on the screen, I reached over and slipped my hand into his. He turned to look at me, and I could feel the weight of his unasked question. “Don’t want to stand out too much,” I murmured.
“Got it,” he whispered. He lifted the arm rest between us and pulled me closer to his side.
It was the best movie I’d seen in a long time.
Actually, I had no idea what happened in the movie. But all theater seating should be like that forever.
When the movie ended, we sat all the way through the credits. The lights had come up, and I should have been rustling around, picking up my handbag, helping Max collect the trash from our movie treats, but credits had become the most important thing in the world; every name needed to be read and considered while I coincidentally stayed tucked against Max’s side.
When the screen went blank and the theater employees began their cleanup, I sat up and scooted toward the edge of my seat. Max’s arms closed around me and pulled me back. “I’m going to buy two more tickets.”
Southern Charmed Page 10
