Page 6 of Baby, It’s Hot Inside

“Yes, it is.” I’ve got my legs folded up underneath me, and I’m gripping the travel mug with both hands.

“So what happened with us? Why did you suddenly stop being my friend?” he asks.

I turn my head and stare at him, looking for a smile that lets me know he’s kidding. But he’s not smiling. His face is full of sincerity. Damn, he’s pretty. Stupid brown hair that looks soft. Stupid green eyes that remind me of my favorite color. Stupid mouth that isn’t smiling highlighting how perfectly shaped his lips are.

“You really don’t know?”

He shakes his head. “No clue. I know that one day we were friends and the next you ignored me. Or glared at me.”

I blow out a breath. I wasn’t prepared to talk about this today. “Do you remember our first school dance?”

“Eighth grade, right?”

I nod. “We went together. Decided we would just go and laugh at the way people danced. Half an hour into the night, you disappeared to go to the bathroom. The rest of the evening you spent with your face attached to Chelsea’s.” I shrug. “I wasn’t jealous or anything. You just made your choice. The popular crowd picked you and I was the geeky girl with her nose in a book. I didn’t fit into your world anymore.”

His eyes close and he rubs a hand down his face. “I didn’t pick her over you. I still wanted to hang out with you. I wanted your friendship.”

“You didn’t have time for me. Especially once high school started. You had football and your cheerleader princess girlfriend and your ‘bros.’” I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter anymore. All water under the proverbial bridge.”

He glances over at me, all sincerity in his features. “I’m sorry, Ginger. If I could do things over again, I would have made different choices” He reaches over and fingers one of the russet-colored ringlets resting on my shoulder. “Think we can start over and be friends again?”

His question makes my heart tighten and I don’t understand what that’s all about. “I’ll consider it,” I tell him.

We sit in silence for a few moments, the buzz of the waiting room television in the background. I can’t see it from this angle, but I can tell that it’s on some twenty-four hour news station.

“You and Chelsea keep in touch while you were in Europe?” It’s been on my mind and I’ve tried not to ask, but we’ve already talked about her now. The seal has been broken, and damn if I don’t want to know if he’s planning to reunite with his high school girlfriend.

He chuckles low. “No. We didn’t exactly leave things on the best of terms.”

“How so?”

“She wanted to go with me. Her parents offered to pay for everything, get us a flat to share and the whole nine yards, but I didn’t want her there. I wanted to go on my own.”

“See the world outside of our small ocean-side town?”

“Exactly. Plus my grandfather had left me money for school. Enough for me to go wherever I wanted. I wanted to follow in his footsteps, study history. Though instead of the American History he loved, I wanted to focus on art history. I knew Chelsea would never understand that. She’d get bored that I wasn’t devoting all my time to her.”

His words warmed me. I’d loved his grandfather and all his cool retelling of the American Revolution and the Civil War. If you can talk about that stuff and catch the interest of a child… yeah he was amazing.

“She came once. To Paris. She thought if I saw her, I’d want her to stay. But I left here for a reason and she was a big part of that. I wanted to be done with high school and the popularity game. People like Chelsea peak in high school. Though she’ll always be financially solvent because of her family, she’ll never truly accomplish anything because she’s still stuck on being the Homecoming Queen.”

I am, admittedly, fascinated by his story. It’s probably not nice of me, but I never did like Chelsea and there’s a twisted part of me that would have enjoyed watching him reject her. “What did you do when she got there?”

“I told her to leave. That I meant it when I ended things with her. She was beyond pissed. We haven’t talked much since. Exchanged a couple of emails, but that’s it. I don’t even know if she knows I’m back in town.”

The thought of that does funny things to my stomach, but I shove it away.

“What about you? What did you do after graduation?”

“Went to college, got my teaching degree, and came back here to teach. That’s basically it.”

“Did you leave a trail of broken hearts in your wake?”

I snort. SNORT! I am hopelessly goofy. “Hardly. I had one boyfriend. His name was Jeff and we were together for three years. But we broke up.”

“Mutual?” he asks.

“Uh, I guess. He thought he should get to continue sleeping with someone else and I disagreed.”