“Can we start again tomorrow?” he asks me. “I’ll email all my professors and tell them I got sick. I’ll even email your professors.”
“You don’t have to email mine. I’ll do it. But yeah, where do you want to go?”
“I’d just like to go home.”
“Sounds good to me, babe.”
Another fifteen minutes goes by before we have him registered on the computer. Finally it’s official and he has the receipt in the front pocket of his backpack, along with the updated course load. A loud gurgling grumbles from his stomach at the same time visions of an afternoon filled with Chinese takeout, iced coffees and snuggling on the couch in our underwear watching movies dance through my head. A perfect way to end an imperfect school day.
Tomorrow we’ll do over. Today, we chill.
As we leave the registrar’s office, holding hands, he stops and tugs on my hand to halt me. “Leif?” Rid asks.
There’s a beetle or something buzzing around my head that I swat at to get it away.
I shift to look at him, still swatting at that stupid bug. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
The sincerity in those two words halts any other distractions. Suddenly there is no insect buzzing around my head. No people shouting across the quad. No rumbling from pickup engines. No students moving from building to building.
“For what?”
“So many things… coming to help me, loving me. For changing my life.”
I’m awed that’s how he thinks of me, because really, it’s Ridley who changed my life, in all the best ways. For the rest of my life I will never forget this summer.
The summer of the boy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to you, my wonderful readers, who took a chance on Leif and Ridley. These two have been around for a while, years actually, and I thought it was about time for you to hear their story. Thank you Heather Young-Nichols for teaching me how to do formatty-type stuff. You know I’m technologically impaired so the fact that I’m learning is huge. Huge. Thank you to my boys. You are the best apple and waterfowl a mom could ask for. A lot has happened to us this year, but as long as we have each other’s backs, we’ll always make it through. Thank you Captain for bringing happiness and fun to what started out as an utterly craptastic 2018. And thank you to all coffee everywhere. Whether instant or brewed, vanilla or mocha, iced, frappéd or even hot, my life would be less tasty without you. And without you, these stories would never get written. I am so serious on this point.
Check Out More from Sarah Zolton Arthur
Thank you for coming along on Leif and Ridley’s journey to find love. If you enjoyed this book please consider leaving a review. Trust me, I get it… writing them can be stressful. But I promise, they don’t have to sound like scholarly journal entries. Even a, “I really, really, really like it and want to read more” or a “I never read her before. She’s okay” if that’s how you feel makes a huge difference. Your reviews are vital to an author’s career and, you know, I’m an author.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah spends her days embracing the weirdly wonderful parts of life with her two kooky sons while pretending to be a responsible adult. And there is plenty of the weird and wonderful to go around with her older son being autistic. She resides in Michigan, where the winters bring cold, and the summers bring construction. The roads might have potholes, but the beaches are amazing. And above all else, she lives by these rules. Call them Sarah’s life edicts: In Sarah's world all books have kissing and end in some form of HEA. Because really, what more do you need in life?
MY FEARLESS FAKE FLING
The Rise
One:
“I can’t do it,” I yelled against the rushing of air making it hard to hear myself, let alone anyone else to hear. The roar was defining, eardrums ready to explode at this elevation.
“You sure?” A sweet, pretty woman. My instructor, much braver than me, asked. “I got you,” she yelled back.
For my answer to if I was sure, I pressed my body against the solid wall of the plane, opposite the open space.
“Whatever,” the other instructor, Lennon, grumbled loudly and leapt out through the door with his client strapped to his body, on the count of three.
My instructor began to unstrap me, having her pinned between my tensed body and the cold metal wall because how the other instructor and his client jumped, that was supposed to be how Lacy and I jumped before I chickened out, yet again.
The fourth time I’ve paid to jump out of a plane. Zero times completed. Zero. Zip Zilch.
Once unhooked, and the door shut, Lacy, able to talk quieter now, patted my arm. “It’s okay. We’ll get ’em next time.”
I hated disappointing Lacy. And she didn’t have to tell me of her disappointment, no, the look on her face said it all. The same look she wore after failed jumps two and three as well.
Apparently not after jump one. She’d been used to people backing out on the first attempt. But I owned a special kind of cowardice. The outright humiliating kind. The kind which so stunted your life you felt like other people could pick up on it from just a glance. Average height, cute outfit, coward.
Exactly as Brian had insinuated last year. A nice restaurant, wine, a beautiful night. I thought with the stage set, he’d been ready to propose. Instead, he’d crushed my future plans by breaking up with me. He’d been kind about it. His words, I’d grown boring. Set in my rituals. And he’d been right. I used to be a braver girl. When we’d gotten together. I mean, I’d never been an adrenaline junkie or anything as extreme as that. Still, he knew the day all that stopped.
Brian was nice, tried to help me past my fears. But I’d become stunted. He said he had dreams of adventures the two of us would share together, but after two years he realized that dream was never going to come true. So he had to change his dream. And although he still loved me, that new dream didn’t include me.
Like an idiot, I held on to the hope that he’d change his mind, that his leaving, a chance for me to get my act together so we could continue on with our lives, but maybe I’d be able to get some of that old Kami back.
Yeah, I held on to that hope until his facepage status update told his friends, of which at least online I’d still been considered, that he sold off everything he could sell, turned in the keys to his apartment and bought his ticket to Argentina.
I heard from mutual friends that he’s happy. Met a girl from New Zealand not long after he landed, and they’d been adventuring together ever since.
Once I heard about him leaving, I decided to try to regain my bravery. It took me to six weeks ago, when I heard about New Zealand girl, to actually act on said decision. Every pay period I plunked down my three-hundred dollars determined that this would be the day.
And I could post my video online for our mutual friends to tell Brian about. So he could see, that maybe if he’d given me a heads up on what he’d been thinking. That if he’d only stuck it out a little longer.
Not today.
The plane glided along the runway breaking. Lacy pulled the door open and stood aside for me to hop out once we’d come to a complete stop. Before I left, I turned to her. “See you in two weeks?” I offered.
“Kami, I feel bad about taking your money. I think maybe we should part ways.”
> “No. I’ll get it.”
“I don’t think you will. I’m sorry.”
So my diving instructor even broke up with me.
Great. Just great.
She took off walking toward the office and I followed a little slower, to collect my purse and phone locked in one of the ten guest lockers. We branched off inside the building as she headed to restock the gear, and I stopped in front of the row of lockers to press my temporary code in to retrieve my belongings.
My phone had been blowing up.
Messages. Messages. So many messages alerted me this friend or that friend posted on a friend’s facepage. And they all said essentially the same thing, congratulations Brian and Kylie. Of course, there were variations with more or less information.
Times like these, I wished we didn’t share the same friends.
I walked back to my car and started the air conditioner to cool it down. Up in the sky kept me cool, all that wind blowing and high altitude chill. Back down here on the ground, the weather app on my phone said we were hitting almost ninety. But I refused to complain because it wouldn’t be too long before all this glorious sun became a long, Michigan winter.
With the cool air blowing on me from the vent, I decided to torture myself a bit further and see what kind of ring he bought her.
No, I’m not proud to admit that when I found out about New Zealand Kylie, I did some internet stalking, and her InstaPhoto page she’d left open to the public. I pressed the app button, waiting for it to load completely. Then I typed in her name. The first picture to load, a picture of her out-stretched left hand sporting a giant teardrop diamond.
Very pretty. I always knew Brian would have good taste.
Not sure of the protocol here, did I leave a comment of congratulations to show no hard feelings? She’d written a caption beneath the picture: One and a half years together and he finally proposed.
Wait. That could not be right.
He’d only known her for a little less than a year. A year and a half ago, he’d still been with me.
Confused, I scrolled down to read some of the comments. One of them, from a girl I considered a close friend: Congratulations Kylie! I know it had to be hard to wait for him to dump crazy Kami, but it was worth the wait.
Dump crazy Kami?
So it wasn’t a typo. They’d really been together a year and a half.
The rapid blinking, which usually worked to stave off unwanted tears, helped not one bit. Tears rimmed my eyes and began to spill faster than I could wipe them away.
There, feeling more stupid than hurt, I sat sobbing my eyes out like a total loser, as the parking lot emptied around me.
“I need a drink.” Only the empty car heard me, as I lamented on how my whole life had been a lie. How many other friends knew about Brian cheating?
At a time like this, it would’ve been nice to have tiny windshield wipers for my eyes as I backed out of my spot to drive.
On the street, just past the airfield, I almost passed the turn into an old dive bar. The sign said Smokey’s. It looked grimy and sad. Exactly what I needed to get through the rest of the day, because I couldn’t handle happy drunks. Not now. I needed people who had given up on life. People who the brightest part of their day came at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.
Slamming on the breaks, I made a quick turn into the lot, found a space and shut the car off. Only four other cars and two bikes sat parked in the lot with me.
When I walked in, heads tilted up momentarily, eyes squinted at me, then those same heads dropped back to their glasses.
The grimy exterior perfectly matched the grubby atmosphere inside, along with the one waitress working, she looked as haggard as the outside of the building. Overly skinny, but not toned, she approached my table and stood there with her hip cocked, not speaking a word to me.
Apparently the half a minute I took to decide on my drink was a half a minute too long for her. “Come on, blondie. I don’t got all day.” She griped in a voice of pure gravel. I looked up to give her my order, noticing she missed both of her top and one of her bottom front teeth. The hand holding two empty glasses from a neighboring table had yellowed fingers. Obviously, her dominant hand, the one she held her cigarettes with.
Her unnatural dye job needed a touch up. At least an inch of gray roots showed. That color red didn’t fit her skin tone. As I worked as a stylist, I felt pretty confident in my assessment.
“Gin and tonic,” I ordered.
Now, I didn’t particularly care for the taste of gin, but I remembered being told that it would get you drunk pretty quickly, and I desperately needed dunk and quick.
Before she left, I amended my order. “Make it two.”
It wasn’t but a minute later when she came back with my two gin and tonics. I slammed the first one like I’d slammed back a shot to get the alcohol infused into my system as fast as possible.
I needed not to feel. What I didn’t need was for the other skydive instructor to pull out the chair next to mine and plop down into it.
Not for the first time, I noticed how incredibly handsome he looked both in and out of a jumpsuit. More than hot, although he had that going for him too. Thick, brown wavy hair just long enough to run fingers through and enjoy it. Crystal blue eyes. Depthless crystal blue eyes a girl could spend her life gazing into, a strong square jaw and a dimple peeking out from the corner of his cocky smirk. Not to mention his killer ‘I jump out of airplanes for a living’ body. Though, I felt kind of meh about that. Brian had the same kind of killer bod, and look where that got me.
“Done staring?” he asked, no that wasn’t right. He mused as if any part of him being here tonight of all nights could possibly be construed as funny.
“Pardon?” I did ask, and jolted out of my hot guy trance.
“Heard Lacy dumped you.”
Clearly, he’d sat down to be a donkey’s butt. Yes, I’d been a coward once again. Didn’t mean he had to rub my face in it. Which meant in lieu of answering, I sipped on my drink, wearing my most rueful face. But only partly due to his presence. The other part because I really detested the taste of gin. No matter, he didn’t take my rueful face as the unspoken request I meant it, to go away, or the fact I ignored him.
“Appears she has a conscience. I don’t have that problem and would be more than happy to be your new.” He used air quotes to say, “Jump instructor.” Then he took a drink of what smelled strongly of whiskey. “We can even meet here, eliminate the pilot fee.” He snickered into his glass.
“No one invited you to sit, so you can go at any time.”
Right then my phone took the opportunity to ping with a text from Deirdre, the girl I thought was my friend.
Her: Hey, Kam. Got some news, think you need to hear.
The traitor. Did she text to get her jollies? Rub it in crazy Kami’s face and report back to New Zealand Kylie?
So much betrayal swirling around, those damn tears started falling again—and in front of that donkey’s butt to boot.
Why did I get out of bed this morning?
“I can’t do this,” I admitted my feelings, slammed back the last of my drink, swipe my phone from the table and push back my chair to stand.
The tears rolled harder now. A downpour.
“What the hell did that text say?”
“Nothing. Never mind. I’m a coward, a loser. We all know, the whole fricking world knows. I’m a coward and a loser. Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”
“Hey. Stop.” He shot his hand out to catch my wrist, holding tight, despite my pulling hard at his hand to get him to release me. “Kami. Stop.”
For some reason hearing him use my name made me not only stop pulling at his hand but sit back down in my seat as well. I didn’t even know he’d learned my name.
“What’d the text say?” He asked again. Too stunned to answer, I pushed my phone at him to read.
“That’s not so bad… unless… you already know what she wants to tell you, don�
�t you?”
I nodded.
“But it’s worse than that.” Then, to this virtual stranger, I launched in to my tale of woe from the breakup with Brian to finding Deirdre’s comment.
He looked understanding, enough that I let my guard down. Today, of all days, I should have known better than to let my guard down.
The rat grabbed my phone and texted her back.
From my phone: I already know. He’s a cheater. You’re a traitor and I couldn’t give two shites about either of you.
My first thought, he even made it sound as if I’d sent the text, avoiding the swears. As I typically tried not to swear. But then I remembered to be mortified.
“What are you doing?” I screamed, straining to snatch my phone back. He, of course, being larger, broader of shoulder, with a wider arm span, kept me from reaching it.
To my surprise, she came back right away: Kami, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
To which he replied: Listen, my boyfriend is here. I have to go.
Too late, because he hit send, I managed to snag the phone back.
“What are you doing?” Repeating myself, but hissed instead of screamed. I was livid. “I don’t have a boyfriend. We know too many of the same people. Now she’s going to see me as not just a coward loser, but a desperate, lying coward loser.” The last wasn’t hissed because once the reality sunk in, my sadness and embarrassment replaced my anger.
He folded his hand over mine. “Listen, I have a month before I have to leave. I’ll pretend to be your boyfriend. We’ll take some pictures, you can post them.”
Summer of the Boy Page 12
