Aroused Page 9

  He’s teasing again, and I give him a sidelong glance.

  “Are you talking about more dares?” I ask.

  “Just until I leave. Why not?” He jerks his chin toward his BMW, which is parked on the other side of the diner. “This is what I propose: in order to expand your horizons, I dare you to drive my rental car for a week.”

  I blink. What kind of guy just gives a girl he barely knows a car to drive? An elegant car with a bunch of whistles and bells that I …?

  Wait. I get it. He’s daring me out of my comfort zone again just for his amusement in what he considers a boring town. And even though that BMW seems as easy to operate as a rocket ship from the future and I shudder at the thought of what my friends and neighbors would say if they saw me driving around in the ridiculous thing, I don’t turn down dares.

  It’s on again.

  “Done,” I say. “But only if you drive my pickup at the same time.”

  He actually seems fine with that. Maybe it’ll further his cred as a trustworthy guy who’s willing to work with the people of Cherry Valley. First the blue ribbon from Milton’s that he’s still sporting on his shirt, next a genuine redneck bucket of bolts to show everyone he’s simpatico with CV.

  “Done,” he says.

  I go to my truck, grab my school parking pass, then come back to extract my house keys from the cherry keychain I got from my sister’s quirky curio shop. I shove my pickup key at him, and he dips his hand into the pocket of his field jacket and offers me his own set.

  As I grab it, he grips my hand, and a thrill goes through me, whirring straight into my belly where it spins and sparks. His skin is rougher than I thought a nerd’s would be, his fingers long enough to make me imagine what they could do to a girl.

  “Swear to me,” he says, “that you’re gonna keep that car intact. No drag racing.”

  I try to act like my pulse isn’t kicking and my nethers aren’t getting happy and tingly. “And you’d better not put a scratch on my Bessy.”

  “Your truck has a name?”

  “You bet.”

  Everything suspends as Zach keeps a hold of me, and once again I think that he’s going to kiss me. I might even be inviting him to do it as I melt a little.

  But then I come to my senses, snatching his keys and letting go of mine.

  Is there disappointment in his eyes? I can’t tell as a pair of headlights sends a flare of white over his glasses.

  A truck drives by. It belongs to Anson Halloway from the dry goods store, and he beeps his horn in farewell.

  Both Zach and I wave, and then I’m backing toward his car.

  “Remember,” I say, lifting my finger. “Not a scratch.”

  I turn around and walk with purpose toward that BMW, shutting out the notion that Zach is watching me go.

  I’m trying not to get turned on again by that very possibility.

  It’s my second day driving Zach’s BMW, and even though I’m embarrassed to be seen in the thing, I think I have most of it figured out. I read the owner’s manual, and I still don’t know how to work some of the frillier stuff, like making phone calls via the infotainment system. Also, every time I don’t do something quite right, like accessing the system’s weather display, the British Terminator bitch sounds very disappointed in my lack of know-how.

  I’m currently thinking about a way to make her into a man with a more accessible accent, but I’d rather concentrate on not crashing Zach’s rental into the truck ahead of me at the light on Main Street and Bing Avenue. What’s even more distracting about this car is that I can smell Zach’s soap in it, and I keep drifting off into dumb thoughts about him and how it felt to have my hand in his the other night.

  So dumb.

  I turn into the parking lot of the Burger Bomb where Abby is waiting on a bench beneath the park-and-eat awnings so we can carpool to class. Then Jesse Herrera sees me and pulls his black-and-white SUV to a hard stop. He gestures for me to halt and power down my window.

  Here we go.

  “Hoo-boy!” he says as he tips up the bill of his Cherry Valley Sheriff’s Department cap. “I heard you’d gone fancy on us, but I didn’t believe it until now!”

  I went to school with Jesse. He’s a good ol’ boy who went off to college and hated the city so much that he ended up back here to become a deputy. A hellraiser in a uniform. Go figure.

  “Well, Jesse,” I say, “you wouldn’t be the first to remark on my sudden fanciness.”

  In fact, I’ve been catching grief from everyone. My parents even called me yesterday to ask what’s going on with my new car, and I told them that I’d swapped vehicles with a techie nerd as a neighborly gesture so he could haul around stuff for his company, which might or might not still move here. They told their Left-in-the-Lurch daughter not to make him feel too at home.

  Jesse is watching me with his BS detector full-on, as if he knows there’s something brewing between Zach and me. Which there isn’t.

  “You know,” he finally says, “you look like you’d rather be driving around a Gator more than this thing. Unless, that is, you’re getting some of those delusions of grandeur just from coming into contact with those city boys.”

  “There’s no danger of that, believe me.”

  Thank goodness Abby spots me and comes over to the car.

  “Bye, Jesse,” I say, rolling up the window as Abby hops in. I dust him as I take off, even before Abby has the chance to make sure she’s buckled up.

  “Hey!” she says. “What’s the hurry?”

  “I’m practicing annoying-deputy avoidance.”

  Abby sits back and immediately forms a meaningful relationship with the car. I can hear her sighing as she snuggles into the seat. But that’s Abby for you — always on the side of progress.

  “I think I’m in love with this beast,” she says. “It’s Zach’s?”

  “A rental.”

  I give her the line about lending him my truck as a neighborly gesture, and as I pull onto the road, I start to miss old Bessy once again. She has squeaks and bumps that make me not mind that I don’t have a working radio, and she’s simple and straightforward. She’s also a lot friendlier than the British hag whose voice is currently telling me where my own college is. As if she knows a better route than I do.

  I hope Zach is enjoying my Bessy.

  “So,” I say as we head toward the CVCC campus. “What’s new and crazy with you? Because I know there’s bound to be something.”

  “Always.” Abby nearly bounces in her seat. “I’m starting a new blog.”

  “Another one?”

  “Yup, and I’m calling it ‘The ABCs of Love.’ It’s a companion site to The ABCs of Cherry Valley.”

  Love. Who wants to read about that?

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, this doesn’t sound like your thing, Abby.” Does she even have enough experience to be writing about love?

  Then again, who am I to comment? If she were writing about being loved and left like I was a few years ago by the out-of-towner who taught me the ABCs of Love, then I could create a blog like that. Yet I don’t think Abby’s had much of any kind of intimate relationship.

  But she’s as gangbusters as ever about her new venture. “In my last What-Say-You Wednesday, I promised that no matter what happens to Cherry Valley, I’m going to do my best to keep its warm heart beating. This is a way to do that — by pointing out all the romance here, even in the face of the technology that’s …”

  “Possibly invading us?”

  Abby gives the car a significant look, and I grip the wheel. It’s as if she’s asking if a techie has already invaded me and that’s why I’m cruising around in this thing.

  When the British lady insists that I take an alternate route, I ignore her.

  Abby says, “I’m starting off with a post about some racy film that’s coming to the Bijou. Everyone at Cannes is talking about it.”

  “Cannes?”

  “It’s an international, glamorous film
festival in France where movies have big premieres and stars come out to promote them.”

  How does such a young, small-town girl know about Cannes, too? I still like my vintage movies that I can watch on late-night TV, but she’s beyond that.

  “How racy is it?” I ask.

  “Pretty.”

  “Huh. And Mr. Darnell’s letting it play at the Bijou?”

  “It’s a smart move. I’ve been talking to him about how to make the theater into a destination place in Cherry Valley since the multiplex went up on the other side of town.”

  “But … porno.”

  “Aroused isn’t a porno.”

  I’m not too sure about that. I mean A-R-O-U-S-E-D, right? I’ve seen enough animals in heat — and people — to know better.

  As we pull up to an accident — hay bales blocking the road — the British lady stays silent. Do listen to me next time, Mandy.

  Okay. Maybe I will.

  And as the days go by, I do give her the benefit of the doubt. I get more used to Zach’s car, too. I start to like how it purrs and prowls the roads, how it encloses me in luxurious comfort and the scent of Zach’s soap.

  I also keep thinking about that film Abby mentioned.

  But there’s one thing you can bet on — I’ll never admit how much I’m thinking about either one to anybody, especially Zach.

  Chapter 15

  Zach

  At first, I was sure that driving Mandy’s screwed-up pickup around town would be a shit show.

  It’s so damned loud that you can hear me coming from a mile down the road, and if I’d hoped that I could keep a fairly low profile for the remainder of my trip, I was wrong. All Cherry Valley eyes are really on me now, and they’ve been wondering why I’m trucking around in Mandy’s old, bumpy, snooze-inducing, giant-assed Chevy. The radio doesn’t even work, but as I chugged from one property appointment to another, explored Cherry Valley, and talked to its people a little more this week, a strange thing started to happen.

  I could actually start to hear my thoughts clearly as I drove around. Sure, those thoughts were accompanied by the truck’s shocks squawking down the roads, but the white noise that used to constantly fuzz up my brain like electric static started to disappear mile by mile.

  And now, on the day before I’m supposed to give Mandy her ride back, I think I might actually miss Bessy and the way she smells like Mandy, thanks to the air freshener attached to a broken visor.

  Fresh, uncomplicated, a little bit flowery …

  Yeah, I’m pretty much getting used to this dare.

  I see Mandy every day in Screaming Beans, and we’ve been checking in with each other — How’s my BMW? How’s my Bessy? — before returning to our usual work. Sometimes we’ll chat during Mandy’s down times, but not too much, because we both have things to do. Then she’ll smile at me as she leaves to go to class and I’ll get back to whatever I need to get done that day, and that’ll be that.

  No pressure between us, no tension.

  It’s all good.

  Now, as I drive away from a homespun furniture store where carpenters sell the hand-worked lumber from the nearby mountains, I roll down the window and take in the crisp fall air. There’s smoke on the wind from fireplaces and the barbecue joint on Craftsman’s Row. A new dresser wrapped in bedding is in the back of Mandy’s truck bed, and I’m heading back to my Airbnb with it as a favor to my rental owner, Miss Carney.

  It’s one of those days when Cherry Valley lives up to everything I thought it’d be.

  My phone sounds off with my mom’s whistling ringtone, and my first instinct is to access my Bluetooth so I can take the call via the dashboard. But there’s none of that high-tech help here, so instead of fumbling with my sing-songing device, I pull over to the curb.

  It’s not bad to slow down every once in a while, or even stop.

  As I pick up my phone, a rough guy holding a cigarillo in his fingers and leaning against the planked façade of a metal shop checks me out. Techie nerd alert, he’s probably thinking before he inevitably brushes me off like most of Cherry Valley still does when they’re not coming up to me and asking about jobs. But then he inspects the truck and gives me a slight nod before sucking the cigarillo to a red glow.

  At his quiet, badass approval, I feel something I’ve never felt before — kind of cool. So I recline in my idling truck and lean my arm out the open window, answering my phone like I’ve done it in this pickup a million times before.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say, suddenly feeling a lot less cool.

  “Zach! We thought we’d call to say hi to our long-lost son. Dad’s on speakerphone, too.”

  “Hey, son!”

  The metal worker has dropped his smoke to the ground and is grinding it out with his work boot. As he goes back inside the shop, I drop all pretenses.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say, grinning. We’ve been keeping in touch with texts, but my parents like to chat once a week to make sure I’m not some computer program that I created to fool them. “I’m still in Cherry Valley.”

  Dad laughs. “The place Barry says is fossilized?”

  Mom interjects. “Don’t start on Barry. He’s a good source of information when our son won’t tell us … what do the kids say? The ‘deets?’”

  I close my eyes because I know what’s coming next from Mom. Damn Barry and his big-mouth texts that he occasionally sends to my parents. He’s done this crap since college just to mess with me.

  Dad seems to know what Mom’s up to as well, because he hops right back in to save me from intrusive questions about what kind of social life I might have out here.

  “How’s business going?” he asks.

  Thanks, Dad. “Great, but right now I’m taking a break to do a favor for someone.” I glance in my rearview mirror at the dresser in the back of the truck. “The owner of my Airbnb got home yesterday from visiting her granddaughter out of state, and the first thing she did was buy a piece of new furniture. I volunteered to pick it up for her and help her move it in.”

  Because …

  A) It’s a good PR move for Full Circle.

  B) I wasn’t about to let a woman of Miss Carney’s age handle this brute of a dresser.

  C) I have a cool truck this week, so I might as well put it to good, friendly use.

  “Bully for you, Zach,” my dad says. “I knew we raised you right.”

  Mom, who’s probably been clawing at the wall in anticipation of getting her piece in, says, “Barry texted that you’re sweet on a girl there.”

  Thanks, Barry.

  I roll my eyes, but my gaze only lands on several of the items Mandy left in her truck: some popular paperbacks that don’t quite seem like school reading plus a few hardcover Agatha Christie mysteries; cloth shopping bags from the little market on Bing Avenue; a white, cute, lacy sleeveless shirt that she probably wears when the weather is warmer.

  I reach out to touch that last item — not that I’ve been doing that all week or anything. Then I pull my hand away.

  “Mom,” I say, “Barry’s just a …” I almost say shit-stirrer, but I catch myself. “Troublemaker. If something noteworthy was going on here, I’d tell you.”

  “Zach, you’re the boy who didn’t tell us you had a prom date until a couple days before the dance, when we discovered you’d rented a tux. I found the receipt in your jeans when I was washing them.”

  Brother. “It was just prom, Mom.”

  “Just prom?”

  Dad interrupts, because he knows how much prom sucked and how bored I was the whole night because I’d been working on putting together a computer in the garage and wanted to be doing that instead. Not that I wasn’t into girls or didn’t pull out all the stops for my date that night — I was just ambitious, and it wasn’t until I got to college that I decided girls were also awesome.

  “So, Zach,” Dad says, saving me again, “the last time we knew, you’d found a property that you think will work for FCT. Have you changed your mind about it?”

/>   “Nope.”

  Then I tell them how I made a second visit to the warehouse that used to store grain on the edge of town. The property is surrounded by autumn-colored oaks and majestic pines, and whenever I think of the place, I use my mind’s eye to layer future details around the main brick building: hiking and bike paths, swimming pools and sports facilities, annexes for developing software and teaching, restaurants, flop quarters for employees who want to crash on the work campus instead of going home every night.

  I chat with my parents about all my ideas until I probably exhaust them, but after I hang up, I can tell they’re proud of me. It never gets old.

  Afterward, I sit there and take another look at Mandy’s belongings, especially that lacy top. I try not to think of her wearing it.

  Or, more to the point, not wearing it.

  Blowing out a breath and getting my priorities back in line, I maneuver the truck onto the empty street and drive it to the Airbnb. Miss Carney is already waiting outside her flowered trellis for me, and she’s laughing with her neighbor, Mr. Doughte, who’s holding onto a steel hand truck.

  I do believe I’m witnessing a senior citizen hookup in motion. Ever since Miss Carney got back from visiting her granddaughter, she and the swinging guy next door have been making eyes.

  Even with knowing her less than a day, I’m feeling oddly protective over the little lady with the curly silver hair and floral housedresses, and after I pull up, I hop of out of the pickup and go straight for Mr. Doughte’s hand truck. The Montana grandson in me wants to make him back up a step because he’s leaning way too close to her, but the San Francisco free spirit tells me to chill out.

  I compromise. “Thanks for bringing this over, sir,” I say without shooing him off.

  But he’s not letting go of the hand truck, and he tugs it out of my hand.

  “We’ve been waiting for you, Zachary,” he says, going from charming gentleman to snarling old fart in a flash. “But I told Jonette I’d take care of that dresser for her.”