She tipped her head toward the ceiling and unleashed a sardonic laugh. “Don’t you ever compare yourself to that animal co-worker of yours. Believe it or not, underneath that unapproachable, sandpaper exterior, you’re an alright guy, Rosenfeld.” In a lower voice, she mumbled, “Even if you have the stamina of a teenage boy.”
Christ, can’t we get past that? His eyes closed momentarily as a beet red swarmed his cheeks.
“Excuse me,” came the nasally voice of a prep-school kid. Callista Morales. Peter had recently interviewed her for placing four consecutive years in the state’s extemporaneous speaking competition. She was a senior, same as Ryleigh. But his stomach did not perform kickflips as he glanced at Callista in her pressed uniform, because he was, in fact, not a creep.
Ryleigh was the exception to the rule. That was all.
Glossy pink lip curled, she said, “I ordered almond milk. Do you really think I wanted whipped cream? I’m vegan.”
Kendall popped the lid and started spooning away the offensive topping. “I apologize. Whipped cream comes on all of our freezers. We’re happy to exclude it if you let us know while you’re ordering.”
Callista narrowed her hazel eyes.
“Are you serious? You’re just going to skim it off the top and expect me to drink it, pretending all the while there aren’t dairy microbes infesting my coffee? I don’t think so.”
Managing a curt nod, Kendall replied in an unbelievably even tone, “I’ll remake it for you. Not a problem.”
One could not afford to be impolite with rent due in New England.
“She’s young, so what?” she asked while scooping ice into the blender. Thick spoonfuls of pumpkin puree, espresso, almond milk, and syrup joined the ice. “She’s single. You’re single. Give it a shot.”
Peter fished a five out of his wallet, setting it beside the coffee he could not bring himself to drink. He wanted to heed Kendall’s advice, but at that idea, an ache rang out in his hollow body.
Because he could never have something casual with Ryleigh; she would get too attached and he would wind up hurt. Again. Or worse, he would hurt her.
“Yeah. That’s not happening.”
“What’s up with you tonight? You’re totally bummed.” Andrea flicked a piece of popcorn at Ryleigh, and it bounced off her cheek.
Saturdays were designated sleepover nights: popcorn, ginger ale in champagne flutes, and a cheesy romance movie marathon. A long-standing tradition.
Ryleigh refreshed the lockscreen on her phone for the millionth time. A crack splintered in her soul with that blank screen staring back at her. She had royally screwed up.
“It’s not a big deal.”
“You’re a pathetic liar, Ry.” Andrea aimed the remote at her television. “Clearly, it is a big deal, because this movie has your most hated type of male lead, and not once have I heard you mockingly ask if he conditions his beard or if he dry cleans all of that plaid.”
The breath Ryleigh pulled in nicked her insides like tiny shards of glass. Would Andrea understand? Perhaps that did not matter. An ear to vent to sounded nice.
“I told Peter I was a freshman at Hemlock. He noticed my psych book one day and I panicked.”
“Excuse me, you what?”
“He found out I was lying, of course, right? But it wasn’t my pathetic lying skills that nailed me. He found my scholarship article. God, he brought it to the shop and presented it as evidence, like I was on trial.”
“You should’ve told him from the start. At least you’re 18, though.” Andrea bit her thumbnail.
“That’s what I said. Let me tell you, he was none too impressed with that defense.” Ryleigh stared at the comforter, startled by memories of the confrontation. The bit with Kendall may have stung, but she had overreacted. He had been right. He owed her nothing. “He was … furious.”
She sat criss-cross, chin resting on her palm. “Sounds like an asshole, if you ask me. I mean, yeah, you lied, but it’s not like you guys did anything.”
The pilot light of Ryleigh’s embarrassment roared and flayed her skin to a crisp. When Andrea figured it out, she was left to wonder what gave it away: the dead silence or the pink, perspiring skin.
“Jesus, how much shit have you been keeping from me?”
“We made out the night of the Creek Bend game. Don’t get your hopes up, I don’t have any crude details to report.”
“Hold on.” Andrea scrambled for the remote and turned the movie off. The brooding lumberjack had lost his novelty. “You have to give me something after dropping that. Was he a good kisser, or what? ‘Cause he kind of seems like a dork.”
Melancholia swirled in the pit of Ryleigh’s soul. The mere mention of that kiss simultaneously made her toes curl and heart crack, knowing that she may never feel those lips again. “The best.”
A small rock pelted against Andrea’s window, preceded by another. And another.
“I told him not to come by tonight,” she mumbled as she undid the latches and lifted the window. Ryleigh migrated to the pneumonia hole, praying that whatever idiocy Colin had on display might distract from her internal pity party. Andrea glanced at her. “Christ, he knows Saturday nights are sacred.”
Colin had on a t-shirt and cargo shorts in full defiance of the early December night. His skateboard lay discarded on the grass. Even from the second floor of the Fuentes’ house, the girls could see his slack expression, as if he were a recent victim of lobotomy.
“What are you doing here? Did you not read my messages?” Andrea whisper yelled.
“I missed you,” his voice blurted, stupid and too loud. He rubbed his eyes, squinting up at his girlfriend like she was out of focus.
She huffed a pathetic laugh. “You saw me this morning, and you’ll see a lot more of me at school this week.”
“Just let me in, Andy.”
“Do you want my dad to kick your ass? Go ahead, ring the bell.” Colin, unable to register sarcasm in his zonked state, moped toward the front door. Andrea halted him. “You’re obviously stoned out of your mind. I can smell you from here. Go home. Call me tomorrow.”
Ryleigh’s chin poked forward at her friend’s election of ‘call me tomorrow,’ painfully aware that Peter would not be reaching out to her anytime soon.
“Is it that time of the year already?” Dr. Kennedy chuckled as he waltzed into the examination room, closing the door behind him.
“I guess so.”
Peter was in no mood to put up with Maxwell Kennedy and his tenor chuckle, his too white coat, his jolly disposition. He wanted to return home and mourn the loss of a girl who was never his.
“I know you’re not too terribly fond of these visits, so we’ll make it quick.” Dr. Kennedy readied his pen and clipboard. “Do you feel as if you’ve seen any improvement over the last 12 months?”
He had gone through great lengths to avoid the yearly check-in to get his medication refilled. Once, he managed to get an emergency prescription by phoning the nurse and explaining that he could not afford the annual appointment. Peter’s keenness to cheat the system backfired, though, when he realized that the temporary supply would only stave off his appointment one extra month.
“No.” Peter tilted his head from side to side. “Not until recently.”
“What caused the sudden shift, if I may ask?”
“The answer is horribly cliché.” He paused, debating whether he wanted to sound weak at the feet of his own psychiatrist. “I met a girl.”
“Hey, good for you, that’s great news,” Dr. Kennedy manufactured a cheerful response, attention diverted from the papers scattered atop his lap. “We can scale back to 60 milligrams a day if you think you’re ready. If you’re not feeling right after a few weeks, we can switch back to your usual.”
His mother had persuaded him to surrender to the help of medication, especially after his ‘incident,’ as she preferred to call it. Sitting here discussing a potential romantic entanglement was ludicrous considering a woman had
landed Peter in this office in the first place.
“I’ll stick with the 80. I just met this girl, I don’t want to scare her away.”
What are you talking about? Do you hear yourself?
Peter had essentially handed Ryleigh an eviction notice from his heart, and here he was yammering on to his psychiatrist like she was this crucial, albeit new, part of his life.
Dr. Kennedy offered an uncharacteristic bit of wisdom as he handed Peter the script. “You have to hold onto whatever happiness you find in this world.”
Peter’s silence made Ryleigh’s poetry skew in an agitated direction, but she had never been more prolific. Bitter verses flowed from the tip of her pen, a relentless fountain of spite. She had no shortage of words to describe his stubbornness and her stupidity.
Ryleigh remained expectant her phone would ring, that Peter would somehow reach out to say he had changed his mind.
The message never came. The phone never rang.
Cue the greasy hair and three-day-old socks. She supposed this is how romance worked in the movies: getting all hung up on a guy and granting permission for the entire flow of daily life to stop or go based on their say-so.
“Meet me downstairs in five,” Charlotte called from the hallway. Seconds later, her ballet flats clicked on the wooden staircase.
Ryleigh slipped on fresh socks and spritzed her mess of hair with dry shampoo. Not much could have been done to rescue her fatigued appearance in five minutes. She would have to roll with disaster.
The thought of leaving the house was unappealing, but this instance was non-negotiable. Once a week, she accompanied her mother to the grocery store. The routine sanctity of the shopping trip became their ritual since they were unable to spend much time together between their busy schedules.
An indistinguishable song whispered through the speakers in the Bransons’ SUV. Ryleigh kept quiet as her mother drove toward Murphy’s Market.
Colonies of bare trees blurred in her peripheral. She felt a kindred spirit with those naked branches, as if Peter had stripped away all the brilliance that made her whole.
Purple rings hugged Charlotte’s eyes, a visual display of her exhaustion after two night shifts. She broke the stillness as they neared the store. “What’s been going on with you lately?”
“Nothing.” Ryleigh further chiseled at her chipped nail polish, the flakes dispersing in the car’s pristine cabin.
“It must be something. You’ve been in your room the entire week. I know it’s exams, but you can’t possibly have spent all of that time studying.” Her denim eyes cut to her daughter. “We’re worried about you.”
“It’s a guy.”
“When we had our little chat, I assumed this guy was hypothetical. Is it the one in college?” Charlotte inquired, pulling into a parking spot.
She was not in the mood to ad-lib details. “Maybe.”
Once they parked, Ryleigh let her seatbelt slingshot away from her body and bolted out of the car. She cursed herself the entire walk to the entrance. Sure, the lying was eating her alive; but luring her mother anywhere near the truth was a more dangerous game, one she was not ready to play.
“Whoever he is, dad and I need to meet him. I agreed to let you go out with someone a few years older with that stipulation. I think that’s reasonable.” Charlotte retrieved a cart as they entered the frigid grocery store. “This guy must be something special if you’re this torn up.”
“I’ll be fine.” Another lie. Add it to my tab in hell.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” her mother began, trifling through her bottomless brown leather bag for the list. “I saw Andrea and her boyfriend at the emergency room last night.”
Ryleigh reanimated on a dime. “Is she alright? She didn’t mention anything about it.”
“She’s fine. Her boyfriend had an accident at the skate park, nothing a few stitches couldn’t fix. Andrea ought to buy him a helmet for Christmas.”
Stoned out of his wits, no doubt.
“No kidding.”
She envied what Andrea and Colin shared; she wanted that with Peter. But she doubted he would ever give her the time of day again after her transgression.
They finished up in the produce section and headed for the bread aisle, nearly colliding with another shopping cart in the process. Charlotte apologized to whomever she had almost annihilated. “I’m so sorry.”
Ryleigh’s breath hitched at the sight of Peter standing just a few feet from them. Their separation did not seem to affect him in the way it had rocked her. His sharp face was clean-shaven, and he wore office clothes beneath his open peacoat. She wished she had changed; the yoga pants and oversized sweatshirt swallowed her petite figure, not doing her any favors in the shapeliness department.
“That’s okay.” He gave a lazy, obligatory smile and cast a look at Ryleigh that silently asked if her mother knew of their connection. If so, he did not wait for a cue. “Hey, Ryleigh.”
Even if the greeting was out of pure politeness, which seemed very un-Peter-like, it melted her aching heart.
Charlotte’s fingers grazed the base of her neck. “You two know each other?”
“From work,” she intoned as if her mother should have arrived at the conclusion on her own. “He comes by practically every day.”
“Oh.” A shaky laugh escaped her mother’s lips.
“It’s true. Your daughter makes a mean cappuccino.” He extended a hand, which Charlotte shook with relative uncertainty. “Peter.”
“Charlotte.” She mirrored his forced amiability.
“It was nice meeting you,” Peter said, then regarded Ryleigh, “I’ll see you later in the week.”
She was not sure if he said this because her mother formed a barrier between them, or if he would actually start coming to the shop again. Her pulse slowed as Peter rounded the corner to another aisle, pulling his ringing phone from the depths of his coat.
No less than two seconds after he left, Charlotte belted her daughter into the hot seat. “I don’t like the way that guy looked at you.”
Ryleigh played it off. “He’s a caffeine addict who probably associates my face with coffee by now. It’s basic psychology, mom.”
“Maybe this after-school job wasn’t such a great idea.”
“Because of Peter?”
“Because of guys like Peter,” she specified, giving her daughter a sidelong glance that suggested, ‘I was your age once, and not that long ago.’
“He’s harmless.”
“Maybe he is, dear.” Charlotte swiped a loaf of 15-grain bread from the shelf. “I’m just not in love with the idea of 40-year-old guys visiting you at work.”
It occurred to Ryleigh she had not the faintest clue of Peter’s age. Not that it mattered. Her deep-seated adulation of him could not be halted by a number.
“They’re there for the espresso, not for me.”
“It’s my job to worry about you,” her mother said, as if the line somehow justified her paranoid rant.
No amount of motherly concern could dispel the pink cotton candy cloud of infatuation blanketing her brain.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Charlotte quirked a blonde brow. “You hate public restrooms.”
Ryleigh’s thumping heart drowned out her mother’s skepticism as she sprinted along the aisle.
As if running into Ryleigh and her mother had not turned his day sideways, the mysterious forces of the universe decided Peter could stand to suffer some more.
‘Leo Asher’ lit up his phone’s display.
Leo, the man who had inadvertently outed Ryleigh’s lie. Leo, the man he should have thanked for shedding light on such a pivotal fact but whom he mostly wanted to strangle.
His tongue lodged between his molars. “Do you realize you’re calling me two hours before work? This better be a Cat 5 emergency. I swear, you and Corso are like cantankerous growths.”
“Sorry to bother you. It can wait.”
“Consider me bo
thered. And you’ve already got me on the phone, so you might as well get on with it.”
“I think I blew my interview.”
The miniscule concern hit a new low of unimportance.
“The one with the basketball coach? I skimmed it when I proofed last night. It was fine. Interviewing isn’t something you pick up overnight.”
Something prevented him from moving any further as he knocked cans of crushed tomatoes into the two-tiered cart. Ryleigh rested her foot on the bottom bar, a smirk playing at her lips.
Peter held up a finger. “Stop by my office tonight if you get a chance. I’ll give you some pointers. Oh, and Asher? I won’t be as gracious the next time you dial me outside of hours.”
“We really need to discuss your eating habits.” She beheld the collection of cans and sleeves of bagels with genuine concern. Her laugh raised goosebumps on his forearms. The familiar, breathy sound may as well have sent him into cardiac arrest.
God, he missed her.
“I’m a single guy hurtling toward middle age. Pray tell, what kind of stuff do you think I’m capable of cooking?” A more vibrant blue radiated from her irises, unobscured by their usual shadows. “You look better without all of that crap around your eyes.”
“It’s called eyeliner. And for the record, I don’t wear it for other people. I wear it because it makes me feel good.”
At last, she stepped aside and permitted him to advance down the aisle. Unrelenting in her pursuit to talk to him, she followed at his heels.
“You can’t do this.” Ryleigh’s protest tugged at his reserve of remorse. “Don’t you realize I miss you?”
The phrase channeled helplessness, as if she were a stray animal Peter refused to take home. It also crossed the rubicon of things that did not sit well with him. Those words signaled attachment. They encapsulated everything he feared.
How could she possibly miss him when they barely knew each other? The idea was absurd.
Another part of him thought he might have missed Ryleigh, too. But there were too many conflicting emotions where she was involved to trace any of their origins.
Loving Rosenfeld Page 7