Perfect Couple (21 page)

Suddenly I was back at school, one week ago, lamenting my boring high school experience.
This
was my foray
into the high school party lifestyle? Cross-eyed from lack of sleep, head over heels in lust, and resentful of my gorgeous boyfriend for cheating on me while he claimed he hadn’t been cheating?

I stood back, closed my eyes, and put my hands in my hair—something I hadn’t done for years, ever since I got on my careful-coif kick. I murmured, “This is some dumb shit.”

“Harper,” he said. “Are you okay? You’re blinking like you can’t keep your eyes open.”

“I think . . . I’ve never worn my contacts this long.”

“Do you have a case for them, and solution, like I told you?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In my purse.”

“In Sawyer’s truck?”

“No, in Will’s car.” I gestured vaguely to the Mustang, which had prowled to a position near both trucks so that Will and Tia could watch the show.

Brody hiked across the parking lot to the Mustang. The driver’s door opened. I could hear them talking, but not what they were saying. Then came Brody’s echoing shout. Everyone sitting on tailgates turned to look: “. . . shocking? What did you say that to her for, Will?” Will’s voice was firm. Tia’s
rose above it: “This is Harper we’re talking about, Brody. Harper Davis. You can’t do this to Harper.”

Brody returned across the asphalt, carrying my purse but not my laptop or camera bag. “Get in the truck, Harper. You’re about to fall down.”

I shook my head. “Only if I can sit in the driver’s seat.”

“Fine.” He rounded the truck and opened the driver’s door for me. It was my first time inside Brody’s truck, where Grace and countless other girls had had all sorts of experiences I’d thought I wanted. I sniffed deeply, trying to detect perfume, but all I smelled was cleaner.

He got in the passenger side and closed the door, then offered me my purse. I dug out the contact solution. He held the case for me while I took out the lenses. Then he put everything back in my purse. My dad had made this sort of sweet gesture toward Mom, too, after he’d started a new affair and she’d caught him.

“I see where you’re coming from now,” I said. “On Wednesday night, you told me you didn’t have to break up with Grace in order to go out with me, because you weren’t
with
Grace.”

“Right,” he said warily.

“I assumed that, afterward, you would be
with
me.” He opened his mouth, but I kept talking. “I was mistaken. What
you meant was, you weren’t
with
Grace, and you weren’t
with
me either. You’re not
with
anybody, and that gives you the freedom to be with everybody.”

“Well,” he said, clearly not liking where this was going, “not
everybody
.”

“Sure, because you’re not a slut. You’re just a free spirit. You’re an individual. Like you explained to me in the pavilion, everybody in your family’s divorced. Couples aren’t meant to be permanent. You get into a couple—a coup
ling
, like a train car—with one girl and then another.”

“Exactly,” he said. His shoulders relaxed, and he popped his neck, relieved that I understood where he was coming from.

I nodded. “That is fucking ridiculous, Brody. It’s rifuckulous.”

His brows knitted. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” I yelled, “I am operating on almost zero sleep because my ex-boyfriend moved my deadline because I broke up with him so I could be
with
you!”

He huffed out a sigh. “I know, Harper. It’s just that you said you were going home after the game, and Grace and I have been friends for a long time. She asked if I wanted to hang out. We came here and talked about that guy from Florida State, and I told her he’s too old for her. I said guys from college trolling for girls from high school are usually
up to no good. She got mad. That’s when you drove up. She spotted some guys from the University of Miami and left with them. The end.”

I wanted to believe him. I sort of
did
believe him, but I felt like I shouldn’t. I felt like I was being taken advantage of, and that he’d been taking advantage of me the whole week, and everybody at school knew it but me.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “I’m just . . . friends with people. I’m not
with
girls. I figure we can go out, or sometimes make out, and later we can still be friends and
hang
out. It’s the girls who don’t agree to that plan.”

I understood now why there always seemed to be a girl shouting at him in the hallway.

“I knew you were different,” he said. “When Grace wanted to hang out, I said okay because that’s what I’d normally do, but we hadn’t even reached the edge of the school campus before I realized I’d done the wrong thing. I’ve worked on this—my mom made me go to counseling after my dad left—and I have this checklist in my mind and these things I’m supposed to say to myself, but they take a few minutes to kick in. I have an impulse-control problem.”

“You sure as hell do,” I grumbled.

“Harper,” he pleaded.

“No,” I said. “I came here with Sawyer because Tia was
mad at you and egging me on. I was trying to make you jealous, but not because I want you back. I don’t. When you cheated on Grace with me and said you didn’t owe her anything, I should have known you would treat me exactly the same way you’d treated her.” I reached for the handle of the door.

He put his hand on my arm—gently, or I would have bashed the shit out of him. When I glared at him, he put up his hand in surrender.

“Harper,” he said, “give me another chance. We haven’t even been on a real date.”

“What does it matter, when you say people aren’t meant to be in exclusive couples? I don’t want to be with a guy who thinks that way.”

He opened his hands. “I thought that because of who I was with. Harper, I don’t want this to be about Grace. I want it to be about you, and me. I don’t want to lose you. You—” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “You make me feel smart, and funny, like there’s more to me than a good arm.”

I drummed my fingers on my bare knee, halfway to a delirious decision. “You have to understand something. If we date, we’re a couple. We’re
not
the Perfect Couple That Never Was. We
are
a couple. There’s no
never
. And it’s
not
okay for you to go out with Grace.” Hearing myself, I shook
my head. “No, never mind. I shouldn’t have to spell that out for you. I’m done.” I reached for the door again.

“Hey,” he said. Wisely he didn’t touch me this time. His voice was quiet. I paused to listen.

“You said we would catch each other tomorrow,” he said. “I’d really like to come over then. That can’t hurt anything, right? We can talk again when you’ve had some sleep.”

I gazed out the windshield. I couldn’t see well enough to discern Sawyer, but I could see his truck, still waiting for me. Sawyer had my back. He’d acted like Brody and I had a claim on each other. Even Tia, in her warped way, had led me here to Brody. Somebody in our school—a lot of people, apparently, though I didn’t know who—thought Brody and I were perfect for each other. And because my feelings for him were so strong, I wasn’t ready to throw away that possibility just yet.

“You can come over tomorrow,” I muttered. “But if you ever pull something like this again, you won’t get another chance with me.”

He said, “I won’t need one. I promise.”

*   *   *

My alarm went off at six a.m. I got up, showered, helped Mom serve breakfast, got quietly scolded for dropping a basket of orange rolls in a guest’s lap, stomped back to my house, and crawled into bed. The talk at breakfast was that the hurricane
had petered out into a tropical storm and was headed farther west into the Gulf, so we wouldn’t get a lot of straight-line wind damage or flooding from the tidal surge—only a lot of rain, and possibly tornadoes on Tuesday, when my parents were scheduled to get divorced. I closed my eyes, listened to the light rain from a band of showers far in advance of the storm, and wished I could go back to sleep. I knew it would never happen with my mind spinning about Brody.

At eleven a.m. I woke again, smelling cinnamon. Something was very wrong. Mom seldom cooked for me, and she was never in the house on weekends. She spent all day every day cleaning and repairing the B & B. Taking the precaution of putting on a bra first in case criminals had broken into my house to fix me cinnamon toast, I wandered into the kitchen and saw it was Brody.

“Sorry,” he said, looking around from the stove. “Your mom said it was okay. Have a seat.” He slid a plate in front of me at the table: the best kind of cinnamon toast, with a buttery, sugary glaze baked to a crisp on top. Eggs. Bacon. Sliced banana. He put another plate with twice as much food down at Mom’s place and dug in.

I tasted the toast. Heaven, but I didn’t want to admit this. I asked coldly, “Is this a postgame phenomenon, or do you always eat this much for breakfast?”

He said between bites, “I already had breakfast.”

“This is lunch, then?”

“No.”

We ate in silence for a while. When his plate was clean and mine was still half-full, he said, “Tonight some of us are going to a movie and then the Crab Lab. Will and Tia, and Kaye and Aidan, and Noah and Quinn. Would you go with me?”

I took a bite of bacon.

“You’re still mad at me.” He sighed. “I don’t know what else to do, Harper.”

“Maybe there isn’t anything else
to
do,” I said. “Maybe, as you so eloquently put it last week, the school is on crack. They never should have paired us up.”

He cocked his head to one side and considered me. “If you believe that, I’ll leave you alone from now on. But I don’t think you believe that. I sure don’t.”

I took a bite of egg. This boy could cook an egg, that was for sure.

“When we go back to school on Monday and everybody hears we’ve broken up,” he said, “fourteen guys are going to ask you out, and probably two or three girls. But I’m thinking you don’t have anything else on the horizon for tonight. And I’m better looking than Kennedy. I’m less weird than Quinn, and probably eighty percent less gay than Noah.”

I laughed. “When you get all romantic on me, how can I refuse?”

“Good. What are you doing until then?”

I gazed toward the front windows. “Has it stopped raining?”

He nodded.

“I’ll walk around town and take photos. The light’s great and the colors are bright after a rain. When I had to stay up Thursday night, I thought I’d never want to take another photo again, but I’ve gotten over it.”

“I’ll come with,” he said.

“No, that’s okay.”

“I want to,” he insisted.

“I’m not just playing around, Brody. I had something specific in mind. Sites online post photos from freelance photographers for people to use in their newsletters and websites. I thought I might try to get in on that gig, but I need a bigger portfolio first.”

“I can help you,” he said.

“I don’t want your help.” When his face fell, I said quickly, “It’s nothing against
you
. I
prefer to work alone.”

“How do you know?”

He had me there.

“Ah-ha,” he said. “See? You
don’t
know. You
think
you prefer to work alone because you’ve never had a good-looking guy to carry your camera equipment.”

“It’s a tripod and one small bag,” I said. “You just want to grovel to me all afternoon and talk me out of being mad.”

He lifted his chin. “I want to spend time with you,” he said self-righteously. “And I could help you. I could model for you.”

“Now
there’s
an idea,” I admitted, mind suddenly racing. “I would pay you if I sold any of those shots, of course. But you wouldn’t have any control over who bought your picture and what it was used for. Your face could end up as an advertisement for a porn site.”

“That could make me
very
popular next year, in college.” When I just blinked at him, he hurried on, “No, I’m kidding. You’re right. You can’t use shots that show my face. My mom makes me keep my online accounts super private, even though my picture has been in all the newspapers. She thinks I’m going to get kidnapped.”

“If people tried to kidnap you, wouldn’t you just break their heads?”

“My mom still thinks I’m twelve,” he said, “but I try not to argue with her. My dad wasn’t very nice to her. My stepdad wasn’t either. Her new boyfriend is okay so far, but I don’t know. I feel bad for her. If I can, I do what she wants.”

I was taken aback. I hadn’t realized Brody was this mature.

“I mean,” he went on, “for a case like this, where she’d find out.”

Never mind about the maturity.

“So we can’t use my face,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t use the rest of me. Have you seen this?”

Afraid of what he was about to show me, I glanced toward the door, sure Mom would choose that moment to appear. But he only pulled back the sleeve of his T-shirt to show me his biceps.

“That’s a great idea,” I said. “You can flex your arm with the ocean in the background. I’ll type ‘The View from Florida’ across the photo and have it printed as a postcard to sell in the gift shops around town. Every lady over sixty will want to mail one to her friends back home.”

“Only ladies over sixty?”

“Well . . .” Jumping up from the table, I slid the TV remote to him. “Here, you can watch whatever game is on. I’ll be ready in a sec.”

I dashed back to my room to change clothes and brush my hair, excited about this new project. Afterward, I would need to update my website to read
HARPER DAVIS, PORTRAITS, EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY, GRATUITOUS BICEPS.

*   *   *

I was all too familiar with going out with a group of friends and being one half of the Couple That Wasn’t Getting Along. I’d spent the last six weeks that way with Kennedy. It was strange to arrive at the movie theater with Brody as half of a brand-new couple who’d spent the entire afternoon together having so much fun that we couldn’t stop grinning. Tonight the Couple That Wasn’t Getting Along was the one that had been dating for three years, Kaye and Aidan. Kaye made Tia trade places with her so she could sit by me, with Tia and Will between her and Aidan.