He slipped inside his apartment, and I slipped into mine. I bit my bottom lip, closing the door behind me and telling myself we had plenty of time to pull off this furniture swap before Grandmother arrived.
While my idea of being on time was arriving anytime within twenty minutes of the target, Grandmother wasn’t so flexible. I doubted she could evenspellthe word flexible, in spite of her Harvard degree.
She was laser-focused on perfection. To arrive too early would be considered crass. To arrive too late would be unthinkable for her. The alarm clock next to my television would be lucky to make it through the day without being scolded for not being synchronized toGrandmother Time’swatch.
I stepped up to the mirror beside the door and took the opportunity to try and work a miracle on my disgruntled hair. I sighed when I had a good look at myself.
Grandmother was a no-hair-out-of-place type of person, and I had to live up to her standards if I was going to have any chance of impressing her. But my hair was one part wavy, one part curly, and one million percent indomitable.
Trying to run a comb through it that morning had been my downfall. You’d think that after a lifetime of trying to tame this mane I’d have learned whatnotto do with it.
Why I’d ever tried to force it into a sleek French twist was beyond me. There would never be anything sleek about my hair.
I grabbed a handful of it, piled it on top of my head, and considered pinning it into place. As far as hairdos went, it wasn’t so bad… if you liked the finger-in-the-electric-socket look.
My frizz fest head of hair had a mind of its own and it hated me. But that was all right because I’d just declared it public enemy number one and was about to put an end to its reign of terror even if it took every last drop of hairspray in the house!
With a sleek hairdo definitely off the table, I began smoothing, finger coiling, and pinning curls into place. I held a few bobby pins with my lips as I wrestled the last few bits of hair into submission.
A sudden knock at the door sent a jolt through my body that wobbled my knees and sent those pins flying through the air. A few landed on the small table in front of me, and the rest fell beneath it.
Better to spit them out than to suck them in, I supposed.
I rolled my eyes at my jumpiness. There was no reason to be so on edge—it was only Cash on the other side of the door, and he certainly wasn’t anyone to get excited about.
With one stubborn curl that was determined to hang down the center of my forehead and curl around the tip of my nose, I questioned my life decisions for the five hundredth time that day.
I’d experienced palpitations and a twisted gut since last night, and all because of this harebrained plan. I was a genuine, bona fide basket case already. What in the world was I going to do when Grandmother was actually in the same room with me?
I shoved those thoughts out of my head. A person could only fight one battle at a time, and I hadn’t finished sparring with Cash yet.
He was still on the other side of the door, but he could wait a minute for me to finish my hair.
I was fed up with him looking at me like I was the punchline of a joke. There would be no more excuses for him to smirk at me. No more cactus quills. And no more flushed cheeks.
He knocked again just as I went to my knees to grab the last of the bobby pins I’d dropped. I ducked under the table, stretching to reach the last one when he knocked a third time.
Fine. If he was that eager to get to work, who was I to stand in his way. “Come on in.” I grunted the words, reaching out as far as I could to lay hold of the last pin.
My door squeaked on its hinges. “Willow Lennox, what on earth are you doing on your hands and knees?”
I jumped higher than a kangaroo on steroids and smashed the back of my head into the bottom of the table. I rocketed to my feet and blew that stray curl out of my face, only to have it land in the exact same spot. My stomach churned, and I felt the blood drain away from my face.
“Grandmother, you’re early!”
CHAPTERFOUR
Somehow in my dumbfounded state, I managed to step aside and allow my grandmother to cross my humble threshold. “You look surprised,” she said.
“I… I am.”
“You didn’t know it was me on the other side of that door?” Her perfectly penciled brows furrowed a tad. “I would have thought you’d have more sense than to invite an unknown person to walk willy-nilly through your unlocked door.”
Great. She’d been here for a grand total of five seconds, and already she was unhappy with me.
But I didn’t have too much time to dwell on that little detail. I just stood there with my jaw flapping in the non-existent breeze, and it wasn’t from the way she’d just saidwilly-nilly,a nonsensical word I didn’t even know her lips could form. It was the fact that my country-club-loving, appearances-are-everything grandmother was wearing yoga pants.
Yoga. Pants.
