by KD Robichaux
March 19th, 2005
I psyched myself up to call Jason’s house phone, crossing my fingers this time that it would be him who answered. I haven’t talked to any of them in a week, and I brace myself to be turned away. I mean, I would understand if he chose Gavin over me. They’ve been friends since their early high school years. If given an ultimatum of his best friend’s friendship or hanging out with a chick he’s only known for two months, well then it’d be silly of me to think he’d pick me.
The phone rings, and my heart stops when I hear his deep Texan drawl answer, “I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you again.”
He sounds happy to hear from me, not like he’s gearing up to tell me to never call him again. “Hey, um…well, your guard dog told me I wasn’t allowed to come hang out with him or y’all anymore, so I kinda thought you wouldn’t want me to.”
“Wait, what?” Jason asks harshly.
“Uh…Gavin said I wasn’t allowed to see y’all anymore. He said that you and your family belonged to him, and I wasn’t to come around anymore,” I say, surprised he didn’t know about this.
“That motherfucker. I’ll kill him. Kayla, of course you can come hang out with us. I mean, so there’s no hostility, it’d probably be best to do it at times he won’t be around, but you…you’re one of my best friends. I love spending time with you. He has no say over who I can and cannot hang out with. Fuck him,” he says heatedly. “When he came back to my dad’s shop after talking to you in the driveway, he told us you’d thrown a fit and said you never wanted to see any of us ever again.”
“What? Are you serious? He told me I wasn’t the one for him and so there was no point in me coming around anymore. Then he got out of my car and stormed off. I was so stunned I didn’t even say anything!”
God, I am so glad I called. Jason would have been left thinking I was some bitch who never wanted to see him again, and his family…fuck! “Jason, please tell me he didn’t tell your parents the same thing. Oh, my God, your mom…please tell me he didn’t tell her I did that!”
He shushes my panicking and tells me, “No, babe, I haven’t even seen him since that day, and my parents left on a cruise a couple days ago, so they have no idea what’s been going on.”
I could cry I’m so relieved. After how sweet, generous, and loving his family has been to me, it would kill me if they thought I would have pulled such a shitty move. “Oh, thank God.”
“Hey, do you want to come over and watch a movie or something? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been bored out of my mind not having to school you in pool and poker all week,” he asks teasingly.
“Ass. I’ll be there in an hour,” I reply and hang up, jumping up from my bed, a surge of adrenaline making me dance around my room like a crazy person for a minute. I’m in the middle of shaking my ass in the mirror when I notice my appearance. Dear lawd, I look like a homeless person. My matted hair is sticking up in some places and glued to my scalp in others. I’m in my ratty pajama pants I’ve been living in for the past three days, and I’m pretty sure that smell is coming from me, not the turtle cage. I grab my phone and hit redial.
“You okay?” he answers, sounding worried.
I laugh, knowing he was probably thinking of when I called after my wreck. “I’m fine; I haven’t even left yet. Make that closer to two hours. I look like something my bird pooped. I’m gonna take a shower and stuff before I head down. Okay?”
“Sounds good. That’ll give me time then to figure us something out for dinner,” he says.
“Awww, you gonna cook for me, home skillet?” I’ve had his cooking before. He’s surprisingly really, really good at it.
“Yeah, I’ll throw something together. Take your time. Don’t get rear-ended.” And with that, we hang up and I do pirouettes all the way to the bathroom, doing an arabesque as I bend over to turn on the faucets in the shower. Wow, I’m so giddy I’ve broken out my ten years of ballet skills I haven’t used in about five. I better calm down or I’ll probably hurt myself.
After showering, blow drying my hair, and putting on a little makeup to hide the fact I’ve been hiding in my cave for a week, I walk over to my closet to pick out what I want to wear. My new pink t-shirt, for sure, but as I pull out the Bui Yah Kah bag it’s still sitting in, I see inside is also the pair of white linen shorts Kim bought me. She forced me to try them on in the store, and after she came into the dressing room with me—since I wouldn’t come out—she said they were perfect and got them for me, even though I insisted I’d never wear them. She told me they would be in my closet ‘just in case I realized I’d die from heat exhaustion in Texas if I tried to wear jeans in the summer’.
It’s the beginning of March and it’s already hitting the mid-eighties. We won’t be leaving Jason’s house, and it’ll be just the two of us, and I don’t think he’d ever pick on me for my skinny legs, seeing how he learned how self-conscious I am about them after one of our rounds of twenty-questions. He may be a broody ass, but he’d never purposely hurt my feelings, I don’t think. Decision made, I pull out both the pink shirt and the white shorts, snap off the tags, and get dressed. After a few spritzes of my Lucky You perfume, I grab my purse, set the house alarm, and head out to my car.
Jason’s garage door is open when I pull in, so I knock on the side door just inside it. I hear him yell, “It’s open,” and make my way into the kitchen. The vision before me stops me in my tracks. Jason, in a black wife beater and jeans, has a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder, and is steadily stirring a yellowish liquid inside a measuring cup. There are two different pots going on the stove, and I see the oven is on too.
“Hey, can you grab the salmon out of the oven please? I can’t stop stirring or the hollandaise sauce won’t turn out right.”
“You know how to make hollandaise sauce?” I ask quietly, still not moving.
“Yeah. Woman, oven. Unless you want burnt fish, which even my sauce won’t fix,” he tells me, lifting his chin in the direction of the oven.
“I don’t even know what hollandaise sauce is,” I admit, setting my purse down on the kitchen table and grabbing the oven mitts. I pull the salmon out and see it’s cooked to perfection…at least, it looks like it’s cooked to perfection. I have no idea how to cook fish. It certainly smells good. It’s topped with minced garlic and pepper, and the aromatic mixture is making my mouth water. I sit it on the silicon pot holder on the counter, and turn to see him trying to lift the lid off of one of the pots on the stove while still holding the whisk he was stirring with.
I walk over next to him and say, “Tell me what to do. I suck at cooking, but I can follow directions.”
“The potatoes are done boiling. Just grab them off the heat and dump them in the colander in the sink for me,” he says.
Still wearing the oven mitts, I do what he said, draining the potatoes and then putting them back into the pot. “Now what?”
“The butter and milk are in the fridge. Grab the hand mixer out from the cabinet under the microwave and mash the potatoes,” he instructs.
I hesitate for a moment, but then get out the ingredients he said and the hand mixer, and after looking at the appliance like a foreign object for a few moments, I finally give up all pretenses. “So, yeah. Never made mashed potatoes before.”
He looks up at me like I’ve grown a second head. “You’ve never made mashed potatoes? How can you be American? Like…never?”
“Nope. I’ve made the boxed kind that has handy dandy directions on the back, but never, like, real potatoes,” I confess.
Apparently satisfied with the sauce, he sits it down next to the stove and pulls the dishtowel off his shoulder, using it to wipe his hands before walking over to where I stand holding the mixer away from me like it’s going to bite me. He takes it out of my hand and pulls the drawer open next to my hip. He grabs the two metal doohickeys that stick into the machine and clicks them into place, looking up at me with an expectant look I suppose is him asking if I’ve got it. I
nod, and then he takes a spoon from the same drawer before closing it.
He digs out two heaping scoops of butter, adding it to the pot of drained potatoes. Then he takes the jug of milk and adds enough that it comes about halfway up the white, boiled cubes. He pulls the salt down from the cabinet above our heads and sprinkles enough to lightly coat the top, and then plugs in the mixer. He watches me as he places the metal spinney things in the center of the potatoes, and then flips the switch on. It starts up, and I watch as the chunks turn into a perfectly whipped concoction I know is going to taste delicious. He flips the mixer off and then pushes the button that disconnects the potato-coated prongs from the plastic and hands them to me. He smiles when I lick it like cake batter, pointing toward the sink when I’m done tasting it. They are damn good.
I walk over to the sink and rinse them off before opening up the dishwasher and placing them in the utensils rack, and then rinse the colander while I’m at it, placing it in too and then close it up. I spin around to find Jason tasting a green bean over at the stove. I stroll over to him, and watch as he blows on a bean he pulls out of the pot with a fork, his lips pursing together to cool off the garlicky-smelling legume. Instead of eating it himself, he holds to the fork out to me, and I lean up to take it between my teeth.
It’s the best freaking green bean I’ve ever had. I don’t know if it’s because Jason cooked and fed it to me, or if it’s because it’s just that good, probably a mix of the two. He turns off all the burners and tells me to grab two plates from the cabinet. When I bring them over to him, he moves around with masculine grace, filling our plates with mashed potatoes, green beans, and then a healthy slab of flaky fish. He sets the plates down at the dining table and asks what I want to drink. “Is there any wine?”
He gives me a look that asks, Are you kidding? before moving to the back fridge to pull out my pink Moscato, along with a bottle of beer for himself. I hurry to the cabinet to grab a wine glass, choosing to be classy for our nice dinner he’s made instead of drinking from a plastic cup.
After the wine is poured, and the beer is opened, we settle in to enjoy this amazing looking food. Before he takes a bite, I stop him by placing my hand on his tattooed forearm. “Thank you for cooking for me. Sorry I’m worthless in the kitchen. I’m a microwave queen,” I tell him.
“No problem. I love to cook, so it’s no big thing,” he replies with a crooked smile.
He picks up his fork and starts to dig into his fish, but I stop him once more when I ask, “Hey…where’s that fancy holiday sauce you made?”
“Hollandaise…and good call. I woulda been pissed when I went to clean up and saw I forgot I took the time to make the real thing,” he says, standing up to go grab the saucepan from beside the stove. He places it on a potholder in the middle of the table, and then spoons some out on top of his salmon.
“So what is this sauce?” I ask, looking at the thick, yellow concoction.
“It’s basically a butter sauce. I guess they just wanted to give it a different name to make it sound fancy,” he jokes. “It’s the shit. Try it.”
Never one to turn down a new food, I spoon some out of the saucepan and put it on my plate instead of directly on my fish, just in case I don’t like it. I don’t know why I doubted him though, because as I dab a forkful of my flaky salmon into the sauce and place it in my mouth, I can’t help the groan that leaves me, closing my eyes to better enjoy the flavor explosion in my mouth. “Sooooo good,” I moan, and open my eyes to see Jason watching me with a smirk on his sexy face.
We eat our dinner in comfortable silence, finishing every morsel of the perfect meal before cleaning up the kitchen together, our movements like a choreographed dance as we wash pots, wipe surfaces and leave everything in the rack to dry.
I follow Jason out the back door after grabbing the cigarettes out of my purse, and it’s not until I’m sitting down in one of the patio chairs, feeling the cool weatherproof fabric against the bare skin of my thighs that I remember I’m in shorts. The whole hour I’ve already been here, I had forgotten about my self-consciousness. Sure, I’m not what Jason goes for; I’m not what he finds beautiful, but around him, I’m comfortable in my own skin. Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not what he finds attractive, because I know it doesn’t matter. Nothing I can do will make me his type, so I don’t have to worry about impressing him with the way I look; I can just be me.
“So what have you been up to this week?” he asks, lighting his cigarette and leaning back in his chair.
I don’t want to sound like a total loser, admitting I’ve done absolutely nothing this week but go to school, work, and then home, so I embellish by saying, “I had a ton of papers and projects due at school this week, and they needed me to work some extra shifts at the dealership, so I’ve been pretty busy. What about you?”
“I haven’t really done much of anything. I went and played in a 9-ball tournament a few nights ago, but that’s about it,” he says.
“How’d you do?” I ask.
“I did all right,” he says, and in Jason-speak, that means he probably kicked ass. I smile at him knowingly. “So what movie do you want to watch?”
“Well, I fell asleep before the end of your Boondock Saints. You want to watch it again? You said you could watch it over and over,” I remind him.
“Sure,” he replies, putting his cigarette out in the ashtray and then standing to make his way over to the door. I take one last drag off of mine before snuffing it out and going inside.
About ten minutes into the movie, after having gotten comfortable on his bed, I feel a tension I just can’t shake. I want to talk to him, but I can’t find the courage to say what I need to get off my chest. Suddenly, I have an idea, and it may seem cowardly, but fuck it. I pull my cellphone out of my purse sitting on the floor beside his bed and type him out a message in the notepad. I would send it to him as a text, but one, I don’t have his cell number, and two, I heard him tell Gavin his parents took texting off his plan after he racked up a $300 bill. I hand him my phone for him to read what I wrote, and then he erases it and types something back. We hand the phone back and forth between us, holding a silent conversation as the movie plays before us.
I’m glad you let me come over, even though Gavin said I wasn’t allowed.
This is my house and my family, not his.
Can I tell you something?
No.
Asshole.
I hear him chuckle as he types.
Of course you can tell me something.
The only reason I kept dating him in the first place was so I could come hang out with you.
I know.
You know?! How did you know?
You didn’t look at him the way you look at me.
Oh.
Can I tell you something?
I never tell you no.
True. When he was thinking about breaking it off with you, I only told him he should because I couldn’t stand thinking he had any claim on you.
Really? But why?
I hear him take a deep breath and sigh before he types something out slowly and hands me back the phone.
He’s not good enough for you. Shit…I’m not good enough for you. And I doubt I would think anyone in the world would be.
What are you talking about? I’m not even what you like. No matter how much I eat, I’m not going to get even close to what you go for. You saw those pics of my mom and the rest of my family. I’m stuck like this.
Babe, I don’t go for big girls.
I almost break my neck as my head spins around to look at him after I read that last message. Which I read ten more times. He has a smirk on his face as he watches the TV, not even bothering to look at me.
What the hell do you mean you don’t go for big girls? You’ve only brought around girls two, three times my size...your email address and screen name is NOMAX4ME! All the stories y’all have told me about you “going hogging”… ??????
It was all a joke. Well, not really
a joke. It was a plan.
Plan for what? To be a freakin’ asshole? To make me look stupid and you guys laugh at me behind my back?
No, babe. It was to make you not like me. But it apparently didn’t work.
I don’t understand.
Gavin always reeled in the girls with those fuckin blue eyes, but then the sec he opened his dumbass mouth, it would break whatever spell he’d have on them. That’s when I’d swoop in and pick them up. I had to learn how to talk, learn some game, because I’m seemingly unapproachable. He’d keep whatever shallow chick would stick with him just for his looks, and I’d end up with the girl who fell for my game. Yeah, we’re dicks, but it is what it is.
I think about what he’s written me, letting it sink in for a little bit, but the whole “plan” thing isn’t quite clicking.
So what does that have to do with you pretending to only like larger women?
I was trying to be a good friend. The last couple of girls Gavin really liked and brought around, they ended up blowing him off and gunning for me. I thought if I told you I only liked women of a certain size…which you definitely are NOT…then it would turn you off and you wouldn’t even consider wanting me.
Wow, are you seriously so cocky you thought you had to put on chick repellant?
Hey now, don’t forget. Who just confessed they only dated my friend so they could hang out with me?
He’s got me there.
Whatever.
Can I tell you something?
No.
You can’t tell me no. And even if you could, I’d tell you this anyways, even though I shouldn’t. I came up with that plan before he even brought you over the first time, because he kept talking about you. Knowing Gavin can’t keep a girl with his looks alone, I tried to make you hate me, or at least not do anything that might attract you away from him. But when y’all came over while I was fixing my truck and I laid eyes on you the first time, it turned into more than warding you off for my friend. I was trying to protect you too.
Protect me? From what?
From me. You were so beautiful and cute, and when you tripped in my driveway and dropped the F-bomb…I don’t know. You affected me. I had never even met you before, and you affected me. You were this tiny little thing with a great big smile, and then the mother of all cuss words came out of that sexy mouth…it caught me off-guard. Especially because you screamed innocence. I was trying to protect you from me.