Rush Me

by Allison Parr

  I flipped my hair back, grinning up at him. “You’re not that lucky.”

  “I’ll let you mark me, too,” he offered, gazing at my lips.

  At which point, my dumb brother stumbled up behind us. “Mr. Carter.” He reached across me and grabbed Ryan’s hand. I sighed. Well, we were supposed to be meeting my family, not making out in a restaurant. “So good to meet you. As my sister might have told you, I represent the San Leandro property on the coast of Turkey...”

  “No.” Ryan refocused. “She didn’t.”

  “Oh.” This took David back a little, but not enough. After shooting me a sidelong glance, he blundered on. “Well, it’s a beautiful resort, filled with all the commodities of big city life, in the privacy of a Mediterranean island.”

  Ryan looked at me, confused.

  “Why don’t you come back to our table, and we can talk about it.” I tucked my arm through his.

  My boldness clearly embarrassed my brother. “I don’t want to impose, Mr. Carter—I just wanted to let you know about our resort, and that if you’re interested, I would be personally happy to arrange your visit. Let me give you one of my business cards—”

  “I’ll sit down.” Ryan angled a skeptical glance at me. Seriously? it seemed to ask. Why are you doing this to me?

  David appeared shell-shocked, and now, no longer able to contain it, he let out a brief, almost professional gushing of how much he enjoyed Ryan’s game.

  “Hi,” Sophie purred when Ryan folded himself down beside me in the booth. She leaned forward, thrusting her breasts towards him. “I’m Sophie Salisbury.”

  From bad to worse. I was offended on David’s behalf. “Sophie is my brother’s girlfriend.”

  Sophie passed a cool look over me, and smiled. “We’re still waiting on Rachael’s date. But poor thing, I don’t think he’s going to show.”

  Ryan didn’t laugh, but it was a close call. “I’m not that late.”

  I tried not to smirk, but alas, I was not that good a person. David picked it up first. “Wait,” he said, voice strangled. He stared at Ryan. “You’re not...”

  Sophie’s poise dropped, and she gaped at us. “No way.”

  Ryan slung an arm around me. I rolled my eyes at him; he grinned back. “Oh, sorry,” he whispered to me. “Does this fall under the ‘I’m-not-allowed-to-mark-my-territory’ clause?”

  “This is my boyfriend.” I tried to restrain the corners of my mouth from tipping up. “Ryan Carter.”

  Ryan nodded briefly. “Good to meet you.”

  My thick-headed brother had trouble processing. “You’re dating—but—you can’t be dating Rachael.”

  Such fraternal support. “Thanks.”

  “I just—” He shook his head, and then drew himself together and gave Ryan a professional smile. “Rachael never told us she was dating a legend.”

  “Oh, she probably didn’t notice.”

  “Oh, yes I did. Didn’t I tell you I read your Wikipedia page just a couple weeks ago?”

  He grinned. “But my homepage is so much better.”

  “Rachael doesn’t even like football.” Sophie sounded personally insulted.

  “Luckily, she likes me, so it all works out.”

  There was a little silence.

  I turned back to my brother, pasting on a bright smile. “So, how’s the company?”

  My brother darted a glance at the man he’d just tried to land as a client. “Good. Better every day. It’s a great gig.” He slid from awed fan to patronizing older brother in an impressively short breath. “You know, Rach, you should really try your hand at something green. Print’s a dying industry, and really, who’s surprised?”

  I bristled. David hadn’t even known “green” equated “environmental” until he started in at his job. I had always been the family member saying “Don’t throw that away! Recycle!” and it galled me to hear David suddenly playing the environmental hero.

  Beside him, Sophie nodded. I was impressed by how her long hair never lost its form. “David’s right. I just watched this segment about how more and more people are publishing online. Soon they’re going to cut your job altogether.”

  Everyone had an opinion, didn’t they?

  Our dinners arrived as David finished giving us the news on San Leandro and his hoped-for promotion, and then he turned to Ryan. “So, how did you meet my sister?”

  Ryan leaned back against the booth. “She broke into my friend’s apartment.”

  I started speaking almost before he stopped. “Shut up. I did not.” I paused. “Or only, you know, technically. I was going to a party near his friend Malcolm’s apartment, and accidentally stepped in the wrong door.”

  David swallowed hard. “Wide-receiver Malcolm Lindsey?”

  “It’s like they’re living, breathing human beings and not just action figures,” I chirped.

  I was pretty sure everyone glared at me, then.

  “How long have you guys been together?” Ryan asked. “Rach told me...you all went to high school together?”

  “Sophie was Rach’s year.” David imparted that news so comfortably, as though this wasn’t cause of much stress and strife. “But we didn’t really know each other until I visited home and ran into her at a barbeque. That was, what, five months ago, babe?”

  “Six next month.” Sophie took a fortifying sip of wine and stared at me like I was an alien. Or a thief. Shaking her head, she smiled brightly at Ryan. “It lines up perfectly with the five year reunion, so I’m thinking of having a little party. Just for our close friends. But you’re welcome to come.”

  Ryan looked at me, raising his brow just the tiniest bit. I could practically hear his thoughts: five-year reunion? Six month anniversary party? Boy, we sure waited for the long haul.

  “I’d love to come,” Ryan said, just as I said, “You know, Ryan’s not actually coming to the reunion.”

  “Really?” Sophie cocked her head like a killer-coo-coo bird. Or whatever kind of bird is violent. Vultures. Could Sophie be a vulture? “That is just too bad.”

  I smiled at him tightly. “But you’re playing Thanksgiving. And the reunion’s two days after.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a home game, and they’re giving us Friday evening and Saturday off.” He smiled warmly at my brother and Sophie. “Sounds great. I wouldn’t miss it.”

  I was mystified. Ryan, however, flew into even better spirits, and joked and laughed for the rest of the evening. He even put in a word or two about how San Leandro sounded like a great place to visit.

  “Why did you say all that?” I asked as we left. “My high school reunion? Ugh, I hardly even want to go.”

  “Don’t lie. You can’t wait.”

  “Okay.” We crossed Fifth just below the Met and entered the park. Dead brown leaves clung to most of the branches, but what little greenery remained still enlivened me. “It’ll probably be a kick. But why do you want to go?”

  “I’ll get to meet everyone you grew up with.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” I asked warily.

  He responded promptly. “To find out if you were always this much of a pain in the ass.”

  “You could have just asked Sophie.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t think she was as bad as you did. She didn’t breathe fire or try to eat your brother alive.”

  I stopped. “You did not like Sophie.”

  “She was hot, too.” Mischievousness tinged his voice.

  “Yeah, ’cause she came straight from the hot place down below.”

  “I suppose it is summer in Australia...”

  I cracked a smile and shook my head. “So, do you really want to come?” I tried to envision him in Ashbury, meeting my parents and friends. “I guess I never quite pictured you in Ashbury. It’s not really your scene.”

  “Why not?”

  Because Ashbury was like a worn fleece blanket, old and familiar and comforting. Ryan was new and bright—but he was comforting, too. “I don’t know. Maybe it would
work. And then we could go to your place around Christmas.”

  “Rach—”

  “What?” The note in his voice made me defensive. “If you’re meeting all my friends and family, don’t you think I should get to meet yours?”

  “You’ve already met all my friends.”

  “Ryan—”

  He stopped and sighed, reaching up to tousle his hair. Cleopatra’s Needle towered up behind him, easily visible through the sparse branches. “Look, Rach, they’re just not—cosmopolitan—enough for you. You’d spend your entire time making fun of the farm, and the trackers, and the clothes—hell, you’d make fun of the entire state.”

  “I would not!”

  He raised his brows in disbelief. “If you saw a guy in a flannel shirt riding a tractor and smoking tobacco, you wouldn’t snicker to yourself?”

  Maybe. A little bit. I tried to joke, “But I would know it was wrong.”

  Apparently that had been the wrong thing to say, since Ryan snorted. “Yeah, there’s no way you’re meeting my family.”

  I snapped my lips shut.

  Ryan didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong, and kept chatting about meeting my brother and San Leandro as we cut through fields of children playing games. Eventually, though, when he pointed out a couple of kids dressed up as superheroes and I failed to laugh, he stopped. “You’re not still thinking about that meeting my family thing, are you?”

  “Sort of.”

  He leaned his head back in frustration. “Look, I’ve never brought anyone home, okay? It’s not something I do.”

  “You just met my brother. And his girlfriend.” I paused. “Do you actually want to come to the reunion?”

  “’Course I do. I told you that.”

  “Fine. Then you can come, if I get to meet your family.”

  He drew up short. “That’s like some weird form of blackmail.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said, insulted. “It’s normal couple stuff.”

  “Normal couple stuff.”

  “Yeah. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think you’d know normal couple stuff if it bit you in the ass.”

  I leveled my gaze at him. “You meet my family, I meet yours. That’s how it works.”

  “Maybe.” He studied the distance with disproportionate interest. “How ’bout I think about it?”

  “Do you think they wouldn’t like me?”

  He stopped and cupped my face in his hands. In his face, I read confusion and seriousness and worry. I didn’t say anything, just let him look, until he finally brushed a kiss across my lips and stepped away. “My mother would have loved you. Fine. We’ll go see your family, and then you’ll meet mine.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Thanksgiving at my house was roughly akin to feeding time at a zoo.

  There were my dad’s parents, two retired teachers who craved great-grandchildren like great-grandchildren craved presents. Since David and Sophie had gone to her aunt’s for the holiday, I was the only one around to pester. My maternal grandmother also attended, and spent the majority of time driving my mother crazy. We also hosted an assortment of aunts, uncles, cousins, and significant others, along with too much pie and too much alcohol. Halfway into his third beer, Uncle Mike always started telling the story of that time he went fishing and there was that storm and that shark and by this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if a mermaid or two showed up as well.

  We started eating around one and didn’t leave the table until four. Ryan’s absence was probably for the best since the interrogation was immediate and thorough. “Why isn’t he here?” Grandma Maisel asked.

  “He’s working.” Funny, no one had ever pressed me this hard about my work. How nice to see my family’s priorities.

  “What he’s do?” My grandmother’s voice was nasal and distrustful. When she squinted, a hundred additional wrinkles billowed out from her temples. “Who works on a holiday?”

  “He plays football for the New York Leopards.” This caused half my relatives to spit up their drink, and the other half to almost glaze over from boredom. My family. A cohesive whole.

  Dad gaped at me, as he so often did, like when I told him that I had finished the last of the milk or that, yes, I had borrowed his boots, but here they were back safe and sound, so no worries. Lots of things shocked Dad.

  This, however, shocked him more than most things.

  Mom, of course, just shook her head. I still wasn’t sure she believed football counted as a viable career option.

  Later, as we sat in the family room in varying catatonic states, Uncle Steve from the half of the family that did care switched on the television. We caught the last quarter of the Leopards playing the Broncos. “See?” I said to Mom, who I snuggled against. “There he is! See, it’s a real thing.”

  Mom looked vaguely horrified as we watched two men fall heavily to the ground and flip heels over heads. “I can’t believe you’re dating a jock.”

  I watched Ryan skirt a pair of linemen, knocking shoulders with a broad-shouldered man in blue and orange, ball cradled in his arm. He spun and ducked, lunging over the Leopards’ thirty-yard line and launching the ball in the air, releasing it just as a cornerback covered him. It tumbled across the sky as the players below scrambled toward the end zone. Malcolm broke free of the pack, his hand outstretched, leaping high to pluck the ball from the air before being buried in a pile of defensive tackles. “Did you see that?” I pressed Mom once I could breathe again. “Did you see that pass he made?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Hmph.” I crossed my arms, waiting for the announcers to calm down, and the camera to go back to Ryan. “Well, I like him anyways.”

  * * *

  He arrived at one the next afternoon, pulling into the driveway in his tiny little sportscar. I resisted running out and meeting him, because I liked to maintain the illusion that I was a mature adult. Still, I scrutinized him as he walked up the drive, watching him with my parents’ eyes instead of my own. He’d dressed casually, but still utterly presentably, and his clean cut jaw and short gold hair made him look heart-breakingly beautiful. My parents were going to be baffled.

  The doorbell rang, and I heard Mom scream “I’ll get it!” from the kitchen, excited as a child at Christmas.

  “Mom!”

  She grinned mischievously and pulled the door open, her whole face lighting up. “You must be Ryan.”

  I quickly stepped up to join them as Ryan handed my mother a bright bouquet starring orange lilies, white roses, and filled out with green poms. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Maisel. Thanks for having me.”

  Astonishment crossed Mom’s face as she took the armful. “Oh, we’re pleased to have you! It’s not often Rachael brings anyone home.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” I stepped forward to give Ryan a light kiss. He smiled at me as Mom bustled around, placing the flowers in a crystal cut vase.

  Dad came around the corner and beamed a little too effusively. “So! Ryan Carter! It’s good to meet you!”

  I tensed. If he started talking about Ryan’s game, I would die of embarrassment.

  “That was a great pass to Lindsey you made in the fourth last night—”

  “Dad,” I said in a low, warning voice.

  Dad looked wounded. “What? I’m just making conversation.”

  Ryan, the traitor, grinned. “Rachael sometimes thinks my being a player is a little...awkward.”

  “I never said that.”

  He gave me a look. I gave him one right back.

  Mom came back. “Why don’t you come in, and we can get you settled. Are you hungry? Need anything to drink? We have seltzer, orange juice, beer...”

  My parents had never offered me anything other than ceremonial alcohol in my life.

  Also, Ryan better not say yes.

  “Just seltzer would be perfect, Ms. Maisel.”

  I let out a tiny sigh of relief. Ryan took my hand and gave it a light squeeze, as if to say, �
�I’m not an idiot.”

  And also, maybe, “You’re not alone.”

  “So,” Mom said, after we had all settled on the living room couches, the flowers beaming up at us. “Rachael has been appalling stingy with details. How did you two meet?”

  Ryan smiled, that golden boy smile of his, the one that made him look like every parent’s dream come true. Mom couldn’t seem to help herself. She gave me another baffled, bemused look, like where did he come from? as Ryan spun out a PG rendition of our meet-cute.

  I’d had no idea if my parents would take to Ryan; if they’d treat him with too much awe on my father’s part or disdain on my mother’s. I wasn’t sure if Ryan could fit into my family dynamic, or if the entire experience would be mind-bogglingly uncomfortable.

  But he fit. My parents treated him the same way they treated all of my friends: like we were still children, but my parents were trying to remember that we thought we were adults. They grilled him thoroughly about his family and his upbringing and his life. Football became an afterthought, even to my father. And my mother, whose dispassionate regard for sports may have been genetic, couldn’t have cared less.

  Ryan seemed to like that.

  “Go on, then,” I told Mom after dinner, once we were alone in the kitchen. Dad had escaped to his study, while Ryan took a call after I assured him it was fine. After all, I wanted to talk to my mother alone. “What did you think?”

  Mom sounded half-amazed. “He’s very nice.”

  “What’s that mean? Do you like him?” I was a little surprised by how much I wanted her approval.

  “Yes, I do.” She paused in loading the dishwasher and wiped her purple-gloved hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of soap bubbles. “I’m just not sure what the two of you have in common.”

  I leaned against the counter. “We have a lot in common.”

  She raised her hands placatingly, which raised my hackles even more. “Maybe you do. I’m just not sure what it is. He seems like a very nice boy, it’s just that...I worry about you, Rachael.”

  “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “I’m sure I don’t.”

  The unsaid “but” dangled in the air, and I narrowed my eyes as she refused to go on without prompting. “Fine. Why do you worry about me?”