As soon as she looked at him, his eyes met hers, and she looked down quickly, knowing that, as usual, her face had gone bright red in that instant. She was embarrassed way too easily and the fact that it showed up so quickly and unmistakably embarrassed her further.
“Who is he?”
“Seriously?”
What could she say to that? “Yes.”
“He and his brother live on Grace Farms with their grandparents. Fastest horses and coolest guys in Middleburg. I can’t even believe you’ve never heard of them.”
“I’m not really part of that … set.” Was set even the right word? The Horsey Set. Maybe that was something only old people said. She’d certainly heard it quite a few times. From old people.
If that was a faux pas, Rami didn’t seem to notice. “They’re kind of hard to miss here. Oh, there’s Frank.” She pointed. “Blue shirt, black backpack.”
Quinn looked. She never would have picked Frank out as Burke’s brother, that was for sure. Where Burke’s face was square-jawed and chiseled, Frank’s was thinner and almost pretty. Undeniably masculine, but there was something slightly more delicate about his features, though his eyes were harder by far. Kind of that Clint Eastwood thing, when he was threatening people in a Western. It was attractive, but also a little intimidating. Which was interesting, because his eyes were the thing that took his look from soft to hard, where the warm light in Burke’s eyes was the thing that took his look from hard to soft. Or softer.
Both of them were attractive. It just depended on whether you liked your hotness in guys obvious or more subtle.
The bell rang.
“That means I’m already late.” Rami laughed. “You too. Nice to meet you! I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around quite a bit!”
Quinn fumbled with her math book while at the same time closing the locker door without everything spilling out. “Nice to meet you too. Thanks for the rundown!”
* * *
The doors to the cafeteria were closed until the second bell rang. Quinn stood in the crowd in the hallway, looking anxiously for Jackie or for anyone she knew from middle school who might sit with her. She’d always hated musical chairs, and that was exactly what this felt like. A game of musical chairs that would determine her standing for the next four years of high school.
Sit with someone and you can, at the very least, go unnoticed until something calls attention to you.
Sit alone, and you are a Loser for Life. Or at least a loser for the lifetime of your school tenure, which might as well be life. She’d seen it happen to Barbara Klepding in sixth grade and she didn’t want to be the Barbara Klepding of high school.
Of course, Barbara Klepding had provided herself with plenty of other fodder for mockery, it had to be said. Her constant and all-too-public hula performances of “Pearly Shells” after her family trip to Hawaii—no matter who asked or how many snickers accompanied the request—didn’t help her popularity much. Nor did her incessant harping about sodium nitrates in the school lunches, when no one knew what sodium nitrates were but everyone liked hot dogs.
Still, standing in the crowd outside the cafeteria, Quinn couldn’t quell the thrum of fear that beat in her chest.
“Excuse me.”
She felt a hand on her arm as someone moved to push past her.
She was already automatically backing out of the way as she looked up and recognized one of the only faces, besides Rami’s, that she could put a name to.
Burke Morrison.
“Sorry,” she said.
He smiled. He hadn’t smiled earlier, so when she’d thought he was cute, she’d had no idea just exactly how cute he was.
So cute.
Seriously, even though his face was gorgeous to begin with—those sweet, warm blue eyes, dark lashes, sharp cheekbones—when he smiled, it transformed into something of guileless friendliness.
She had to smile too.
“You’re new here, right?” he asked.
She nodded. Mute.
“I’m Burke.”
She met his eyes, though it took courage she kind of felt she didn’t normally have, and said, like she talked to cute guys all the time, “I’m Quinn.”
“Quinn.” He repeated it like he was trying it on for size. “Quinn what?”
“Barton?” She knew it was Barton. She didn’t know why her answer came out as a question.
He shrugged. “Never heard of you.”
Well, that was rude. “I’ve never heard of you either.” Then, even though she knew the answer full well, she asked, “Is Burke your first name or your last name?”
There was that smile again. “You never know. It might not be my name at all.”
“That’s true.” Though she knew it was. “You could be making the whole thing up. But that would just make you a jerk. Burke.”
He laughed. “Well, I’m not that.”
“Which?”
“A jerk. I am Burke. Morrison,” he said. “Burke Morrison. And you win, Quinn Barton.”
“I do?” She was seized by an uncharacteristic surge of confidence. “What’s the prize?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Hmmm. An ice-cream sandwich?”
“I love those!”
“Guess you’re going to have to sit with me, then, to make sure you get it after you eat your lunch.”
Her face flushed with pleasure. She had not seen this one coming. Not at all. Today was turning out better than she ever could have even imagined.
“I don’t know.…” Where this was coming from, she could never say. She never had nerve at all, much less the kind that went head to head with a guy. But something about him made her want to play along. “I was going to sit with my friend.…”
“Boyfriend or girlfriend?”
“Girlfriend.”
He looked pleased. “I think she’ll be okay for the day.”
And, in fact, she was. Jackie had met a guy in her civics class, whom she ended up dating for all of a month and a half, so, though of course she and Quinn would compare boyfriend notes, neither of them turned out to be as socially needy as Quinn had feared she would be.
By that time, Jackie had made other friends and didn’t care that Quinn spent every single lunch period for the next two years—until his graduation—sitting with Burke Morrison.
Chapter 6
Present
The first few days of Glenn’s challenge were relatively easy. Side Ponytail Day (I felt ridiculous, as he knew I would, but got a ridiculous number of compliments). Wear All Black Day (I never wear black, he had to leave a dress shirt and his black formal pants for me to borrow, since we wear the same size). Run a Mile Day sucked, but it had the codicil, “It doesn’t all have to be in a row, I don’t want you to die, just make sure you run a total of a mile no matter how much walking you need to intersperse”—so that took longer than it might have for most people. And my favorite was Sit in the Sun for at Least an Hour Doing Nothing Day. That one was good. It really wasn’t something I normally would have allowed myself, but under Glenn’s rule, I had no choice and relinquishing some power felt good.
There was probably something in that fact alone that was beneficial to me in terms of this thirty-day program of his. I was always in complete control of everything in my life and I was just so tired of having to do that alone. Not that I wanted someone else to take over my life for me or tell me how to do things, but when you’re the only one accountable for everything, that can get old.
Doing silly things because I was being instructed to in order to get out of my rut was fun.
Until day six, when I arrived at the shop in the morning and found the small red envelope taped to the door as usual. It was addressed to Wonder Woman. He always had a different name on the envelope. For instance, Run a Mile Day was addressed to Bruce Jenner, whom we had a morbid fascination with, thanks to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Side Ponytail Day was addressed to The Real Housewife of Middleburg, since all the stars of the Real Housewives
franchise seemed to, at one time or another, end up with a side ponytail in their diary interviews.
But Wonder Woman … that was a strong statement for Glenn. He loved Wonder Woman. At one point he had, with a straight face, suggested we stake out Lynda Carter’s house in D.C. just to try to catch a glimpse of her and see if she had an invisible plane in the yard (I already knew he was planning to tell me he could see it “right there!”).
I’m not gonna lie, I felt a little twizzle of dread in my chest.
I opened the envelope and took out a card that simply read, Go Commando today.
I laughed and looked around, half expecting Glenn to jump out and tell me he was kidding, but there was literally no one out yet on the sunny sidewalk.
Then my phone rang. Glenn.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Take off your panties, miss.”
“No! That’s creepy and insane.”
“No, if any other guy told you to do that, it would mean something totally different. I want you to do it because it’s something you’d never, ever do, and you’re going to be reminded all day long, as you squirm uncomfortably and think everyone knows or is somehow going to see through your jeans.”
“How do you know—” I stepped back and looked in the window of the Mouse Trap. Glenn waved his phone at me, smirked, then put it back to his ear.
“This is an easy one,” he said. “A little something to get you started. Trust me, these little things are going to make a bigger difference than you expect. Call it a Mind Adjustment.”
“I call it ridiculous.”
“Do it.”
“It’s so…”
“Do it.”
“Fine.” I clicked off the phone, made a face at him, and unlocked the door to the shop.
It was ridiculous, but what if he was right? What if little changes could add up to something bigger for me? Not huge. Not giving up all my wordly goods and going off to finish Mother Teresa’s work, but just … maybe crack me open a little bit more.
I went into the dressing room and took off my jeans and looked in the mirror. This was worse than he’d probably imagined. I was wearing briefs that weren’t all that brief. They weren’t exactly Granny Panties, but I knew Glenn would have called them that.
They were more modest than most bathing suits.
He was right, damn it. I needed to stop being so stuck in my ways. I took off the briefs and wadded them up to put in my purse, but at the last second I just chucked them in the trash can.
Old Quinn would never have done that, but new Quinn was going to get some new lingerie.
Maybe.
We’d see. But maybe.
* * *
Oh, did I mention the Morrison boys were coming back to town to clean out the farm? I feel certain I did. So of course one would arrive, after he’d been gone for ten years, on Go Commando Day.
See, that’s just exactly the kind of guys they were. The kind who would be inexplicably drawn right to the spot where a woman, sans underwear, was looking for frozen corn. Yes, it was the grocery store, but no, it wasn’t the cucumber section of the produce department or anything else quite so ridiculously parallel.
I was just trying to pick up the frozen corn for an amazing-looking soup I’d seen someone make in, like, three minutes on Top Chef, when I heard a voice I’d never forgotten.
How could the grocery store be out of frozen corn? Corn was a staple! A boring one, at that. Not the kind of thing you’d expect them to have a run on, certainly.
Someone opened the door next to the one I had open. By then I’d been standing there so long the glass had fogged, so I couldn’t see the person, but I saw a hand reach in and grab bag after bag of frozen peas.
That’s how it happens, I thought. Some weirdo with a corn and pea fetish had obviously gotten to the corn just before me. I closed the door and stepped back to ask the person if they could spare just one of the bags of corn I expected to see in their cart (along, I imagined, with scads of other irreplaceable ingredients people might need—all the yeast, for example, or seventeen cans of garbanzo beans and twelve boxes of stuffing mix).
But there was no cart.
There was, instead, a familiar man.
My stomach dropped.
Of course.
Obviously this moment had been coming, I’d known it from the moment Dottie told me the boys were coming back to pack up the farm.
Somehow I think I’d imagined the eventual meeting would come at a more predictable time. A time, perhaps, when I might have been able to look my best and, I don’t know, have underwear on so I didn’t feel so off.
That, of course, had been Glenn’s aim, to mix things up for me and take me out of my very narrow comfort zone. And that was fine(ish) in the shop, or on a normal grocery run, but not now.
At first it didn’t register that it was him. I hadn’t seen him in years and his features, while still young, were settling into a more granite masculinity. And he was wearing a really nice suit that I’d never seen him in, although the tie was loosened and it looked like he’d spent a long day in it.
Plus he smelled good.
I love when a man smells good.
So I noticed him before I noticed him.
He tossed the last of what looked like ten bags of peas into the basket he had hooked over his forearm and backed up, glancing at me and then doing a double take.
“Quinn? Is that really you?”
At least I wasn’t the only one taken off guard.
“Well, hey, Frank,” I said, all brightness and bluster. Like this wasn’t incredibly uncomfortable for me under the best of circumstances, but even worse, as I wasn’t exactly at my best. “I heard you might be coming around town soon.”
It all came back to me, those neon-lit nights in Las Vegas, the way the shadows played across those high cheekbones and cleft chin, and the machinelike movement of his muscles as he moved onto me, naked, in the dark.
Those were my most vivid memories of him. Unfortunately, I was also aware that his memories of me would involve a lot of sobbing, sniffling, mascara smears, and, on one semi-memorable occasion, puking.
So who did he see me as now? Who did he remember me to be?
I expected him to put the basket down and come in for an awkward hug, and I wondered if I should do the same, but neither of us made a move toward the other. We just stood there looking at each other, both our faces registering what I could only imagine was a mirror image of surprise and discomfort.
He looked good. I had to admit it, he looked good. If I’d just spotted him in the frozen food aisle and he was a stranger, I probably would have thought he was hot.
He gave a short nod. Busy man, lots to do. “Lots to do here suddenly.”
“I heard. I mean, Dottie said she was selling the farm and you and Burke”—my voice didn’t actually change at all when I said his name, but even so I heard it as if I’d been bleeped by a censor—“would be coming here to get the farm ready to sell.”
“That’s right.” He nodded. Didn’t move.
“And apparently eat pea soup.”
“Sorry?” He looked blank.
I gestured at his basket. “That’s a lot of peas.”
Finally he cracked. He gave a short laugh that showed the old Frank in his face. There had been a certain stiffness to his visage before he smiled that made me feel a little like I was talking to a stranger, but when he laughed I felt his warmth.
It had been a long time, but I’d always liked Frank.
So why I felt so nervous with him now, I couldn’t say.
“Except I don’t think those are the kind of peas you make into soup,” I went on, lamely. “I don’t know.”
“Dottie sprained her ankle,” he said, as if that explained it. “So she sent me out to get the peas.”
“Peas help a sprained ankle?” She was eccentric, but there was no way anyone was going to make me believe eating peas magically healed bones.
“No, no.” He laughed again. An
d I could see the handsome guy I used to know. Somehow, over the years, he had grown more and more dour and serious in my mind, to the point where I was picturing someone as grim-faced as Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, instead of the real Frank. “She’s supposed to keep it iced for a couple of days.”
“Okay, you know that’s peas, right? Not tiny green ice cubes?”
He took a bag out and held it up. It flopped over his hand. “She prefers these because, she says, they form-fit to the injury. And the ice cubes she had in Ziploc bags just poked her bruises.”
“Ahhhhh. That actually makes sense. Very clever.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and was reminded of my commando status, which made me—if possible—feel even more self-conscious standing here talking to Frank than I had before.
He shrugged, oblivious to my internal struggle. “They make ice packs that do the same thing, but she wanted peas.”
“You don’t happen to have any corn in there too, do you?” I asked, peering at his basket.
“Nope. Not the same.”
“They’d probably feel the same.”
“Not quite.”
And suddenly I felt like we weren’t talking about vegetables anymore. We were talking about him and Burke and the fact that one could not easily replace the other. Though both, in my experience, were capable of turning ice-cold.
But they weren’t interchangeable by any means.
My life probably would have been a lot easier and more comfortable if they had been.
“So is Burke in town as well?” I went ahead and asked, since I really believed we were both standing there as aware of him as if he’d been standing right in between us.
Frank shook his head. “Can’t be bothered. He had to work. His work is more important than anyone else’s, as usual. You know how he is.”
Well, no, I guess I didn’t know how he was. Arguably that had always been the problem. I didn’t really know him as well as I thought I did. But I knew he loved Dottie and that farm, so I couldn’t believe he would leave her high and dry instead of coming to help.
Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger Page 7