Sparks the Matchmaker (Aaron Sparks Series) (15 page)

“Hi,” Scott said, extending his hand.

Ollie shook it with ambivalent resignation; he felt powerless. “So… I guess you guys knew each other when you were kids, then?” He hoped the word “kids” would remind both of them that whatever it was that used to exist between them was a long time ago.

“When we were kids; right,” Scott said. “We knew each other in high school.”

“It was good seeing you,” Joy said, pulling on Ollie’s arm. It was more than he needed for an excuse to get out of there. He stood, and so did Joy.

“Yeah. It was good seeing you too,” Scott said, his voice softening with tenderness. “Maybe we could catch up sometime?”

“Maybe,” Joy said. She smiled politely. It wasn’t the same smile she used when she was genuinely happy, and Ollie wondered if Scott knew that.
Probably.
That’s what worried him.

Chapter 19

Ollie and Joy were halfway to her house before she finally broke the tension and let the words spill. By that time she was clearly worked up, even more so than the night before.

“Why didn’t Dusten tell me he was roommates with Scott?” She sounded perturbed.

Ollie didn’t have an answer for that. He had nothing interesting to say. He was completely lost for words and lost for emotion; numb. Lost.

In a few more steps, she had tightened her grip on his hand. When she had first seen Scott her grip had conveyed anxiety. This time it was a plea, asking him not to let her go. She buried her head into his chest and let go of his hand so that he could wrap his arm around her as they walked.

“He was my boyfriend in high school.”

Ollie felt like he’d been stabbed, but he soldiered on. “I assumed it was something like that.” He paused, breathing, hoping she couldn’t feel his heart racing. “I’m guessing he was the one to break up with you? I mean, bumping into him seemed a lot harder on you than it was on him.” The words just came out. Sure, he was wondering that, but giving voice to the worry made him feel like he was being insensitive. What he needed to do, and he knew it, was to let her tell her story. He couldn’t help himself.

“No, that’s not true. I broke up with him.” Her voice was choked. “We still hadn’t broken up after I moved to Missouri. After I was there for about a month, I broke things off.”

She sounded to Ollie like she was confessing something, not relating the events of a story. “So you didn’t like the long distance relationship thing. That’s never easy.”

“Yes, in a way, but mostly… it was just the best thing to do at the time. I felt like I was going to hold him back from… from his life, if I didn’t cut things off. It was the best thing for him.”

“I don’t understand, Joy. Why would you hold him back? And from what; moving on and finding another girl?”

“That’s part of it.” She sighed. “But it’s going to be okay.” Her eyes were vacant. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve dealt with it, but lately… I’ve realized I still need to sort some things out inside.”

Ollie walked her home in silence the rest of the way. He said goodnight on the same doorstep as the night before. Throughout the evening he had been thinking about stealing the first kiss, but that was out of the question— just like every night before. Once again he gave her a warm hug, once again he watched her slip through her door.

As he walked home, he thought about this guy, this Scott.

It didn’t
seem
like he should be a huge deal. But Scott was obviously quite fond of her still, and that was an unsettling thought. Scott had said he wanted to get together with her, to catch up again. From what little Ollie knew about him, he was sure that Scott was the kind of guy who would find a way to make that happen.

Plus, there were still a lot of things on Joy’s mind, things she wasn’t telling him. He was going to need to get them out of her— somehow— before they could move on.

Sparks was sitting at Ollie’s desk when he returned, saving him the effort of putting the hat back on. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

“You’re not giving me a whole lot of reasons to feel secure here, Sparks. What’s making things so cloudy all of a sudden?”

“It’s cloudy because she still doesn’t know how she feels.”

“Well, how is
that
fair?”

“Bomber, there’s a cheer for that,” Sparks said, standing. “Women are like, ‘WHO ARE WE?’” He held his hands like pompoms to one side, like a cheerleader gesturing to one side of a stadium. “And they answer, ‘WOMEN!’” he held his imaginary pompoms to the opposite side. “And then they say, ‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’ and they answer, ‘WE DON’T KNOW!’ and then they’re like, ‘WHEN DO WE WANT IT?’ and they all answer, ‘NOW!’” He pranced around Ollie’s bedroom shouting, “YAYYY!”

Ollie just stood there blinking at him. “Sparks. What are you trying to tell me?”

“What. That wasn’t clear?”

“She doesn’t know how she feels about him?” Ollie asked, “—or about me?”

“You know the answer to that already.”

“Just tell me.”

“But you already know.”

“Tell me anyway. Why can’t you just give me answers when I have questions?”

“Because you need to be able to do things on your own. I’m not going to be here forever.”

“I can see that. I always thought you meant I’d want to send you away someday because I’d want to continue on my own, but I can see now that it will be because I can only take so much of you teasing me, dangling a carrot in front of me that I can never reach.”

“Calm down, Ollie. All I’m saying is I’m not going to feed you information that may steer you in the wrong direction. I don’t know
all
the answers right now, but I feel like we’re still on track. I’m not going to give you information before it’s time for you to know.”

“What’s all this
we
stuff, anyway? You always say
we
are on track. You do realize this is
my
life we’re talking about here, right? You can’t live through me.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Well, you said earlier that you might know after Acoustic Night about when the time might come to ask her what’s up. Do you know now?”

“Not exactly, no.” Sparks examined his nail beds. “The only thing I really know is that she’s confused about Scott, and she’s going to need to come to terms with that before she can move on with you— with anything for that matter.”

“Great! So in order for me to catch her, she has to be able to let go of her high school boyfriend that she hasn’t seen in years. And I suppose I have you to thank for engineering his reappearance?”

“It’s more complicated than that, but those are the basics, yes.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me not to go to Acoustic Night in the first place? Then we wouldn’t have to deal with this!”

Sparks sighed. “Ollie, it’s not about you. Can’t you get that? The guy lives a block and a half away from her. How long do you think it would have taken before they bumped into each other anyway? It’s a wonder that they’ve made it two months into the semester without seeing each other.”

“Yeah well, I bet we could have avoided it somehow. I mean, you can predict pretty well where a softball is going to fall. You can probably predict where and when they’d run into each other, and we could find a way to avoid that.”

Sparks buried his face in his hands in frustration. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just
not.
The situation is a lot more complicated than you think it is.”

Ollie sat down on the corner of his bed and stared at Sparks, searching for the right question. It never came.

“Keith is about to knock on your door,” Sparks said, breaking the silence. “I think I’m gonna split, Bomber.”

Ollie said nothing, burying his own face into his hands until Sparks quietly slipped out of the room. Even from that first moment, when Sparks helped him push his car, he had always irritated him. But this was something much more.

Ollie’s life was the thing at stake, but instead he was a pawn in the virtual chess game of a nosy little gimpy Yankees fan.

***

The door opened. It was Keith. “How did it go tonight?”

Ollie felt angry. “It was going great until we went to that acoustic show and ran into her old boyfriend. Whatever set her off last night, I think it had something to do with him.”

“What, is she not over him or something? How long ago was this relationship?”

“High school.”

“Well… that shouldn’t be a
huge
problem.”

“It seems like it might be. Hopefully it’s not.”

“Most people don’t go around thinking about their old high school flames. If seeing this guy got her all worked up, you know, maybe it was something insignificant— or at least maybe it will be soon.”

“I don’t see how. She was fine last night until I brought up her teenage years. I think it has something to do with moving to St. Louis, or with him, or both. I’m just not sure.”

“You’re just gonna have to come out and ask her.”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Well, you can’t let this thing keep on going. If you wait for it to fix itself, this guy might get in the way. Was he still interested in her?”

“Sure seemed like it. I don’t think now’s the right time to bring it up with her, though.”

“Every situation is different, I guess. You know her better than I do, but… I wouldn’t wait too long.”

Keith soon left Ollie with his thoughts.

Maybe the relationship had taken off too fast; maybe that was what it was. She was probably looking for some stability in her life, having just broken off one relationship, but Sparks had seen to it that she’d met Ollie before she’d even had time to catch her breath. Then again, maybe it was him, not Joy, who was feeling those things. After all, he was still in love with Anne when he first started flirting with Joy. Maybe
he
wasn’t ready for another relationship yet. There had been only a few days’ difference between the moment he’d popped open the ring box to ask Anne to marry him and the day he popped in to Joy’s work to ask her out on a date.

It was Sparks. He was the one who had picked out his girl for him. He had been the one to pick the
timing,
too, however poor that timing obviously was right now. Sparks was the puppeteer pulling his strings, making him dance all over the stage.

The funny thing about all of that was that Ollie had known it somehow, all along. Sparks was the one making all the decisions for him, and how could he do that unless Ollie both knew it and allowed it? No, he wasn’t telling Ollie what to do— in fact, Sparks rarely gave him any answers that might even remotely tell him what course of action to take. But Ollie was definitely making all of his decisions based on what he thought Sparks
wanted
him to do, and that meant he was out of control of his own life.

The more he thought about it as he lay in bed— the orange glow of his space heater lighting up the room— the more frustrated he became. He was tired of playing the marionette. He wanted to take control. Sparks wouldn’t be calling the shots anymore. He didn’t want Sparks to be the one who got to tell him how high to jump or when to lie low.

Ollie had to admit to himself that if he truly felt that way he would have put the hat on his head, and when Sparks showed up he would have told him off, that it was time for him to move on to someone else. But that’s not what he did. He jumped out of bed, snatched the hat off the computer desk, flung open the closet door and hurled it onto the back corner on the top shelf. He wasn’t going to touch it for at least a week.

Now Ollie was in control again. It felt good. The first item on his to-do list of defiance was, first thing in the morning, to ask Joy about the details from her past as they walked to class. That would get things rolling.

Chapter 20

Ollie was ready to face the world free from the burden of someone telling him how to do everything. His body and his spirits felt lighter than usual as he got himself ready for the day. It was awesome. He felt carefree as his brain jogged through the things he was going to tackle over the next week. It was incredible how bold he felt about facing Joy.

Sure, he didn’t like how Sparks had brought it about, but that didn’t change the way he felt about the girl Sparks had pointed him toward. There were things within his relationship with her that he hadn’t felt for a very long time… since the early days of his relationship with Anne.

Joy was fun. She was beautiful. Amazing. He wasn’t going to let her slip out of his hands, and especially not just for the sake of spite— he knew Sparks wanted it as well, but he would beat him at his own game, and he would do it Ollie’s way.

He knew Joy well enough anyway. He knew she’d be there at her apartment waiting for him to walk her to class like she had been every morning. He was confident she would shake off the weirdness of the night before, that she would be wearing that contagious smile on those lips again. Ollie and Joy would have a normal day together. He was sure that the opportunity for them to talk about her issues would present itself before too long. Most importantly, he knew these things for himself— not because Sparks told him so.

When Ollie bounced up Joy’s front step and tapped the front door with his knuckles, it wasn’t Joy who answered. She wasn’t even home. She’d left earlier than usual for class and hadn’t told her roommates why.

When he showed up at her cash register later in the day, the uneasiness set in further when he saw that her contagious smile hadn’t found its way back to her lips. She shot him down when he asked her if he could walk her home, saying she had something she needed to do elsewhere on campus, that he wouldn’t be able to come along.

At the end of a full day of being in full control, the only thing he did know was that the opportunity to talk about her past had slipped by. But he wouldn’t pull the Yankees hat out of the closet. He didn’t need Sparks.

He walked slowly down the long hill on one corner of campus. The pathway was divided by a metal railing, one side being for pedestrians and the other for cyclists. Ollie defiantly chose to walk down the bikers’ side. If he couldn’t be in control of his life, he was going to control a small part of the lives of the people around him. He found sick satisfaction when the second biker to pass him yelled at him to get back in the pedestrian lane. But satisfaction turned to anger when the last biker to pass him hit him with his elbow as he zoomed by. He fumed, knowing that it had been done on purpose, even though he also knew that he’d brought it on himself. He usually succeeded in making himself even more upset when that was his goal, and it was that time for sure.

He fumed a little more as he walked past Skywalker House on his way home, thinking about what was going on within those brick walls. He was sure someone inside there was plotting some scheme to steal his girl. There were enemies inside.

Though each step he took on the sidewalk heated his temper more and more, even though he walked in the door fuming, D’s unexpected presence took some of the heat out of him.

“I went down to the Ascend office today,” D said. “I put in my application for the job with Greg.”

“Yeah?” Ollie was glad to focus on someone other than himself for a change. “How’d that go?”

“Good. The guy there was completely surprised to see me. It was almost like he was trying to talk me out of it, giving me all the reasons why Greg is so tough to work with and all that.”

“I still haven’t seen why myself, yet. Except for the laundry, it’s not that bad. I think he’s more teddy bear than Grizzly bear.”

“That’s kind of what I told him, but he insisted that it wouldn’t stay that easy. I think I’ll like the job, though.”

“You did get it, then? I mean, you’re probably the only one applying.”

“Yeah, I got it. He probably thinks I’ll just keep the position warm until someone more qualified comes along.”

“So he thought you were qualified?”

“I guess so, but I’m not. Not really. I mean, I’ve never worked in this field before. I don’t have any handicapped siblings or friends. I don’t have any credentials. The only thing I have going for me really is that I’m a big guy and they need a big guy to work with him.”

“So he doesn’t fight with you.”

“That’s kind of what the guy at the office meant, though he didn’t quite say as much. It was more like he felt I could get away when Greg
does
fight with me. He made it sound inevitable.”

“He is a pretty intimidating guy. Even when he’s in a good mood, you just can’t guess what’s going on in that brain of his.”

“We talked for a pretty long time about the job,” D said. “I think he wanted to make sure I wanted it; he was feeling me out the whole time to see if I could be easily intimidated.”

“Did you talk about that staff worker who didn’t show up on Saturday?”

“Yeah. I told him the whole story about how the note was there when we got there and all that. He called Lynn up and talked to her about it too. Naturally, they’re going to fire that guy.”

“That leaves two empty spots. The manager and the worker.”

“Yeah. You
are
still planning on being the one to fill that other position, right? I mean, because if you’re not, then I’m gonna have to... ya know…”

“Find someone else?”

“No, give you the beating of a lifetime.”

“So I either get beat up by Greg and get paid for it or get beat up by you for nothing?”

“That’s a good way to look at it, yeah.”

“Which one of you do you think can hit the hardest?”

D laughed. “Ya know, I think the key to Greg is going to be keeping him busy. From what I can gather, pretty much all of his explosions are when he’s just at home doing little nothings around the house. We can’t really avoid that, but it sounds to me like he’s never erupted out in public or when friends are over.”

“Well, if we don’t have anything to do, we can just take off and write in the log book that he was getting upset, like the other worker did.”

“Exactly,” D laughed. “My first official shift with him is going to be on Wednesday. I think we’re supposed to go grocery shopping that day, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have to think of something else to do to fill up the day.”

“Keith and I have a softball game that day. You guys should swing by. That’ll take up a few hours, and he’ll probably like it.”

“Good idea.”

They eventually parted, and though he was glad to be calmer now, the rest of Ollie’s day was uneventful. Since Joy wasn’t there to share his dinner with, he made himself a quesadilla and planted himself on the couch with the TV remote in his hand. After that it wasn’t too long before he surrendered the remote to D and the gaggle of girls from Ivy House who had come over to watch a movie.

Ollie wasn’t interested in socializing, so he slipped out. He found his brain stuck on Joy, wondering what she might be doing. But later his thoughts wandered from Joy back to memories of Anne, and they even wandered to the point where he thought a little about Lynn. He wondered what that meant for a split second, until he slapped himself.