“So?” he asked.
“So what?”
“Give me your phone,” he instructed, and before I knew it, I’d reached into my backpack and handed it to him. He pressed a button and looked back at me.
“I need the password.”
“Two-five-double-zero,” I rattled off and he punched it in. He grinned as the phone unlocked and then proceeded to type in a number, holding it to his ear as it rang. Then he hung up, handed it back to me and pulled out his own from his jeans’ pocket.
“Great,” he said. “All done. So, I guess I’ll talk to you later?”
“Sure,” I said, it being the only word I could manage. I wanted to say something else, something witty and cool, but I was at a loss for words. He continued staring at me, grinning, his beautiful teeth gleaming against his tanned skin.
He was about to say something, but the moment was ruined, as suddenly, Catherine appeared, grabbing her brother by the arm.
“We’re going to be late,” she said to him, then cast a look my way that was filled with such disdain that my moment of joy was immediately soured. Like a bashful idiot, I lowered my eyes, not meeting her gaze, as though we were apes in the jungle, and I had to bow to her dominance.
“Chill out,” Liam said. “I was just talking to Elle.”
“Come on,” she persisted. Standing behind her, Amy and Cristal, and Michael Zimmer were all watching the scene. “Amy needs you to help her with her homework.”
“Right, I’m coming,” Liam said. He looked at me and winked. “See you, Elle.”
“Bye,” I croaked.
And he walked off down the hall, his books clutched under his arm. I could only stare at him, stupefied. I couldn’t believe that Colin had missed it!
The first thing I wanted to do was skip biology and run to the library, just as Colin had, so I could tell him that Liam Wilde, the same Liam Wilde who’d seen me naked and had kissed me, had now taken my number and said he would text me.
No amount of pursed lips and snickering whispers behind manicured hands by Catherine’s entourage, or any of the other kids in my grade, could have ruined that moment for me. The news that Liam had talked to me and taken my number had, apparently, spread like wildfire and was quite the hallway gossip that afternoon.
But, I barely noticed the looks and whispers, because my ears were still ringing from the sound of his voice.
I’ll talk to you later, he’d said, and I dared to believe that he really would.
~~~
I must have checked my phone a thousand times that afternoon, but there was no text from Liam. It was only as I sat at the dinner table that evening with Mom, Dad, and Henry, that I felt a buzzing in my pocket and sneaked a quick look at my phone.
I saw his name but couldn’t read the message. If there was one thing my parents didn’t tolerate at the dinner table, it was cell phones.
I just couldn’t eat another morsel even though Mom had made her famous chicken casserole. All I could think of was escaping to my room so I could read the text.
So, I pushed my plate away and I excused myself, muttering an excuse of suddenly remembering an important assignment I needed to finish and fled before anyone could ask me anything. I took the stairs up to my room two at a time, flopped onto the bed and opened the message.
Hi. How was biology? Did you know that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell?
My grin literally stretched from ear to ear as I read every word again and again. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard, but I didn’t dare to press anything in case he saw I was typing. I had to play it cool. I should really have waited for at least an hour before responding, but I just couldn’t.
Finally, I settled for a bored-face emoji before feeling a little daring and typing a reply.
It was as dull as one of Mister Greenleaf’s ties. And did you know that the human body contains enough bones to make up an entire human skeleton?
He sent me a laughing emoji.
You don’t say!
I giggled.
Did you finish Amy’s homework for her?
Another laughing emoji.
Not a chance. She wanted to copy my notes as she always does. Not that it’ll help much. She’s as dense as my sister is mean.
I had to admit to feeling a certain amount of satisfaction from reading this. Ever since we started high school, Amy Calder had stuck herself to Liam like a leech. Nobody laughed harder at his jokes, and nobody touched his arm as often. I’d always thought the two of them were an item, but it seemed that perhaps I’d misread things. I never considered that I would ever be a part of Liam’s and Catherine’s social circle, let alone its dynamics.
As much as I’d always found Liam to be the hottest guy in school, I was hardly alone in thinking so, and I could never have dreamed for a second that he would ever have looked at me twice.
I wanted to pinch myself as I lay on my bed, texting him like this, so casually. Or, at least, I tried my hardest to make it look casual. In truth, I was agonizing over every word.
After a couple of texts back and forth, though, I began to relax. He asked me how my day was, whether I was looking forward to college, and even what I had for lunch. I laughed aloud when he called the pizza ‘a bread slice of nonsense’.
Didn’t your butler pack your usual cucumber sandwiches? I teased, and he quickly fired back with a remark about how Jeeves had been busy that morning, polishing the Ferrari, so he had to settle for a school cafeteria lunch.
He made me feel so at ease as he wanted to know about the most mundane things in the world. We may as well have been talking this easily since forever. He didn’t once make any reference to my naked humiliation at the party, but instead asked me if I was reading any good books at the moment, or had been to the movies recently.
We talked about our favorite candy bars and argued over the best baseball teams. He was a Yankees fan, where I’d been raised as a Mets girl.
We texted for nearly two hours that night so that I missed my favorite fashion TV show without even realizing, or caring. By the time I went to sleep, Liam had started putting kisses on the ends of his texts, and I dared to do the same. When we eventually said goodnight, he told me to sleep tight and that we’d talk again tomorrow.
As I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, I was still smiling like an idiot. I realized that, for the first time, at the age of eighteen, I had a serious crush.
6
________
LIAM
“What’s so funny?” Catherine asked as she got into the car.
“Nothing,” I replied, as I closed my phone and slipped it back into my pocket. “How was practice?”
“Fine,” she said, “although Kirsten’s put weight on. I swear to God, if that outfit doesn’t fit her in a week’s time, then I’ll make sure she’s pulled from the squad before I leave.”
“Why?” I asked. “It’s not like she’s the one at the top of the pyramid. Besides, you’re soon to hand over the squad to next year’s captain.”
“I know, but still. I won’t have a baby elephant ruining things for everyone else in the squad,” Catherine sniffed.
I rolled my eyes as I put the car into reverse and backed out of the school parking lot. Catherine’s car was at the shop, thanks to her second fender-bender in two months, so I’d offered to pick her up from practice. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that the reason for my smile had been another text from Elle. It went without saying that my sister wouldn’t have approved.
For the past two weeks since I’d taken Elle’s number that afternoon at her locker, we’d messaged each other every day. I looked forward to hearing from her, and we were slowly getting to know each other better. I couldn’t believe that it had taken me so long to make an effort to get to know her better before. It took seeing her naked in my pool to do so, but I was glad that I had.
I always thought she was beautiful, with her long auburn hair, fair skin, and catlike green eyes. But, what I didn’t know, was t
hat she was intelligent, witty, and driven, too. I had no idea, until she told me, that the dress Catherine had accidentally ruined at the party was one that she’d made herself. I was stunned when she finally confessed, convinced that it was a designer gown as nothing about it had hinted that it was home-made. I might not have been au fait with women’s fashion, but my mom and sister had spent enough on dresses over the years that I’d come to distinguish couture from K-Mart.
Despite her intelligence and obvious talent, though, Elle never bragged about herself to me. Reading between the lines from the texts that flew back and forth between us, I learned that she inherited her skill for design from her mom, who was an art teacher.
I also came to know that she cared a lot about her family and that she was close to her brother, who was due to start high school just as we left for college. She worried about him, and she’d miss him when she left home.
Her father, of course, worked for mine, and from the little I knew about Simon Evans, I knew he had a solid work ethic and that my father had come to rely on him in business. The whole family seemed respectable and diligent. They seemed to treat other people with respect and didn’t look down on anyone.
Unlike my own family. As much as I loved them, I knew that they thought they were better than everyone else. I felt embarrassed at times, and even Elle had thought of me in the same way at first but as we’d begun to get to know one another, I hoped that the more we talked, the more she’d see the side of me that, admittedly, not many people knew about.
I was busy thinking about Elle as I drove, so much so that Catherine had to nudge me to get my attention. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I was talking and you weren’t listening to me at all,” my sister said, irritated.
“Sorry,” I said. “My mind was miles away. What were you saying?”
“Never mind,” she pouted.
“Come on, Sis. Tell me.”
“No. You tell me. What were you thinking about?” Catherine asked, snippily.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Come on; tell me what you said earlier.”
“You know, I’ve got a horrible feeling you’ve been thinking about Elle Evans. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your little chats in the hallways,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “Rumor around school is that that sad little face of hers hasn’t stopped smiling recently and that you’re the reason for it.”
While that little piece of news made me want to smile, I managed to keep a poker face. “Why would that have anything to do with me?” I asked.
“Don’t be coy and don’t be naive.”
“Naive?”
“Come on, Liam. You know she’s not our kind.” Catherine pulled down the visor above her head and checked her hair and makeup in the mirror. “I’ll accept she has pretty hair, but that’s about it.”
“She has beautiful hair,” I said, beginning to feel a little irritated. “But that’s not all that matters in a person, you know. There’s more to a person than good hair.”
“Exactly,” she said, her lips curling into a smile. “We have to make sure that the people we date have the same values as we do.”
I raised an eyebrow, one hand on the steering wheel. “And what sort of values would they be, Catherine?”
She sighed. “Look. Don’t make me spell it out. Elle Evans isn’t from our world. She doesn’t have the social responsibility we do. She’s from a family whose name means nothing in Albany. She’s not from money, Liam.”
We pulled up to the front gate of the house and it slowly opened. I drove in, the gravel up the driveway crunching beneath the tires of the car. I switched off the engine and turned to look at Catherine.
“You know, it’s not like we’re a master race just because our grandfather made a fortune and passed it down to Dad,” I said. “We might be richer than a lot of people, but that doesn’t make you genetically superior to Elle in any way.”
Catherine seemed surprised. “Oh, my God. Are you listening to yourself?” she asked. “I wonder if Daddy knows you talk like this.”
I snorted. “Dad’s view is the same as yours, it seems,” I said, half to her, and half to myself. “Money and power are everything.”
“Exactly,” Catherine said. “And Elle doesn’t have the future we have. Don’t waste your time on a peasant like her. I’m only saying this because I care about you. Because you’re my brother.” Her voice was dripping with sweetness, but I wanted to shake her hand off as she placed it on my arm.
We got out of the car and went inside.
Upstairs in my room, I lay on my bed, thinking about what my sister had said. Maybe she was right. There was no doubt that Elle and I came from different worlds, after all. While Elle’s family was doing very well for themselves, the Evans name certainly didn’t have the kind of impact that the Wilde name had. They’d only made their money recently, where ours had been in the family for generations, as long as anyone alive could remember. We had a reputation to uphold, and it had always been made clear to me that I’d end up married to someone of the same class, the same breeding.
But it wasn’t until Elle had come along that I’d realized just how much I didn’t care one bit about the kind of money her parents had, or how long they’d had it. I realized that I cared about the way she made me laugh, and made me think. She challenged me and talked to me like a human being rather than the rich kid in school whom everyone wanted to impress. From the way we talked about books and life, and our dreams for the future, we transcended anything as pretentious as wealth.
Something was holding me back, though. As I thought honestly about myself, I knew that for as long as Elle and I had been sending hundreds of messages back and forth in the privacy of our respective houses, we hadn’t really had a real, face-to-face conversation yet. Yes, we talked in passing and greeted each other here and there, but nothing like it should have been.
Elle had even mentioned it to me, telling me in a text that she liked that it felt we had a secret nobody else knew about and that it didn’t really bother her that much, that we were just getting to know each other. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized I was at fault.
I wanted to get to know her in person, rather than mainly having a cyber-relationship. I’d subconsciously been worried about what Catherine would say if she saw us talking, or what the guys would say if I went to sit with Elle at lunch rather than joining them. I had to grow a pair and stop being so worried about what everyone thought.
So, the following day, as I saw Elle sitting with Colin in the cafeteria as they did every day, I caught her eye and smiled. She smiled back at me, shyly, the way she always did, the way that we confirmed to each other that we had a secret connection nobody knew about.
But, it was no longer enough. So, I walked over to her with my tray in hand and placed it on the table. She looked up at me, clearly surprised.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Uh, you want to go somewhere else?”
“No. I just wanted to know if you were free this Friday afternoon after school, that’s all.”
She bit her lip, and her beautiful green eyes seemed to light up with excitement, making me smile. “Um, I’m not sure,” she said, her voice trembling slightly.
But it was Colin who spoke up next. “Take it from me. She’s free,” he said. “God, Elle, if you don’t go out with him on Friday, then I will.”
I laughed. “Thanks, dude,” I said. “That’s a really kind offer, but I was sort of hoping Elle would want to come with me instead.”
Elle was stunned into silence, so Colin again took charge. “Where are you taking her and what time?” he asked.
“Four-thirty,” I replied, to Elle. “I’ll pick you up at your place. There’s an old movie theater in the city that’s showing the original version of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier.”
“Fine. She’ll be ready and waiting for you to pick her up at four thirty sharp,�
�� Colin said. “And she thanks you for the invitation.”
I balanced my tray on one hand and shook Colin’s with the other. “Thanks for helping out,” I said. “I just hope Elle won’t need her interpreter on Friday evening.”
“Oh, she won’t,” Colin assured me, and I grinned and walked away.
Back at the lunch table, Catherine glowered at me. “Are you fucking kidding me,” she said. “Didn’t we talk about this? About how you weren’t going to keep talking to her?”
“No, you talked about how I needed to stop talking to her,” I said, jabbing my juice box with a straw. “But I’ve decided to ignore you and ask her out anyway. I like her. And it’s none of your goddamn businesses, anyway.”
Catherine detested anyone disagreeing with her, and she certainly hated anyone telling her that something was none of her business. But there wasn’t much she could say. Her cheeks flushed red with anger and her eyes narrowed in their familiar calculating way.
“I’m going to tell Daddy. He’ll put a stop to this.”
“Fuck, Catherine,” I sighed. “Anyone would think that this has absolutely nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me!” she snapped. “She’s not one of us, Liam, and you know it.”
I bit my tongue and said nothing. Instead, I stood up again, scooped my food into the trash and left the cafeteria. It wasn’t lost on me that the more I got to know Elle, the more my sister and her snobbery was beginning to grate on me. I couldn’t bear to be near her.
Instead, I went to the gym and took a soccer ball from the rack. For the next few minutes, I kicked it against a wall, again and again, taking my frustration out by smashing the ball as hard as I could with my foot.
By the time lunch was over, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to take Elle out on Friday, and I wasn’t going to give a shit what anybody thought. I might have my future decided for me, but I wasn’t about to have my love life decided, too.
How wrong I was.
FIRST LOVE_A Single Dad Second Chance Romance Page 4