The Option Play, page 23
Me: I’m supposed to go to a party tonight with Woodsmen people. GFs and BFs and spouses. And me.
Kellen: Remember that deer are a crepuscular species and watch your speed.
That wasn’t the answer I was looking for from him. I pounded my desk, exasperated.
Me: You don’t think it will be weird?
Kellen: ?
Also not the answer I wanted to read!
“Um, Caitlyn? Are you upset about something?”
I forced out my frustration on a long breath instead of taking it out on my blameless coworker. “No, nothing,” I said to Isaac. “Nothing about the shop, anyway. It’s only, you know when you want people to notice something, and they just don’t? Like, they don’t seem to see what’s in front of their dumb, handsome face? No, it’s a really smart face,” I admitted with a sigh.
“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean,” Isaac replied. “It’s like how I kept trying to ask you out because I was crazy about you for three years.”
I stared at him. “What? You are?”
“Not anymore,” he told me quickly. “But yeah, before? I really was. You just never noticed it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I now knew exactly how that felt—and it sucked. “I’m really sorry, Isaac. That was terrible of me!”
“You didn’t do it on purpose.”
No, and Kellen wasn’t doing anything on purpose either. Right? He was smart, but he wasn’t relationship-ready, I reminded myself. I remembered what he’d said about his future plans: playing football in Miami, a house on the ocean, and no woman in the picture at all. I also remembered his feelings about the “breakup” that was supposed to happen when we got back from the trip: he thought that the things people wrote about their sadness and loss were BS, that they would forget about it after having a drink.
“Caitlyn? Did you hear what I said?”
“Sorry, yeah. Sorry, no,” I corrected. “Can you repeat that?”
“I said, I used to get totally tongue-tied when you came into the shop to see your dad before you started working here. I would just stare at you and it took a long time to get up the courage to talk. I finally said, ‘I can move your car for you.’ That was my great line.” He laughed, and I smiled back at him.
“I definitely didn’t know that ‘I can move your car for you’ had a deeper meaning. It’s like this book I’m reading, the one you thought was supposed to be funny? It has all this other stuff going on behind the words.”
“Yeah, there was a lot I was trying to express with that but I couldn’t get it out right. I tried to ask you out, too,” Isaac told me, but he grimaced and shook his head. “I kept coming up here to the front of the shop but either I lost my nerve or I got interrupted. One time, Kellen Karma came in and cut me off.”
I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about, but I sure didn’t. I’d thought that I remembered that day very well, every moment as Kellen walked in and then all the odd stuff he’d said to me about hiring me as his fake girlfriend. Fake, I emphasized to myself. However, I didn’t seem to recall that Isaac had even been there at all. Ugh, that wasn’t so nice. I’d totally ignored him like that?
“I finally got over being a such damn wuss about women,” he went on. “I wanted to tell you, because it may come up, that I got Danni to go out with me.”
“Danni Lalka? You and Danni?”
“Yeah.” Isaac grinned. “I sat and waited around at the smoothie place near the stadium. Danni finally came in to get a drink and it turned out that when she was here at the shop to talk to you, she had noticed me, too. I asked her out and she said yeah, and we’re going to dinner this Friday.”
Mostly all I remembered from her first visit here were a lot of tears, snot, and wailing. There had also been flirting? “Woah. Well, that’s great, Isaac! I’m glad it’s working out with her. She’s super sweet.” She was getting back to her former level of dance, too, as her confidence returned to normal. “I’m happy for you. And I’m really sorry that I was so dumb before and didn’t notice…you.”
“It was mostly my own fault,” he said. “I should have just come out and told you. You don’t have ESP.”
No, but I wished I did, and I decided to ask the mediums about it the next time they came over for a cleansing. I felt terrible about Isaac’s crush, so dumb. No, more like so…thoughtless. “You know what? Danni loves yellow roses,” I told him. “Her mom got them for her after the Woodsmen Fan Day and she said that they’re her favorite.”
“I should bring flowers tonight?”
“For sure.” I nodded. “She’ll think it’s really thoughtful of you.”
Thoughtful? Thoughtless. Those words ran through my head a lot as I went over to teach a dance class at Helping Hands when I was done at my dad’s shop that afternoon. I’d started volunteering there and I loved it. But I didn’t love what I’d just learned about myself. How had I missed that Isaac had liked me for three whole years? Had I really been so thoughtlessly ignoring him?
I was seriously frowning as I drove past the dump and into the parking lot, and I felt even worse as I walked toward the beat-up door of the old building. Mercy, this place was a dump too. I sent Kellen a picture of one of the big ruts in the old blacktop.
“Where are you?” he wrote back immediately. “Are you in a bad neighborhood?”
I thought about our town. Where would that be, exactly?
Me: I’m going in to teach my Beginner Ballet class at Helping Hands. It does stink a little here from the dump. I mean, the recycling center. Where are you?
He sent back a picture of a wide front porch overlooking green lawns and the beautiful lake.
Kellen: I’m sitting with Jory Morin. He says hello. He invited us to either come over for dinner, move into their house, or camp on his lawn. I wasn’t clear what he was suggesting. I agreed.
To what? Us camping on the lawn? Moving in? “His wife may have other ideas,” I wrote back. I thought for a moment, then typed again.
Me: I was thinking about Landon Zalamero. The image guy.
Kellen: ?
Me: He was the one who came up with the contract, right? It was his idea that we would go on the trip together.
Kellen: Yes. I thought at first that it was a terrible idea but he convinced me of its merits. Why are you asking that now?
Because I’d been hoping a little that it had only been an excuse, that actually, Kellen had been interested in me and he’d hatched a plan to get us together somehow. Like how Isaac said he’d waited for Danni at the smoothie shop, hoping he’d run into her. Like we were in some drippy romance book. Dang it.
Kellen: Be careful when you leave. The sun will set at about 9:13pm so it should be very light. I’m more concerned about the winter months when the days are so short.
“About” 9:13. I smiled slightly at the screen and told him that I’d be careful and that he didn’t need to worry about the winter yet, and then I went into the dance class. The little girls ran and jumped on me for hugs, and I felt a lot better about the whole day.
“Hey, Caitlyn?” my old friend Jessie called out to me as I left. She worked at the front desk here and also ran arts and crafts classes during the summers, so she often had a lot of glitter in her hair. “You’re with Kellen Karma, right?”
“Um.” I cleared my throat. “Why?”
“Why?” she repeated. “Aren’t you?” But she went on. “He called here and asked to speak to the director, Miss Margulies. She said he wants to donate outdoor lights and repave the parking lot! It’s amazing! I can’t believe that you didn’t say anything.” She went on about the Woodsmen and how charitable most of them were, how great it was for people to work in their communities, how Kellen’s donation would help their organization so much.
“That is amazing,” I agreed, just as surprised as she had been. “I’ll tell Kellen how happy everyone is. And you know what? I’m going to a party right now with all the Woodsmen spouses and partners. I’m going to talk to them about working with Helping Hands. I bet so many of them have really cool skills and they could teach stuff here, or maybe they’d want to help renovate the building. Or just give gobs of cash, because that would be great, too.”
“Really?” Jess grinned at me. “That would be even more awesome.”
I nodded. Yeah, it would. I called Kellen when I got to the old parking lot but he didn’t respond, and then I rushed home to get ready, shaving twenty-four minutes off my time by leaving my hair down for Gaby and her daughter to fix for me. They did a nice job, too, but I still felt weird about the night. I picked at the seam of my dress as we waited in Gaby’s beautiful living room for the other guests to arrive. She didn’t have one cold spot, and the house smelled great.
“Why are you nervous?” she asked me. “You’re going to like most of these people. Well, the wife of the cornerback isn’t my favorite, because she’s a little critical.”
That probably meant that the woman planted a hatchet in everyone’s back. Gaby was a very nice person and not very critical herself. “Who else?” I pressed, and got a short list of guests I might want to avoid. But when everyone arrived, I found that she’d been right that they were very nice. They were also very interested in me and Kellen, mostly in him.
“Darius swore to me that he speaks, but I never heard it myself,” a very pretty, very tall woman told me. But she was smiling so I knew that she wasn’t trying to insult Kellen, which was good because I didn’t want to hear a bad word about him. Not one. If anyone had anything to say, I wasn’t great with comebacks but I still had an outstanding high kick and my right foot in this pointy-toed shoe with the stiletto heel would really do some damage.
Not that I was going to have to kick any of these people in the face, because they were generally friendly. I had a big conversation with Jory Morin’s wife and straightened out with her that we weren’t going to move into their house, that in fact, Kellen and I didn’t even live together.
“We’re more of a loose couple,” I told Meredith Morin, who didn’t seem to understand what I meant but nodded as if she was trying to. I repeated that several times around the room to create a little distance between myself and Kellen, but then right after I said that? I’d find myself talking more about him, some funny thing he’d said (which might not have been on purpose, but I’d found it funny) or a nice thing he’d done (which he never wanted to talk about himself).
“When we go to the beach, he worries that the sand will be too hot for me. He seems to think my skin is very weak,” I heard myself say to the new assistant quarterbacks coach’s wife, Alicia Nour. “And once, when I got thrown in the ocean, he jumped in to save me.”
“What did you say, Caitlyn?” Gaby demanded. “Did Kellen throw you into the ocean? Did he know how scared of whales you are?”
It got very quiet all of a sudden, like they were waiting for my answer. “No!” I said, my voice just a little too loud. “He would never do anything like that! Someone else—someone who’s a big jerk did, though, and Kellen jumped right in after me. He didn’t even think about it, not even if there were whales! And he swam to the boat with me riding on his back and he told me a story in Italian so I would stay calm. He’s a very thoughtful person, when you get down to it.”
“Is he?” I heard someone mutter, and I turned around, enraged.
“He is!” I said. “He knows that he doesn’t always come off that way and it upsets him. It does! He just never had practice with people because he had a very, very weird childhood. Very weird! But I’ve thought a lot about it and I don’t think he should have to change. Obviously, he shouldn’t say things that upset people, and he shouldn’t hurt their feelings, but if he likes to know the exact number of minutes that Bircher muesli will need to soak or something, so what? Or if he likes to shake hands a certain number of times or he notices that my eyes perfectly match the couch, that’s great, because that’s just the way he is. He doesn’t mind things about me, like he doesn’t really care that I’m in the bathroom getting dressed for sixty-four minutes. So…” I scratched my forehead. Where was I going with this? “Kellen’s awesome and I don’t want to hear anybody say any different.” I looked around the group. “Anybody,” I repeated, and if they took that as a threat, then good.
Gaby put her hand on my arm. “I really wasn’t trying to criticize him,” she told me. “I’m glad you feel that way about him.”
“I wasn’t, either,” Alicia Nour said. “I’d like to hear more about your dance classes. I know someone else who volunteers at Helping Hands but he doesn’t have the financial resources right now to contribute a lot besides his time.” She glanced over at Gaby as she spoke. “He’s always been very impressed with Miss Margulies.”
“She seems like a very strong director,” I agreed, and gradually, other people started chatting again and moved past my outburst.
Gaby hadn’t, though. She returned to the topic of Kellen after the last guest left (the cornerback’s wife, who was complaining that she thought there might have been shellfish in the spinach and artichoke dip and that was why her feet were puffy, that the swelling wasn’t related to her four-inch heels).
“Ok, Caitlyn,” G ordered. “Put down those dishes and come talk to me. I know something’s going on. You acted so strange tonight.”
“Did I?”
She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “This is going to be great practice if my daughter ever starts sneaking around in high school. What is going on?”
“Tessa wouldn’t sneak around. She’s not like that,” I said.
Gaby tilted her head. I was just not as good as not-answering as Kellen was.
“I’m not sneaking around, either. Not really,” I assured her. “Not too much.” I covered my face with my hands. “Mercy, G, I have to tell you. It’s been brewing for months and I couldn’t say anything because of the contract, and then, because I don’t know what’s really happening so I couldn’t even explain it. But you’re going to be so mad.”
I peeked through my fingers. She was still waiting.
“Ok,” I said. “Here I go.” It took me another moment before I continued, “It started with my first strike. No, I think it started with what happened with Brown.”
“Sleeping with him?”
“Sleeping with him and what he said after. How we broke up.” I paused, giving myself a moment to gear up to repeat it, something I hadn’t done before. Sure, Gaby knew part of it, the sex part of it, but I’d been too ashamed to spill everything, even to her. “He said that I’d been leading him around by his penis, but he used a different word, and that I’d teased him. I felt like I had to.”
“Ugh! I hate that guy! I can’t stand that he put pressure on you,” she said furiously.
The whole thing had been awful. “Afterwards, he said it wasn’t worth the time he’d wasted with me.” I covered my face again. “He wanted a woman who knew what she was doing, not a little girl who didn’t. I knew that I should have done it before.”
“There’s no right and wrong with timing!” Gaby said, sounding exactly like my mom.
“Yeah, there is. It was just like everything else I’ve dragged my feet about. I shouldn’t have waited to have sex so that I was the oldest living virgin.”
“He shouldn’t have made you feel bad about it, you mean!”
“It was dumb to wait and make it into a big deal, but I’ve been waiting for everything in a dumb way. Like, I should have moved out of my parents’ house the minute I graduated from high school. I should have gotten a job with someone other than my dad and I should have planned for a future beyond the Wonderwomen. I should have learned how to do laundry, I definitely should have, because I shrank my favorite jean shorts to the point that I think they would fit Tessa. I’ll bring them over the next time I come here.”
“I think you’re wrong. No, you’re right about laundry, but I don’t think you should rush things if you’re not ready. Not moving out, not sex, not anything until it’s really right. And I can’t believe that Brown said that baloney to you,” Gaby told me. Her eyes were wet. “It’s so mean!”
“He was really mad because I cried and I said that I should have held out for more than the back of his car, that I was worth more than what we’d just done. That was why he turned so awful.” I’d decided that yeah, I was going to have sex with him, because I really cared about him and I thought he felt the same way. I didn’t know that he was going to immediately say, “All right. Climb over the seat. Or are you going to make me wait even more?” We hadn’t even taken off all our clothes—he never even saw me naked. There was just some grabbing and then it was over. “I got emotional afterwards and a lot of men don’t like tears, I’ve found,” I went on.
Luckily, Gaby’s husband was ok with them because she cried plenty. Like, right now at this moment, she was bawling, but she dried her eyes and hugged me. “I slept with my boyfriend after prom,” she said when she let go. “I still had my crown and sash on for prom queen. He was so confused about the whole process that he put on the condom inside out.”
“How did he manage to do that?” I asked. He obviously hadn’t had anyone like my mom in his life. She’d had me practicing on fruit for ages.
“I’m not sure how because I had my eyes closed. All I remember was saying, ‘Ow, that hurts! Ow! Are you done already?’ And it was over.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m just trying to say, sometimes the first time isn’t like in books—you know, everybody passing out with bliss or something? But it gets a lot better. Especially with someone who actually cares about you, which Brown didn’t. Isn’t it so much better with Kellen?” Luckily, she didn’t wait for an answer. “Would hitting someone with my car leave a big dent in the hood, and if so, would your dad be able to get it out, no questions asked?”
“You’re a great friend, G.” I hugged her too and she got tissues for us both. “I was thinking about Danni and how the knocks on her confidence made her dance badly. Mine made me act badly. It’s not an excuse for my keg stand—”
