Dylan noticed.
You thought we parted ways after I told him he shouldn’t kiss me, didn’t you?
We didn’t. He called me the next week—I gave him my number before we left The Majestic—and we chatted for a bit. We met for coffee several times, and I saw his band play three of their next four performances. In effect, over the next few months we became friendly. I wouldn’t call us friends, per se. If I was in a car accident, he’s not on the list of people I’d call. However, if I want a name for a new vibrator, “Dylan” is a good candidate.
There’s always an undercurrent of tension between us that I think people expect us to act on, but we don’t. Dylan isn’t ready for that, and I don’t want to push him. If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen. Otherwise, I’ve made a new set of buddies.
Toward the end of summer, he invited me to play softball. A few years have passed since I played softball, and I’m no longer sure about my skills. Dylan assured me that wouldn’t be a problem, so I agreed to meet him at the park. When I arrived, softball season was in full swing, and hundreds of people were warming up on twelve different diamonds. I got there on time, but it was taking me a little longer than expected to find the correct field. I was scanning the mixed-gender teams when a shrill whistle caught my attention.
Dylan waved, and I hurried in his direction. He looked different today, probably because he was wearing the team uniform. The red shorts and matching shirt shattered his bad-boy image. Now he just looked cute. Daisy tossed me a spare uniform, and I changed in one of the dirtiest bathrooms I’ve ever seen. Public parks are not as clean as they should be.
As I tied my cleats, I surveyed the field and the benches. Women, women everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Some men were in the stands, but Dylan was the only one poised to take the field.
I bent over to stretch and heard a few murmurs of appreciation. Standing slowly, I cocked my head at Dylan. “You play in a lesbian league?”
He grinned. “It’s Daisy and Audra’s team. They needed a catcher.”
I so badly wanted to make a pitcher/catcher joke, but it seemed out of place in this lady-filled environment. “How long have you been helping them out?”
“Just this season. Jessie, the regular catcher, had a baby. They needed someone to take over for a few months, and, according to my sister, I wasn’t doing anything anyway.”
He stood next to me with his hand on my lower back—friendly close, but not I-want-to-sleep-with-you close. However, I’d be lying if I denied the presence of sparks. Him still mourning his wife didn’t make him any less attractive, and it also reminded me I’d finally found a man who wasn’t attached.
Yet despite our budding friendship, I didn’t know all that much about him. I’ve decided I should change that. “What do you do when you’re not writing lyrics or practicing with the band?”
“Family counseling.”
I looked up at him, carefully considering his career choice and his apparent attraction to me. “Is it my insanity that appeals to you?”
“You’re not nuts, Lacey. You’ve got an OCD thing going on. Hand washing is a pretty mild manifestation.”
It did explain why he both let me finish my cycle of six and was adamant that I stop afterward. John treated me the same way. “Then you must be aware that washing my hands isn’t my only issue.” I said that quietly, offering him a ticket off my crazy train. He was still technically at the station, and this wasn’t a ride most people relished.
Whenever Jane or Luma need a break from me, they take one. I know they’ll be there if I need them, but sometimes I can be a bit much. John’s theory is that I act out to push people away when they’re getting too close. I prefer to think of myself as somebody who occasionally needs to be alone.
Dylan tilted his head, ruminating on his response. “Everybody has issues. You haven’t come close to cornering the market where that’s concerned.”
That was a sweet sentiment, and I wondered when the right time would be to tell him all my energy goes into controlling my urges to lie, so I don’t really try to curb my hand washing.
“Your hands are looking a little raw today. Tough week?”
Some parts had been excruciating. I’d passed up more than one opportunity to deliver a juicy fabrication. And contrary to what you’d logically think, holding back doesn’t make me feel better. “I’d prefer if you didn’t analyze me. I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime.”
He stroked his hand up my back. The move was both sensual and soothing—yet another of the mixed signals he liked to give. “Noted. No shrinkage. That’s good. I’m not exactly an objective observer.”
“No?” I thought he’d remained relatively detached throughout most of our short association. Other times, he’d been unconsciously (subconsciously?) affectionate. No, I definitely wasn’t the only one on this field who had issues.
“No. Do you have plans for after the game? We all usually go out for pizza or something else that’s equally healthy.”
I didn’t get the sense that he was asking me on a date. The fact that the entire team planned to go pointed away from that prospect. So, I took the offer at face value. “Sure. I love that kind of health food.”
We lost the game, but I’d batted in one of our five runs, so I didn’t feel badly about it. They’d sacrificed me to get that woman home. The other team had simply been better. Significantly better. Holding them to nine runs was difficult, so the team celebrated that they’d only lost by four. Apparently that was a victory compared to the last time they faced that team.
Dylan sat across from me at the pizzeria. The owner, who sponsored the team’s uniforms, had set up a long line of tables down the center of his restaurant for them. Audra sat to my left, and Daisy took the seat next to her.
I remembered the little blonde well. Thankfully, my residual feelings of guilt had faded, and seeing her no longer triggered an urge to wash my hands. She’d been to all the Kiss Me Goodnight performances except that first one. Monty’s babysitter had come down with a summer cold at the last minute, so Audra had stayed home.
They must’ve had a standing order because the pizza came out minutes after we sat down. The woman to my right was tall and broad-shouldered. She had a larger build, but it was solid muscle, and her long red hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. I was pretty sure her name was Missy.
She smiled at me, a friendly one that made her hazel eyes sparkle. “So, you’re Dylan’s new girlfriend.”
Unless she’d been attuned to cues I’ve missed, that was a leap in logic. “We’re just friends.”
She lifted her brows and eyed me. “Are you playing for our team?”
I knew what she meant, but I thought it would be funnier if I pretended otherwise. “I just did. We lost.”
Across the table, Dylan chuckled softly. He gave me half a grin before continuing his dissection of the game with the cute towheaded pitcher.
Missy offered a long-suffering sigh. “He always gets the prettiest ones.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I accepted the compliment with a cocky, flirtatious smile. Very few people have called me pretty. My mother and John don’t count. They’re a little biased when it comes to me.
After pizza, I went home to shower because Dylan wanted to hang out some more. “Just the two of us,” he said. “No nosy older sister or her friends.”
The late-August evening had grown unseasonably cool, so I threw on a pair of jeans and a shirt with a sweetheart neckline that made me want to play with my own girls. When Dylan knocked on my apartment door, I grabbed a jacket and followed him to his truck. He might eventually like watching me touch myself, but we weren’t there yet.
“Where are we going?”
He opened the passenger door for me. The scent of his aftershave drifted on the breeze. “Will it kill you not to know?”
“No, but it might not go well for you if I’m dressed inappropriately.”
He looked me up and down. His gaze stutter
ed twice on my chest. Score! I did a mental fist pump.
“You look great. I mean, fine. You’ll need the jacket.”
A mental stutter. I was doing well tonight. After four months, patience is becoming my strong suit where Dylan is concerned, but I’m still hoping the mixed signals will eventually settle on the hot side of the relationship spectrum. In the meantime, I’ve celebrated the end of my dating hiatus by going out with several unmarried men who asked me. But none of those kisses (or men) have been memorable, and I haven’t consented to any second dates.
Dylan drove for a very long time. We talked about music and sports and what it’s like to work your way through college. Like me, he’d spent six years earning his degree.
I liked that he didn’t seem to have an agenda and was easy to be with. For the first time in my life, I opened up to somebody and told him truthful things right off the bat. Even Jane and Luma, who’d been my best friends since high school, had endured the morass of my lies before I’d let them get close. Maybe the fact that Dylan put no pressure on me worked in my favor.
He turned down a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere, and I had no idea where we were. Absorbed in our conversation, I’d paid no attention to the scenery. He turned onto a narrow dirt road where a sign proclaimed the Highland State Recreational Trails.
“Is this open at night?”
“Probably not.” He parked in a small, dirt parking lot and grabbed a blanket that had been wedged in behind the seat. “We might get chased out, but they won’t arrest us. There’s a flashlight in the glove box. Can you grab it?”
I got it out. Darkness descended once the truck doors were closed and the dome light faded. I searched for a switch to turn the flashlight on, but I couldn’t find one. Dylan solved the problem by clicking a soft panel on the back. A strong, steady beam lit the path in front of us.
“Ah. It’s one of those newfangled contraptions.”
He laughed and steered me forward with a hand on my lower back. “I’m all about new technology.”
I like the way he touches me. It makes me feel sexy and cherished, and that’s not a feeling I experience very often. “Very manly of you.”
“Well, I am a man.”
Here’s where I stopped myself from saying something about how I’d wondered. There’s no way to make a snarky comment like that without damage to his ego. Plus, he’s definitely a man. My pointy nipples could attest to that.
We followed a trail through the trees. All of a sudden, it opened up and dropped off sharply, and that freaked me out. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but it was dark, and I couldn’t see the bottom. Even with the flashlight, we were surrounded by inky blackness. I was the one in front, and I would have been the one pancaked at the bottom if I hadn’t stopped short.
“A little warning would have been nice, Dylan. Real men warn people when they’re about to plunge into an abyss.”
“It’s not an abyss. Watch your step, though. It’d be a nasty fall.”
I threw my nastiest look over my shoulder, but I really couldn’t see his face, so I surmised that he couldn’t see mine either. “My ghost would haunt you forever.”
He paused for a millisecond, long enough for me to regret the thoughtlessness of my joke, but then he continued. His hand tightened on my waist, and he pulled me closer. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, Lacey.”
That assurance washed over me, a quiet declaration he seemed to mean with every fiber of his being. I placed my hand on his smooth, soft cheek. It wasn’t usually smooth or soft.
“I know you wouldn’t.”
I don’t know if he was thinking about kissing me, but I was definitely having those thoughts. A heaviness hung in the air, and for a little while, I felt the palpable force of the magic between us. I hoped I wasn’t the only one.
He cleared his throat. “Just a little farther ahead. It slopes down to the right.”
I took the hint. He wasn’t ready, and I would continue being patient. I really don’t want to be with a man whose heart belongs to another woman.
The trail dropped a few feet, and flat land spread out to my left. Light from the flashlight glistened on a watery surface.
“A pond?”
“A stream. It connects two lakes.”
He directed me to the bank, and that’s where he spread the blanket. When he sat down and patted the space next to him, I swallowed a comment about taking him back to my place to make him scream in my bed. There was no need to traipse along dangerous paths in the dark.
I sat. He scooted back and lay down, folding his hands under his head. I set the flashlight between us. This had all the hallmarks of a seduction, but I didn’t think that was his goal.
“Dylan, what are we doing here?”
“Looking at the stars. You can’t really see them where we live. Too much light pollution.” He turned off the flashlight, plunging us into darkness.
Then I understood. This was probably somewhere he used to come with Nadia.
I wanted to leave.
I wanted to wash my hands.
I wanted to tell him I was allergic to looking at the stars.
Careful not to make physical contact, I lay down next to him. Above me, the sky sparkled. I’d never seen this vast array without the filter of a lens or a screen. It was bitterly beautiful.
He pointed out constellations: The Big Dipper. Orion the Hunter. The Pleiades. Others whose names he knew and I can’t remember. I relaxed and enjoyed what he was trying to share with me.
“Daisy used to bring me here after our parents died. We’d bring a picnic lunch and wander around for hours or sit here and talk. Sometimes we’d just sit and enjoy the silence. I was fourteen when they were killed in a car accident. She was eighteen, recently graduated from high school, and two months pregnant with Monty. Our parents never knew.”
I relaxed a little, but the urge to wash my hands didn’t go away.
“We didn’t have any close family. She got a job and fought for custody of me. Then Monty came along, and it was the three of us. She met Audra a few months after I started college. Audra was the T.A. for one of my freshman classes. I introduced them when Daisy made me argue for a higher grade on one of my papers. She went with me to make sure I did it. I wasn’t the kind of person who liked to rock the boat.”
It was difficult to imagine Dylan needing somebody to force him to argue, but I guess somebody had to teach him to stand up for himself. He continued talking, and I continued listening.
“Daisy said she’d never considered dating a woman before, but the second she met Audra, she knew. It was love at first sight. Audra changed the grade on my paper without even looking at it. She blended into our family seamlessly—Monty fell for her immediately, and she became another big sister to me.”
I understand losing something so profound that it leaves you feeling empty and alone, and then having someone come into your life and fill that hole. The pain never quite goes away, but it does become easier to bear. I knew exactly what he was trying to tell me, but now was not the time for me to share. This was his place, his time to reveal some of what made him tick.
He pried my hand away from the flashlight’s handle—I wasn’t losing that thing—and twined his fingers with mine. We stayed that way for a little while, lying next to one another, holding hands in the darkness, and watching the stars move.
“I like you, Lacey.”
His soft statement rippled through the comfortable darkness.
I squeezed his hand. “I know.”
He rolled toward me and up on his side. “No, I mean I really like you, Lacey.”
I heard the weight of his struggle, and I felt for him. I felt for myself as well, because I’d finally met the perfect man, and he wasn’t in a position to make any fairy tales come true.
A breeze lifted from the water, bringing a freshness with it that seemed to be making promises. I wanted to listen, but didn’t think it wise. I’d listened to promises for years, and none of the
m have come true.
I wasn’t sure what kind of response he was expecting, so after chewing my lip for a moment, I rolled onto my side to face him. Holding hands this way was a little awkward, but neither of us let go. His face was inches from mine, and he brushed a caress down the side of my cheek, his fingertips tickling.
I couldn’t see more than his outline, which was good. This way I could imagine a sad expression on his face, with echoes of wistfulness. I don’t think I could stand it if I saw something sultry or affectionate. I want to see him look at me like that, but I don’t want to see it until he’s actually mine.
He kissed me, brushing his lips across mine, tender and sweet. I gripped his wrist, and he cradled my head. When we both pulled back, ending the kiss, he scooted me closer to him and guided my head to the crook of his arm. I stayed like that—cuddled up to him, enjoying his body heat and his comforting, male scent—for a long, long time.
As we packed up to leave (I held the flashlight while he folded the blanket), he threw out a casual question. “Are you doing anything tomorrow afternoon?”
I happened to have plans. “Baking a cake.”
In the dim glow, I saw his expression change from shy to very interested. “What kind of cake?”
“German chocolate.” My mom and I make one every year on my birthday. John sits at the counter on a bar stool, mostly watching us bake and listening to us chat. Sadie curls up at his feet and nibbles on anything we drop.
“That’s my favorite.”
I laughed. I sensed that any kind of cake was his favorite. “Mine too. I have a weakness for coconut.”
He slung the folded blanket over his shoulder and put his arm around me. It was the same pose he’d used to guide me down here, only now it was a little more familiar.
“I have a weakness for chocolate,” he said. “And cake.”
I wasn’t going to invite him to my mother’s house, not for my birthday. I sometimes invite Jane and Luma, but only for dinner. The time before that, when we do the baking and cooking, is sacred. Only my family is allowed.
Kiss Me Goodnight Page 7