I blinked, a stab of hurt in my chest. Good old boring, reliable Sutton who would much rather go to a charity event than an actual party. Or maybe this was more about how I had let her down in school. Hadn’t put myself out there for her. I’d apologized ages ago, but it was obviously still lingering. I wasn’t sure what else I could say about it.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t implying anything by her statement. Just making a joke. Jokes were meant to be laughed at. So I laughed.
CHAPTER 22
We kissed!I wanted to scream.
I was sitting in Elijah’s car Saturday evening in my slinky black dress, my hair in loose beachy waves, the first time I’d worn it down in ages, my makeup on. When he’d picked me up, his eyes had traveled over me like he wanted to take me right there on the porch. I wasn’t sure anyone had ever looked at me like that before.
My expression had probably been similar. He wore a fitted black suit, a button-down white shirt with thin mint-green stripes, and no tie. The color made the green in his hazel eyes pop. He’d kissed my cheek, then stepped around me to poke his head through the door and greet my mom with a wave. She gave him a cold head nod.
She wasn’t happy I was going out, even though she constantly liked to tell me that she didn’t need me here and that she could take care of herself. When I told her I was leaving for the evening, she reminded me she was still experiencing thesymptoms of a concussion and that anything that might occur to her in my absence would be my fault.
“Mom,” I’d said. “Call me if you need me, okay? I’ll come. Or call 911. They’ll come too.” I wanted to add that I was not my father. I hadn’t ever been him. I’d made sure she knew that by calling like clockwork for ten years, visiting like clockwork.
“I’m not going to call 911,” she’d muttered.
“What should I do to get on your mom’s good side?” he asked now, his hand draped over the top of the steering wheel, a smile on his face.
“This is hard for you, isn’t it? Someone not immediately liking you.”
“Yes!” he said.
I laughed. “Maybe you’ll grow on her… in about thirty years,” I said, then my words caught up with me. “I mean, not that you’ll be hanging around me for thirty… well, if we’re friends or whatever… you don’t have to… but…” I trailed off. Wekissed!
I’d been the one to kiss him first in that elevator, and even though he wholeheartedly kissed me back, I wondered if he’d wanted that to happen. HadIwanted it to happen? God, did I seriously have to overanalyze everything? It could’ve just been a kiss. Nothing more. Nothing less. I was leaving, after all, eventually. And he had to stay here to pay back his dad. We both knewthat.
“Thirty years,” he said as though imagining that amount of time. “Tell me you don’t have your life planned for the next thirty years.”
“It was just the first big number that jumped into my mind.”Butdon’tyou have the next thirty years of your life planned,Sutton?a voice in my head unhelpfully pointed out. “What about your parents? Do they like the people you bring home?”
“My parents will love you.”
After parking, we went through the front door of his parents’ large house, even though it seemed like most people were going through the side gate. He just opened the door without knocking. The tiled entryway was two stories high and was probably as big as my mom’s living room. Straight in front of us was an extra-wide staircase leading up to the second story. He led the way through the entryway to a great room. It was full of rich wood moldings, a stone fireplace, and large windows.
“That picture is gorgeous,” I said, staring at the oversized black-and-white photo of Half Dome on the wall above the fireplace. This was what the restaurant could use. Some California nature pics. Big and bold. I wondered who took the picture and how expensive art like this would be. Considering the house it was in, I was sure it was well beyond our price point. I searched the corner of the photo for the artist.
“It’s Yosemite,” Elijah said. “It’s not hard to take a gorgeous pic of Yosemite.”
“I couldn’t take that picture.”
“I’m sure you could. With your iPhone even.”
I backhanded him playfully across the stomach. “Don’t disparage artists. It’s not as easy as it looks.” But even while saying it, I wondered if Icould. Yosemite wasn’t far. Could I drive up and take some decent pics with my phone that I could blow up? Or would my attempt look worse than the cheap art we already had?
The living room was attached to the kitchen, and maybe I was exaggerating, but it seemed bigger than my entire apartment. Maybe I wasn’t exaggerating.
“You ready?” he asked, nodding toward a wall of what I thought were floor-to-ceiling windows but must have actually been doors since he was implying we could walk through them.
“Is this where you grew up?” I asked, curious if his parents had moved here more recently or if they had lived here for a while.
“It is,” he said.
“I want to see your bedroom,” I said. Maybe it was a stall tactic because suddenly I was nervous to walk into a party full of rich people. Or was it his parents I was more nervous about?
“I bet you do,” he said in his teasing voice.
“No, not like… I just want to see what you were like as a teen.”
