He moved from the arm of the chair down onto its seat, dislodging Liam—who jumped right back up into his lap. “You mean your best friends don’t even know? Caylor? Zarah?”
Flannery shook her head. “Not really. They know that I occasionally still dabble with writing fan fiction. But they have no idea that I’ve been posting any of it publicly. I knew that would come back to bite me. I should have just kept it to myself. But I went out to see what others were doing, and I was so disappointed in their characters and writing ability that I felt compelled to post mine, just to give fans an alternative to a lot of the…really bad stuff I found. But if you figured it out, who else will? It’ll be public humiliation all over again.”
“Public humiliation?”
She covered her eyes with her hand again. “When I was seventeen, my sister Sylvia and I got into a huge fight. I don’t even remember how it got started, but she accused me of reading her diary. I hadn’t, but with Emily egging her on—because I had read Emily’s diary when I was all of about eight years old—Sylvia believed her. When I was out at my riding lesson that day, Sylvia went into my room. She found my notebooks, filled with stories I’d been writing for years based on the Sir Gawain legends. When my boyfriend came to pick me up for prom that weekend, Sylvia started telling him all about how I was in love with a fictional character from a book and how I wanted him to change his name to Sir Gawain and wasn’t it childish that I spent all of my free time pretending that I was part of a fantasy world. It was horrible.”
Having seen how girls reacted to finding out he was something of a fanatic himself, he completely sympathized with her. “Tell me he didn’t leave you standing there and didn’t take you to the prom.”
“Oh, no! That would have been better. He took me. And made a complete fool of me when he laughed about it with all his football team buddies. I ended up calling my mom to come pick me up—I was so humiliated. Thank goodness there was only a week of school left after that before graduation. Of course, by the time we all got there for the start of exam week Monday morning, everyone in school knew. I was never one of the most popular girls, but I’d had a large circle of friends. That last week, you’d have thought I had exploding boils all over, the way people avoided me. Which is why I now avoid just about everyone I went to high school with. Because that’s always the first thing that comes up.”
She sat up and hugged a pillow to her chest, drawing her feet up under her. “Of course, I would imagine they all went to see the movie
King Arthur
when it came out several years back, because then it was cool to be a fan of Arthurian legend. But about six months after that movie came out, I ran into a girl whom I’d considered a friend since fourth or fifth grade. And not two minutes into the conversation, she starts in on, ‘Hey, how’s that fantasy boyfriend of yours…now, which one was he in the movie?’ I mean, come on! It’s been sixteen years, and people still can’t let it go.”
“You know, being an Arthurian-legend junkie when I was a kid didn’t win me a lot of friends, either.” Under his hand, Liam rolled onto his back, clasped Jamie’s hand between his paws, and started licking his fingertips. Jamie shuddered and pulled his fingers away from the rough tongue.
“It’s different for you.” She shook her head, her tone dismissive.
“Why is it different for me?” Setting Liam on the floor, Jamie pushed himself out of the chair and crossed to sit near her, in the middle of the sofa.
“Because you’re a guy. You can do geeky stuff like that as a kid, but then if you grow up to be good looking and successful, people forget all about it.”
Contentment vibrated through him like one of Liam’s full-body purrs. She thought he was good looking and successful. “No, believe me—that kind of stuff stays with you no matter how successful you are. And let’s not forget I’m not only the dork who was into all that kind of stuff as a kid—and who couldn’t talk to pretty girls to save my life. I’m the guy who was that dork who’s now
still
a dork who has trouble talking to pretty girls sometimes
and
is unemployed.”
“Ha! With the way women start drooling the moment you walk in a room? I’m not buying it.” She popped him with the pillow.
Grabbing onto the corner of it, he leaned forward. “Um, hello—remember Fanny and the Dracula comment?”
“I remember.” She stilled; the smile slipped slightly from her pouty lips. Lips he really wanted to kiss.
He pointed at himself. “Dork.” He pointed at her. “Pretty girl.”
Rolling her eyes, she yanked on the pillow again, and he let it go. “Whatever.”
“It’s true. Those first few times I was around you, I couldn’t think straight. And when I can’t think straight, words get past that filter in my brain—you know the one that says, ‘That’s stupid; don’t say it’?—and they spill out of my mouth, and I can’t control them.” He wrapped a few silky threads of the pillow’s thick tassel around his finger, imagining doing the same with her hair.
“You seem to have been doing a pretty good job of it lately.” She shifted so that her back pressed against the arm of the sofa and she faced him.
Turning, he bent his left knee up onto the sofa, almost touching hers. “It wasn’t easy. But I knew I needed to work at making you see I wasn’t just some weirdo with no social skills.”
She raised her eyes toward the ceiling, puckered her lips, and cocked her head. “Weirdo with no social skills. Hmm…Actually, I was thinking arrogant and condescending jerk, but six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
“Seriously? You’re going to go there?” He put on his best arrogant, condescending, tough-guy bluster. “Because I’ll go there, Fanny, I will.”
Finally she laughed. Not just a giggle or a chuckle, but a head-tossing, full-throated laugh.
Something fell out of her hair and hit the floor, and the blond mass tumbled around her shoulders. Jamie’s hands itched to feel those loose curls wrapping around his fingers, to brush back the piece that came to rest on her cheek.
Flannery tucked it behind her ear and pushed the rest over her shoulders.
Words started boiling up in Jamie’s brain, words that wanted to come loose. But even more than that, the compunction to lean forward and kiss her came so forcefully that it scared him. He’d kissed lots of women before—too many, probably. But the desire to kiss Flannery, to hold her in his arms, to cradle her head in his hands, to run his fingers through her hair…this was completely new.
He shot to his feet and backed away from her.
She set the pillow aside and stood, too, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m about to say one of those dorky, socially inept things.” Better to let the words spew out than to offend or embarrass her by giving in to the need to kiss her. “I really want to kiss you right now.”
She lowered her head a little and arched her brows as if expecting more.
“I—that’s it. That’s what I needed to say.” He turned and headed toward the kitchen. “I’ll go now.”
“Jamie, stop.” The forcefulness in her voice stopped him as much as her words.
He didn’t—couldn’t—turn around.
“Please look at me.”
Flinching at the nearness of her voice, he did as bade.
She stood just out of arm’s reach. “I want you to kiss me, too.”
His knees gave out, and he grabbed the back of the nearest bar chair.
“But—”
He should have known there’d be a
but
. There was always a
but
when it came to him and women.
She moved closer, and he straightened, meeting her eye-to-eye. When she reached up her hand and ran her fingers along his bearded cheek, the bar chair’s feet started rattling against the floor. “Tell me the truth behind why you’re growing a beard.”
As soon as her hand dropped back to her side, a little bit of oxygen returned to his brain. He had a beard? What? Oh—right. “After praying and not really receiving a clear answer, I decided I wouldn’t shave until I’d made a firm decision of what I want to do.”
“And what do you want to do?” Her hand joined his on the back of the bar chair—not touching, but near enough that the slightest shift would bring them into contact.
He’d forced her to share her big, embarrassing secret. It only seemed fair to allow her to do the same to him. “I’m thinking about going to nursing school.”
She didn’t balk, didn’t laugh, didn’t run screaming in the opposite direction. “That’s a big change from marketing.”
“I know. I had breakfast with Danny—my best friend—Wednesday morning to talk about it.” He told her a little about Danny’s leaving the ad agency and going to nursing school. “Even though he didn’t have some of the hang-ups about it that I do, he had other pressures—cultural and family—that made it difficult.”
“Hang-ups?”
Just how much about himself did he want to share with her? “My dad—my real dad, not Don—was kind of…demanding and difficult. He’d been a marine and fought in Vietnam, and, according to Cookie, he came back with some weird notions about women and how they should behave and what they should do. When I was growing up, he was a cop. And it really bothered him when his department started hiring a lot more women. My mom was only nineteen when she married him, and I was born eleven months later. She’d had a year of college before they got married, and she wanted to go back, but he wouldn’t let her.”
“What did she want to do?” Flannery shifted her weight, and her pinky finger pressed lightly against his thumb. She didn’t move it.
“She w–wanted”—he drew a deep breath and tried to quell the chaos going on inside his head from Flannery’s nearness and the swirl of memories—“wanted to get her degree in business—in marketing, actually. He told her that was a man’s world—business and marketing—and if she wanted to go to school, he’d pay for her to go to beauty school or nursing school, because those were appropriate jobs for women.”
“So did she?”
“Yeah—she went to cosmetology school. And as soon as I started first grade, she got a job at a hair salon in our neighborhood so that I could walk there after school, sit, and do my homework while she finished up with clients, and then we could walk home together.”
“Is that why you ended up going into marketing? Because your dad said that was a man’s world?”
Could she cut to the chase or what? With a sigh, Jamie pulled out the middle bar chair and sat. He motioned for Flannery to do the same. This could take awhile. He told her about the way his father had yelled at him for failing PE, for getting kicked off the peewee-football team, for being more interested in reading than in sports or hunting. And the arguments his parents got into because of it. Then he told her about his thirteenth birthday, including what Mom had just told him.
“So the last words my dad ever said to me was that he didn’t want to be disappointed in me anymore. That I was thirteen years old, and as the Bible said, it was time to put away childish things and be a man. Less than half an hour later, he was dead.”
Flannery reached over and took his hands in hers. “Oh, Jamie.”
“I hated him. But I loved him—he was my dad.” Jamie looked down at their entwined hands. “And ever since then, I’ve been trying not to disappoint him. But as both Mom and Don have pointed out to me recently, I’ve done that to the exclusion of making sure that I’m not disappointing myself. Oh, and that the ‘putting childish things away’ doesn’t appear in the Bible quite the way Dad paraphrased it.”
“How did your mom and Don meet?”
He told her about Mom’s leaving six months after his father died. “She had a friend from high school who’d moved out to Salt Lake for college and then stayed, and she invited Mom to go out and live with her. Mom needed a job, so she went around to all of the salons in the area to apply. Several of them were salons that Don owned, so he brought her in for an interview. They got married two years later.”
“Wait—your stepfather owns hair salons?” A little chuckle of disbelief preceded a smile.
He liked it when she smiled. “Yep—started out as a hairdresser, put himself through college, got his MBA, and started buying up salons all over the area—especially in the ski resort towns—and turning them into high-end ‘experience’ salons and spas. Mom went to college, got her business degree, and is now the vice president of marketing for the company.”
Flannery stared down at their joined hands for a long moment. He didn’t interrupt. This was a lot for anyone to take in.
“I can see why you’re struggling to figure out what you want to do. Your real dad, the one whose blood you share, made you believe that if you didn’t have a profession he deemed masculine enough, you’d always be a disappointment to him. Your stepfather, who sounds like he’d love nothing more than to have a genuine father-son relationship with you, is the antithesis of everything your real dad stood for and believed.” She looked up at him. “You’re having to choose between them. Like, if you choose to go to nursing school, you’re picking Don over your dad.”
Jamie swallowed hard. Without even knowing all the facts and details, she’d managed to pinpoint his exact problem and put it into succinct words. Don’s advice of seeking out objective feedback had been right.
“I told you that I want you to kiss me, too. But I don’t think now is the right time. I don’t want to distract you while you’re trying to make this decision. I also don’t want our first kiss to be with you in a beard.” The corners of her eyes crinkled up. “You need to figure out what you want to do with your life, what God is calling you to do. You told me that one of your options is going out to Utah to work for your stepfather. If that’s where God wants you to go, I don’t want to stand in your way. I want you to know, though, I will support you in whatever you decide, so long as you’re following God’s will and not your own—or someone else’s.”
She leaned forward and planted a soft, lingering kiss on his forehead. “I’ll be praying for you,” she whispered. She untangled her left hand from his and touched the shaggy hair at his temple. “Did you also decide not to get this cut until you figure everything out?”
“No, that’s just me being lazy.”
“I guess you deserve a few weeks of laziness after working for so many years.” She slipped down from the bar chair and went around the island into the kitchen and started washing the plastic container the corned beef was in.