Something in the Way: A Love Saga (The Complete Collection) Page 2

“If I made you uncomfortable.” He removed the bandana and used that on his face instead. Dirt smeared across his olive skin. He was making it worse. I could see his eyes better now, dark brown like soda pop, but against the sun, there were lighter flecks, gold as the chain in my pocket.

  My stomach tightened. I was uncomfortable, but him knowing that made it worse.

  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and hit it against his palm. “You should get the clasp checked,” he said before he walked away.

  I made it all the way to the front door when I remembered I didn’t have my house keys. I could picture them on my desk between my phone and a stack of Sassy magazines. I hadn’t even thought to take them this morning. Why would I? Tiffany was supposed to be with me. Even the gate into the backyard was locked. Dad had been extra diligent about securing the house since construction had started.

  I shuffled back down the walkway, sat on the curb, and took out my book. Somehow, I could sense the man watching me. I wanted to look back. I liked his dark eyes, and how he looked scary, but he’d done something nice for me. I read the same paragraph three times and still didn’t know what it said, so I gave in and glanced up. He sat on a brick wall that surrounded the lot, his hand cupped around a lighter as he lit the cigarette between his lips. He wasn’t looking at me.

  I realized what was bothering me. I hadn’t thanked him for returning the bracelet, and that was rude. I closed my book and got up. This time, he did watch as I walked back along the street toward him.

  “Thanks,” I said from the curb.

  “For?”

  I put my book under one arm, took out the bracelet, and showed it to him. “You could’ve kept it. I wouldn’t’ve known.”

  “What would I do with women’s jewelry?” he asked.

  “Give it to your girlfriend.” I pretended to concentrate on getting the bracelet on so he wouldn’t see me blushing. The longer he was silent, the more uncomfortable I got. I had no idea how he’d taken the comment. Unable to help myself, I finally glanced up at him. “Or your mom. Or sister.”

  “If I’d kept your bracelet, I would’ve taken it to a pawn shop.”

  Heat soared up my chest, right to my cheeks. A porn shop? If he hadn’t seen me blushing before, he definitely did now. I’d never heard of a porn shop. Well, I knew what porn was. Boys at my school bragged about looking at it. My dad got Playboy in the mail. But what kind of things did a shop sell?

  “You get locked out?” he asked.

  I stepped onto the lot. “My sister has the key.”

  He nodded. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Because he was older and bigger, he seemed unapproachable, but I wanted to talk to him anyway. He took a drag of his cigarette. “What’re you reading?”

  I gave up trying to get the bracelet on. “The Grapes of Wrath.”

  “The one with the farmers?”

  “It’s about the Great Depression,” I said.

  “Why’d you pick that?”

  “Because it was next on the list.”

  His forehead wrinkled. “The list?”

  I walked a little closer to him, holding my unclasped bracelet in place. “Required summer reading.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette he’d just lit. “You want to sit?”

  The wall probably only came up to his waist, but for me, it was tall enough that I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by trying to get up. “I’ll stand.”

  “So this list . . . you just go in order, one by one?” he asked. “What if you’re in the mood for something different?”

  Was anyone ever in the mood for the Great Depression? This paperback had taken me longer to read than any other book so far and not just because it was almost five hundred pages. I hadn’t thought to tackle the list any other way. “I guess I could try something else.”

  “You’re not enjoying it?”

  My mouth went dry just thinking about all the lengthy descriptions—traveling across country, drought, dust. “There’s a lot of . . . information.”

  “Put it down for a while. Try something else. Maybe something not on the list.”

  “Can’t. School starts in six weeks, and there are more books after this.”

  “You could always do what I did and watch the movie.”

  I balked. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s cheating.”

  “Huh.” The ends of his grease-smudged jeans grazed the bottoms of his worn boots. Where did they carry pants long enough for so much leg? His t-shirt must’ve been through the wash hundreds of times, faded to the point I could barely make out a rainbow streak across it.

  I squinted to read it. “What’s Pink Floyd?”

  “What?” He glanced at me and then down, pulling the fabric taut with one hand. “It’s a band. You never heard of them?”

  I shook my head as my cheeks warmed. I shouldn’t have asked. Tiffany knew all the latest bands, watched all the music videos, and I tried to keep up, but there were so many. Nirvana was the one Tiffany loved most. Why couldn’t he have been wearing a Nirvana shirt? I knew most of their songs—I’d heard them through the wall enough times. “I don’t listen to the radio much.”

  “Me, neither. There’s some pretty bad stuff out there.”

  I smiled a little. Tiffany was all about her CDs. Saying you didn’t like music was like admitting you weren’t cool. Everybody had something to say about the latest album or some underground band or the ‘song of the summer.’ “I play a little piano,” I said. “But I’ll probably stop.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m not any good. Anyway, my sister says piano’s for geeks.”

  He studied me a few seconds and then nodded toward my parents’ house. “Was that your sister yesterday?”

  Of course he wanted to know about Tiffany. It should’ve occurred to me earlier that she was the reason he’d talked to me, but for some reason it hadn’t. Even though I was pretty sure he was around Tiffany’s age, he seemed more mature.

  I nodded. “Tiffany. She’ll probably go out with you.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “She goes out with lots of guys.”

  His heavy black brows fell. “What do you know about who she goes out with?”

  “She tells me.”

  “Tells you what?”

  “About who she likes and stuff.”

  “And stuff.” With a grunt, he reached into his back pocket, took out another cigarette, and stuck it in his mouth without lighting it. “You should stay out of your sister’s business.”

  I jutted my chin out. He sounded just like my dad, except when Dad said it, it was an order, not a suggestion. Dad made Tiffany’s business sound filthy, like I might go looking for it in the garbage cans out back.

  “Look at that.” The cigarette sagged from between his lips as he glanced at my feet. “You dropped it again.”

  I followed his eyes to where my bracelet had fallen in the dirt. Damn. I picked it up and tried again to get it back on.

  “Come over here,” he said. “Let me do that.”

  I breathed through my mouth. “What?”

  “The clasp,” he said.

  My heart skipped as he beckoned me. I took a few tentative steps and held out my arm, the chain dangling precariously. He moved the unlit cigarette from his mouth to behind his ear, then leaned forward and turned my forearm face-up. He could crush my wrist with one hand, I was sure of it. It took him several tries to even get the two ends between his huge fingers. He squinted, muttering under his breath. His callused palms brushed over the thin skin of my wrist until goosebumps traveled up my arm and my insides tightened up. The ends slipped from between his fingers over and over.

  His knee brushed my ribs, and I flinched.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I was pretty sure with a little more focus, I’d have better luck with the bracelet than he was having, but I didn’t want to stop him. An unfamiliar tingle made the hairs on the bac
k of my neck stand up. It wasn’t as if I’d never had a crush. Like my friends, I blushed when a senior said hi in the hall. I got giddy when someone like Corbin Swenson, the most popular boy in school, acknowledged our table in the cafeteria. But the boys at school were just that—boys. Tiffany liked to tear out pictures of celebrities and tape them to her wall—Andrew Keegan, Luke Perry, Kurt Cobain—and this man was as wall-worthy as he was sweaty, dusty, and quiet.

  He grasped me, his tanned hand covering more than half of my white forearm. “Hold still.”

  Men of his age or size were never this close to me. I hadn’t moved; I was certain of it.

  Finally, he got the two pieces to connect. “How’s that?”

  I gave my wrist a shake to make sure the bracelet was secure. “Good, I think.”

  “You walk home from school a lot?”

  “What?”

  He nodded at my backpack. “Didn’t you walk?”

  “Today was the first time.”

  He tilted his head back, looking down his nose at me. “Probably shouldn’t be walking home alone. Or at all, maybe.”

  “It’s not far. I don’t have my license yet.”

  He knocked the heel of his boot against the brick, looking anywhere but at me. “But you’re old enough?”

  I almost asked how old he thought I was so I could tack “what about you?” on to the end, but what if he guessed too young? I suddenly regretted my t-shirt, high-necked and white cotton with a round, yellow happy face in the center. I’d bought it from a record store, so it wasn’t really childish, unless, I realized, a child was wearing it. On Tiffany, it would look cool, but I was flat-chested. Suddenly, a year seemed like a lifetime to wait for breasts.

  “I’m old enough . . .” I said. He looked as though he expected me to continue. “I’m sixteen, but I have to get a certain number of behind-the-wheel hours with my parents.” Tiffany was a licensed driver and could take me, but she’d had two speeding tickets and a fender bender in the last year alone. My dad would never allow her to teach me. I shifted feet. “We started, but I haven’t had time lately.”

  “You haven’t? Or your parents?”

  I went to answer but stopped. Dad usually worked until past seven. Mom was probably showing houses or at some meeting. I had time now, but there were a hundred other things I should be doing, like reading from the list, studying for SATs, or volunteering. “We’ve all got stuff going on.”

  “What keeps a sixteen-year-old so busy?”

  “College prep,” I said in the same tone Tiff said duh. “Do you go to school?”

  “At night.”

  “Oh. Like community college?”

  “Yeah.” He let his posture fall and laced his hands between his knees. “You sure you don’t want to get up here? That backpack’s as big as you.”

  I looked around, as if someone might be watching. “I don’t think I can.”

  He gestured for me to come closer. When I was at his feet, he took my backpack off and dropped it. It landed on the ground with a thud, disturbing the sand into a cloud. “Christ. What’s in there? Rocks?”

  I unzipped it to put The Grapes of Wrath away and showed him the inside. “More books.”

  “Figures. You need to lighten your load, like me.” From his back pocket he pulled a paperback small enough to fit in one of his big hands.

  I read the title—The Metamorphosis. “What’s that about?”

  The cover had what looked like a huge cockroach on it. He studied it, his eyebrows drawn. “To be honest, I’m not sure yet. It’s weird. I’ll get back to you.”

  I wrinkled my nose. Nobody I knew ever called a book weird. My English teacher and classmates were always using words like abstract, poignant, or metaphorical. It was so unheard of that I started to laugh.

  Without any warning, not even a grunt or word to prepare me, he lifted me by my waist and sat me on the wall like I weighed a hundred pounds.

  Well, I about did, but that wasn’t the point. He was strong, all dirt and grime, long and lean, his face and arms bronzed by the sun. He could pick me up. He could throw me if he wanted to. He could probably put me over his shoulder and walk a thousand miles without running out of breath. My urge to slide closer to him was as strong as my urge to jump down, run inside, and hide in the house where men like him only existed in my glossy magazines.

  The hard brick didn’t give much of a welcome. All at once, I was an absolute and nervous mess about sitting next to a man. I didn’t think of my dad as a man, and certainly the boys I went to school with weren’t. The sun beat down on us, and he smelled of heat and sweat. It wasn’t bad.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “What’s yours?”

  He wiped his palms on his jeans. “Manning.”

  “Lake.”

  The cigarette was back in his hands. He rolled it, flipped it around, tapped it against his knee. Everything but smoked it. “Are you trying to quit?” I asked.

  “Quit what?”

  “Smoking.” My feet dangled over the wall. “You look like you really want to smoke it.”

  He returned it behind his ear. “Lake,” he said as if trying the word out. “And your middle name?”

  That, I’d never reveal. “I hate it.”

  He turned his whole body to me. “Tell me.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “How can a name be ugly?”

  “Trust me, it can,” I said simply. Mom liked to remind me it was a family name when I talked like that, but I didn’t care. Family or not, Dolly seemed like a babyish name, and it was no better than the stuffy-sounding Dolores from which it came.

  He half-smiled, one corner of his mouth lifting. That was the first I saw of his straight, white teeth. My heart skipped. Under the dirt, the sweat, the calluses, he was handsome. I’d known it already, peripherally, as I knew the direction of the beach or the artwork hanging in my dad’s office. But now it was right in front of me—I couldn’t miss it.

  His forehead creased with lines. “Careful, or it’ll come off a third time,” he said.

  It took me a second to realize I’d been twisting my bracelet around my wrist.

  “This time, I might not give it back,” he said.

  “You’d take it to the porn shop?” It came out fast, breezily, before I could think about it. But it was probably the most brazen thing I’d ever said.

  “The what?” he asked, pulling his entire upper body away.

  “The . . .” I widened my eyes at his incredulous stare. “You said you’d take it to a porn shop.”

  “Pawn,” he pronounced slowly. “P-a-w-n.”

  I shook my head. I was still confused. “I—I don’t know what that is.”

  He blew out a sigh and glanced up at the sky. “It’s a place you can take valuables for quick cash. Never mind.”

  “Oh.” My embarrassment was palpable, like an anvil on my chest. The silence made it worse.

  “You can go if you want,” he finally said.

  Did I want to? Since I’d come over here, my impulses had ping-ponged between smiling and shaking and lots else. Everything felt different. Even the house they were building looked further along than it’d been yesterday. Nobody seemed to think it was weird, me sitting here with him. “Do you want me to?”

  He kept his eyes forward. “You remind me of my younger sister.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have one.”

  “When?”

  I thought back to the conversation earlier. I’d suggested he might’ve given the bracelet to someone like a girlfriend or sister. Maybe I hadn’t said sister. I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  With the squeal of tires against pavement, I checked over my shoulder. Tiffany’s BMW zoomed in our direction. I wasn’t supposed to be out here. I didn’t think Tiffany would tell Dad, but I didn’t want her to see me and come over. I also wasn’t ready to go inside.

  Tiffany parked at the curb. I sucked in a breath and held it, sitting as still as pos
sible, hoping to blend in with my surroundings. After all, Tiffany overlooked me all the time.

  I should’ve known she wasn’t in the habit of overlooking attractive men.

  2

  Lake

  Tiffany shut the driver’s side door of her BMW and started across the construction lot to where Manning and I sat on the wall.

  Manning leaned his elbows onto his knees and watched her approach. My sister had that effect on men. They were always looking over or around me to see her. What’d he think when he looked at her? What’d he notice first?

  I’d spent my life hearing how beautiful my sister and mother were and had been told I looked like them enough times to believe I might also be attractive. Some day. What I didn’t have usually didn’t bother me. Things like lipstick and hairspray and shopping had always seemed stupid compared to books and grades and college applications. Watching Manning’s face as Tiffany approached, I began to wonder if that was true. I’d never doubted my own attractiveness more.

  “Sorry I was late,” she said to me as she looked Manning over. “I went by the school.”

  “I walked.”

  She stopped in front of us, shielded her eyes, and put a hand on her hip. “What are you doing out here?”

  I shrugged casually, but inside, fervently prayed she wouldn’t send me home. “He found my bracelet.”

  “I didn’t know you lost it.” Tiffany glanced from my wrist to the cigarette in Manning’s hand. “You’re smoking?”

  I shifted on the brick wall. “No. Of course not.”

  “You can tell me. I smoked sometimes at your age. It’s normal.”

  “She wasn’t,” Manning said, his voice smooth. Deep. “And smoking at her age isn’t normal.”

  Tiffany wrinkled her nose. “It was for me and my friends. I’m Tiffany, by the way.”

  “Manning.”

  The three of us went quiet.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  She squinted against the sun behind us. It was obviously hurting her eyes. “The mall. Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale is next month, so I was making a list of what I’m going to get. As Daddy says, it’s good to be prepared.” She glanced between the two of us. “I’m sorry if she was bothering you. She’s not supposed to be out here.”