Solving for Ex (4 page)

“So, what do you think about this guy?” Brendan asked, leaning forward and flicking his head toward Vincent. Just then, a tan, toned arm with perfectly painted nails rested on Brendan’s forearm. “Space for me?” Sofia’s sickly sweet voice interrupted the words I was about to say. That I thought Vincent was obviously very full of himself.

Sofia started chatting with Brendan again, flicking her hair back and pushing her chest out. Suddenly, I itched to leave the table, get up and walk anywhere. But even I knew how weird that would look, so I just looked down and pushed the M&M’s around in my melting custard, watching the colors bleed and swirl into a weird shade of reddish-greenish-brown. Between the oppressive heat outside, and the melting point of custard, I figured this would be warm soup in a few seconds under eleven minutes. Ugh. Now I didn’t even want the custard.

I was about to excuse myself and wait behind the car where no one could see me starting to unravel when Vincent’s voice jerked me out of my pity party.

“So, hey. Which one of you lucky assholes is Ashley’s boyfriend?”

The whole table went silent. A couple of the girls laughed nervously, and I shot them a grateful look. I wasn’t some kind of freak or something. I just wasn’t that interested in going out with anyone. Except Brendan.

Vincent quirked his eyebrow, and that slight smile was there just enough to bring out his dimple. His eyes sparkled playfully at me.

Holy hell, was he ever beautiful.

Brendan cleared his throat, and everyone turned to look at him. “Ah…Ashley doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

Wow. And I thought this conversation couldn’t get any more awkward.

“Well, that’s weird,” Vincent said, leaning back in his seat and giving me a searing look. My cheeks blazed red-hot. I knew by that way he was looking at me exactly what he meant. I wasn’t weird—the other guys were weird for not wanting to date me. Vincent held my gaze for two more seconds, and everyone at the table stared. Hell, the whole custard place stared. Then he went back to talking with the other guys at the table. A couple minutes later, he swiped the napkins from the table and stood up to throw them out. “Let’s get going, okay, Sof?”

A breath of relief rushed out of me. I didn’t know what it was about Vincent that made my stomach curl into a ball of tension, but I did know that getting away from him would relieve it.

no feelings could be strong enough

That Sunday morning, I relished the opportunity to sleep in. My urge to crawl under the covers and sleep all day had been steadily intensifying since our first day back, actually.

I blinked my eyes open drowsily from the most wonderful daydream—Brendan and I holding hands, and him kissing my temple, during some sunrise from the water tower. He didn’t tremble, wasn’t scared. Wasn’t focused on his fear of heights, or the next math exam, or anything but me.

That’s how I knew it was a dream.

Still, I wanted to revel in it, and I turned my cheek to the side, rubbing it against my pillow.

That is, until a deep, thundering bark woke me up out of a deep sleep.

I groaned, rolled over, and pushed up the blinds from the window over my bed, blinking as the sun’s rays careened recklessly through the slats. Blinded, I didn’t see anything until a giant, wet nose attached to a black and white mottled snout huffed steam against my window.

“Goddammit, Hamlet,” I groaned, but rolled out of bed, stepped into a pair of jean shorts and threw a T-shirt over my camisole. I fumbled in the bottom of my huge duffel bag for some flip-flops. Poking my head out the front door, I noticed two things—Aunt Kristin and Uncle Bruce’s cars were both gone, and a pair of giant black and white paws followed by a matching tail swished around the side of the house.

Of course the damn dog would want to play a game of chase.

“Hamlet!” I called behind the house, looking up and down the row of houses that stretched down the street. Back in Williamson, I lived in an old farmhouse, standing all on its own for miles. I could scream bloody murder from my driveway there and no one would hear it unless they happened to be passing by. Here, two kids laughing too loudly in the front yard playing hopscotch would wake half the street on a Sunday morning.

There were also a lot of roads around here, and that seemed to sense that the only thing bigger than he was that were willing to play chase with him were the cars.

Why couldn’t Brendan keep his goddamn dog in check?

I tripped around the side of the house. The grass, dry from weeks of scorching summer sun, was sharp against my toes and ankles, but wet from dew at the same time. I cursed myself for not taking the time to put on real shoes, and I cursed Hamlet even harder as my heels slipped off the stupid cheap foam-and-plastic sandals and onto the grass below. I rounded the corner of the house and blinked my eyes into focus. That ridiculous giant dog, sitting square in the middle of my backyard holding two of Uncle Bruce’s brand new, glowing yellow tennis balls in his drool-dripping mouth.

No matter how cranky I was at being woken up, I couldn’t help but laugh. The damn dog was smiling at me.

“Is Brendan ignoring you today?”

Hamlet pawed the ground, and I looked over at the Thomas’s driveway. Julia’s car was gone, but Brendan’s car was there, and so was his mom’s. Meaning at least two grown people around who could walk Hamlet, and no one who was.

I trudged over to Hamlet, whose shoulder reached my waist, wrenched the dog-slobber-slick tennis balls from his mouth, and tossed them across the yard. He launched his massive body after them, and I stared after him, feeling sad that he only had this tiny yard in Pittsburgh to sprint across. The fluorescent yellow tennis balls glowed in his mouth as he galloped toward me, and when he was about twenty feet away, I realized he wasn’t even close to stopping.

“Hamlet!” I shrieked, when his giant muscled shoulder slammed into my side, knocking me over. Before I knew it, I was staring up at the hazy blue-purple summer sky, and the damn dog was huff-panting over me, threatening to drop his drool on my face any second. I hooked my hand into his collar and hoisted myself up.

I hadn’t even had the chance to get any food into me, and I wavered on my feet from the lightheadedness when I stood. Luckily, I steadied myself against Hamlet. And then looked down to see my T-shirt coated in drool.

“Aw, Hamlet! You are the grossest!”

The dog freaking grinned at me. Like he was gloating.

“Kristin and Bruce are not going to be happy about you being in the house,” I grumbled as I led him to my front porch with me, “but I don’t trust you not to run for a second. And I’m not going after you again.”

Finally, huffing and puffing, I made it to our blue-painted front door, pushed down the handle and…

“Oh, shit,” I yelled at the rocking chairs and little glass table that lived on the porch. “Shit. Locked out.”

I reached under the mat for the spare key, and found a key-shaped outline on the concrete, but no key there. That would be, I realized, because I’d grabbed it when I went for a run the other day, stuffing it beneath my sneaker’s insole—and left it there. Locked inside the house.

I surveyed the situation. Giant, runaway-prone dog. Slobbery shirt, muddy shorts. Aunt and uncle gone. Starving. Locked out. I only had one choice.

I craned my neck up to the Thomas’s house. My eye automatically went to Brendan’s window. Every single time. Once in a while, I’d see his thin silhouette changing shirts, his hands running through his hair to unconsciously re-mess it when the shirt was down. Then my heart would trip and I’d have to take a deep breath to keep myself from daydreaming about being in there with him.

Yeah. I was definitely pretty far gone.

The light in his window was on, and so was the one in the hallway below it, so at least I knew he was awake. I glared at Hamlet and yanked on his collar. “Come on. And don’t you dare pull me over again, you mutt.” I ruffed the top of his head with my other hand and he gave me that goofy happy dog look again, and trotted back to his house alongside me. Like he was just out for a stroll to retrieve me, instead of me being the one to take him back home.

I opened the heavy glass door to the Thomas house, but when I raised my fist to knock on the main door, it pushed open the slightest bit. Hamlet nosed it the rest of the way open and barreled in, his nails skittering against the polished hardwood floor.

“Hello?” I called up the stairs, and waited a second or two. I was about to turn around and go home, wait on the porch or something, when my stomach growled. Then I remembered the cabinet full of junk food in the Thomas’s kitchen—a studier’s paradise. It didn’t make any sense, but after a summer full of home-baked muffins and cookie bars from my mom, there was something about the processed, packaged goodness of a strawberry frosted Pop-Tart that made my mouth water.

I traipsed into the kitchen, which was still, quiet, and lit only by whatever summer morning’s sunshine filtered through the curtained windows. The countertops were as pristine as the floors, which was insane considering that at least one teenaged boy was living in the house at any given time. The only thing that I saw there was a wineglass. Must have been left out from the previous night. I could imagine Hamlet propping his paws up there and knocking it over, into the built-in range top that it sat next to, so I moved to pick it up and put it in the sink. As I got closer, I noticed that it had a fresh water ring around the base, and the liquid in it was cold and damp to the touch.

Someone had poured it this morning.

A voice echoed from the upstairs, a lazy, low, yet loudly feminine cadence. Brendan’s mom. I hadn’t seen her yet, and I was excited to say hi, so I grabbed a shining foil pack of Pop-Tarts and walked back around to the stairs. But as I got closer, I heard her uncontrolled tone interspersed with a calm, quiet one—Brendan. Then, a high-pitched, crazy-sounding laugh, and Brendan saying, “Come on, Mom.”

I made it halfway up the stairs and just barely saw Brendan closing a bedroom door behind him, leaning against the wall next to it, and blowing out a breath. He didn’t look like my carefree Brendan. He looked stressed. Exhausted. Sad.

“Hey, what’s going on? You okay?” I couldn’t mask the sudden concern in my voice. I’d seen Brendan in intense moods, when he was concentrating on math or one of the old westerns he loved. When he was waiting for his favorite lines to come up in Tombstone. But that intensity was excited. This was completely different.

Like I’d flipped a switch, his face changed. With a grin, he pushed himself off the wall and came toward me. “Ash! Hey! What are you doing here?”

“Well, I was trying to sleep in. But Hamlet had other plans.”

“Are you kidding me? I’m so sorry. But at least you got breakfast out of it,” he said, raising his eyebrows at the crinkly wrapper in my hand.

“Yeah. Breakfast and a wet shirt. And muddy shorts.”

“Oh, geez. Did he…”

“Steal Bruce’s tennis balls? And make me throw them? And then tackle me on return? Yeah,” I laughed. “But it’s really no big deal. I’ll just borrow some of your mom’s stuff and…”

I headed for the door of her room, but Brendan darted out in front of me. “No, don’t…I mean, it’s not the best time to….I mean, she had a late night. Haven’t you unpacked your own clothes yet?”

“Um…no, not really. But also, I locked myself out.” I suddenly felt embarrassed, and stared down at my muddied feet. At least I’d given myself a pedicure before I rolled into town. “It was…I went for a run and…the key…”

“Oh, geez.” He rolled his eyes and smiled at me. “C’mon, slugger. I’ll get you one of my old shirts.”

A few minutes later, I’d changed into Brendan’s Mathletes shirt from his sophomore year—the one from two years ago, when the back said “member” where it now read “captain”—and a pair of his darkest boxers that I’d fished from one of the drawers at the back of his huge walk-in closet. I think they actually must have been before his latest growth spurt, because no way would they fit him now. But that only got me thinking about Brendan and his boxers, and exactly what parts of Brendan were up against which parts of the boxers, and…

I blew out a breath. I had to get a hold of myself. This would be a very long year if I didn’t.

I still hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do about this year. I wasn’t clueless—a summer full of five-day stretches where I felt like I’d die if I didn’t talk to Brendan soon was enough to tell me that I was crushing on him pretty hard. I also knew that he was the worst person in the world for me to be head over heels in love with. Because he was my best friend.

Brendan was the first and strongest tie I had to this place, and I wasn’t about to do anything to screw that up.

When I first came here, everything had felt so empty. I didn’t know my way around town. I didn’t want to leave my room, I was so depressed. So Brendan had brought photos of the town and tacked them on my wall. He told me stories of things he had done there.

Soon, his Pittsburgh became my Pittsburgh.

Including Pamela’s café. The first time we’d walked through the heavy glass door that rang a tinny bell, and stepped into the cramped diner whose air filled with the servers’ shouts and the smell of staling coffee, it was like I could breathe again. Between the cramped space, the board games everywhere, the trivia cards randomly slung on the tables, the raised voices and the bustle and browning butter underneath pancake batter, it was just like my house. Just like home.