Sparks the Matchmaker (Aaron Sparks Series) (19 page)

Chapter 25

It was colder outside than it was inside but still, the girl on the doorstep wasn’t the one who froze. Ollie stood just inside the doorway like an ice sculpture. He would normally have greeted her with words of welcome and excitement, but his jaw remained congealed; his lips motionless.

Joy was no dummy. She knew something was up. Without being rude, she stuck her head into Ollie’s living room and peeked around the door to see Lynn quietly sitting on his couch, a throw pillow curled in her arms.

“I can see you’ve got company,” Joy said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Lynn dropped the pillow and stood up. “That’s all right. You two look like you need to talk. I’ll go.”

Ollie the ice sculpture continued to stand dumbstruck in his doorway.

Lynn was no dummy either. She knew something was up. She snuck up behind Ollie and gave him a hug. “Call me tonight once you guys are done talking.” There was a hint of frustration in her tone. She made her way past both of them, out the door.

Ollie still hadn’t invited Joy inside. He hadn’t even uttered a sound, but Joy stepped inside anyway. She wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sorry I’ve been so distant. I won’t do that to you anymore, okay?”

The warmth of her arms around him made him feel horrible. It had only been a few days since he was excited about the prospect of kissing her, but that felt like a lifetime ago. He could still feel Lynn’s lips on his. And Joy’s words, “I won’t do that to you
anymore,”
seemed to make it clear that she was sticking around from now on.

“I’m really sorry,” Joy continued as Ollie closed the door. “I’ve done a lot of thinking. It wasn’t fair of me to hide from you like that.”

Her apology was warm. He had to be honest with himself; he hadn’t expected it. He’d expected some indelicate words about Lynn that would continue to chill the situation, but her apology was sincere. She was silent, clearly waiting for him to say something, but he still hadn’t thawed enough to do that. She wrapped her warm arms around him once more, giving him a little time.

“Did you go to Colorado with that other guy, uh, what’s his name?” Ollie managed to ask. It wasn’t the most charismatic sentence he could spit out, conveniently and yet
purposefully
forgetting Scott’s name. He could have said something about accepting her apology or something about being happy to see her again.

But he didn’t.

“I went with Scott, yes. Um… that’s kind of what I came here to talk to you about.”

“You’re together with Scott again. You came here to tell me that.” It was a statement more than a question.

“No. That’s not it at all. I need to start being open with you about a lot of things. I haven’t been fair to you.”

Ollie had been wrong when he thought he’d have to chase Joy down and corner her in order to get to the bottom of everything. He wouldn’t need to work out some great strategy to get it all out of her; she was spilling it right here and now.

“The real reason I’ve been pulling away from you is because I like you. I thought for most of last week I was protecting you from some hard times, but really I was just trying to protect myself.”

“High school…” Ollie paused, willing the rest of the sentence to form itself, but it never happened.

“High school what?”

“Something happened to you when you were in high school. Every time I mentioned that time in your life, you shut off. Something horrible must have happened to you there.”

“Horrible and wonderful at the same time.”

“I can’t say I really know what that means—”

“I know. I know. That’s kind of the problem. It was one of those situations nobody could understand unless they were there.”

“Try me. You’ve got me braced for the worst. I’m ready.”

They moved to the couch, and Joy sat with her eyes on the floor as they began to cloud up with tears. Ollie’s excitement and curiosity had bubbled up as soon as he realized she was going to finally unveil the mystery, but when he saw the tears forming in her eyes he abandoned all that and gently wrapped his arms around her.

Her tears didn’t seem to be tears of pain, oddly enough. Her expression didn’t seem to carry the same type of hurt that she’d expressed before. Rather, her eyes swam as an expression of something she felt very deeply. It wasn’t pain, though. Not this time.

“When I was in high school in Colorado, dating Scott— I know we were just kids, and a lot of people don’t think teenagers are mature enough to experience anything more than a deep infatuation, but I was really in love with him. On our last day together, after he helped my family load up our moving truck, we went out for one last night together. Well, the short version of the story is that I ended up pregnant.”

That caught him off guard. He’d guessed a million things about her past, but that possibility had never crossed his mind. “What did Scott say when you talked to him about it?”

“You mean last week?”

“Last week? Are you telling me that he didn’t know he was a father until just a few days ago?”

“No. I mean, years ago I called his mom… and
she
told him. I could never face him. He tried and tried to call me for months, but I never took his call. Even after our daughter was born I still didn’t want to talk to him.” She looked up at him. “That’s why I dropped out and took the GED instead. I didn’t want to go to high school anymore, not pregnant. That’s also why I didn’t bother making any friends in St. Louis. And I didn’t want to tell you about my past because I made that mistake once… I told my last boyfriend about it and he never looked at me the same way again.”

Ollie’s stomach turned over. He felt horrible. He’d only had to wait one week to find out what was going on, but he didn’t, and now everything was crashing down. “Yeah, well your last boyfriend wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Ollie said.

Joy smiled. “I went through a lot with my pregnancy… and everything. The people at church in St. Louis didn’t know me, but that didn’t stop them from judging me. And being new in town didn’t help, because they didn’t know the real me. They only saw a pregnant belly without a husband. So I tuned the rest of the world out for a while. It seemed like it was the best way to cope with their ignorance.”

“That’s why you said you became a shut-in.”

“Exactly. The little bit of time I spent at my new school, I hated. I didn’t go around telling the other kids I was pregnant, and anticipating the day when I could no longer hide my belly, I kept myself reserved. I didn’t bother trying to make any friends.”

He wrapped his arms around her again and pulled her in. He could feel her watching his every move, his every expression, to see if he would emotionally make a run for it.

“I still don’t understand. Where’s the baby now?” Ollie asked, realizing that their conversation still had a lot of distance to travel.

“Colorado.” She paused. “Trust me when I say I gave it a lot of thought. I was up and down during the majority of my pregnancy, but I think I knew the whole time I wasn’t quite ready to be a mother. Not a single mother, anyway, and since I wasn’t ready for marriage either... It just didn’t feel right.”

“So who’s raising the baby? Scott’s parents?”

“No. But his parents knew someone who’d been waiting for a long time to adopt; some friends of the family. I still couldn’t face him, and from what his mom told me over the phone they sounded like the perfect couple. So Scott’s parents worked that part of it out. I still felt horrible about everything. I felt low. I felt alone. I felt like I was pulling Scott down just because he was connected to me.”

Ollie paused, processing everything. “I guess I can see how bumping into him kind of threw your life off balance for a week.”

“Yeah. I can’t tell you how many dreams I’ve had over the last few years in which I’ve run into him. In each dream, he’d have a different response. One time he’d be mad. The next time he’d be sad. I usually woke up crying.”

Ollie tightened his arms around her as she continued to talk. He was hesitant to say what was on his mind, because he couldn’t sort his thoughts out quickly enough. He did his best to be supportive even though taking in this much information felt like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant.

“He was much more understanding than I thought he would be,” she said. “I felt so guilty, but in the end, once we finally talked last week… I’m finally at peace with everything. I found peace quite a long time ago about choosing adoption, but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I started feeling peace about everything else.”

“That’s why you went back to Colorado? It was your first time seeing her together?”

“When you and I went to Colorado together a few weeks ago, that was the first time I’d seen her since she was a few days old. I’d been getting pictures and letters ever since she was adopted, but I’d never gone to visit.”

“Did she know who you were? Your daughter, I mean.”

“Well, she’s still pretty young, Ollie, so I guess she knows, sort of. Her parents haven’t tried to keep anything from her. They’ve always told her she was adopted; that I chose to place her for adoption out of love.”

He felt guilty. He suddenly realized all week he’d been worrying about himself more than he was worrying about what Joy was going through. He’d made everything about himself. He didn’t regret bringing Lynn into his life, but he couldn’t have picked a worse week to do it. The situation was already complicated enough;, even more complicated than he’d thought it was.

Oh, crap,
Ollie thought.
What have I done?

***

Ollie walked Joy home. On her doorstep, she wrapped her arms around him.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her head still buried in his chest.

“My mind is kind of all over the place. I don’t know what to think.”

“You’re still here, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you didn’t bolt for the door even after I laid everything on you.”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“Are you still interested in… you know… me?”

Ollie didn’t have an answer. He tried to come up with something to say, but the delay in his response gave him away.

“Can you tell me this?” Joy pulled away from her embrace enough to look in his eyes. “Obviously, things have changed, then. Is it because of all the stuff I just told you?”

There was no hesitation in answering this time. “No. It’s not that. It’s just—“

“It’s okay,” Joy said, pulling herself back in tightly to his chest. “I guess I couldn’t expect anything different after the way I treated you this week. You don’t have to explain yourself.”

As she pulled away from their embrace and stepped toward her door, Ollie tried to read her expression. He couldn’t. She didn’t seem sad or even disappointed. She didn’t seem relieved either, though. He suspected that, just like him, she had too many things going through her mind to know what to think.

“Can I make a request?” she asked once she was halfway through her door. “Walk me to class in the morning tomorrow?”

Ollie smiled. “Of course.”

He watched her front door swing closed, leaving him alone and unmoving on her step. He thought he should probably wait until his mind was settled down before talking to Lynn, but he knew his mind wasn’t going to settle down tonight, so now was as good a time as ever. One thing was for sure, though. He didn’t want to do it over the phone, and he could use some time alone to try to sort his mind out first. He’d walk to her place.

***

Lynn always had a way of calming him down, making him feel better, but he wasn’t sure if that would be the case when she answered the door. He stood on her doorstep for a long time, contemplating what he should say, but his mind came up blank. He wished he had answered Joy’s question about his feelings for her so he could at least have something to tell Lynn; some evidence to back up the deep feelings he wanted to confess to her. He hadn’t said anything to Joy, though. The only thing he had to build on was the ice sculpture situation at Tall House when he’d stood silent and frozen between the two girls. And that wasn’t much.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and contemplated calling Lynn instead of knocking.
Would this be easier or harder face to face?

He slid the phone back into his pocket, knocked, and waited.

Lynn answered the door, and although she was wearing only her pajamas and socks, she stepped out into the cold and shut the door behind her. “I don’t even know what to say to you right now,” she said.

“It’s not what it looks like.”

“Isn’t it? Tell me something, then— when did you start dating Joy?”

“A couple weeks ago, I guess.”

“And when did you break up?”

“We were never really— it wasn’t like that.”

“Did you kiss her?”

“No.” Finally, something in the conversation that didn’t make him horrible.

“Did you want to?”

Ollie hesitated, and just like when he hesitated when talking to Joy, she interpreted that as his answer.

“I don’t know that I can trust you, Ollie. You just can’t play me like that.”