I felt my forehead crease. “What?”
“Logan’s still in high school. He’s eighteen.”
Oh. My. God. As if this moment could get any more embarrassing. If things hadn’t gotten all mixed up that first night I came here, if Logan had been working and receptive—if I hadn’t seen Reece first and fixated all my longing on him—I could have hooked up with a high school boy. Eighteen or not . . . he was still in high school!
I shook my head as if breaking free of the vestiges of a bad dream. “I didn’t throw myself at him. I just met him tonight.”
“But you came here for him. You thought I was him.” His gaze cut into me, merciless and deep.
As a rule of thumb, I didn’t run from life when it got ugly or uncomfortable. I’d faced a lot. A father dead. A mother who chose her addiction over me. This—him—shouldn’t be anything I couldn’t handle. His opinion or judgment of me wasn’t supposed to mean anything. He was just one step getting me closer to Hunter. That’s all he was supposed to be.
Even telling myself this, I couldn’t stop myself. The time had come to retreat.
The tide of people shifted. Bodies bumped us. His grip slipped off my wrist and my opportunity arrived. I ran, using my elbows as he’d once advised me. Plunging out the back door, I spotted Emerson with her phone to her ear.
“There you are,” she said when she saw me. “I was just trying to reach you.”
“Let’s go,” I growled, latching onto her arm and pulling her down the street toward the packed parking lot.
“What’s wrong? I mean besides the obvious awkwardness of finding out we confused your hottie for the other hottie.” She laughed. “C’mon. It’s kind of funny.”
I slid her a look.
She bumped me with her hip. “C’mon. Pat yourself on the back. According to Annie, Reece is the elusive one. And he kissed you.”
“Reece just cornered me back there, when we got separated.”
“Ooh.” Her eyes flared. “What did he say?”
“Oh, he knew all about it.”
She winced. “Awkward much?”
“Oh, yeah, and his brother. Logan? He’s eighteen and still in high school.”
“Oh, that’s awesome.” She laughed, clapping her hands. “Wait till I tell Annie.”
“Yeah, Reece pretty much thinks I’m a terrible person.”
She stopped laughing. “Impossible.”
“Yeah. He does.” I nodded doggedly, my footsteps beating out a hard rhythm across the gravel. “You should have seen the way he looked at me.”
“Well then he’s a jerk. Screw him. Who needs him?”
She unlocked her car and I opened the passenger side door. I sank down onto the seat with a heavy sigh.
“You can hone your skills on any guy you want.”
I laughed brokenly and corrected her. “No. Not any guy I want.”
I wasn’t one of those girls who didn’t know what she looked like when she stared at herself in the mirror. I knew I was attractive enough, but with thousands of other pretty twentysomethings around who dressed much better (and in far less clothing) than me, I wasn’t anything extraordinary.
“Yes! You’re the full package, Pepper. Hunter’s already noticed. Hell, you don’t need Reece or any other guy for that matter. Maybe it’s time you just go for it, Pepper. Stop beating around the bush and go after Hunter.”
Nodding, I stared out the windshield as she pulled onto the street and left the strip of bars and restaurants behind. “You’re right. It was a dumb idea.”
“No, it wasn’t. And even if it was, I think it was my idea, so blame me.”
A smile brushed my mouth. I looked over at her. She frowned as she stopped at a red light, and I could tell she was feeling bad.
I relaxed back against the headrest. “No one made me do anything. I know you credit yourself with mad skills of persuasion, but I decided to do this.”
She sent me a skeptical look. “Really?”
“Really. It is possible to go against the Great Emerson.”
She sniffed as she turned onto Butler, the main street that cut through campus and crossed in front of our dorm. The academic buildings were quiet as we drove past. Several upstairs windows glowed with light. I envisioned the students within, buried in their lab work. They possessed too much ambition to cut loose for a wild night at the bars. A few weeks ago I would have been one of them, ensconced in my dorm room or at the library. It was crazy to think that a phone call from Lila, meeting a hot bartender, and bumping into Hunter had changed all that. I told myself it was the combination of the three, but what did I know? Maybe it was just time for a change. To break out of the shell I’d forced myself into the morning my mother dropped me off on Gram’s front stoop.
Whatever the reason, a switch had been flipped inside me.
With Reece’s face running through my mind, his light-colored eyes so sharp and scornful, I felt vulnerable and shaken. It was an uneasy sensation. Reece didn’t make me feel safe at all, which was everything I needed. Everything I craved. My lips tingled in memory of his kiss, and I admitted that it wasn’t the only thing I craved anymore. Hopefully things would work out with Hunter and then I could have both—what I craved and what I needed.
With a sigh, I rested my head against the glass of the window. The coolness seeped into my cheek. “I’ll have to go back. Apologize to him.”
“To Reece?” Emerson slid into a vacant spot in front of our building. This early, it was relatively easy to score a good space. She put the car into park and swung around to face me. “What for?”
“I was using him.”
She laughed. “Oh, Pepper. You’re too nice. You think he cares that you mistook him for his man-whore of a brother? So you flirted with him a few times. No harm in that.”
I saw his face in my mind again, the anger in his eyes. He looked like he had cared.
“I think I owe him an explanation at least. I lied . . . I denied everything and then I ran off like a coward.”
Emerson shook her head and killed the engine. “You have scruples, I’ll give you that.”
We got out of the car. It beeped locked after us as Emerson continued. “Men use girls all the time and never apologize. My own father is at the top of the list. He’s the king of players, even at fifty-four. I went through half a dozen nannies because he usually ended up sleeping with them and then fired them afterward because things got too awkward.” Emerson fumbled for her door key. “And don’t let me get started about my mother and the prize shit she married. And my stepbrother.” Her shoulders shook with a visible shudder. “I won’t even go there.”
We stepped into the harsh fluorescent lighting that buzzed like an incessant gnat. I studied her almost warily as she punched the UP button on the elevator.
She rarely talked about her father, and her mother was a dead subject. I didn’t even know she had a stepbrother. This gave me new insight into her and confirmed what I’d always suspected. There was more beneath the surface. She was more than the carefree party girl who fooled around with a different guy every night.
I wasn’t going to push her to talk. After my father died, there had been a string of loser guys in my mother’s life. She never hooked up with the decent, settle-down types. Some of her boyfriends were so mean that I learned to be grateful for the ones who didn’t see me at all. The ones who looked through me like I wasn’t there.
Yeah. Em could keep her secrets. I had mine.
As we stepped inside the elevator, her eyes swung my way, the brilliant blue there as hard as I’ve ever seen. “You don’t owe him anything, Pepper.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. But I still had to see him again.
Chapter 11
Hey, Gram, how’s it going?” I sandwiched my phone between my shoulder and ear as I kicked off the khaki pants that were regulation for all Little Miss Muffet Daycare employees.
“Oh, Pepper, dear, when are you coming home?”
It was the same question she always asked. Even though I wrote the dates of my breaks on the calendar beside the fridge, she never referred to it.
“Thanksgiving week. I’ll be there the Wednesday before. I have to work that weekend.” I winced at my reflection in the mirror as I unbuttoned my blouse. The tightly constructed braid had deteriorated hours ago. It hadn’t held up well against wrangling toddlers. I tugged the band loose from the already unraveling mess.
“They need an accurate count for Thanksgiving dinner.”
I shook my head at her reprimand, but said nothing. “Well, RSVP for two.” Dinner was usually catered by Hardy’s, a local cafeteria that did a decent roast turkey and dressing. The seniors packed into the hall as early as 10 A.M. I would be the only one in the room under the age of seventy. But at least I didn’t have to worry about my grandmother cooking a huge meal anymore.
My first Thanksgiving with her she insisted on cooking everything herself. She was going to fry the turkey. Fortunately, a daughter visiting her mother next door to us noticed Gram setting up the fryer outside and came to investigate, stopping Gram seconds before she dropped a frozen turkey into the pot of boiling oil and burned down our house—and us.
“I will. Just two?”
I hesitated. She had never asked that before. “Yes.”
“Because Martha Sultenfuess’s granddaughter just got engaged. You don’t have a boyfriend yet, do you?”
“Isn’t Mrs. Sultenfuess’s granddaughter in her thirties?”
“Is she? I thought you were about the same age.”
“I’m nineteen, Gram.”
Rosco started yapping in the background. I could picture the Yorkie standing at the screen door, begging to be let out. “Your father married when he was nineteen.”
I fell silent, stunned she had even said that. Was she honestly holding up my parents’ marriage as some sort of example I should follow?
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Gram had always been a little flighty. Once, in eighth grade, I opened my lunch sack to find a can of green beans, a bottle of prune juice, and the remote control inside. That had gotten a lot of laughs and earned me a few unpleasant nicknames. But lesson learned. I packed my own lunches after that. By my freshman year, I took care of her more than she took care of me. Leaving home for college hadn’t been the easiest decision, but I’d forced myself to do it. I couldn’t devote my life to her. She didn’t want or expect that from me.
Now, at seventy-nine, there was no predicting what she would say or do. The latter was a very real point of concern for me. I worried that she would soon need to move into a full-scale nursing home. I hated to consider it. And so did Gram. The first and last time I mentioned it to her, she started crying so hard I hadn’t had the nerve to bring it up again.
I’d watch her over Thanksgiving and decide if we needed to revisit the conversation.
“I’ll meet someone someday,” I assured her. For some reason the image of Reece flashed across my mind. What would Gram think if I brought home a pierced, tattooed bartender? She’d probably think I was a lot like my mother.
“Well, I won’t be around forever, Pepper. I’d like to see you settled before my time comes.”
“Oh, Gram. You’re going to live forever.” It’s what I always said whenever she brought up dying.
She laughed. “God, I hope not.”
I fell silent at this. I didn’t want to think about losing her. When Gram was gone, I’d be truly alone. Emotion welled up in my throat. When I first went to live with her, the thought of losing her terrified me. I’d already lost everyone and everything. No one ever stayed. I assumed I’d eventually lose her, too. It took a few years for me to accept that she wasn’t going to abandon me. I used to freak out every time she caught a cold. When she broke her leg and had to stay a few days in the hospital, I couldn’t eat or sleep until she was back home.