“Bring it,” he says.
I rummage through my purse and find a tube of lipstick. On the mirror, I write ROMEO and JULIET in block letters. “Let’s do this thing.”
For the next hour, we play round after round of silly childhood games.
A knock on the door interrupts us.
“Hey, girl, are you in there?”
I mouth to Romeo, “My roommate.”
He makes puking noises. “No. Go away.”
I cover my mouth with my hand to keep from laughing.
“Okay, but if you see her, tell her I’ve left with Jason.”
“Sure.” I can hardly understand his words over his fake retching sounds, and it’s all I can do to keep my giggles silent.
I add another notch under the JULIET side of the mirror and smirk at him. Watching him is worth the price of admission. I like the way he paces and mumbles under his breath when he loses a game. Each time he sits back down on the counter, he’s a wee bit closer to me. His knee taps against mine as we get involved in the next round.
I like it even more that his eyes twinkle when he wins. And he winks at me. Yikes. I really like his ritual before each round of thumb wrestling. We start with a handshake. Next, he slowly slides his palm over mine until we lock into position. His soft, strong hand is a stark contrast to the calluses on each of his fingertips.
“Can I go home now? We’ve worn down two tubes of lipstick already, and unless you carry makeup on you, we’re completely out of writing utensils.”
He smirks at me.
“Is that a tube of lipstick in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?” I slap a hand over my mouth, trying to force the words back down my throat. I cannot believe I said that. I don’t know how to flirt, but with him, it seems natural. I need to take a deep breath and say good-bye before something else crazy spews from my mouth.
“Good one, but no… on the first part.” He slides off the counter and places his ear up to the door. “Sounds like a lull in the action. I think we can make a run for it. Let me get you some clean clothes.”
Nope. Not a good idea. “That’s very nice of you, but—”
He grabs my hand and cracks the door, peeking out before he opens it. Then we dash down the hallway, away from the stairs and toward bedrooms. He scans over his shoulder every few steps with a wide grin spread across his face.
Romeo unlocks a bedroom door, and we slink inside. He kicks off his shoes after he closes the door.
I don’t make a habit of being in guys’ rooms, but this one is pretty atypical. Aside from the normal socks strewn on the floor, it’s kind of orderly. No beer bottles or fast-food containers litter the table. And thank goodness, the standard frat aroma doesn’t permeate into his room.
But the oddest thing is the Bible on the nightstand. I certainly don’t see that every day. He either uses it as a prop to draw in girls, or he’s got a spiritual side to him. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s the real deal. How nice that would be.
He opens a drawer and removes a T-shirt with “Don’t trust atoms. They make up everything.” printed on the front. Oh yay! He’s geeky too.
He tosses the clothing at me. “You can wear that. Oh, and here are some scrubs.”
I have to do some serious juggling, but I catch everything without dropping my purse.
“Okay, but I’ve got my ion you,” I say, hoping he gets my geeky humor.
His knees buckle. “Ah, talk nerdy to me.”
It takes all my willpower not to laugh at his joke. He’s funnier than I expected.
“No offense, but how do you live in this frat house? I mean, your room is actually quite clean, but the rest of the place is gross.”
“And you saw the clean parts. I kind of wish I’d stayed in the dorm.”
“Do you ever leave your room without shoes?”
“Never. Besides, I’m not here much. I’m usually at the library.”
I slip off my sandals, and Romeo faces away from me before I even have to ask. He shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks back and forth on his heels. I wriggle out of the sundress and slide on the T-shirt. Then, I take a look-see over my shoulder to make sure he’s not looking. He continues to stare at his feet. He’s either a perfect gentleman, like he said, or he’s not interested in anything more than silly games.
“Sure,” I say as I finish changing. “The library.”
“I’m serious. If I was smart like my brother, I could party all the time and not worry about my grades. But I got the handsome genes.”
I try to stifle a giggle. I don’t know why Mallory thinks this guy is shy. He’s far from it. He’s super easy to talk to. I’ve only known him an hour, and I feel as though I could tell him anything.
“Actually, he did too, but don’t tell him I said that,” he adds.
It’s getting harder to muffle my laughter.
“And the height. Hell, maybe I should introduce you to him.”
The laughter bubbles up in my throat and out my mouth. It feels good to really belt it out. With the stresses of finishing nursing school, I can’t even remember the last time I smiled, let alone had a good belly laugh. “I’ll pass. You can turn around now.”
He grins again, and I melt. “That’s better.”
I curtsy. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a dorm refrigerator with a padlock on it next to his bed. “So no one steals your brewskies in the middle of the night?”
He tsk tsks at me. “There you go, being judgy again. Am I going to have to whip out my Bible?” He points to the Bible on his nightstand. He either really does know his scripture, or it’s a good conversation piece for all the girls he parades through here.
He unlocks the fridge and removes the padlock then opens it to reveal soft drinks, water, orange juice, and vials of some kind of medication. My nursing brain kicks into high gear. A guy his age does not have a refrigerator full of medication unless he is really sick. Glass vials mean he has to inject the drug into his body, and from the amount of medication in the fridge, it seems as though he has to do it often. He retrieves two bottles of water and hands one to me. Before I can even open mine, he has guzzled his down.
“Wow. You were a little thirsty, weren’t you? You don’t have a stash of beer in here?”
His mouth tilts up on the side in an almost grin. “It’s bad for my health.” He removes one vial from the refrigerator then grabs a syringe and an Accu-Chek machine from his nightstand. I watch as he wipes an alcohol pad across a finger and pops a lancet over it. He puts a drop of blood on the test strip and slides it into the machine. Now the calluses make sense.
“Type one?” I ask.
“Since I was seven.”
“Why don’t you have a pump?”
“It’s busted.” He whips off his shirt.
Oh. My. God. There goes that telltale heart again. I wish he hadn’t done that. Liar. He’s fit and lean, and I’m finding it really hard to focus. I have to blink a few times in order to bring myself back from fantasyland.
He cocks an eyebrow. I’ve been busted. His whole body tenses when he wipes a spot on his abdomen with an alcohol wipe. “God, that’s cold.”
After he measures his insulin in a syringe, he hands me the vial to hold. He flicks the needle into his pinched skin and tosses the used syringe into a Coca-Cola bottle with a handwritten label that reads, “DANGER—DO NOT DRINK.”
“You should have been a fly on the wall the last time I told Stella I broke another one. She hit the roof.”
“Stella?”
“Stella’s my mom.”
“You call your mother by her first name?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty hip. She’d like you. Anyone who can almost whip my butt at one of my own games is golden in her book.”
“Shoot,
I let you win.”
“You did not.”
I shrug. He’s too adorable. I couldn’t bear beating him at his own game.
“You better not hold anything back next time,” he says.
Now, it’s the telltale heart coupled with a full-blown asthma attack. He said, “next time.”
I pick up the insulin vial and roll it between the palms of my hands to keep them from shaking, but mostly I do it to keep from running my hands over his bare chest or through his messy blond hair. I don’t think I could be any hotter if the place were burning down around me.
“Here.” I hand the vial to him. “You might want to put that back in the fridge.”
He takes it and places it on the nightstand. “It can wait.”
He leans in and kisses me on the lips. Oh, sweet Jesus. His lips are even softer than they appear. He moves away ever so slightly.
I clear my throat. “Do you mind—”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
I cover his mouth with my hand to shut him up. “Do you mind doing that again?”
I move my hand away from his mouth, revealing an impish grin and that cute dimple. Not the dimple again. I’m such a goner.
“I don’t mind at all,” he whispers. He leans in to kiss me again. He cradles my face in his trembling hands.
I kiss him back. This time, I let my hands slide up his bare chest, causing him to actually purr.
Sigh.
I can count on one finger the number of make-out sessions I’ve had, and that one was so long ago, I’m sure I wouldn’t even recognize the guy without all his pimples. This is not what I expected tonight, but sometimes, a girl deserves to let go and have fun.
In between kisses, he mumbles, “But I might need that OJ in a bit.”
I giggle and allow him to lay me down on his bed. I know it’s probably a bad idea to be here with him, but I don’t want to leave. I don’t care what I should or shouldn’t be doing. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
After all the fun we had playing his silly games, I’m positive we saved the best for last. And because I’m such a good sport about everything, I think I’ll let Romeo win the first round of our tongue-wrestling competition. Or maybe it’ll be a tie.
Chapter Two
Theo
Seven Years Later
If Mallory lets out one more of her “I’m disgusted with you” sighs, I think I will scream like a nine-year-old girl. My norepinephrine level is probably way out of the normal range by now. When Mallory isn’t happy, the whole world knows it.
“I don’t understand the attraction of Nashville,” she says. “It’s so… Nashville. The y’alls, the hats, the music in the grocery store. Anywhere but Nashville.”
She shudders and tosses a vase into one of my shipping boxes without even wrapping it. It’s not hers, so she doesn’t care if it breaks. If I did that, I would get a tongue-lashing to beat all.
“No one is forcing you to move. Besides, I miss my family,” I say, hoping I don’t come off like the homesick puppy I am. I miss them so much it hurts. The last seven years have been hell with medical school and my residency. I’m worn slap out, and my health has taken a beating. So when a slot opened up at my alma mater, I jumped at the opportunity to return home for my fellowship without even discussing it with Mallory first—an act she hasn’t let me forget.
She flips her long blond hair off her shoulder. “Theo, they’re all really annoying.”
I stop packing and stare at her. She has crossed the line. “Why would you say that?”
She stops stuffing items into her box and places her hands on her slender hips. She sneers at me, indicating she has a list, complete with bullet points, and she is ready to unleash it on me. Knowing Mallory, she has a slide presentation on her cell phone and is ready to beam it onto the wall. I don’t even know if that technology exists, but if it does, she would have it and use it on me.
“Well, for starters, your mother—”
“What’s wrong with my mother?” How my mom managed to be a mother to us kids and be a preacher’s wife is no small undertaking. She’s about the coolest person I’ve ever met. Almost.
Mallory stares at me as if I have a wart on the end of my nose. “You must not see her the way I do. She dresses like a bag lady.” She wags her head. “How she ever passed the bar is beyond me. And don’t get me started about the gaggle of siblings you have, especially that mother-hen big sister of yours.”
I grin at her. Peanut butter and mustard go together better than Jennifer and Mallory. They butt heads over everything, even about Jennifer’s wedding. Even months later, Mallory was still ranting about how simple their wedding was and that it didn’t even make the society pages. She made it clear that when we get married, it’s going to be the event of a lifetime. And I made it clear that she’s putting the cart before the horse. We are several steps away from taking a walk down the aisle.
“Remember that time she tried to fix your hair?” I ask as I lick my hand and move toward her. “You gotta admit that was funny.”
She swats my hand away. “That was not funny.”
I nod. “Yes, it was.”
Mallory bites her upper lip. I think there’s a smirk trying to peek out. I can tell it’s killing her not to admit how funny that day really was.
“She means well,” I say.
Mallory stares at the floor. “I know,” she quietly replies.
She removes picture frames from the mantel then rotates one frame around for me to see. It’s a photo of the two of us snorkeling at Key Largo.
A moan escapes my throat as I point to it. “If that picture had been taken three hours later, I would have been sporting that massive sunburn.”
“It looked painful.”
“Says the girl who remembered to wear sunscreen.”
“Poor baby,” she says with a pouty face. She always points out this picture when she wants to make me feel stupid.
I shudder. “I cried like a baby. It hurt like crap.”
She grabs a photo of my family and hands it to me as if it has Ebola covering the frame. I’m not sure why my family is so repulsive to her. They’ve always been nice to her, but she acts as though their professions are menial. Her attitude toward them is getting really old. Actually, it has been old for quite some time.
“That one’s yours,” she says. “But it wouldn’t matter what box it went in if we were moving to the same apartment, now would it?”
I slump down on the couch, watching her overly dramatic actions as she slings her stuff into boxes. She thinks if she keeps it up, I’ll give in and we’ll move to Nashville together. It has worked before. After six years of constant whining about wanting to move in with me, she wore me down. Her behavior was starting to affect my ability to concentrate, so I agreed. She knew after an eighteen-hour day at the hospital, I wouldn’t have the energy to conjure up a rational excuse.
“If you are hell-bent on moving too, then I think it’s best that we have our own apartments,” I said for the hundredth time.
She shrugs.
“And I’m gonna be moonlighting in the ER, so I won’t be around much at all.”
She does her standard-issue Mallory huff.
“It’s not important right now. Mallory, neither one of us has been happy for a long time.”
I had hoped my love for her would grow stronger with time, but it hasn’t. And it’s completely obvious that I don’t make her happy.
“You’d make me happy if you would try.”
I lean back on the couch and stare up at the ceiling. “I haven’t tried?”
“If you really loved me, you’d try a little harder.”
“Are you kidding me? I spent last Christmas with your family instead of visiting my parents. For my birthday,
I stayed out way too late at the concert you wanted to go to and almost fell asleep in clinic. Oh, and don’t forget last week, I went to that dinner party with you, and you ignored me the whole time. Don’t tell me I don’t try to make you happy.”
“We could get married.”
Here we go again. I pace around the room, stubbing my toe on a box in my way. I mumble a few curse words under my breath. I’m not sure if it’s from the pain in my foot or the predicament I’m in. They are equally distressing.
“I can’t change the things you don’t like about me.”
“Like what?” She wraps another picture frame in tissue paper then proceeds to wrap a stack of plates. She grumbles something under her breath as she chucks the plates into a box.
I hold up my index finger. “For starters, my family.”
“I like them fine from five hundred miles away. To be fair, the same goes for my family.”
I hold up two fingers. “Church, especially Dad’s.”
She shrugs. “I grew up going to church on holidays. It’s not my thing.”
I add another finger. “I’m shorter than you as if I did that on purpose.”
“Tommy’s six feet five. I’m just saying.”
Sure, throw my geeky brother into the argument. I’m certain my IQ combined with Mallory’s doesn’t even come close to his.
I flail my arms in the air in desperation. “I was trying to be funny.”
“I wasn’t.”
I wag my finger in her face. “Blame it on my diabetes, which I’m sure you resent as well.”
She swats my hand away.
“And I know that disapproving glower you give me when I take out my Accu-Chek machine.”
She sits down in the recliner and crosses her legs and arms. “Now that you mention it, I think you’re a bit OCD about it.”
Left Hanging Page 2
