Advanced Physical Chemistry
Page 19
“You want something to drink?” Caleb asked.
She eyed the vintage avocado Frigidaire rumbling in the corner, imagining what horrors must lie inside. “No, thank you.”
“Probably smart. You don’t want to have to use the bathroom. Trust me.”
Penny turned her eyes to the patio door at the far end of the breakfast nook and the weight bench that lay beyond. “Is that where you work out?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see?” She headed out to the patio—which was nothing more than a concrete slab—without waiting for an answer. There were two stacks of plates on either side of the bench, and a heavy knurled bar resting in the racks, all of it covered in a layer of rust.
“Do I get a demonstration?” she asked.
He ducked his head sheepishly. “No.”
“Come on. Please.” She gave him her best Puss in Boots eyes. “I want to watch.”
He shook his head in capitulation and stooped to pick up one of the forty-five pound plates. Penny helped him load the other end of the bar, and he lay down on the bench. She studied his form as he set up under the bar. Hands shoulder-width apart, feet flat on the ground, good back arch. Once he unracked the weight, she forgot about his form and became distracted by his biceps. It didn’t appear to be an especially challenging weight for him, but it was enough to make his muscles do amazing things before her eyes. She lifted a hand to her mouth to make sure she wasn’t drooling.
After he’d done a few reps he glanced over at her. “Happy now?”
“Yes. Very.” She moved to the head of the bench and helped him rack the bar. “Is one-thirty-five your usual work weight?”
He looked surprised—either that she could do plate math or that she knew what a work weight was. “No, it’s just for showing off in front of girls. I usually work up to two-oh-five.”
She eyed the rusty old rack, frowning. “You bench out here by yourself without a spotter or safeties?”
“Sometimes I get one of my roommates to spot me when they’re home.”
“And when they’re not?”
“Then I figure my neighbors will hear the screams and call 911.” He got to his feet and gestured to the bench. “Your turn.”
Penny blinked. “What?”
“You got to drool over me,” he said as he slid the forty-fives off the bar. “Now it’s my turn to enjoy an exhibition.”
She backed away from the bench. “Uh uh. No way.”
“Yes way. Fair’s fair. How much weight do you want?”
She looked down at her dress and leather-soled ballet flats. The residue from the floor would give her shoes a little more traction, but it still wasn’t ideal. “Just the bar.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I’ll bet you can bench more than the bar. How much?”
“Um.” Penny bit her lip. “Give me the twenty-fives, I guess.”
“Ninety-five?” He looked impressed again.
Her personal record was one-fifteen, but she figured she could manage ninety-five pounds without a warm-up. Maybe. Hopefully.
Caleb loaded the weight for her and gestured to the bench again. “All yours.”
Penny’s stomach churned with stage fright as she got under the bar. She’d never lifted in front of a man before. Her weight class was women only, and she liked it that way. She always felt a little like an imposter when she exercised. Like a fat kid pretending to be an athlete. Bench pressing in front of someone as fit as Caleb was a terrifying prospect.
“You got this,” he said, taking a position at the head of the bench to help her unrack. “Ready?”
The bench was too high for her to get her feet flat on the ground, she didn’t have chalk, and she was wearing a dress, but sure. She nodded and Caleb gave her a wolfish grin. “What?” she said, staring up his nostrils.
“I’ve got a great view of your boobs from this position.”
“And I’ve got a great view of your crotch.” It was only inches away from her face, close enough that his shorts were brushing the top of her head. “Let’s get this over with,” she said, trying not to let his proximity distract her.
He lifted the bar out of the rack and waited until she had it in position over her chest before letting go and stepping back.
Penny took a breath, braced her abdomen, and lowered the bar down to her diaphragm and back up again. That wasn’t so bad. Her arms only felt a little shaky. She took another breath and did it again. It felt even smoother the second time. She did it three more times, and then Caleb put his hands on the bar and helped her guide it into the rack.
She sat up, feeling a little dizzy. “Happy now?”
“Yes,” he said, looking a little dizzy himself. His pupils had gone wide and dark with naked lust. “That was unbelievably hot.” He pulled her off the bench and into his arms. “Can I come watch your next weight class?”
“Nope. No boys allowed.” She slid her hands under his tank top and over the bare skin of his back.
“That’s a tragedy,” he said and kissed her. His mouth tasted salty and he smelled like coffee and sea air.
She closed her eyes and melted into him as his tongue slid into her mouth. A seagull called out overhead, and with the sun warming her skin Penny could almost imagine they were at the beach—the sound of the surf crashing around them, soft sand between their bare toes.
We should go to the beach sometime, she thought. Then she remembered they only had two more weekends left together and kissed him harder to push away the sadness.
“Where’s your bedroom?” she said when they finally came up for air, and he led her back into the house and through the messy living room, down a grubby hall with some truly appalling carpet, and into a small bedroom.
The carpet in there wasn’t much better, but it at least looked as though it had been recently vacuumed, and there were no dirty dishes or old pizza boxes sitting out, which put his room head and shoulders above the rest of the house. There was a cheap desk covered with books and a double bed with a faded plaid bedspread, but other than that the room had no personality whatsoever. No pictures on the walls, no decorations of any kind, nothing that wasn’t purely functional. It made her think of a jail cell.
“Sorry it’s not nicer,” he said, looking around the room with an expression of disgust.
She reached for him and kissed him. “You’re here. That’s all I need.”
He closed the door, winding his arms around her, and they fell into each other.
Chapter Nineteen
An hour later, Penny lay curled against Caleb on his sad, lumpy mattress in his sad, drab room in his sad, gross house. What kind of life is this? she wondered as she listened to his breathing slow and deepen. There was nothing joyful or beautiful in this place to brighten his life. He didn’t even seem to have friends to distract him. It was like he was living in exile in a self-imposed prison. Doing nothing but working and exercising and saving his money until he was sprung from his incarceration.
Now that she’d seen how dreary his life was, it was easy to understand why seeing her had been the brightest part of his days. It wasn’t that she was all that special, it was that everything else was so awful in comparison. He must be counting the days until he could leave this place and start his new life.
He let out a soft snore and she smiled, marveling that he managed to be sexy even while snoring and drooling a little out of one side of his mouth. Moving carefully, so as not to disturb him, she unwound herself from the heavy arm draped over her and slipped out of bed. She padded over to his closet and slid open the louvered door. Inside, all the shirts she’d gazed at lustfully over the months hung on cheap wire hangers. She ran her fingers over them until she found her favorite, the red plaid flannel he’d been wearing the day he dumped iced coffee all over Kenneth. She pulled it off the hanger and put it on. It fit her surprisingly well—one of the many benefits of sleeping with a man who lifted weights. Kenneth’s puny shirts hadn’t even fit her arms, much less her bust.
A single framed picture perched at the back of the desk, partially hidden behind all the books. It was the only photo in the entire room. A group of smiling kids beamed out of the frame from the shore of a lake somewhere. She picked it up to study it more closely, searching the faces to see if one of them was Caleb. She found him standing off to one side. A teenager by the looks of it, but several years older than the other kids.
“Hey,” Caleb said behind her, his voice husky and sleep-roughened. “What are you doing?”
Penny turned toward him, clutching the photo against her chest. “Snooping,”
“Ah.” He propped himself up on one elbow. His hair was all lopsided and sticking up, and he looked just as sexy as when he’d been snoring. “Find anything interesting?”
“Not really. You’re so secretive, I was hoping for something juicier.”
He actually had the nerve to look affronted. “I’m not secretive.”
“Yes! You are! I barely know anything about you, you never talk about yourself—or anyone else for that matter—and wrangling an invitation to your house was like extracting a tooth from a grumpy bear.”
“I thought it was pretty obvious why I didn’t want to invite you over here.”
“Okay, fine. But the rest of it still stands.”
He stretched out his arm and ran his fingers along her thigh, dipping them under the hem of the shirt she’d borrowed from him. “What do you want to know?”
Refusing to be distracted by his wandering fingers, she held out the photo. “Tell me about this.”
He sat up with a sigh and took it from her, adjusting the pillow behind his back. “That’s Camp Northbrook. I was a counselor there for three summers in high school.”
“Why is it the only picture you have in your room?”
He shrugged and handed it back to her. “I don’t know. The others are all back at my parents’ place.”
“See, that’s what I mean,” Penny said. “You don’t want to talk about things.”
“I don’t know what you want to hear.”
“I just want to understand you.” She thrust the picture back at him. “This photo is the only one you didn’t leave behind. There must be something special about it.”
He stared at the photo with an inscrutable expression. “I guess it’s one of the last places I remember being really happy.”
She scooched closer and crossed her legs underneath her. “Why?”
“We moved a lot, so I never really made close friends at school or felt like I fit in. But at camp, everyone was just there for the summer, so everyone was new. It’s a camp for special needs kids, and most of them were really excited to be there. Seeing how much harder they worked to do things most of us take for granted really gives you a sense of perspective. I guess they showed me what kind of man I wanted to be—which was something my father never did.”
“That’s why you’re going to med school.” The realization raised a lump in the back of Penny’s throat. “It’s not because of your father, it’s because of them. Because you want to be able to help them.”
“I guess. I never thought of it like that, but maybe.” He shoved the photo back at her. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes.” She leaned over and kissed him softly on the lips. “That wasn’t too terrible, was it?”
His hand smoothed over her curls. She hadn’t straightened her hair in a week. “Not too terrible, no.”
“Wonder of wonders. Caleb Mayhew talked about himself and didn’t die. And now I feel like I finally know something real about you.” She set the photo back on the desk and selected a Neil Gaiman hardback from the top of a stack. “Tell me about this next.”
He regarded it dubiously. “You want a book report?”
“No, I want to know what you like about it. I assume you like it, since it’s one of only a dozen books you seem to own.”
“I have crates of books at home. I just didn’t want to lug them all around with me.”
“So why do you lug around this one?” She flipped it open and a piece of paper that had been tucked between the pages fluttered to the floor. “Oops.” She stooped to pick it up. It was a letter from the University of Mississippi billing office about the tuition deposit deadline. “You haven’t paid your bill yet?”
He leaned over and snatched it out of her hand. “I will.”
“The letter says it’s already overdue.”
He sat up on the edge of the bed, covering himself with the sheets, and shoved the letter in his desk drawer. “There’s a grace period.”
“Which ends in a week.”
“You read all that in the half-second you were looking at it?”
“I’m a fast reader.” Penny frowned. “Is the money a problem?”
“No, I’ve got the money.” His face was turned away from her, so she couldn’t read his expression. Not that she’d have been able to read it anyway.
“Why haven’t you paid your bill?”
“Laziness. I’ll get to it.” He shot her an exasperated look. “Would you like to see my electric bill next, or can we talk about something more interesting?”
“You haven’t started packing yet.”
“So? I’ve got two and a half weeks.”
“I’d have started packing a month in advance.” Two months in advance, even.
He cracked a faint smile. “Yeah, but we both know you’re a freak about things like that. And I don’t have that much stuff. It’ll take me two hours, tops.”
“Still.”
He sat back on the bed and pulled her into his arms, tucking her head under his chin. “Tell me something about you now.”
“Like what?”
“Tell me about your family.” His fingertips stroked a path down her arm, and she let her eyes fall closed.
“My family are really boring.”
“Boring families are nice. Do you like them?”
“Yes. They drive me crazy sometimes, but they’re my family. I love them.”
“Liking them and loving them aren’t the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.” She gave his arm an affectionate squeeze. “But I like them too.”
“You’re close?”
“I’m really close to my parents. My brothers and sisters…” She thought about her brother who only seemed to care about football, and her sisters who only ever talked about their kids and their husbands. “We don’t have as much in common.”
“What’s your dad like?” Caleb’s voice had grown soft, and it rumbled pleasantly under her ear.
“Quiet. Kind. Nerdy. His favorite TV show is Jeopardy, and he looks forward to his Times Sunday crossword all week. When I’m home we do it together.”
Homesickness burned at the back of her throat as she pictured her dad bent over the kitchen table with his reading glasses on, chewing the cap of his ballpoint pen while her mother cooked breakfast.
Penny FaceTimed with her mother almost every week, but her father didn’t like to talk on the phone. Occasionally, he’d wander through the room when her mother was talking to her and say hi, but video calls made him even more uncomfortable than the phone. Instead, he sent Penny long weekly emails touching on a range of topics, including politics, the antics
of their neighbors, the latest documentary he’d watched on TV, and any new bird sightings he’d made on his morning walks.
Caleb smoothed a hand over her hair and she burrowed deeper into his arms. “He tells lots of dad jokes,” she said, smiling faintly. “He’s really big into the dad jokes.”
“What’s he do for a living?”
“He’s a chemical engineer too.”
“You wanted to be like him.”
“I wanted to be like both my parents, but a chemical engineering major seemed more lucrative than English. Also, I didn’t want to have to write all those papers.”
“You said your mom’s a teacher, right?”
“High school English and German.”
“Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch,” he said in an impressive German accent.
Penny looked up, surprised. “You speak German?”
He shrugged. “Just enough to get me in trouble. We lived in Germany when I was in middle school.”
“My mom would love you. She’d talk to you in nothing but German.” Between this and his taste in books, she’d be calling him “son” within ten minutes of meeting him.
Except her mother would never meet him. Penny hadn’t even told her parents he existed. What was the point, when he’d be out of her life soon? No sense getting her mother’s hopes up, only to crush them again. She wouldn’t approve of what Penny was doing, anyway. She’d think she was setting herself up to get hurt. Which was exactly what she was doing.
Penny’s throat squeezed again and Caleb kissed the top of her head. “Your parents sound nice.”
“They are.”
“You must miss them.”
“It was hard moving here, so far away from them.”
“Why did you?”
She shook her head. “It’s your turn again.” He’d finally struck on something she didn’t want to talk about.
“Penelope.” He put a finger under her jaw and tilted her face toward his. “Why did you move out here? If you telework anyway, why move so far away from your family?”
She lowered her eyes, embarrassed. “For a man.”
“What happened?”