He and his bouquet froze on the curb.
Cassie squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, and it was clear he hadn’t disappeared like a bad dream, she put out a forced hand.
“Hi, there. I’m Cassie.”
Slowly, he shook hers. “I know. I just said your name.”
She flew past his reply. “Look, I’m really, really, sorry to do this to you, but whatever you were told about tonight or—” her eyes flicked to the bouquet as though he was holding a python “—were planning isn’t going to work out after all. I’ve been standing out here for twenty minutes waiting on a friend. But apparently—” her eyes darkened, the same look he imagined on murderers just before they pounced “—that friend got the bright idea to send someone else instead. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Honestly, I don’t think I could put my best foot forward after the day I’ve had. Consider yourself lucky to be off the hook.”
She managed a weary smile, but her eyes seemed wary, as though half expecting him to fly off the handle at the news. And why not? It was certainly a punch in his gut to have the date he’d spent two hours cleaning his car for, put on uncomfortable clothes for, and bought absurdly overpriced flowers for barely take a glance at him before informing him she’d rather spend the evening alone than at a free dinner in exchange for conversation. Frustration, to whatever degree, was the normal reaction. However. This wasn’t any old date who was attempting to turn him down.
Jett paused, carefully putting together the facts. “So, let me just clarify here. You never wrote me a message. We never corresponded in any way.”
Cassie nodded.
“And I could venture a guess that this ‘friend’ of yours stole your identity and messaged on your behalf.”
Her jaw clenched as she nodded again.
“And you don’t actually remember me from high school?”
Her brows raised curiously for a moment, her eyes seeming to trace him before coming up short.
“Huh.” He eyed the sidewalk thoughtfully. Stuck a hand in his pocket. Considered his options. Then, at last, he held out the bouquet. “In that case, I believe your friend ordered these.”
Cassie put up her hands. “Oh, no. I couldn’t.”
“Don’t worry about it. I already have three bouquets at home.” He smiled, but her expression didn’t register the joke. He shook the flowers a little. “Please. I insist.”
He continued to hold out the bouquet, and finally—regretfully, it seemed—she took it. When she did, he dipped his head, his smile not watered down in the least. “Well, Ms. Everson, I sincerely wish you a relaxing evening and a nice holiday tomorrow with your loved ones.”
He glanced around his surroundings, the slimming stream of cars, the lack of pedestrians on the sidewalk, the dark and empty building behind her. It connected to a string of boxy apartment buildings he knew only too well from work. Some of the stories he came away with made his skin crawl.
“Mind if I at least walk you to your car? I assume it’s in the back.”
Cassie’s once-set jaw, growing softer and softer as the conversation went on, snapped tight again. She pushed the stems of the bouquet carefully into her work bag. “No. Thank you.”
Clearly she wanted two free hands to ward off her attacker.
As if he hadn’t descended enough from the status of “chivalrous date” to “stranger worthy of immediate rejection” tonight, he’d now dropped another peg to “potential assaulter.”
Terrific. This night was going swimmingly.
“That’s a kind offer,” she added, though her hands noticeably played with her keys—keys with a rather large can of pepper spray attached. “But I do this all the time.”
And before he could say another word she was walking toward the side of the building. She called out, “Thanks—and sorry again—for the flowers.”
Jett waited behind his steering wheel until her headlights lit up the short drive to the street and an old green Subaru rolled by. She pressed her face into a smile and gave a brief, tight wave before her tires squealed onto Profit Drive. The woman couldn’t drive away fast enough.
Tilting the mirror down, he looked at himself. He was clean shaven, his hair cut short. His mild blue eyes looked back at him with the dim dissatisfaction he felt. Nothing about him looked like a serial killer. In fact, nothing about him looked like he should be shot down—for a first date at least.
Great, now Donna Gene was giving him an ego.
But perhaps that was it, though. He had the distinct sense Cassie had not turned him down tonight but all men in general. In one way that was encouraging, in another it proved to be a whole other challenge.
As he drove back to the apartment he considered his options. First, and most obvious, he could take Cassie at her word and leave her alone. The most simple and straightforward solution. One he let himself consider the span of one red stoplight.
Option two: pursue the heck out of her. Charm her socks off. Now that would be hard to do. The woman obviously had a chip on her shoulder. Dramatic pursuits, like attaching a walkie-talkie to a box of chocolates delivered to her workplace, would be a gamble.
Option three: casually pursue her. Find out where she did life and just so happen to run into her there. The grocery store. The fancy-ladies-and-millennial-men coffee shop. On the greenway, perhaps, as she walked her dog. But he had the distinct feeling she would take his innocent research into her whereabouts as a sign of stalking, and that handy pepper spray of hers would come out again.
Which brought him back to option one, where he didn’t want to go.
So how, then? How could he convince a woman—a very specific woman—to go out on one date? She was on a dating website. Unless her friend had signed her up entirely, she was actually in search of a relationship.
The predicament was beyond his ability to solve alone.
Jett ruminated on the issue in front of his complex. He barely registered his neighbor’s door opening as he pulled out his keys.
“Look at you, Jett. Went somewhere fancy?”
He turned. Sarah stood in her doorway, a bundle of mail in her hand.
For the moment, he pushed the puzzle aside. “Expected to, but plans fell through.”
“Oh, really?” Sporting pink slippers, she stepped an inch out the door. “That’s too bad.” She checked her watch. “Dinner, I’m guessing?”
“Dinner theater, actually.”
Her brows rose considerably. “I didn’t peg you as a dinner-theater guy.”
“I’m not.” Jett reached into his wallet and pulled out two tickets. “You want them? They told me at the box office My Fair Lady was the ‘hit of the season.’”
Sarah laughed lightly and took the tickets, reviewing them. “Sixty-five bucks a seat? You can’t let these go to waste.”
“Do me a favor. Use them so they won’t. You still have a good thirty minutes to get there.”
She paused, bit her lip as she looked at them. “I’d be happy to, but I don’t know of anyone I could snag in such short notice. Definitely not tonight, with Thanksgiving tomorrow. We’re quite the loners, aren’t we?” She smiled up at him, then pushed the tickets his way with one hand as she flapped her letters with the other. “Ah, well. Off to the mailbox. Sorry things didn’t work out tonight.”
He took the tickets and she passed by him. It was indeed painful to let one hundred and thirty hard-earned dollars slip through his fingers. And despite his complete and total disinterest in watching an ensemble decked in makeup dance on stage, there was still the matter of two fine dinners going to waste—according to the online menu, two New York strips in a spicy coffee rub with baked potatoes drowned in sour cream and chives, strawberry cheesecake, endless coffee. As it was, he would be lucky to find a couple slices of leftover pizza in the refrigerator.
Sarah turned the corner and went down the stairs. After a moment’s thought, Jett walked over to the railing and called down as she slipped her mail into the b
ox. “Hey, Sarah. I changed my mind. I’m up for steak if you are.”
In only seconds, Sarah blew by him, calling out as she dashed in her apartment, “Give me two minutes.”
“Sure.”
As he waited, he drew out his phone, the Cassie quandary returning like a briefly paused game. The fact was he was not in the position to solve the puzzle alone. He needed someone closer to help him. Much closer—so close, perhaps, they were able to steal Cassie’s identity and still walk away friends. If he was going to do this, he needed to have an inside man—or in this case, woman—so he could execute this perfectly.
“Almost ready! Just getting on my boots.” Sarah’s muffled voice called out just beyond the door as Jett began to type.
To Cassie’s imposter: let’s talk.
5
Cassie
The room was littered with scraps of wrapping paper and snips of gold and red ribbon. More ribbon twirled slowly as it dangled from the low ceiling where several of the girls had taken advantage of the holiday and taped yards and yards of the stuff throughout the room. The door to the game room, and every other door in the building, was covered in cheerful wrapping paper: reindeer in little red sweaters with presents on their backs, snow-covered Christmas trees, nutcrackers, and long, festive trains. A wooden ornament hung over the wrapping on Cassie’s door depicting baby Jesus in a manger. Christmas music played loudly—and being December 1, quite proudly—over the speakers.
Every possible chair in the place was in use.
“We’re going to need more shoeboxes over here, Keely.” Cassie spoke as she hurriedly opened another bulk box of donated deodorants and set them beside one of the girls’ chairs.
This was the biggest event of the season for the girls, and today was the culmination of all their hard work. It had been months since Girls Leadership Club, a subset of Girls Haven, had made the unanimous goal to collect supplies and assemble Christmas shoeboxes for that year. And they had worked tirelessly. Several Mondays Cassie had chauffeured them throughout town, letting them take the wheel as they charged like the businesswomen they were destined to become into stores and organizations, giving their well-prepared speeches (and poster-board diagrams). And what an incredible turnout. United, they had managed to gather enough supplies for a whopping total of 346 boxes to send to those in less fortunate circumstances overseas.
The pride in Cassie’s eyes was so thick she practically needed glasses.
“Van’s full. Where should I put these?” Star stood behind Cassie, an armful of colorfully wrapped boxes stacked to her chin.
“Just start making a pile by the door. This is going to take multiple trips.”
“I’m running out of soap,” one of the girls called out from her station. The girl dropped a bar of soap into a box and pushed it in front of Bailey’s area.
Like little elves in a Ford factory, they had two extremely efficient assembly lines going. Four girls wrapped the boxes as quickly as their Scotch Tape fingers would allow, two girls ran completed stacks of boxes to the van, and the rest dropped their designated items into the boxes before pushing them along the line: a toothbrush, comb, deodorant, toy, coloring book, pencils, stickers, woodwind recorder (their pride point, for which the girls had received over four hundred donations), a Girls Haven shirt, underwear, and a sturdy three-pack of socks.
Cassie moved down the hall to her office, where cardboard boxes took up nearly every square inch of floor space. She squeezed inside and began rummaging for the soap. As she did, her eyes trailed over the blooms on her bouquet, and for the zillionth time what should have been a feeling of pleasure at seeing the festive display was overcome by a deep sense of regret.
Why on earth had she not given that guy a chance?
Sure, Cassie had never been good at spontaneous things. Despite what her currently cluttered office might say, her personality leaned on the side of precision and organization, and with those qualities naturally came a resistance to such messy and potentially chaotic things as meet-a-guy-on-a-sidewalk-at-night dates. Too much could have gone wrong. In fact, too much that day had already gone wrong.
Rachel, one of the DCS staff, had come by unannounced that afternoon, leading her to scramble for replacement staff so she could take the private meeting in her office. She was familiar with the questions, but discovering that Cam had been moved with her mother to a women and children’s shelter for protection was shocking and heart wearying. Cam—cheetah-print-wearing, sassy Cam—had been tagging along with Star at Girls Haven for over a year and never said a word about the abuse she’d been facing, sexually or physically. It was Cassie’s job to protect and empower these girls, and yet for all the training and all the careful watching, she hadn’t had a clue. She ached over that fact.
So, there Cassie had stood outside, waiting on Bree to pick her up, holding it together until she could slide inside the car with her friend and share every emotion—including the guilt—that simmered. She’d known Cam was resistant to getting too close at the Haven. Why hadn’t Cassie taken her resistance as a silent cry for help? Why had she let the busyness of the business—the programs, the reports, even the Christmas-box program—occupy more attention? And if she was really honest with herself, why had she gone with the flow and focused her attention on the other girls, like Star, like Bailey, who wanted to be loved? The ones who were easy to love. The ones who rewarded Cassie’s time and attention with responses of affection. But Cam? If she had only pushed harder past her exterior walls, spent more time making Cam a priority . . .
Her nondate couldn’t have stepped out of his truck, holding a bouquet of flowers, at a worse moment.
Her mood had lifted with the sun the following morning, enough that she brought the bouquet to work to be a cheerful companion. And through eleven long days, the relentless, apparently immortal, bouquet had kept its bloom. Eleven long days remembering the conversation with Jett Bentley, his purposeful stride, his nervous smile. Eleven long days kicking herself for not giving him a shot.
She’d logged back onto her hijacked account and read his message, thoroughly this time, feeling that weasel of regret stir in her stomach the deeper into his message she got. He mentioned he’d gone to school with her, and sure enough, when she’d pulled out her old yearbook, there he was. The contrast between her senior picture and his freshman one was seismic in proportion. Her in pearls, cap, and gown, her confident seventeen-year-old smile ready to take on the world. Him a tall, skinny boy with a long, thin neck and bowl-cut hair, bearing small resemblance to the man he had grown into. He awkwardly held a basketball on his hip on the JV basketball page. And that’s when his face had flashed across her memory—a face in the stands out of the corner of her eye as she dribbled the ball down the court, a face as she squeezed through the halls on the way to class. To some degree, she really believed she could remember him. But then, at one point in her life she had also convinced herself she could fly.
Even so, his wobbly, freshman smile—just six pages from her own—soothed her and set him apart from the rest.
Still, she couldn’t bring herself to message him again. After what both she and Bree had put him through, she knew the last message he’d ever want to receive was from her.
Lesson learned. If she wrote a how-to manual for dating, this would be a bullet point: be prepared in season and out of season to get into cars with good-looking strangers so long as they provide flowers. And you have pepper spray.
It would be a bestseller.
“Keely says she’s out of toothbrushes.” Star spoke to Cassie from the hall, her arms loaded with yet another stack of boxes. “I’m going to start putting these by the bathroom.”
“No, don’t do that,” Cassie replied. She’d forever rue the day she told the team they didn’t need to come in to work for this. “Here, can you take these back to Finn and find the toothbrushes? I’m going to run a load over to the church.”
As Cassie handed Star a box of soap, she heard a sound mingling
with, and soon overpowering, the voracious chatter, heavy wrapping, and Christmas jingles floating from the game room. The sirens grew louder, and Cassie starting striding down the hall. Star left her box and followed behind. Cassie picked up speed when red flashes blinked through the windows, the roaring of sirens hitting peak volume.
She pushed open the double doors.
What in the world?
“Ho-ho-ho!” Santa bellowed as he wiggled his large body out of the fire truck. Evidently Santa was a fireman as well, because peeking from under the large red coat and golden buttons were firefighter suspenders. He grabbed his helmet, evidently thought better of it, then reached for the Santa hat and stuffed it on his head before grabbing a large black trash bag from the back door. Classy.
With jolly confidence he walked down the sidewalk with a sort of half stride, half Irish jig, straight to Cassie as a group of girls grew behind her. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he drew out a crumpled piece of paper and stretched it out as though about to read an imperial speech. He began talking, but the sirens overpowered his words.
Cassie furrowed her brows. Several of the girls behind her covered their ears.
Santa stopped and flapped his hand at the truck. The sirens stopped.
“As I was saying,” he began again, “Meeeeeeerrrrrryyyy Christmas to the lovely ladies of Girls Haven! Ho-ho-ho!” The bell on the top of his head jingled as he used his free hand to grab his belly. When the bell fell over his face, he stopped and adjusted it. “A little elf told me about all of the work you have been doing for little girls and little boys around the world. And on a Saturday too! You work harder than we do!” He grabbed at his belly again. “Ho-ho-ho!”
A chuckle escaped from a couple of girls, and Cassie turned, halfway in disbelief, to see several of them smiling.
Normally, a guy like this wouldn’t last ten seconds with this crowd.
But then, normally, people didn’t roll in wearing Santa suits in fire trucks.
“And we,” Santa continued loudly, “at the North Pole decided to take a trip down to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, on our official fire engine. A few of my men here have volunteered to help you girls out with the delivery. That is if your fearless leader approves?”
The Dating Charade Page 4