More Than This: Contemporary Christian Romance Novel

by Stallings, Staci

  Relationships were so impossibly impossible. She hated all of this, the hope, the letdown, the wishing and the knowing it would never work out the way she wanted it to. To top it all off, she felt so stupid about all of it. At Bible study on Sunday night, she was a mess— not physically. Physically she looked all right, but the rest of her was scattered and frustrated.

  “You freaking out about next Saturday?” Tracy asked after the prayer session had broken up. “Studying like mad?”

  Liz wished. If she could just keep her mind on school, that would surely help. “Oh, you know, burning the midnight oil.” Which was true enough. She simply didn’t include the why of that phrase.

  “I don’t know how you do it all— school, studying, working. I’ve got a part-time job on Saturdays at the church, and I’m a basket case.”

  “It’s not so bad. Sometimes I get the chance to study at work.” Unless I’m left pining for some dark, handsome stranger who doesn’t bother to show up. Ugh. This was silly. She was making far too much of it. He was a guy. There were a million guys in this city who were single and eligible. Besides that, she didn’t even want a guy.

  “You know, when this whole test thing is over, Danny has this friend who’s dying to meet you.”

  “Me?” Liz pointed at herself with her fingers and her cup.

  “Yeah.” Tracy let her gaze fall. “I may have kind of mentioned you once or twice. He’s a really great guy, graduate law.”

  Graduate law? Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. She bet he didn’t hang out in the back corner of coffee houses, saying he’d see you and then never show back up. Yanking that thought up, she knew she was being harsh, but she couldn’t help it. “Well, let me get through the test first. Who knows? I may have to take it again.”

  “Not you. You’ll ace it. But I’ll wait. Don’t want to freak you out any more than you already are.”

  Liz laughed. What else could she do?

  Jake sat in his dingy, cramped apartment. It was fitting, he thought without bothering to put effort into it. He could see her at the coffee shop on Thursday when he had folded up at ten, long before she would get off. Why had he done that? Why? Because he was scared? Because she might want to read something he’d written?

  His mind showed him that screen as if it was right in front of him, filled with wavy red and green lines that he had no way to know how to correct. And then it careened him backward into high school and elementary before that. He felt again the humiliation of sitting in the back, his desk turned to the wall because the teacher thought he was “being silly again” trying to read out loud when he couldn’t. He’d never been able to do that— the whole reading out loud thing was so foreign to him. So he got into trouble every time he tried.

  Lazy. The word went through him like a knife. Undisciplined. Doesn’t put enough effort into learning the material. Not serious. Not trying. Seems bright but puts no effort into his work. He could hardly ever read their comments, but he knew what they meant, and they all wound around to one word: Stupid.

  Of course, they didn’t say that to his face, but that’s what they meant. Pushing back in the recliner, he tried to focus on the television show; however, it held no fascination for him. Instead his mind was intent on bringing up in full, living color every single heart-crushing moment he’d survived all the way through junior year. That’s when he gave up. They had given up on him long before. It was only fitting that he confirm what they all believed about him.

  No. He wasn’t going back to The Grind. She was better off that way, and so was he.

  By the next Wednesday, Liz had to face facts. He wasn’t coming back. She wiped the counter slowly, her gaze anchored as it was so often into that empty back corner. Her mind wondered where he was, if he was okay. Something could have happened to him. A car accident maybe, or a forklift accident at work. The possibilities were endless, but in the end, she always came back to the only explanation that really made any sense: He has no interest in you, Liz. He never did. He’s just letting you down easy by not coming back. Not that he was the first guy to ever just disappear. She hated that, but what could she do? She still didn’t even know his last name.

  Jake took the little laptop, the one he had slaved for, saved for, dreamed of, the one he had thought would change everything. If he just didn’t have to write things down… that’s what he had thought. And spell check had sounded heavenly. Too bad you had to know how to spell things to work it. So on Thursday night, he took the thing that had mocked him for a week and stowed it in the top of his closet under two boxes he hadn’t looked in for years. Then he shut off the light and went back to the living room. Life would go on without it.

  He dropped into the chair, hoping something good was on the television, something that would keep his brain from thinking about the computer or worse the alcohol. He had come so close to stopping in at the little convenience store on his way home. One drink. His mind begged for it, pleaded for it. Yet thoughts of rehab and all that had gone along with it kept him from indulging. If he gave in now, there would be no parents to pull him back this time. No, if he did that, he would surely end up on the streets, and from just this side of sanity, he did not want that.

  “Did he say anything?” Mia asked on Thursday night. “Anything about not coming back?”

  “No,” Liz said, deflating on the word. “I’ve gone over that night a million times in my head, and there’s just nothing there. I mean, he asked about my school, and I told him some of it. And then we talked about his writing.”

  “Whoa. Wait. His writing?”

  “That’s why he has the laptop. He writes. He’s a writer.”

  “A writer like what? An author?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t really say exactly. He just said he was a writer, and I said I’d like to read something he wrote sometime. I didn’t mean it like, ‘Let’s get married.’ You don’t think I freaked him out by saying I wanted to read his stuff, do you?” Then she deflated for real. “Oh, I did. I did. I messed everything up.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “What other explanation can there be, Mi?”

  There were a thousand other explanations, but Liz didn’t want to hear those. She was too intent on making it all her fault as she had every other problem in her life.

  “So are you ready for your test?”

  “No.” Liz went all the way down to the counter. “I’ve been studying, but I’m so fried about everything else… Ugh. I knew this was going to happen. I told you this was going to happen.”

  “Liz, girlfriend, chill. Okay? It’s all gonna be all right. You’ve just got to get a hold of yourself and realize that some things you can change and some things you can’t. Concentrate on the things you can change.”

  And so, with effort, she did. She went on Saturday, and she took the test. By the end of the next week, she had all but forgotten about Jake and the corner and writing.

  ~*~

  “Today we will turn our attention to a problem that affects nearly one in five students in every classroom.” Practical Educational Psychology was starting off with a bang. Liz tapped her pen to her paper, wishing she had just skipped today. With the weather turning cooler and the leaves falling, getting up to go to class was getting more and more difficult. Especially this one.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that she had chosen the wrong minor. She didn’t want to teach. Not that she had found anything to substitute in its place, but this was definitely not it.

  “Some of you may have heard of this issue before.” The professor, a short gray-haired man with paunchy skin and a paunchier belly, wrote the word on the board in very large letters. Dyslexia. “Dyslexia. Does anyone know what this means?”

  “It means someone who flips letters around.”

  “Or numbers,” someone else offered.

  “They can’t read.” This answer came from behind Liz, and she drew a little star on her paper and colored it in slowly.

  “No. No. Ye
s,” the professor said, pointing at each in turn. “Dyslexia is having difficulty reading, but it’s not because they flip letters so much as they do not see the letters in a word.”

  How could they not see the letters in a word? Liz was already tuning out. Sounded like someone should tell them to get off their butts and work a little harder to her.

  “They see a word like ‘cat’ not as three individual letters, but as a unit. Younger children with dyslexia often don’t realize that words are even a combination of letters. They see each word as a unit, so they begin to memorize units rather than individual letters combining in different ways to make a word. Further, they do not see the word ‘cat’ as a cat. They see a cat as a cat. They see the world in objects, not in written words. If the word they are working with has a corresponding object, they can often attach the word that names it, but get farther out from concrete objects, and their ability to memorize the concept and the written word that goes with that concept diminishes greatly.

  “These children, who remember account for up to 20% of all students, go through the early learning-to-read stages seeing the forest but never the trees. They do not decode words like many of us do— like you are supposed to do to learn to read.” He wrote the word “text” on one side of the board, “decode” in the middle, and then “intelligence, understanding, and context” on top of each other on the right. To the far right, he wrote Meaning. “Because there is an issue with the decoding part of reading, dyslexic children skip over that and use their intelligence, memory skills, and the context they can glean from what they can read to try to compensate.”

  “Are you saying they can’t decode words?”

  “No, not ‘can’t.’ In most cases, they can, but they are never taught to decode words the way they have to be taught to learn it. They are taught the way most of us learn it, only their brains do not work the way most of ours do. They rely heavily on the right brain, which we learned earlier in the semester means…?”

  “The creative side,” someone in the class echoed.

  “Right. They are, in fact, highly creative people. They see the world in pictures and sounds and colors. They do not see the world in terms of words— especially written words. For example, Ms. Savoy.”

  Liz’s attention jerked up from the fifth little star she had drawn.

  The professor smiled at her. “If I asked you, what did you do yesterday, please tell me how you would go about retrieving that information from your brain?”

  “Yesterday?” Her eyebrows shot up in concern and confusion. “Well, yesterday was Tuesday, so I got up at 7 and I got ready for school so I could be here by 8.”

  “Very good. Now, did you see all of that in pictures in your head or in words?”

  She had to think about that. “Words, I guess. I mean I can see the things I did if I think about it, but you only asked me what I did.”

  “So you think in words?”

  “Well, yeah. Doesn’t everybody?”

  His smile broadened. “No. Some people think almost exclusively in pictures. The more a student thinks in terms of pictures, the more likely it is that that student will be dyslexic.”

  “Have you ever heard of dyslexia?” Liz asked Mia when the 7:30 crowd thinned out into the boring 8:30 hour.

  “Dyslexia? Isn’t that that reading thing where people flip around letters and stuff?”

  Liz laughed softly. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. We were talking about it today in class. I’ve just never thought about what it would be like if you couldn’t read, you know? I mean I’ve known kids in class that couldn’t read. I just always thought they were lazy or they didn’t care. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Sounds like you just stumbled on something that actually interests you.” Mia flipped the towel she was holding into quarters.

  “Yeah,” Liz said softly. “Maybe I did.”

  It had all sounded so great, and Liz really was interested. The problem was her roommate came down with a horrible cold that morphed into the flu and promptly shared it with Liz. So two Mondays before Thanksgiving, she found herself in The Grind, sneezing, wheezing, and generally ready to collapse. Dyslexia and class seemed the farthest thing from her mind. She was now focused solely on survival.

  “Wow. You. Look. Awful.” Mia came back to the counter where Liz was laying with her head down, trying to get up the energy to move. It wasn’t working.

  “Thanks.” She ran her nose over her sleeve and was glad the counter was there to catch her head when it fell back.

  “No. Seriously. Why don’t you go on home? You don’t need to be here. Besides, you’re scaring the customers.” Mia went around and filled the order she had taken ready. When she came back, Liz still hadn’t moved. “Okay. Now, you’re scaring me. Go home already.”

  “But I don’t want to leave you here… ACHOO!” The sneeze practically blew her ears apart. “Alone.”

  “Yeah, because you’re being so much help as it is.” Mia delivered the coffee with a smile. In seconds she was back. “Seriously, Liz. Go home. Get some sleep. Take some cold medicine. Do something.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, then take some more.” Mia lifted her from the stool and angled her steps to the back. “Go. I’m fine. Go home. Go to bed. Get some rest.”

  “Okay.” Liz didn’t want to go, but Mia was right. She wasn’t doing anyone any good like this.

  Jake’s steps took him as they so often did on nights like this now to the street with the theatre flanked conveniently by The Grind. He didn’t go in. He never did anymore. Instead, he had learned to just walk past, hoping only to get a glimpse of her. She was always working because he knew how to time such things. Monday night. 9:20. She would be immersed in customers and lattes. She wouldn’t even have time to glance outside to see the idiot walking by looking in to get a glimpse of her, at least she never had before. It was pathetic. He knew that. But he just couldn’t help himself. His heart clenched at the thought of never seeing her again, of never getting to sit with her and look into her amazing eyes.

  His steps took him to the window, and his gaze scanned the place even has his feet kept walking right on past with the others on the sidewalk. The steps slowed as he scanned the establishment, but he did not see her. They slowed further, begging him to stop, telling him just this once wouldn’t hurt. Then, just as he got to the door, a hooded figure came jangling out on a single hard push. Before he could think what to do or what he should do, it turned right into him without stopping.

  The collision was hard, knocking him backward as books went scattering all over the sidewalk, dropping like small bombs around them. Instinct only allowed him to catch the figure before it too went crashing to the concrete. “Oh, my… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His hands steadied the figure, keeping it from joining the books as humiliation rained across his consciousness. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there. Are you okay? I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m… ACHOO!” The hood dipped down with the sneeze which was followed by a loud sniffle. “Ugh. I’m… ACHOO!” The three hard coughs that followed the sneeze sounded right out of the pneumonia ward at the hospital.

  Concerned and flummoxed, he bent to retrieve the three books and the one up-ended notebook on the ground. “I’m sorry. I really… I didn’t see you. Are you all…” And then he took a good look at the book in his hand. He still couldn’t read it, but that design in the top right corner could be none other. His hands slowed, and as he looked up, he angled his gaze to under the figure’s hood as it wrapped its arms around itself, looking like it wanted to disappear. “Liz? Is that… you?” Without him thinking it all the way through, his hands gathered the last of the books, and he stood all the way up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you. Are you okay?”

  Slowly, sheepishly, she pulled the hood from her head and sniffled again. The white Kleenex in her hand stood out in stark contrast to the black hood and the darkness around them
. “I’m sorry,” she said, with another sniffle, but she kept her gaze down as she reached for the books. “I should’ve been watching where I was going.”

  Panic and concern met somewhere in the middle of his heart as he looked at her. “Are you okay? You look pitiful.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Anger tinged the words as she swiped at her red nose and took hold of her books though he didn’t really let them go.

  “No.” He held on. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

  “I know what you meant.” There was ice in her gaze when she glanced up at him, and she yanked her books free of his grasp. The look hurt as much as seeing her sick did.

  They were still standing in the doorway as another couple stopped to gain entry.

  “Oh, um, sorry.” Realizing they had to move, Jake took Liz’s arm and pulled her away from the door down the sidewalk. Three steps and she sneezed again, the violence of it shaking him as well. The coughs that followed grew increasingly insistent until she was very nearly doubled over with them. Worry slithered over him. He stopped, mid-sidewalk, and looked down at her. Suddenly she seemed very small and incredibly fragile. “What’s going on? Why are you at work? You look like you need a gallon of orange juice and a week of sleep.”

  “Duly noted, doctor.” She ducked her head, swiped her nose again, and started past him, but Jake couldn’t let her go that easily. Not like this.

  He reached out and arrested her motion, taking hold of her arm. “Liz, wait.”

  Turning on him with anger and a venom he hadn’t expected, she scowled. “What?”

  “I just…” His words stopped as he searched for more. She was clearly angry in addition to being really, really sick. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”