His fingers tangling in her hair spurned a mild pain in his chest. Not a day had gone by where he did not reflect on the transcendence of their first kiss. She had made him feel whole, if only for a minute. Peter needed to feel that again.
The tips of their noses brushed as he leaned into her. “Keep your tongue to yourself, this time.”
“Oh, of course. We wouldn’t want you feeling morally compromised.”
Languidness laced his acquisition of her silken lips. This contact was something to be savored, to bottle and revisit throughout a lifetime. Their mouths tangled and untangled, creating their own brand of intimacy despite their stoppered lips. His pulse waxed percussive, resonating like a lone, thundering drum amid the stillness of the street. Her teeth skimmed his bottom lip, as if considering to defy the boundary he had set. Ryleigh never crossed the line.
In fact, she was the one to pull away.
“That bad, huh?”
Shaking her head, she removed and returned his coat. She crossed her arms. “No, it’s not you. It’s me, I felt … guilty.”
Guilty? Why should she feel guilty? I’m the one sullying her youth via my selfish inability to cut her out of my life.
“For what?”
“For wanting something you’re so unwilling to give.”
The phrase feasted on his nerve endings like a hoard of ravenous termites. That can’t be how she sees it. He rose from the hood of the car. They were both quiet for a beat as they headed up the paved path toward the Bransons’ home.
Manic energy rose in Peter, squeezing a response past his tight lips. “It’s not that I’m unwilling to give it. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
“Because I’m in high school, right? Because to you, I’m just some kid who makes your coffee.”
“I don’t see you that way. That’s what bothers me.”
A broad-shouldered man sporting plaid pajamas and glasses emerged from the shadows of the unlit porch. As Peter pieced together who this must have been, every bit of breath whooshed out of his lungs.
“Peter, isn’t it?” he demanded coolly.
“Dad, stop.”
Ryleigh’s weak interjection made little difference. Mr. Branson joined them on the walkway, daring to enter Peter’s personal space. Rage illustrated itself across his features like a cartoon character, skin reddened and neck corded.
Her father was out for blood.
“This is the guy who’s been texting and calling you, is that right? Your mother’s convinced of it. And do you know what she said when I asked her why on Earth she let our daughter drive away with a grown man? Your mother said, ‘I didn’t think she would lie to our faces, Dex.’”
The ruthless reprimanding broke Ryleigh. She turned to Peter and soundlessly sobbed into the wool of his coat. He made the fatal mistake of wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“Take your vile hands off my daughter, you pervert.”
A glinting gold wedding band was all he saw before her father’s fist met his unsuspecting face. The punch landed on his cheekbone with a grotesque crunch—either from Mr. Branson’s knuckles or Peter’s defenseless zygomatic—and skidded to graze his left eye. A vertigo of suffering danced in his dizzied head. Fire, ice, pain, numbness. He stumbled backward from the impact, collapsing on the snow-dotted lawn after a series of unsteady footsteps.
“And you. Get inside the house, young lady. Move it.”
The Bransons’ front door slammed shut.
Peter could have cried out countless expletives, could have pushed to his feet and booked it out of the neighborhood. But the source of his strength was locked away in her house.
He lay defeated on the dead grass and let the snowflakes nurse his searing face.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
Ryleigh’s tongue was caught in a paper shredder, mangled and incapable of speech. Her lips pressed together to form a thin line as she searched for an explanation. She was not quick enough to prevent her father’s tirade.
“Tell me, Ryleigh Collette, what business do you think you have prancing around with a grown man? Your mother agreed to letting you go out with someone college-aged, not someone old enough to be a tenured professor.”
Too ashamed to meet her father’s glare, she focused on the rug in the middle of the sitting room. The saliva she swallowed felt like an immovable boulder lodged in her tender throat. It took all her strength to hold back the stinging hot tears that clouded her vision.
In her peripheral, a glimpse of her mother’s shadow danced along the wall. Charlotte rounded the staircase, clothed in a fuzzy pink bathrobe and hair secured in a ballerina bun.
“You’re in high school, for God’s sake.” Dexter clung to the edge of a wingback chair. His eyes widened, giving the whites more real estate. “What do you suppose this guy wants from someone your age? One thing and one thing alone.”
Her pitiful levy broke. Tears flowed over her waterline and streamed across her cheeks. “If you’d give him a chance, you wouldn’t say such foul things. You don’t know anything about him!”
“Apparently, I don’t know anything about my own daughter.” His booming baritone ricocheted off the walls.
Dexter said nothing to his wife as he swept out of the room. Seconds later, a door banged upstairs.
Trembling, Ryleigh sank to the floor, crumpling in a defeated mess on the rug. Her thoughts spun like the needle of a compass. Tonight felt like a reconciliation between Peter and herself. A fresh start. That second chance was gone, courtesy of the lie that sponsored her fantastical evening.
One night of bliss and you’ve wrecked this to hell.
Charlotte knelt beside her weeping daughter on the carpet, rubbing her convulsing back.
“I’ve never been very good at this.” Her mother’s forehead creased to reveal its faint wrinkles. “I knew your father would be upset when I told him, but I had no idea he’d react so conversely.”
“Conversely? Dad punched him in the face.”
“You have to think about it from his perspective. Suppose you have a daughter one day, and one night, she brings home a guy who’s old enough to be her father.”
“Peter is not old enough to—“
She’s right. People have kids when they’re in high school.
Her chest tightened as the potential ramifications of her mistake set in. What would this lie cost? Would she be forbidden from seeing him? The notion left her nerves raw.
Rug fibers scratched her face, but the irksome sensation dulled in comparison to the relentless knifing wreaking havoc on her heart.
“We’ve decided to take your phone away for a few months.” No matter how carefully Charlotte chose her words, they failed to mask her disappointment. “Why didn’t you tell me that day, at Murphy’s? Whatever happened to transparency? You used to tell me everything.”
“I’m friends with a 35-year-old guy. I don’t think transparency would’ve aided my case.”
“35? My God,” she mumbled under her breath. Her mother extended an open palm. “Phone.”
Ryleigh surrendered the device and cupped her hand over Charlotte’s, pleading at her with glassy eyes. “Read our messages, mom. He’s a good guy.”
“You two are just friends?”
She thought of their kiss, and how it somehow eclipsed their first. Things had always been confusing between them. Tonight’s sliver of clarification perhaps meant nothing after the drama with her parents.
“Maybe we’ve entered a gray area.”
“I’ll look over the messages. I may not like this, or understand it, but I’m willing to try. For you. I’d like to know who you’re spending time with, even if I disagree with the age difference. Your father, on the other hand, I can’t promise he’ll come around.”
Ryleigh struggled to nod her head in response. She felt undeserving of this olive branch. Was this one of those parental maneuvers steeped in reverse psychology? ‘We’ll let her think she has the upper hand …’
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She swallowed heavily as her mother bounded upstairs, leaving her to rot beside the crackling fireplace with nothing but her guilt-laden conscious for company.
Pink, swollen flesh stared back at Peter in the bathroom mirror. There were no cuts, no scrapes, only red splotches that would be replaced with unsightly blueish-purple bruising in the days ahead. He had tried to do the right thing with Ryleigh, to kiss her in a chaste way, and how did the universe retaliate? A perturbed father’s fist in his face.
“You did this to yourself.”
They were the same words Mr. Roberts had spoken to a then 22-year-old Peter the first and only time he missed deadline. The throbbing in his cheek intensified when he stopped to think about how much of his life had gone to waste over this career he had become submissive to.
Leaning on the sink’s ledge, he buried his face in his hands. Broken, unsteady breaths escaped. A tornado of clashing emotions raged in his heart, fighting one another for dominance of his mood.
The scholarship article had been his first strike, the punch a clear second. One more lick of karmic retribution and he was out.
“I need a drink,” he murmured, whisking into the kitchen. Peter spied the three bottles of red wine atop the refrigerator with immediate disinterest.
Liquor had never been a big deal to him, but he kept a supply on hand. He should have displayed it in a glass box proclaiming, ‘Break in case of romantic folly.’
It certainly would have made it easier to find.
He rummaged through several cabinets, fighting hard to recall where he hid the long-forgotten bottle of whiskey, until he located the dusty vessel. Deciding that a cup was unnecessary, Peter threw back a swig of the aged liquid. He welcomed the burning sensation that trickled over his lips and along his throat. It dulled the stinging in his cheek, righted the weakness in his legs.
He retreated to the living room and flung himself on the sofa, placing the whiskey on the floor within arm's reach.
You put your neck out on the line, knowing things would end this way. You knew it wouldn’t work with her, that there were too many complications.
“Why couldn’t you just ignore her when you met? What’s so charming about her?”
It was an inane inquiry. He had been at Ryleigh’s mercy ever since she whispered ‘antithesis’ in his ear at the football game. Maybe his obsession with her predated that; maybe it could be traced back to the first time she looked at him, blue irises popping against her overly lined eyes like a clear sky bordering a thunderstorm.
His ankle twisted as an unwanted sensation built inside of him. Unadulterated urgency flooded his veins, a triple dog dare from his dangerously low serotonin to take another drink.
“Every time things go south with a girl you end up with a bottle of liquor, how’s that?”
Heather. Drink. Kendall. Drink. Ryleigh. Drink.
And what’s the common denominator? You.
He lay perfectly still on the couch, riding out the intense but familiar paralysis of anxiety. Peter caught his breath as the initial panic and fear disbanded.
Worry made a terrifying comeback when he remembered the last time he had been rendered this hopeless. But this would not be like last time. He had a low stock of whiskey. He had left the pain medicine in the bathroom where it belonged.
‘Don’t you ever scare me like that again,’ his mother had said when he woke up in the hospital seven years earlier.
Peter had brushed lips with death once and he was in no hurry for an encore. No, he would begrudgingly remain on Earth and carry out his life sentence of wallowing in the confounding misery of human existence. He just needed to drink enough to forget the memories swirling in his head.
Heather’s lies. Kendall’s thighs. Ryleigh’s eyes.
“This is all that’ll ever come of your pathetic life, capping off the night with a stiff drink and all your problems,” he whispered, losing consciousness.
Peter kicked himself for being eight minutes late as he sprinted through the hallway to his office. He flipped on the lights as the fire in his lungs subsided from running most of the way to the newspaper building. Blinding fluorescence flooded the room, further agitating the migraine rattling around in his skull.
While the outdated desktop computer started up, he made use of the time by checking the voicemails on the clunky landline. The red, flashing number on the device indicated five new messages.
“Hey, Peter, this is Brad from the Audubon Society. I got your message about scheduling an interview and wanted to follow up. If Wednesday works for you, I’m …”
Fuck Brad. Fuck birds. Fuck Harris.
Peter wanted to crawl between his sheets and sleep the next decade away. He clutched his stomach as a crippling siege of nausea overpowered him.
“Oh, God.”
Looking around in a frenzy, he snatched the mesh wastebasket beneath his desk. A waterfall of vomit flowed into the trash can, oozing through the metal cross hatching. He cursed the uselessness of the mesh material as his spell of sickness tapered off.
“Rosenfeld, would you mind …” Mr. Roberts materialized in the doorway.
Self-consciousness threatened to further wreck Peter’s immune system as his boss studied the unsightly pool seeping out of the wastebasket and onto the carpet.
Mr. Roberts removed his gold-wired glasses and examined his sickly employee; thick hair in disarray, an unshaven face, dark circles framing his bloodshot eyes, slacks wrinkled beyond repair.
“Go home, Rosenfeld.”
The many illuminated windows of The Harris Chronicle acted as a dim spotlight inside the darkened coffee shop. The Roast was deader than dead for a weeknight.
Peter had not been avoiding the cafe, though he made it a point to avoid Ryleigh. Whenever she dwelled on it, the world seemed to slow down. If she could sustain that state, maybe he could catch up to her, maybe he could digest the sticky predicament in which they found themselves.
“I ended things with Colin.” Andrea stirred her iced macchiato, white swirls of milk blending into the espresso.
Ryleigh should have gauged the breakup by the two inches missing from Andy’s caramel tresses.
“Everyone who splits this time of the year always gets back together by prom. Come April, your Prince Charming will be on your arm, escorting you into the exhibition center.”
She frowned and ceased the compulsive stirring. “Are you even listening to me? I broke up with him.”
“Sorry, I—”
“You have a lot on your mind, right? I’ve heard that line from you during our last trillion conversations. Your dad punched paperboy and now he’s ghosting you. I refuse to sit here and let you spend the rest of our senior year as a lovelorn zombie.”
“He’s not ghosting me. My dad’s held my phone hostage for two months.”
Her father had returned her phone that morning, attached with a jaw-dropping offer. Seizing her recyclable cup, Ryleigh zeroed in on the newspaper building.
Within thirty minutes, she would be knocking on Peter’s office door. Would he slam it in her face? Turn her away?
She swallowed the lukewarm remnants of her latte along with her concerns.
“Well, seeing as I’m single and you’ve been ditched by your fossilized boyfriend, I guess we have no choice but to be each other’s prom dates. Better than going stag.”
Ryleigh bit the inside of her cheek. “One, Peter’s not a fossil. Two, he is not my boyfriend. Three, I’m not going to prom. Forget it.”
“I smell boy trouble.” Kendall squatted by the display case, boxing up the unsold pastries. “You need to straighten out whatever’s brewing between you and the coffee purist. He’s making my shifts unbearable.”
“She’d need a miracle to work that one out. Her dad punched him in the face,” Andrea volunteered.
Kendall held her chin high. “I knew he was lying. When I asked about his shiner he said he hit his face fixing something under his sink. There’s no pipe in existence that
could’ve caused that much damage. Seriously, though? I can’t picture him in a fight.”
“Peter told me what happened between you guys.” Ryleigh’s face felt impossibly hot. She restrained her focus to the tabletop, unwilling to meet her co-worker’s gaze after such an intimate revelation.
“That was my favorite skirt. I bet he left out the part where he offered to pay my dry-cleaning bill. He’s a trip, huh?”
Andrea stilled before slipping into a pained expression. Rising from her chair, she said, “I’ll leave you two alone to discuss your X-rated filth.” She aimed a french tip at Ryleigh. “I’m not dropping this prom thing. You. Me. Dresses. Memories. Magic. We’re going.”
“You’re not going, are you?” Kendall asked once the front door swung shut.
“Not a chance.” Ryleigh joined her at the case. She assembled one of the mini, white pastry boxes. “Do you mind if I take some of these?”
“Be my guest. My boyfriend’s thoroughly annoyed with the hoard of treats I bring home every night. I’ve started to pawn them off on family members.” Kendall’s movements slowed. She placed croissants in the larger box with great deliberation. “Peter talks about you, you know.”
“Yeah, right. Like what?”
“Like he should’ve been more careful because you’re the best thing he’s ever had. Lovesick stuff.”
Not even a twinge of jealousy edged her tone. And why should Kendall be jealous? Peter was nothing more than a hilarious anecdote in her life.
“Lovesick?” Her stomach contorted at the adjective.
“Believe what you will, but I haven’t seen him this despondent since I accidentally put peppermint syrup in his cappuccino a few Christmases ago. He’s got it bad for you.”
How could he possibly ‘have it bad for her’ when he had erected a steel wall of resistance? Were they talking about the same Peter Rosenfeld? The emotionally unavailable guy who never seemed to relax enough to have one iota of fun? The guy who had demoted her to closed-mouthed kisses?
Yeah, because nothing screams attraction like retracting established physical boundaries.
Loving Rosenfeld Page 11
