“All right, then, Jett,” Cassie said, flinging her hands in the air. “I’ve tried desperately to jog my memory of you the past two hours, and I’ve given you every chance to lie and make me believe you were cooler than you were. I give up. If you don’t want to embellish your high school days to impress me, that’s your prerogative.”
“Does lying impress you? Because I can lie. I can be the best pathological liar you’ve ever met.” He smiled with ease as he took the bill from the waiter, who was looking down at him suspiciously.
Cassie waved a hand in the air. “Forget it. I looked through the yearbooks anyways. I know about the bowl cut.” She leaned forward. “How about you stick to the present, please. And leave nothing out.”
“Nothing, eh? Don’t tell me you have some grand escape plan worked out with The Cobbler’s Steakhouse too.”
“You kidding me? Guys never make it to the meal portion of the evening. Still, if you see me drop my fork and start crawling beneath tables for the front door . . .”
He laughed. She laughed back.
Both their eyes twinkled.
The luxury-cabin dining room was filled with votive candles and crisp white tablecloths. Busts of deer and elk and bear surrounded them from their lofty positions beneath the ceiling, and Cassie and Jett sat beside one large, roaring fireplace, knees nearly touching beneath the small table.
“Well, let’s see,” Jett began, sliding cash into the check holder and pushing it to the edge of the table. “You’ve already heard about my job. What I like to do. My family—”
“Your sister. Yeah. I remember her.”
Jett lifted his brow. “Do you really remember her?”
“No, I really do.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “Impossible. She was a year behind me.”
Cassie shook her head. “Believe it or not, when I looked you up in the yearbooks, your last name kept popping into my mind, and it took me a minute, but I realized why.” Cassie grinned widely and slapped one hand on the table. “Guess. You won’t believe it.”
“I don’t know. You both . . .” He paused, clearly stumped to come up with any possible way their circles could have intersected. When he kept shaking his head, clearly shuffling through possibilities, she interjected.
“She was my reading buddy at Pittman Elementary!” Cassie exclaimed. “Isn’t that amazing? In Mrs. Richardson’s class in fifth grade, we’d go every Friday to read to the first graders. And my reading buddy was Trina. Isn’t that incredible?”
Cassie took the last piece of baguette from the basket as she shook her head, amazed at the coincidence. First she’d discovered he was the fireman she’d watched out her window that day at the Haven. Then she’d realized his sister was her one and only reading buddy. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to believe this was fate.
“She was such a cute kid too. I remember how she’d get so excited whenever I came, and how she’d grab my hand and drag me to the tent so we could read in it together.” Cassie smiled at the memory, practically smelling the crayons and seeing the rose-tinted books filtered by the rainbow tent around them. “I’d love to see her again. I can’t believe it’s been more than twenty years. Makes me feel old.”
When she looked up from her baguette to him, however, she realized his playful smile had shrunk to a mere shadow, his eyes no longer twinkling.
Before she could begin to ask, or imagine, he spoke. “I haven’t seen Trina, or my niece and nephew, in a little over a year now. Unfortunately, she’s hit a rough patch . . . or rather, been stuck in a rough patch for a while.”
He must’ve seen the way she looked at him, because he shrugged and added, “But I’m sure she’ll come back soon.”
Cassie felt, and resisted, the far-too-soon urge to reach over and touch his hand. Instead, she clasped hers together beneath the table. “I’m so sorry. I hope so too. So . . .” She searched for a milder topic. “You’re an uncle, then?”
“Yeah. They’re twins.” His shoulders eased slightly as he, then she, stood. “And I tell you, if they all came as cute as those two, I’d want my house to be overrun with them.”
Cassie felt her stomach flutter, but not in the way she wanted.
“Thankfully,” he added with a wink, “I know all kids aren’t that cute.”
The knot in her stomach released. “Yeah,” she said, releasing a breath. “Well, it sounds like you have the favoritism part down pat. I’d say you are doing your uncle job perfectly.”
His smile drooped slightly, expressing the words he wasn’t saying: I want to. She just has to come back first.
Instead, he motioned for the door. “Shall we?”
Cassie grinned. “I’m the one ambushed on this date. You call the shots however you want.”
The parking lot sat at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the only light around them coming from the streetlamps overhead and the shimmer of the Little Pigeon River in the distance. Cars filled every available space. Carolina silver bells, basswoods, and Frasers towered above and beyond them.
“Ambushed. Hijacked.” Jett stopped beside her car. “Call it whatever you like, the point is I had to find a way to get you out to dinner, and I succeeded.”
“By stealing my best friend and using my own moves against me.” Cassie opened her door with a grin, the plastic bag with the words The Cobbler’s Steakhouse hanging off her wrist. She set it on the passenger seat and turned back to him, laying both arms across the top of the door.
“Well, I’ve got just two questions left.” Jett stopped at the other side of her door and zipped up his jacket. Frost blew from his breath as he spoke.
A gust of cold air ripped through her own coat. For half a second, she considered taking the keys in her hand and turning the car on to heat it up. The tips of her sockless toes were already starting to bite beneath the thin canvas of her shoes.
But then, taking the three seconds to draw her eyes from him was enough to make her fold. Plus, the very idea that Jett could take that to mean she was ready to go was enough to make her slide her keys into her pocket altogether. She had tried to play things cool and casual, but the longer the evening wore on with Jett Bentley, the more terrifying it had become to feel the warmth, the zeal, the plain old enthusiasm welling up within her. This was it. Finally, she’d found somebody she wanted to be somebody with.
“Two questions. I’m listening,” Cassie said.
“So, you’ve told me all about your family. I’ve met—and commandeered—your friend. You play tough but have a weakness for girlish romances. You’re quasi-vegetarian, all rules off for pepperoni and overcooked bacon. Love the girls at your job but don’t want the hassle of your own.”
Cassie held her face steady but felt the slap of that false statement. She’d never directly said that she didn’t want kids. No doubt, he’d surmised it from her profile. Well, not surmised so much as confirmed from the statement in ten-point bold: DOES NOT WANT KIDS.
“I laid my ninth-grade confessions on the table for you—” Jett continued.
“Which, as a free dating tip, you probably should’ve reserved such tidbits as Sharpie-ing our initials in your closet for our second date,” Cassie added.
“Are you asking me out?” Jett grinned as Cassie bit her lip. “But, all that’s to say, given our lifelong history together—”
Cassie chuckled. “Lifelong, eh?”
“The decades ago we first met,” he forged on. “I only have two questions left. First, what are you doing Wednesday?”
“Wednesday? Aren’t you supposed to let me wallow in anxiety and self-doubt for a couple of days before calling for a follow-up date?”
“Believe me, I’d be asking about tomorrow if I wasn’t working. But if you want me to wait a week or two . . .”
“No, don’t make me suffer on account of me,” Cassie said hastily. “I can’t think of a thing on my schedule for Wednesday. Count me in. Your second question?”
He crossed hi
s arms with superiority. Paused. “Do you still have game?”
Cassie squinted. “You mean, can I still play ball?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Oh, I can play ball. Just tell me when and where.” Cassie met his challenge with equal force. Half the afternoons a ball swished through the net at the Haven, Cassie was out there with the girls, sweating drops on the concrete pad.
“GP High. Six p.m.”
Her brow raised. “You want to break into our high school?”
He shrugged with the nonchalance of a guy who was about to say something cool and knew it. “The athletic director owes me a favor.”
“Ah. I see. What’d you do, save his house from burning to the ground?”
“Yes.”
Cassie started, then began to nod. “Oh. Literally. Good work, then. Keep it up.”
He rested his hand on the top of her car door and paused, the door separating their bodies but their faces suddenly not so far apart. “Till Wednesday, then.”
The exposed skin of his neck was red from the chill, and beneath his form-fitting jacket sat a pair of dark jeans that complemented his green, button-down oxford. Any drift of cologne—if he wore any—was overpowered by the thousands of pines surrounding them, infusing their world with shouts of Christmas.
Nat King Cole’s melody, “Almost Like Being in Love” came over the outdoor speakers, drawing them toward one another like the red-velvet ribbon draped around the large Christmas trees in shop windows.
“Till Wednesday,” Cassie repeated softly.
He inched toward her, and then, bumping into the driver’s side mirror, looked down to the door between them, which was currently working as hard as an elderly chaperone separating them at a middle-school dance.
“I probably could’ve thought that through better.” Cassie gave the chaperone door a friendly pat.
He laughed, the mood breaking like a sunny March day on a frozen lake as he moved to the driver’s side of his truck. Taking a half step in, his body lifted above the frame. “See you on the court, Everson. Bring your A game.”
“It’ll be my pleasure, Your Royal King of the Mountain.”
They both climbed in and shut their doors. Started their cars.
Cassie’s face hurt from smiling. For ten minutes she drove with that smile—a slaphappy grin. When a car cut her off turning into Food City, she had nothing but a Merry-Christmas-to-all grin to give him. As she slowly passed the lights of an ambulance and two feuding citizens beside busted cars, her wide and vibrant smile met them, and with understandable misunderstanding both citizens threw a few choice words toward her before turning back on each other. But there was nothing to be done about it. The smile wasn’t going anywhere.
What if he was the one?
Her eyes were forced into a squint with the sudden and impossible burst of smile within a smile, as if it could get even wider. It was terribly embarrassing to even think these thoughts in the privacy of her car. But . . . wouldn’t it be something? Everybody who ever got married had a first brush of meeting. What if she was just aware that this was hers? Instead of holding hands one day looking back at the fond recollection of their first date, telling each other cute little things like, “I never would’ve believed that night would change my life” or “If I had known that was going to be the start of everything,” perhaps she gripped the steering wheel now, fully aware that this night was it. The first page of a hundred chapters together.
Wouldn’t it be something?
Cassie turned on Profit and glanced over to her office. Girls Haven sat quiet, dark but for the blinking lights of the Christmas tree in the game-room window. The fire-engine stunt had been the hit of the season with the girls, many of whom she’d driven to cash in their gift cards on extra-vanilla, extra–white chocolate, extra–whipped cream, sure-why-not-add-peppermint-sprinkles triple-shot lattes that afternoon.
All of them, that is, but Star, who hadn’t turned up.
Or returned her texts.
She flicked her turn signal and moved onto Day Street. The small homes there were lit by the occasional string of lights across paint-stripped porches, inflated snowmen, and retro nativity sets—the yellowed Marys seated quietly above baby Jesuses as poor and unnoticed as the renters watching televisions inside.
She slowed whenever she recognized one of the residences of her girls. A silhouette ghosted by of Destiny’s mother walking past one of the windows—involved in her daughter’s life, grateful for the Haven’s services, always willing to lend a hand and dispense doughnuts. The hardworking single mother who’d pushed herself through night school to be an RN. One of her favorites.
Star’s home was at the complex at the end of the street connecting Day to Seventeenth, the “ST” of the stop sign blotted out by black graffiti. Cassie neared it, then saw the blinking lights. She slowed as she watched the two patrol cars parked at the front of Star’s building. When she spotted Ershanna, she jerked the steering wheel to pull into an empty parking space.
Bold as aluminum foil beneath the lamp post, Ershanna stood in her silvery puffer jacket, talking privately to an officer at the lower end of the building. With receding hairline tilted down, he nodded, listening to her while simultaneously jotting notes on his pad.
Cassie waited a beat while two other cars passed, then opened her door.
It was probably nothing. There were over ten—her eyes lifted to the windows, counting the lights, calculating the numbers—twelve apartments in the building alone, with half a dozen more buildings surrounding them. And Ershanna was a chatty-child adult, her personality one that drove toward drama instead of shutting the curtains and letting the matter deal with itself. Her talking to the officer meant little.
And yet, Star hadn’t shown up.
And yet, she so uncharacteristically hadn’t returned Cassie’s texts.
Cassie hopped onto the sidewalk and quickened her pace. She sidestepped an overturned can as she turned up three concrete stairs.
“Ershanna?” She spoke softly, not wanting to be rude or interrupt.
Ershanna turned her face to Cassie. The mildly puzzled concentration of the girl’s eyes told Cassie she had a hard time placing her.
“I’m Cassie. I know Star from Girls Haven.”
“That’s right.” Ershanna’s flat expression dissolved as she nodded expressively and turned, opening up the space for the three of them.
Not a good sign. Cassie didn’t want any come-to-the-circle-this-involves-you vibe, didn’t wish for any welcoming expression or stance.
Reluctantly, she stepped into the circle. “Is everything all right with Star?”
But just as she asked the question she heard a door open several floors above them and the distinct voice of Rachel, the social worker she’d talked with about Cam’s case less than two weeks ago. “Sweetie, your sister is going to hold your hand, see?” she was saying through the child’s screaming tantrum.
Something to the effect of “I don’t want to go” followed by a garbled “Mypapeesndheidr” poured repeatedly from the little girl’s lungs and spread out into the night air.
Then, suddenly, Cassie saw Star. She withdrew immediately and began jogging toward the stairs.
“Ma’am. Ma’am!” the officer called after her, but Cassie only stepped quicker, her Toms slipper-soft quiet as she bounded up one set and began another. Perhaps that, too, was something she had in common with Jett Bentley: evading officers.
Halfway up the stairs, she met them. “Star?”
Star was hip-holding Deidre, whose six-year-old legs hung loosely toward the ground. Her youngest sister, Kennedy, the four-year-old Cassie had only heard about in stories, sat in Rachel’s arms, though the child seemed unable to make up her mind between tear-filled shrieks toward the door and her older sister. She arched her back, and Rachel gripped the railing.
Cassie grabbed Rachel’s coat and held her steady through another round of “Mypapeesndheidr!”
“She wants Tinker Bell,” Star explained, her words stiff and emotionless, detached from the chaos around her. “She wants her puppy.”
“A puppy?” Rachel craned her neck around the mass of the little girl’s hair to catch Star’s eyes. “A real puppy is in there?”
“No, a stuffed one. It’s in my room.”
Cassie turned to Rachel. She wanted to ask what was going on. She wanted to interrupt whatever swift transition they were making to demand answers. But the child shrieked again, and all Cassie could manage was, “Can I get it for her?”
Rachel’s eyes darkened with unspoken meaning. She looked to the child. “Sweetie, we think little puppy—Tinker Bell—is too sick and needs to stay behind. I don’t think—”
“Mypapeesndheid!”
Cassie held on to the back of the girl’s pale-pink shirt as she reared again. Snot from cold and tears was forming a stream down her lips and past her chin, leaving clear circles on Rachel’s thick parka. Cassie wasn’t sure what Rachel meant by the dog being too sick, but she could venture the dog needed some sort of heavy cleaning. In hushed tones, she spoke, “What if I took Tinker Bell home and cleaned her up? I’d bring her back to . . .”
To where exactly? And for how long? And why? There were a hundred possible places, and reasons, and lengths of time they were going. The questions were building each moment.
With great effort, Rachel regripped the child on her hip. “You don’t want to go in there, Cassie. But can you help me get them to the car?”
It was at that moment Cassie noticed the extreme juxtaposition between the dress of the social worker and the children she was trying, with such difficulty, to get down the stairs. While Rachel’s blue parka had a thickness hinting of bulky wool sweaters and down feathers, a gust of wind would roar straight through Kennedy and Star’s thin cotton shirts. Only Deidre had a jacket on, though the smiling blue princess printed on the back grinned as if she were as cold as the girl wearing it. And while Deidre wore the jacket, the flip-flops were doing nothing for her toes.
The Dating Charade Page 6