Exavier turned me to face him. “So, how’s acting working out for her?”
I glanced at the floor, not wanting to meet his eyes. “Umm, good. I think. I don’t know. I just run lines with her.”
“That’s really nice of you.”
I stepped out of his grasp and forced a smile to my face. “Since my ten o’clock apparently kicked the bucket, I’m free for a couple of hours. I need to grab a shower and change into something other than workout clothes but if you want to…umm…still want to get something to eat? Some friends of mine own a place down the street. The food is good and—”
“Sounds perfect.”
I smiled as I headed off towards the showers.
Chapter Four
“Did that guy just shake his ass on his way to the kitchen?” Exavier asked, folding his arms over his chest.
“You do that a lot.”
“Do what? Notice guys shaking their asses? Umm, no.”
I smiled and glanced at the menu, which I knew by heart. “You take a very manly stance by crossing your arms that way.”
Arching a brow, he smiled slightly. “A manly stance? Hmm, is that so wrong?”
“No, Xavs, it’s not bad at all.” Wrinkling my nose, I did my best to look sweet and innocent. “I have no clue why I continue to butcher your name. I’m sorry. I swear I’m doing my best not to but…”
Nodding a bit, he gave me a sexy, mysterious grin that sent heat rushing through my cheeks. “It’s more than fine by me.”
“Do I know you from somewhere?”
Licking his lower lip, he drew it in slightly. “What makes you ask?”
“Never mind.” I was too embarrassed to tell him why.
“Hmm, you strike me as a rather gutsy gal. I’m surprised you’d back down so fast when I asked you a simple question.”
I baulked. I was not backing down. “If you must know, you remind me of someone I used to know. A little boy I used to play with, Exavier Kondrashchenko.” I rolled my eyes, knowing my cheeks were flaming red now. “It’s the name and the dark hair. I called him Xavs. I’m sure that’s why I keep butchering your name. Sorry.”
Exavier nodded. “Hmm, Kondrashchenko. That’s a hell of a last name.”
I thought back to when I was little and a soft laugh came from me. Exavier tapped the table. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
Doing my best to appear innocent, I wrinkled my nose. As I glanced at him, my cheeks flushed. “I’m fairly sure I technically proposed to him. But, I’m not positive. I might have just informed him I was going to marry him someday. Does that count as a proposal or a threat?”
The deep laugh that came from Exavier warmed my heart. “Hmm, tell me more.”
Covering my face with one hand, I did my best to hide my mortification as I continued, “His last name was too hard for me to spell so I also informed him he’d have to change it.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe I actually said that to him. Granted, I was like five-years-old when I told him this, but still.”
“I bet that boy is kicking himself now.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “What makes you say that?”
He leaned back in his booth and shrugged. “I’m just imagining what I’d do if a little girl said that to me when I was younger…uhh…I’d have probably done something stupid like leap away from her like she had cooties or something.”
A half snort, half cough tore free from me. “Ohmygod, that’s exactly what he did. Must be a boy thing. He couldn’t have gotten away from me faster if he tried. Great, now I’ll surely continue to call you Xavs. On a bright note, I won’t beg you to play dolls with me.”
His lips twitched. “Dolls. Hmm, you made him play with dolls?”
“Not exactly.” I winked. “I asked, he said no. I cried. He gave in and did a rather bad job of playing along. The point is that he did it.”
“Ah, so you used tears as a weapon.” Exavier ran his fingers over the edge of the menu absently. “No guy can resist tears.”
I let out a soft laugh. “I wish I was that good at getting my way. No. I’d found out we were moving away that morning and I was so upset about leaving him that the second he said no I couldn’t hold it in anymore. He thought it was the doll thing. It was really an ‘I didn’t want to say goodbye to him’ thing. I had the biggest crush on him.”
“Really?” He licked his lower lip again, a habit I was beginning to really like. “So, you’re saying I’ve got some stiff competition.”
I just laughed.
“Oh my word, do my eyes deceive me or has my angel brought a man with her?”
Looking up, I smiled as I found a six foot tall man with short brown hair standing in front of us. He had on his double-knit polyester pants and oh-so-sexy disco days shirt as did every other person working at the diner. He rubbed his chin and stared at Exavier harder than I had. Winking, Harly smiled. “Oh, he’s a looker, Lindsay. Does he have a name or will he answer to Dark and Dangerous?”
Exavier shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat.
“We certainly have a straight one here. Have no fear, Dark and Dangerous. I’m happily married.”
“That’s right!” Charles called from behind the counter. He waved at me. “Hey, hon. How are you feeling? Any better? Jay mentioned you were sick or something last night.”
“I feel wonderful, Charlie. Thanks.” Glancing up at Harly, I winked. “I’m liking the Dark and Dangerous name, though I sort of like Hella Hunk too. It’s a shame someone already got to him and named him Exavier.”
“Well, what would the two of you like today?” Harly rolled his eyes and tossed his hand in the air. “I don’t know why I’m bothering to ask you, Lindsay. You get the same thing every time you come in here. We’re still trying to figure out where you put all the food you eat.”
Grinning, I tried to push my stomach out. I lifted my red-ribbed t-shirt and patted the almost non-existent mound. “Here.” I held it out until I was forced to exhale or burst. I chose the first option.
“She’s a nervous ball of energy. That’s how she burns all that food off. It’s in her aura, Harly. I told you that already.” Charles poured several cups of coffee, talking over the other patrons as he went. “I’m telling you, she doesn’t leave her lights on for any old reason. The girl can’t sleep and when she does, it’s fitful at best.”
Smiling, I shook my head. “Charlie, they have stalking laws you know.”
Harly tapped my arm. “Speaking of stalkers, that Stan guy you’ve been having trouble with showed up again this morning. Jay went crazy on him. He even threatened to shoot him if he dared get near you again. No offense to Dark and Dangerous but why is it you never meet Jay here for lunch anymore? Half the time you barely miss each other. Are you two on the outs again?”
Great, just great. Jay was already gunning for me about the attack. Couple in Stan the Stalker showing up after I left and Jay was sure to be pleasant.
I shuddered and did my best not to dwell on that. “I don’t know. Make up an answer and I’ll smile prettily and agree with it.”
Charles leaned over the counter. “Sweetie, never give Harly permission to make something up. You know that.”
Harly laughed. “Oh, I don’t need to make things up where Lindsay and Jay are concerned.” I went to object and he arched a brow. “I know. I know. You two are not a couple anymore. I understand that but it still didn’t diminish the drama and I’m all about the drama.”
“Drama?” Exavier asked, taking more of an interest in the conversation than I liked.
Harly grinned. “Our Lindsay has a bit of a temper.”
“Really, I hadn’t noticed.” Exavier winked at me and I almost melted. “Tell me about some of this drama between her and Jay.”
My eyes widened and I cleared my throat. “Umm, Yes, I’m ready to order. I’ll take the usual. Exavier?”
“I’ll have what she’s having. Thanks.”
Harly walked away giving me a rather funny expres
sion as he went. Glancing at Exavier, I found him biting back a smile. “You have some interesting friends.”
“Yeah, they’re great.”
“So, are you going to tell me any more about your first crush?” He ran his finger over his spoon as he looked out from under thick black eyelashes. “I’m curious as to what I’m up against.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Sorry, but no guy wins over him.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” I took a sip of my diet soda and nodded. “Filling his shoes is a big task. I cried myself to sleep for an entire year after we moved. It’s pathetic, I know, but I did. I can assure you that has not happened with anyone other than him so don’t fear me stalking you.”
He looked so sexy sitting there that I wanted to crawl into the booth beside him. I held back. “That’s good to know. Do the two of you still talk?”
“No.” I forced a smile to my face even though the subject wasn’t one of my favorites. “For a while, right after I moved away, we wrote letters back and forth and talked on the phone every now and then. He’s almost three years older than me and I think he got to the dating stage before me. Plus, he sort of lost interest in our friendship.”
Exavier’s brow furrowed. “Why do you say that?”
“For a variety of reasons. I have a childhood lumped full of let downs. I was ten and my parents told me I could spend a month with my grandparents back west. I called his house, so excited that I’d get to see him again—keep in mind that we moved when I was seven and I hadn’t seen him in all that time. His mother answered. I left her a long message for him and when I got to my grandparents’ and tried to get ahold of him, his mother told me that he’d decided to go away to some boy's camp and must have forgotten it was the same time I was coming home. I get that he was thirteen then and had better things to do. It just hurt a little that he’d forgotten. No biggie.”
Liar.
Exavier’s jaw tightened. He cleared his throat and took a sip of his soda before looking at me. “Hmm, if you two were as close as it sounds like you were, I’m surprised he’d forget something as important as you coming home. Did you try to reach him again after that? He might not have gotten the message.”
I nodded. “I did. I left so many messages for him that it hit me just how pathetic I was being so I stopped. We were friends when we were little but that’s it.”
“You don’t sound very convinced.” Exavier tipped his head slightly. “Is that all there is to the story?”
“Pretty much.”
“You never tried to contact him again?”
I rolled my eyes and let him have another pathetic snippet of my obsession with a childhood friend. “I sent him a gift for his eighteenth birthday.” I tapped my fingers on the table, doing my best to stay removed from it all. Why I even felt the need to tell Exavier all of this was beyond me. “I was hanging out with my girlfriends. You met them, Gina and Myra. Anyway, we walked past this shop that had the coolest looking black guitar in it. It had the eye and part of the nose of a wolf airbrushed on it. I saw it and immediately thought of him. Please don’t ask why. I have no clue but I did. I bought it, had it packaged up and Myra actually mailed it for me. It was only after it was long gone that I found the card I’d gotten to go with it lying half under Myra’s bed.”
Exavier snickered. “So the guy got a guitar in the mail with no card attached?”
“Yep. It gets better.” I rubbed between my eyes and laughed. “Myra put her return address on it. She’s, umm, different at times—she can sense things and was adamant that he would not get the gift if my name was anywhere on the packaging. She seemed to think someone would keep it from him or something. I don’t really know. That’s why she took it and mailed it. I don’t argue with her. She’s scary.”
“Ah, so he got a guitar with no card and some girl’s name on the packaging that he didn’t know.”
“Yep. And I’m guessing he never in a million years suspected it was from me. He hadn’t seen or talked to me for almost ten years at the time. I did try to reach him the summer after that. I was headed in to spend the entire summer with my grandparents and was hoping to at least see him for a couple of minutes. Didn’t happen.”
“Why’s that?”
Shrugging, I took another sip of my drink. “I drove over to his place and got to visit with his mother but that was all. She informed me that he’d met a really nice girl at college and decided to spend the summer there with her. She was fairly sure that he was planning on proposing to the girl. I left a note with her letting him know that I was happy that he was happy—sounds lame. I know. But I was, am, happy for him.” I traced the edge of my glass, collecting condensation as I went. “I left, ran into the ass end of some guy’s car with mine. He got out. I fell for him. We hit it off and dated the entire summer. The day before I left we watched the sunset and talked about things that we’d sort of forgotten to talk about over the three months we were together. He brought up one of his close friends, Xavs, and I couldn’t breathe.”
“Why is that?” Exavier asked, his face a mask of nothing.
“Because as much as Xavs didn’t want to see me, I still wanted to see him. But the idea of seeing him, knowing I’d just lost my virginity to one of his best friends, didn’t seem as appealing any more. I never tried to contact him after that and he’s never tried to contact me so that was that. Now, it’s your turn. Tell me about your first crush.”
He just sat there, staring at me but not saying a word. Harly came out carrying our food and easing the awkward moment between us. He set a platter full of thick cut fries and a cheeseburger in front of Exavier and a matching one in front of me.
“There you go, you two. Behave yourselves.”
“Thanks, Harly.”
“You can thank me by making us uncles, darling.”
My appetite instantly dissipated. I nodded at him and let out a soft laugh.
“We are dying to get to shop for a little one. And we want permission to take the baby for long walks. You’re our only hope of getting to be uncles.”
“Harly, go pester Myra about settling down.” I wanted to be off the subject of having a family and Harly seemed dead set on it.
He shook his head. “No honey, it’s not Myra I see down at the park laughing and hanging around with the children. I know how you are, Lindsay. Those mothers down there are not your type of people. You go down to be by the little ones. It’s not Myra who drags me to the hospital once a month to hold premature babies who need the stimulation and whose parents need a little break. It’s you. It’s not Myra who opened a rec center to keep kids out of trouble and to provide daycare for women who couldn’t normally afford it.”
Glancing down at the table, I tried to will myself away. It didn’t work. “Umm…”
“I like your place here, Harly. It’s like a step back in time.” Exavier held up a fry and tipped his head a bit. “And the food is delicious.”
Harly looked at me and beamed. “Oh, he’s a keeper, Lindsay. Don’t toss this one back, honey.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than your best, Lindsay.”
I waited for Harly to go into the kitchen before I sighed. My cell phone rang. Digging in my handbag, I pulled it out. “Hello?”
“Ah, there you are. I have been trying to reach you at home all morning.”
I smacked my forehead as punishment for not checking the caller ID on my phone before answering. “Hi, Dad. I was at work all morning.”
“Lindsay, the recreational center is far from work. Stop dumping money into a section of the city that will never get better.”
“Dad, I made more money than I could ever dream of spending in my first year of choreographing alone.. You invested it for me and I kept earning beyond that. Am I in danger of going broke anytime in my lifetime?”
He snorted. “No.”
“Am I spending your money?”
“No, but that is not the point.”
&n
bsp; I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m sorry. There’s a point to this lecture? Continue on.” I knew he was seething mad and it only made me smile more.
“Lindsay, there are better ways you could be…”
I put my hand up then realized he couldn’t see me. “Hold on. If you’re going to launch into the spiel about me dumping money into other programs and freeing myself of the ‘burden’ of the center again then I’m going to hang up and change my number. Those kids and those people mean the world to me. And, to be honest, I can’t see how it’s any of your business what I do with my time or my money.”
“You studied dance, not how to swing around a pole, Lindsay.”
“I know I studied dance, not how to swing on a pole.” I wanted to strangle him. I held back doing it over the phone. “Daddy, it’s not nice to have hired eyes everywhere. We’ve talked about this.”
“Someone needs to watch over you. You are reckless and—”
“Oh, hey, you called just in time for the lunchtime toss-myself-in-front-of-a-bus meeting. Thank gawd you got your digs in before I leapt in front of the mother load of horseshit.”
He snarled. I guess he didn’t like me offering to toss myself in front of a moving vehicle just to avoid taking anymore shit about my life. I smiled. “Lindsay, we will be meeting at eight tomorrow evening.”
I hissed. “Darn it. Eight tomorrow just won’t work for me, Dad. I’ll have to take a raincheck. See that’s the time I do table dances and give men four times my age lap dances. I make a hell of a killing in tips. Granted, I have to pull the money out of my thong, but still.”
He didn’t find it as amusing as I did. “You are attending. There is someone special in town that I wish for you to see. I will discuss the matter no more with you.”
“Psst, you aren’t sounding as young as you should. Use contractions, Dad, they’re all the rage. Ooo, better yet, start using one of the like hundred languages you speak. How many of them are obsolete now? Your French accent is all but gone, Daddy. Come on, pull out the big guns.”
He chuckled slightly. “So, I will see you tomorrow evening?”
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