by Strong, Mimi
“Hey! He’s your hero? What about me?”
“The guy who led me right into the bear’s territory in the first place?”
“And then dragged you right back out again. Like a hero.”
“Thank you for that. I guess I owe you. Dinner at DeNirro’s? Unless we made plans for something else?”
“I could go for some Italian. Can we close up the store yet?”
I looked down at my brand-new watch. “Seven more minutes.”
Adrian reached across the counter for my hand, then drew it near him as he studied the fancy watch. “This is new.”
I cleared my throat. “A gift, from this weekend.”
He let my hand go and turned his head to the side. “I don’t want to hear about him, or the expensive gifts he buys you.”
I leaned on the counter between us, reached up with one hand, and stroked the side of his face with my fingertips. “Adrian.”
It hurt me to hurt him.
“Seven minutes.” He pulled away from my hand, looking down as he withdrew his phone from his pocket. “I’ll step outside and call DeNirro’s to see if we need a reservation. What do you think? Monday night? Shouldn’t be too busy, unless they ran a coupon in the Beaver Daily.”
“I’ll start counting the float.”
“I’ll flip the sign.” He walked to the door, where he stopped and looked back at me. “You know, this is the end.”
“The end?” My heart leapt up, my pulse banging in my throat.
“Say goodbye and make it a good one.”
Adrian knew I was breaking up with him? I stood there in stunned silence. I had to tell him everything that was happening, yet I didn’t want our new relationship to be over. He wasn’t just some guy. He was Adrian, and we’d known each other for years. We had history. When I was with him, I felt like we had a future.
He patted the wall next to the door. “Goodbye old bookstore! I hope you like wine!” To me, he winked and said, “Say goodbye to the store. Something like that.”
“Five minutes!”
He paused, seemingly frowning at my watch, then retreated out the door to phone DeNirro’s about reservations.
I ran the reports on the credit card machine and double-checked that there were no customers in the store. I’d been pretty sure nobody was there at the time Adrian had arrived, but sometimes a person will be reading quietly on the other side of the shelf and make me scream when they reappear. Not this time, though.
I walked around turning off the lights and saying goodbye to the store. The whole thing seemed silly and premature, since we were coming back the next day to oversee the movers, but I did it anyway, running my hand along the bead curtain leading back to the bathroom, and letting the clinking chimes ring through the space.
“I’ll miss you,” I said to the space in general.
“I won’t miss you, evil jerkface,” I said to the cupcake vent as I passed underneath on my way out.
Adrian was leaning up against the building’s exterior with one foot resting on the wall. With his blond hair and high cheekbones, plus wearing his tight jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt, he looked like a troubled youth in an indie Euro movie—like he was waiting in some Swedish city’s alley for a drug dealer.
“Hey, sexy,” I called out.
He moved languidly away from the wall, stretching his arms theatrically over his head. His sleeve rose up enough to reveal his compass tattoo.
“Hey, yourself,” he replied. “You’re a beautiful stranger I’ve never met. What are you doing in this dangerous part of town? Are you looking for a good time with a hot stud?”
“I sure am. Do you know one?”
He gave me a supermodel stare, sucking in his cheeks and running his hands up and down his long torso. “I’m not rich, but I know how to work. Hard.”
“I’m the kind of girl who appreciates a man who works. Hard.” (Shit! What was I doing, flirting with the guy I was supposed to be breaking up with? What was I doing besides, obviously, getting way too hot under my clothes, thanks to the dirty talk.)
He said, “Then I suggest we load up on carbohydrates, and get down to our hard work.” He jumped up and down in two jumping jacks, then crouched. “Race to you DeNirro’s.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Monster Legs! As if I could ever win a footrace with you.”
“I’ll give you a head start. Run!”
With that command, I did. I ran down to the corner, looked both ways, and darted across the street, then off in the direction of the restaurant. As I raced up to the door of DeNirro’s, I could hear Adrian’s footfalls behind me, and I moved faster, giddy with adrenaline. He grabbed me, swooping his long arms around my body. I squealed and trembled, panting heavily.
Adrian pressed me to the restaurant building, my back to the wall, and kissed me. Both of us were breathless, and I wrapped my arms up around his neck, yearning for more of his lips on mine.
He pulled away silently and gave me an eyebrow waggle before leading me into the restaurant.
For a few minutes, I forgot about the things I needed to say. I was just a small-town girl on a date with her boyfriend.
We ordered the sampler plate for two, which was a new special they were offering, with a bit of everything.
As we crunched on bread sticks and waited for the meal, Adrian started drawing parallels between the sampler platter and our lives.
He said, “A little taste of one thing contrasts with everything else and makes you appreciate each thing more.”
“We can’t appreciate one delicious thing on its own? Like a bowl of one flavor of ice cream? Maybe rum raisin?”
“Isn’t two scoops of different flavors better, though?”
“But you always like one flavor more than the other,” I said. “It’s inevitable. You always get the one you really like on the bottom, so you can finish with it.”
He smiled, his big teeth bright in the candle light. Adrian had worn braces for a while, then went straight to the lip piercing, always distracting from his perfect smile.
He continued, in a grave tone, “The key to happiness is the right blend of novelty and routine.”
The way he was smiling, I knew he meant his dating life, and not store business.
I asked, “Who’s the novelty and who’s the routine for you? Golden is the routine, I bet. How can I not be the novelty?”
“I have a confession to make.”
My body got tense, the hard chair I was sitting on suddenly uncomfortable.
He was breaking up with me.
My skin got clammy. No! Yes! No!
Adrian swirled his water and ice cubes, looking down at the red-checked tablecloth, his fair eyelashes hiding his eyes. If he was breaking up with me, that was a good thing, probably. Then I wouldn’t have to do the same to him.
I couldn’t keep dating him while I was getting fake-married to Dalton Deangelo, could I?
No, really?
I was asking myself for permission to have it all.
Was that so crazy? Any crazier than me being an underwear model, or any of the other insane things that had happened to me lately?
“I tricked you,” he said. “We didn’t have a date for tonight, but I pretended we did, and you’re so sweet and easygoing, you went along with it.”
I chortled with relief. He wasn’t going to break up with me at DeNirro’s after all.
“Adrian, did you just say I’m easygoing?”
“You’re pretty cool.”
“Thank you.” I wished I could have gotten that recorded, to send to a certain you-know-who to prove I was easygoing.
Adrian swirled his drink again. “In fact, you’re so cool, that you agreed to a date with me tonight, even though you’re somebody else’s fiancée.” He glanced up, catching me with his cool, metallic-blue eyes. “What’s the deal with that?”
BUSTED.
CHAPTER 23
My heart nearly stopped.
Oh, Adrian totally knew. But of course he did.
How could I have been so stupid? Beaverdale wasn’t in a remote mountain village with no internet.
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
“Really? I figured it was a publicity stunt you two cooked up.”
I took a second to process this information.
“Okay… so it is exactly what you think. You’re a smart guy, Adrian.”
“I’m no valedictorian.”
I reached for the basket of bread, feeling more confused and mixed up than ever.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Are you really marrying that guy, or just doing the appearances? You should probably start wearing an engagement ring, because I’ve been reading some of the gossip sites. I’m not the only one who suspects your timely engagement is a stunt.”
I dropped the bread and covered my face with my hands. “Oh, Adrian. I’m the fucking worst.”
“We promised to be honest with each other.”
“I know. Things have been crazy.”
“I can imagine.”
“I just want to climb into my bed with a book and make the whole world go away.”
“I feel the same way sometimes, but everything falls apart if you close your eyes and ignore your problems for too long.”
With my hands still over my face, and my eyes closed, I asked Adrian if anyone was close enough to the table to hear what I was about to say.
“Just me,” he replied.
“Please don’t ever tell anyone. Your parents don’t even know, because my mom didn’t even tell your mom.” I kept my eyes closed and my hands over my face. “When I was fifteen, I had a baby. That’s Kyle, who my parents took as their own.”
“And you only missed school for a week.”
My hands dropped and my eyes flew open. “You knew?”
“Don’t worry. I never told anyone. My mother doesn’t know. My parents bought the cover story that your mother never told anyone, and hid her baby bump because it was a high-risk pregnancy.”
He kept talking, saying that he’d noticed my body changing shape, and my weight loss when I returned to school from being sick. He’d come to his own conclusion after seeing my mother with the baby, but respected and cared for me enough to never ask, despite his curiosity.
His words became foreign, like a language I couldn’t understand. How could I have been so stupid? I was still the same dumb kid, oblivious to what was right in front of me. Would I ever use my brains, or was my father right about me being prone to whimsy?
Oh, fuck. Everything was such a mess.
I tried to fight the tears, but they came. The waitress arrived with more food, and I turned away, blowing my nose on a napkin.
A hand landed on my shoulder and I opened my eyes to find Adrian kneeling on the floor in front of me.
“I’m here,” he said. “Tell me what to do. Should we leave here? Can I get you something?”
“I’m sorry,” I sputtered.
He stayed right there, one hand grounding me on my shoulder and the other hand on my knee, completing a circuit of touch.
He said, “We’ll just take a minute here. Nobody’s paying any attention to us. I can drive you home if you want.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “I understand.”
“I’m scared.”
“Life is scary, but you’ve got people who care about you.”
I sniffed. There was a break in the tears, like the sun coming through the fog. I wiped the wet napkin across one cheek then the other.
My voice gravelly, I said, “I’m okay now.” I licked my dry lips. “Wow, that sampler plate smells good.”
Adrian gave me the most heartbreakingly sympathetic look, and I nearly started leaking from the face again, but swallowed it down.
“We should try to eat a little of that food,” I said.
He squeezed my shoulder and knee again before slowly removing his hands.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with fire and my nose with aromatic herbs. The sounds of the music and people chattering around us came back to me.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” Adrian said.
“A red-eyed nightmare?”
“Soft and vulnerable.”
I shook my head. “Oh, no. Do not call me soft. Do not make me double-punch you in the asshole.”
Chuckling, he got to his feet and made his way back around the table to his chair. I gave my nose one final swipe, then pulled my chair in to better survey the feast before us.
“Fuck, yeah,” I said as I used the large serving fork to transfer some deep-fried tortellini to my plate. Everything looked so good. I even took a bit of green salad, though it looked suspiciously like kale.
“Fuckin’ fried pasta, yeah,” Adrian said in agreement, doing the same.
For the rest of our dinner, we talked about the bookstore, and the big move that would be starting the next morning. Gordon had sprung for professional movers, agreeing that the expense would be worthwhile, because we’d have less downtime.
Adrian and I joked about the town-wide panic that would begin Tuesday, when all of Beaverdale went from having two bookstores to having zero. By the time we re-opened a week later, there’d be so much built-up demand.
Giggling, I said, “We might sell fourteen books by lunch time.”
“We’ll be run off our feet,” he said.
“What’s that called when two people want to pay for stuff at the same time?”
He grinned. “A lineup. We’ll probably have one of those happening all the time.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
He laughed. “So I should cancel the order on that deli-style, take-a-number system?”
“No, keep that. We can use it to keep track of who we’re dating.”
He blinked for a minute, then started laughing so hard he had to hit his hand on the table.
Our waitress came running over, worried he was choking, and the confusion that ensued made me laugh so hard, I must have looked like I was choking.
We finally finished eating, working together like a team to finish every item on the platter.
The owner, Mr. Russell DeNirro himself, came over to our table just as we were finishing, to ask us what we thought. I got nervous, because he’s basically a celebrity chef in the town, plus I’ve had a crush on him probably since I was twelve. I’d always wanted him to flirt with me the way he did with my mother, and not refer to me as “kidlet” when he brought out my birthday cake with sparklers and candles on top.
“How is your beautiful sister?” Mr. DeNirro asked me. He meant my mother, whom he’d been jokingly referring to as my sister for the last decade, since she couldn’t possibly be the mother of such a mature-acting kidlet.
“Still married to that guy,” I said, playing along.
Mr. DeNirro shook his head. “That guy! A man should be so lucky.” He turned to Adrian. “And you’re Stormy’s son, aren’t you.”
“Guilty,” Adrian said. His father’s cop name around town was Stormy, which is a pretty cool nickname, albeit not as cool as Peaches.
As he backed away from the table, Mr. DeNirro pointed a finger at me. “We’ll see you soon for your birthday, won’t we?”
“Of course!” Even as I said it, though, I got a bad feeling. My birthday was coming up in October, and given the way my summer had gone, I couldn’t imagine where I might be when I turned twenty-three.
Coming to DeNirro’s for my birthday, and getting my photo taken at one of the red-checkered tables—that was my tradition. My routine.
If Adrian was right about happiness being the perfect blend of novelty and routine, I was out of balance. With the store moving, and the fake wedding coming up, nothing at all felt routine or safe.
“You’re not even listening,” Adrian said.
I jerked my head up to look at him. “Beg pardon?”
He smiled, his blue eyes focused on me. “We’ve got a
killer day ahead of us tomorrow, and a killer week. Would you like to walk down to the movie theater and watch a movie?”
“Do you know what’s playing?”
“Does it matter? I’ll put my arm around you and we can cuddle in the back row for two hours, just me and you.”
There’s only one screen in our town’s movie theater, so I didn’t have any idea what I was committing to, but I agreed. Sitting in the dark for two hours with Adrian’s arm around me sounded perfect.
~
The movie was one of those romantic comedies where the hard-working business executive woman hires a smokin’ hot man she thinks is gay to be her escort for a fancy dinner, then gets drunk and gives him a lap dance, only to discover that’s not a roll of candies in his pocket, and he’s not so gay after all.
The movie was good, and I liked it almost as much as the one about the workaholic business lady who pays a male art model to pretend to be her boyfriend at a family picnic, only to get drunk and make out with him, and find out he isn’t so gay after all.
Come to think of it, if high-powered executive ladies would just ask their gigolos if they’re gay or not, a lot of comedy hijinx would never happen. But then, uptight business ladies would never find out that deep down, they don’t want to be president of the company as much as they crave the animal touch of a younger man, plus all his hot baby gravy. I’d be offended if it wasn’t so damn enjoyable to watch. Especially the makeover scenes. Sigh.
Adrian and I walked out of the theater with smiles on our faces.
“Sorry it wasn’t an action flick,” I said. “There’s a new Tom Cruise movie next week, and I’ll take you to that.”
“I didn’t mind this one. I like a story about two people overcoming one simple and incredibly stupid misunderstanding to find lasting happiness together.”
I laughed, and Adrian looped his arm around my shoulders as we walked up the street. “My car is this way,” he said.
“You mean your mom’s car.”
His eyes went to my gold watch.
My words hung in the air, and I instantly realized I’d said the wrong thing.
He was quiet, looking down as we walked under the glow of a streetlamp, our shadow becoming squat, then stretching out.
“I was just kidding,” I said. “I don’t care that you borrow your mom’s car, or live with your parents. I just say dumb things, all the time. It’s kind of my thing.”