by Blair Holden
Nana Stone is Sheriff Stone’s mother and one of the coolest people I have ever come across. She breaks, no, scratch that, smashes every stereotype you might possibly have for a person above the age of sixty. When we were kids and she used to live in this town with her husband, Cole’s grandfather, I used to go to her house every other day since she volunteered to babysit me. I still remember all the eccentric clothes she used to wear. She had all these different colored wigs, which she’d pair with crazy outfits. If one day she wore a neon pink wig and a floor-length gown, the next she’d wear an inky black wig with leather pants, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket. On top of everything else, she was the only one who didn’t let Cole get away with the things he did to me. Once she caught him emptying a tray of ice down the back of my shirt and she punished him by having him clean every toilet in the house. Obviously, I idolize the woman.
When Cole’s grandfather died, she sold her house and moved away. I hear stories of her traveling around the world and scuba diving in the Caribbean and I wonder if she’s really out there doing all that. I know Cole still sees a lot of her, even when he was states away in military school; he’s really close to her even though he tries his very best not to show it. From what I’ve observed so far, he still goes to see her once every two weeks. For someone who’s considered the town bad boy, he sure is a softie when it comes to his Nana.
If he senses the fact that I’m clearly deflecting the jealousy question, he doesn’t make anything of it. He just looks warmly toward the cell phone in his hand and shakes his head.
“She’s still the craziest old lady I’ve ever met. She was just telling me about how she let a stink bomb go off during bingo night.”
Cole’s grandma through and through.
“Do you still see her often?”
He nods. “I try to but she doesn’t like me seeing her in the seniors’ home a lot. If it were up to her, she’d be off street racing, but my dad put his foot down. She hates that place.”
I could understand. For a free spirit like Nana Stone, being confined to an old age home would be a nightmare. It didn’t matter how good the care was, the woman wasn’t supposed to be kept all caged up.
Cole studies me as I stare out the window, looking into the distance but painfully aware of his gaze on me. My skin’s starting to prickle under the scrutiny and I just want him to spit out whatever he’s thinking but I’m afraid to open my mouth again. My feelings are starting to become painfully obvious and I need to put my guard up before he sees everything.
“Do you want to go see her with me? You’re free, right? We have a Founder’s Day long weekend and nothing to do. Do you want to go visit her? She’ll love to see you.”
I’d love to see Nana Stone too; it’s been far too long. But from what Cole tells me she lives about two and a half hours away, the drive isn’t that long. I know my parents wouldn’t mind; they themselves won’t be home till tomorrow. Travis would make a scene but I can take care of him. Besides, he’s so obsessed with Mystery Girl at the moment that nothing else matters.
The sad thing is that even though this teeny tiny part of me is questioning all of this, a bigger part is jumping up and down in excitement. Of course I want to go with him.
He’s waiting patiently for my answer but there’s a sort of apprehension and anxiety surrounding him, like he’s testing me. I wonder what would happen if I said no but I guess we’re never going to find out since the word yes leaves my mouth before I can overthink anymore.
His entire face lights up and he’s grinning like a kid on Christmas. We immediately go into prep mode. I put on some makeup while he goes home to change and get his car. It gives me time to regroup and get my nerves under control.
Now, I’m no fortune-teller, that I can assure you. However, right now I have this feeling in my gut telling me that this trip will define who we are. We’ve been swinging like a darn pendulum between being frenemies and then something more. Buying dresses, dances, and almost kisses—we are already something more, aren’t we?
I start hyperventilating at the thought of all the possibilities that could possibly be. I’m absentmindedly doing the dishes, trying to calm myself down when all of a sudden the hair at the back of my neck stands up. I know it’s him, without even questioning myself.
“Ready to go?” he whispers in my ear. I hadn’t realized that he was so close. The plastic cup in my hands drops to the floor with a loud clatter.
I whirl around, only to notice that he’s caged me in his arms. I’m breathless, panting heavily with my heart crashing wildly against my ribs.
“Don’t do that! You could’ve killed me,” I chastise but the effect is dimmed by my breathy voice.
I expect him to tease me, to mock me, and to turn the situation into a humorous one, but the serious look in his eyes takes me aback. His blue eyes are sparkling, his lips slightly parted, cheeks flushed.
“Cole, what’s . . . ?”
“You told Jay you thought I was sexy?”
Oh crap.
I want to disappear, I want to be abducted by aliens and I want to be run over by a truck, like yesterday. That big-mouthed, no-good ape! I felt slightly guilty for slashing the tires of his car but now I feel like I let him off easy. I want to grab a baseball bat and wreck his Jeep so badly that even that stupid MTV show won’t be able to fix it. How could he . . . why would he even . . . ?
Why do these things keep happening to me?
“I—I didn’t exactly . . . he misunderstood and I . . .” I don’t know what to say and my pounding heart isn’t helping. With all the blood rushing to my head and a whooshing sound in my ears, I don’t exactly feel good.
“Do you like me, Tessie?”
I gulp. Is this the part where we finally talk about all the weird tension between us? Do I want to admit that maybe I could have a crush on Cole Stone? The words crush and Cole Stone in the same sentence just sound so strange. It shouldn’t feel right but it does.
He tilts my chin upward to look at him. There’s an odd mixture of happiness and fear on his face. It makes answering him all the more difficult. All that hope, all that anxiousness, every conflicted feeling shared between the two of us is now out in the open. I could wreck everything with just one word.
“I don’t know.”
He cocks his head to the side, a crooked smile on his face. “Well, at least that’s better than a no.”
“I wouldn’t say no, not after everything,” I say in a quiet voice, afraid to even look at him again. My heart rate is going haywire; it’s not normal. This dizzying effect he has on me is now so overwhelming that I can hardly hear myself over the pounding in my chest.
He cups my cheek, his thumb brushing over my cheekbone. My eyes flutter close and instinctively I lean into his touch. This moment feels so perfect, so earth-shattering and unreal that I almost feel like I’ll wake up any second and realize that it is all a fantasy my mind has conjured up.
“Tessie,” he says in a voice that says it all. It expresses longing and desire, care and warmth, yearning and . . . something more.
He takes a deep breath, as if preparing himself for something. I’m afraid to let out the breath I’ve been holding. I have all these thoughts and feelings, emotions I can’t put into words. I don’t think I’m ready for whatever he’s about to say.
“We’ll take this slow, as slow as you want.” He gulps audibly and I’m relieved to see that he’s as nervous and rattled as I am. “Whatever you need, it’ll all be on your terms. I just want a chance to show you that I’m not that stupid boy who left four years ago.”
You haven’t been that boy for a while now; I want to say this out loud. I want to tell him that he’s changed my life, quite literally ever since he’s come back but I feel numb, incapable of speech. I just nod stupidly and his hand drops from my face. Instead he takes my hand in his and interlinks our fingers.
“I promise, Tessie, I won’t let you down.”
I squeeze his hand in response, n
ot knowing what else to say. Only someone who’s known me for my entire life knows that this means more than words. He knows I’m not the most eloquent person on the planet so he doesn’t push me, doesn’t try to make me speak. We finish doing the dishes together and that’s the only time Cole lets go of my hand.
Later, when I’ve made sure that the house is safely locked, Cole and I head for his Volvo. We haven’t said much aside from mundane instructions and single-word responses. Is this how it’s going to be between us now? Will it be awkward, will we both be too shy to behave the way we usually are with each other?
I take shotgun as Cole starts the car. Once we pull out of the driveway, he takes my hand again and smiles at me shyly; I mirror his expression.
“Tessie?” he says after a while and I remove my gaze from outside the window.
“Yeah?” I say quietly, afraid of what’s coming next.
“I told Jay slashing the tires was completely your idea.” He chuckles and I gape at him.
“You did not!”
I lunge for him over the gap between the two seats but am restrained by my seatbelt. He chuckles at my misery and embarrassment and that’s when it hits me. It doesn’t matter what we become to each other, in the end the most important part of our relationship is his ability to drive me crazy.
And he’s doing a stellar job with that. But I will admit, that when I tug my hand away so that he can drive, I immediately miss the warmth of his skin.
Chapter Seventeen: Don’t Strip on Top of the Pool Table, Nana
The members of the Stone family are not the kind of people who subject themselves to conformity. Nana Stone was far from being a sweater-knitting, cookie-baking, slobbery-kiss-giving kind of grandmother. Her husband always seemed as if he were the older version of Cole himself. They even looked alike so it wasn’t really a surprise that they were like two peas in a pod. When his Grandpa died, Cole lost his partner in crime. I remember my heart breaking for him. I remember the funeral, where he silently shed tears. A thirteen-year-old boy had just lost his best friend and it didn’t matter how I felt about him, I still wanted the tears to go away.
I think about our pasts as we drive through an obviously elite beach town. It’s kind of like the Hamptons but the glamour is more subdued. It looks like the kind of place where the extremely rich would come to retire. I can see the ocean from the car window and the large Spanish-villa-style houses that line the streets. It’s beautiful, of course it is, but everything screams money and it’s kind of confusing me.
That’s not the only thing that’s confusing me right now.
“What do you mean she ran away?”
“I mean exactly that, damn that crazy Nana.” Cole slams his fist against the steering wheel and hangs up on whomever he’s talking to. He runs a hand through his hair and while I’m all for caring about his escape artist grandmother, I cannot for the life of me concentrate on anything but how weak in the knees I feel when his hair’s disheveled like this. Oh boy, we’ve only just established this thing between us and I’m already turning into the psycho from Swimfan.
“So you’re saying that she knocked out her caretaker and busted out from the seniors’ home after stealing said caretaker’s car?”
I find it a little hard to believe that a sixty-five-year-old woman is capable of doing all that. She might be a Stone but even they aren’t invincible.
“I told her to wait for me; I would’ve gotten her a much better car than that beat-up old Mustang.”
Ha! He’s not mad that his elderly grandmother ran away from a facility which obviously provides excellent care, he’s mad that she made a poor choice of car to steal. Who says I know boring people?
“Well then, since you obviously were going to help her you’ll know where she went. Problem solved, call your dad and tell him everything’s fine.”
Sheriff Stone had called us about half an hour ago. Apparently he’d been informed that his mother attacked an employee before busting out, oh and stealing a car. He’s fuming and he thinks Cole somehow assisted her. That’s where I came in, I told him feeling absolutely mortified that Cole had been with me for the better part of last night and today. Things got really awkward really fast and he dropped the subject. When he found out that we were on our way to meet Nana Stone, in some cruel twist of fate, he asked us to find her and take her back to the retirement home.
Cole, it turns out, has done this a few times. He’s a Nana Stone whisperer and whenever she pulls a stunt like this, he’s more or less involved in the process. He knows how she thinks, so if she’s hitchhiking her way to Texas, we’ll find her.
“It’s not that simple, shortcake. If she didn’t wait for me, then she’s obviously planning something big. She knows that in the end I’ll tell my dad where she is because we all worry about her. She doesn’t want to be found.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, tapping his fingers against his forehead as if willing the answers to suddenly come to him. I’ve known Nana Stone for a long time but even that doesn’t qualify me to figure out where on earth she is. It’s one thing to help her carry water balloons to the terrace to throw on the mailman but it’s another to pinpoint her location after she runs away.
“Well, maybe you should let her be on her own for a while. I mean she obviously wants some space so what’s the harm in that? She’s more than capable of taking care of herself.”
Opening his eyes, he sighs. I can see the worry written all over his face and my heart’s aching for him. Whenever he’s around me, he does whatever’s possible to make me smile. He’s never made me aware of his own problems, except maybe the ones he has with Jay. I cannot believe how selfish I’ve been. I’ve never once asked about how he’s doing. I haven’t talked to him about military school, about why he came back, about . . . anything.
Okay, time to change, Tessa. He needs you. He’s been your fairy godmother and now you need to return the favor. Obviously this means a lot to him and you need to stick with him through this, no matter what.
“She has asthma, Tessie, and it’s bad. She doesn’t take it seriously enough. I humor her by letting her run away but I’ve always got an eye on her. I know where she is, what she’s doing, and if she gets sick, I find her and bring her back immediately. Right now I’m scared shitless because I know the woman doesn’t give a damn about her health.”
The knots begin to form in my stomach. All of this sounds bad, really, really bad. A woman Nana Stone’s age, one with asthma and a wild streak, out there all by herself, doing God knows what. Suddenly I feel like I can’t breathe. I fear for the boy sitting beside me, who’s probably going out of his mind right now. He’s lost his grandfather, he can’t lose the only other person who understands him and loves him unconditionally.
I scoot closer to him, between the gaps of our seats. He’s stopped the car, holding his head in his hands and breathing hard. The need to comfort him is so powerful that it takes me aback. I am not a touchy-feely kind of person, I like my space, but this is something else entirely. I wrap my arms around his waist and rest my head on his shoulder. His breath hitches as he realizes how close I am but it’s probably due to surprise.
“It’s going to be okay, we’ll find her,” I mumble into his shirt. His heart’s beating so fast that I can feel it. I only have to slide my hand up his chest to rest on the place that’s practically pounding to confirm my suspicions but now’s probably not the best time to feel him up.
His arms come around me almost instantly, like it’s a knee-jerk reaction. If he’s shocked by my actions he doesn’t show it. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, holding me tightly and just like that we’re wrapped all around each other in the middle of a residential parking lot. If one of the Stepford Wives that live here gets a glimpse of us, they’ll most probably get the wrong idea since I’m practically straddling him. Something as innocent as a hug suddenly has a whole new meaning. I don’t know what to do next. Do I just let go of him? Do I keep sitting right where I am? Somehow the
latter seems like the best available option. I can feel his breath on my neck and it sends tingles down my spine. If his hold wasn’t so tight, I’d probably shudder in pleasure. I know what it takes to feel this way; I’ve read my fair share of romance novels. So why is everything I believed to be true, being proven so darn wrong?
“Tessie,” he groans into my skin and that one sound basically tears me apart. He sounds so, so . . . seductive. What do I do? Do I kiss him? Do I say something just as exciting? I need an instruction manual right now, please.
He chuckles and I feel the sound reverberating through my own body. Why is he laughing? I pout. Obviously he’s amused by my lack of skills. This is the point where he’ll tell me that this morning was a mistake and that we were better off being . . . a confused unlabeled pair.
“Remember what I said about not overthinking and enjoying the moment?”
My face heats up rapidly as I remember the pool incident. I thought we’d both boxed up that particular memory and stored it until further use. I guess that would be now.
“Uh-huh.”
Where’s Shakespeare when you need him? If I were the kind of girl a guy like Cole is meant to be with I’d say something sultry and confident. I’d charm him into thinking that I am the most irresistible woman on the planet, but right now he’s probably contemplating ways to end whatever it is between us without breaking my pathetic little heart.
“You really need to work on that.”
Despite myself, I laugh. We both know that despite my best attempts I’d never be able to let go in his presence. He winds me up in both the best and worst of ways. If I’m not raging at him, I’m melting at his feet. There is no way that I can ever “enjoy the moment” when he’s around and that’s what I tell him.
“I don’t think I can.”
The smug look on his face says it all. He knows what he does to me and he’s proud of it.
“Well, we can try; we have a really long time to work on that,” he promises.