Lowering his tablet and medical questions, he gave an acquiescing sigh. “Now, Donna Gene, where on earth would I find time to coax a woman into picking me out of a crowd? If I did, I wouldn’t have the time to visit you.”
“Oh, stop.” Donna’s cheeks lifted as she waved a hand at him. “I’m serious, now. You’re a fine young man. Are you sure there’s not something holding you back from all the blushing brides out there?” She laced her fingers together over the remote as though it were an encyclopedia. This was her office. “Are you dealing with some inner angst?”
A clicking sound came from behind him. He turned to see Edie nodding on the couch as she scribbled something on a paper. “Because we have theories.”
“I have no doubt.” Jett slid the tablet back into his backpack. “Well, all I can say is to the best of my knowledge, I’m not suppressing childhood trauma. But mark my words, if I remember that I am, I’ll let you two know first thing.”
This evidently soothed the old ladies, because Edie began nodding again, scribbling something while she mumbled, “Receptive to help.”
“Do that, Jetty boy. Because we talk about it often and, for the life of us, find your case baffling.”
“I can only say I’m glad you’re on the case, because it’s equally baffling to me as well.” Jett zipped up his backpack and took a step toward Sunny standing by the door. “We’ll be seeing ourselves out now. You two have a nice Thanksgiving.”
Both faces fell. “So soon?”
“Afraid so. I’ve got a roast to cook. Can’t leave the guys hungry.”
Both of them waved as Sunny opened the screen door. Donna Gene tapped her temple with her remote. “We’ll be drilling the old lemons, Jetty boy. Don’t you worry.”
The TV volume kicked back up to deafening level as they stepped out into open air. Pine icicles clicked together as a breeze swept through the surrounding trees. Everything about the world just outside their door was as opposite as could be from the inside: silent, clean, still. And yet, a part—a very, very small part—of Jett could see why these women let the raucous television shows fill their ears with sound. If they sat in silence up here too long, chances were they’d start to feel just how lonely they really were.
“You know what you could do—” Sunny started as he climbed back into the cab of their vehicle.
“No.” Jett turned on the ignition, knowing exactly where Sunny was going. He backed out and turned around. The road made a steep decline.
“Seriously, man. Just a couple months ago I went on a date with a gorgeous brunette—or was it blonde?” Sunny leaned back, resting his hands behind his head. “Met at the aquarium. She actually shared my affinity for shark culture—”
“No.”
“Lost her halfway through, though.” His eyebrows knit together. “I should message her . . .”
Jett shook his head, staring straight ahead. “Date however you want, Sunny, but I couldn’t stand thinking women were out there swiping left and right over my picture. Judging me on the type of food I like. Deciding who I am from a paragraph.”
“Fine, man.” Sunny propped his feet on the dash. “But good luck trying to meet someone in our neck of the woods. You’re not exactly in Atlanta anymore.”
“I haven’t got a lot of time on my hands anyway right now.”
Sunny laughed and raised one brow. “You do realize we share an apartment. And a job. I know exactly how much time you have on your hands. Enough time to wear out that pull-up bar for no good reason.” He rubbed his belly, now rolling like jelly beneath his shirt. “Me, on the other hand, I don’t waste my time. Slim pickings in this town work in my favor. Which is why, if you just tried out the app—”
“No,” Jett replied, his firm tone stating this conversation was over.
Sunny turned his gaze out the window, mumbling several more points to the glass during the rest of the ride.
Jett ignored him. But as much as he pretended not to care, there were moments it bothered him. Unlike many of his buddies, he wasn’t coming up on a decade-long anniversary and struggling to find something decent for his wife. He didn’t get to complain about having to stop by the grocery store on the way home because the wife was in the middle of making chili and had forgotten the diced tomatoes. He never had the opportunity to warrant a wife’s wrath by suggesting she just “do without.”
Now, to be fair, that also meant he didn’t clean up dried macaroni glued to the carpet of the minivan on Saturdays or dress up in matching family outfits for spring photos. When the married guys crawled into work because they’d stayed up all night holding kids who’d thrown up from 2:00 to 6:00 a.m., his act of benevolence was offering a cup of coffee.
No, he had neither interest nor the need to fill his life with those things—those small human beings. Never had. But as for the other, the chance to find the woman whom, as Dr. Donna so aptly put, he could “warm his toes with”—well, that was another matter. And sometimes, more and more of late, he’d felt the nudge to do something about it.
Dr. Donna was better at this than he realized.
Jett thought about it as he wiped down the kitchen after dinner and made his way toward his small, private room. He twisted the combination dial on the locker closest to the wall.
Missy Jenkins. Her name drifted like a song note across the forefront of his mind as the locker popped open. Had it really been that long, that long, since he’d been out to dinner with a woman?
Sure, there was Sarah, his neighbor across the hall. She fed him a casual meal every now and again. But that usually began with them running into each other in the shared hall and her mentioning the idea with as much expectancy and desire as she would have in asking Sunny or any one of their neighbors. They usually sat on her sofa with plates of spaghetti and chatted in between plays of the UT game. He always left with no hint beyond having strengthened their neighborly bond. And frankly, that was just fine with him.
But Missy, the woman who’d moved off to Seattle and taken his heart with her . . . Could it really be coming up on two years?
He caught his face in the small mirror hanging in the back of the locker and immediately frowned. Touching his temple, he tried to decipher if the hair poking out was white or simply his imagination.
He swung the locker closed. He needed to get it together.
In the stillness of his room he lay on his back, picked up his phone. It glowed in the otherwise dark space. Even as he typed the words in the app store and hit the download button, he felt the heat on his neck, the shame in even considering the terribly desperate option. He twisted his neck to double-check the lock on his room door. The mere act of looking into one of these sites depleted the level of his manhood.
This was just testing the waters, he reminded himself as he swiftly created a username and logged in, scrolling down the page as dozens of faces popped up. He would just take a look around, see if this was a real possibility for expanding his connections . . .
The alarm sounded, but this time it was both outside and in. Because there, illuminated in the red light flashing above his bed, was the profile picture of Cassie Everson. Fifteen years had changed the cut of her hair, had altered her muscular frame of high school years to something softer, more feminine. But that unmistakable smile was still all hers, thin lips tilted up as if she was on the cusp of laughter. Hazel eyes twinkled with that same down-to-earth confidence he’d seen on the court all those years before but had never managed to turn his way. She’d been a senior, after all, while he’d been but a lowly freshman.
And yet here they were, single, fifteen years later. His boyhood dreams come true.
“Well, I’ll be,” he murmured as he jumped out of bed, siren wailing.
Cassie Everson.
The one and only.
3
Cassie
“Jeeves, I’m home.”
Cassie’s keys clanked inside the tidy, porcelain bowl beside the front door as she proceeded to slip off her coat. Jeeves t
ook his time greeting her—the selfish thing—determined to watch a cardinal bouncing lightly across her front yard instead. Only at the sound of his food clattering into the ornate and entirely-too-expensive-to-be-a-cat-bowl dish did he drop off the window ledge. He gave an appreciative rub against the side of her leg and dug in.
Her phone dinged as she picked up his water bowl.
The notifications from her dating app always gave a lighthearted ping whenever she received a message from an interested hunter. When she’d started the dating app a year ago, she’d optimistically called them suitors. As time went on and she got more and more acquainted with their characters, they’d dropped down to men and then humans, shortly after scum bags, and finally rested comfortably at hunters. Still, that ding was addicting and so chipper nobody could resist its siren call. Surely whoever’d invented that ding was a billionaire.
Unconsciously she fell into the familiar habit of checking the app, no less certain of her plans to terminate the profile tonight, while setting the fountain bowl in the sink and turning on the water. As it began to fill, she read the message.
Dear Cassie.
Not Kassie, not Casey, and not Hey, Smokin’ Hot Lady. So far so good.
I’ve never been on this site before.
Ah. The classic “I’ve never been on this site before, was in fact heading to the monastery to swear off hope of love forever . . . until I saw you” line. Her hand lowered an inch toward the counter.
But when I was scrolling through I saw you—
She put the phone on the counter and turned off the running faucet.
No more. Suddenly, finally, she knew without a doubt she couldn’t handle one more excruciating message. She picked up her phone again and deleted the app without a moment’s pause.
At last.
Freed.
“Jeeves, if you ever go out searching for a Mrs., make sure to skip the sweet talking.” She raked her hands through her hair. “And you have to stop talking to your cat, Cassie,” she added, then bit her lip. “And yourself.”
The house was quiet. She felt the day drag her toward the freezer, leading her to pull out the small, prepackaged box of frozen tikka masala. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds later, Cassie tucked her feet under her as she sat on the glider by the window in her modest living room. Jeeves jumped onto his sill beside her.
Some nights she turned on the television or a Pandora station just so she couldn’t hear her own breath, but tonight she couldn’t even muster that. Tonight, without her mother or Bree or teens to distract her and love on her and harass her and ultimately give her the strength to feel like it wasn’t so bad after all, she just wanted to grieve. Just tonight. Just for a few absurd, self-wallowing minutes alone.
It felt silly to mourn the loss of something that never had been in the first place, but if she had to name the feeling, that was the word she would use. Mourning.
She was all too aware that people faced harder problems every day. She knew she had every reason to be thankful: An incredible pair of parents who were healthy and supportive and lived only a handful of miles away. A wonderful older sister, a sturdy brother-in-law, and two fantastic nieces and a nephew to dote on. Supportive friends, and a job she loved. She was financially stable and, apart from the accident and its aftermath, in tip-top shape. She was truly, truly grateful.
But tonight she looked at her white-slipcovered couch and matching loveseat and couldn’t help but notice how clean, and how empty, they were. When she went over to her sister’s place, Emily was usually scrubbing something her nieces and nephew had gotten into: the walls from bright purple marker, the carpet from apple juice, the couch from where one niece had smeared her peanut-butter-and-jelly lips across it like a paper towel. In those moments Emily tended to carry a frantic edge in her tone, her eyes always roving around corners as if waiting for the next crisis—crash, tear, or stain.
Right then, there was nothing Cassie wouldn’t give for a long streak of red crayon across her perfectly white couch.
She sighed and rubbed her weary eyes before looking out the window. From the four-bedroom house and five acres inherited from her grandparents, only two other brick residences rested within seeing distance, propped along their own hills of pasture. Smoke lifted from the Smiths’, where no doubt Mr. Smith was spending the hours busily pushing the children aside as he added wood to the fire. He was a man who loved his fires.
A few stubborn leaves clung to the branches of the large maple on her front lawn. One, especially stubborn in maintaining its rich auburn hue, finally gave in and let itself drift slowly to the awaiting pile. Cassie rose and took with her the empty plastic bowl.
Time was up.
She conceded to background music and spent the next two hours in miscellaneous odds and ends, dusting the already dust-free coffee table, taking a broom across her kitchen floor. She was halfway through spraying down the toilet when her phone rang, the Jaws theme song notifying her it was Bree.
She cradled the phone to her ear as she kept working. “Hey, Bree. What’s up?”
“I’m about to do something, and I want to make absolutely sure you are going to remember how much you love me when this is all over. Do you think you can do that?”
“It depends.” Cassie picked up the scrubber. “Will I be publicly humiliated?”
“Nope.”
“Will I appreciate whatever you are about to do?”
“Yep.”
Cassie began scrubbing. “Will you tell me what you are planning?”
“Not in a million years.”
Cassie pursed her lips. This type of conversation was hardly surprising; Bree occasionally threw Cassie into situations “for her own good” and so they had something to talk about—besides a life of cleaning toilet bowls—when they were ninety years old together.
“Fine. I trust you. But don’t mess with my Thanksgiving. I’m going to be over at Mom’s all day.”
Cassie could practically hear Bree’s mischievous lips creeping upward in a smile. “You won’t regret this. Well, I take that back. There’s a small possibility you might, but what’s life without risk?”
“Wait. How much of a risk are we talking here—”
The line, however, went dead before Cassie could finish her question.
4
Jett
Dear Jett,
Of course I remember you. How could I not, if you know what I mean? *wink wink*
How’s tomorrow night sound, 6:30 p.m.? Meet me at Girls Haven. I’ll be waiting outside. I’m up for anything you want to do. Surprise me.
Cheers!
Cassie
P.S. Skip the messages and text me at 865.345.6473 from now on. I think we can both agree this online dating site is for the birds.
P.P.S. If you have any of the following conditions—agateophobia, pluviophobia, thaasophobia, Russophobia, pupaphobia, are married and seeking an affair, alcoholic seeking more alcohol, a kleptomaniac, rude, or boring—text me immediately. Deal’s off.
P.P.P.S. I’m a sucker for old-fashioned chivalrous-men things. Bring flowers.
Jett read the message for the third time before tucking it into his pocket and pulling out his debit card. His eyes skimmed the row of colorful bundles before landing on an arrangement of white alstroemerias and Douglas firs mixed with pinecones and red berries, held together by a large, red satin bow. “That one,” he said and handed the man his card.
As he stepped back into his car, he couldn’t help feeling compelled to check the message yet again. Strange. Exceedingly strange. But despite getting commanded by his date to bring flowers to his date, the infraction wasn’t about to slow him down a minute. Perhaps she’d turn out to be crazy. It was quite possible the woman she was up close was a far cry from the perception he’d had half a lifetime ago. Even then, the extent to which he “knew” her was the daily crossing of paths in crowded halls between the bells of 1:00 and 1:05 p.m. He “knew” how she felt each day as he watched her mood sh
ow on her face, her joy as she laughed with another teammate over some shared story, the frustration when the halls were busier than usual and the bell was about to sound, the playfulness—oh, the pain he’d felt from February on through her graduation—as she clung to Peter Eckstut, wearing his football jacket and school letters. But the time he enjoyed seeing her most was on the court.
Back then, that girl could shoot.
Jett realized he was grinning as he turned his truck around the corner and saw her standing, as promised, on the sidewalk. As he pulled to a stop in front of her, a flurry of nonsensical, boyish fears dropped in and took up residence in his chest.
Aside from the frown on her face, she hadn’t changed one bit. A thin black jacket wrapped tightly around her, Cassie Everson stood—clearly freezing—on the sidewalk. Though he, too, wore a nice pair of jeans matching his black, button-down oxford shirt, she had underdressed him by a mile. The pink collar of a polo peeked out from above her jacket, and her orange-and-green Nikes met at the bottom of her skinny jeans. Her hair—or rather what he could see of it from the ponytail—looked darker than the picture, and more than a few strands were out of place, as though she had put it up hours ago and forgotten about it in the chaos of the day. She hoisted a large work bag full of binders over her shoulder.
In sum, the only item matching the level of attention he’d given to the evening was a simple pair of diamond studs twinkling behind wayward wisps of hair.
“Cassie?” Jett stepped out of his truck and, feeling more than a little silly, brought the bouquet of flowers with him. “It’s been a long time.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
The Dating Charade Page 3