Chapter 10 Sprinkles And Side Quests #2
Staten ponders me, no doubt surprised I’m even capable of taking accountability.
When she eventually decides to speak—apparently vacillating between silence and censure—her voice deepens to that of a scrape.
“You were just trying to help. I could’ve corrected you, but I chose not to. I’m just as much to blame as you are.”
My confession is more exhilarating than the thrill of a rollercoaster drop, yet it has the same belly-twisting side effect.
Nausea is quick to jump on the bandwagon.
“I’m so sorry I put you in such a difficult position,” I apologize, setting my plate down.
“We can come clean. I’ll take full responsibility. ”
Do I think Staten and Leif are good for each other?
No, I don’t. That man has been playing with her heart, and he doesn’t even have half the brain to notice.
Do I think Staten wants to be with him more than anything?
Yeah, I do. And all I want is for her to be happy, even if that means…
even if that means she finds that happiness with someone else.
An aborted breath oozes from her mouth, and Staten takes a minute to really consider my reverse proposition. She sets her food aside.
The waiting is a cruel and unusual form of torture. My ribs compress, and through my carb-induced stupor, it dawns on me that I’m practically begging for beautiful ruination to annihilate the earth beneath my feet. Beautiful ruination in the form of knife-edged wit and the bat of silk-spun lashes.
With my pulse a fatal misstep away from petering, Staten finally makes up her mind, as if she can sense the unease tight-fisting my gut.
“As twisted as this whole arrangement is, it made Leif notice me for the first time. The real me. Not his nerdy best friend with the sex appeal of a dead fish. I’ve never seen that man jealous before in his life, because, well, he has everything.”
“Except you,” I conclude.
“Except me.”
I don’t want him to have you. He doesn’t deserve you.
“So, what do you want to do about our little ruse?” My tone is torched with pain and a pinch of despair.
If we come clean now, I don’t think I’ll ever get the opportunity to really know Staten. Our acquaintanceship will depend on literary analysis and reading comprehension.
A brutal gust of wind pushes her closer, our shoulders bumping as a cosmos of admiration implodes inside of me, deserting me on the winding avenue of an endless, blacked-out horizon.
Even despite the numerous layers she has on, she still shivers like the last autumn leaf clinging to a naked spruce branch. I don’t dare move.
“I want to go through with it,” she decides, sidling up to my body to conserve heat, the steam of her breath configuring into a parabola that enters the frosted atmosphere.
Goose bumps proliferate on my arms, but it’s not because of the chill.
“Are you sure?”
“I want to show him what he’s missing.”
I nod, staring straight ahead, feeling as powerless as a pig fattened for culling. I guess fake anything is better than nothing. Maybe time will allow her to see Leif’s true colors—that he’s nothing but a man who has to mark his territory whenever he feels threatened.
“Okay,” I agree, hoping that the little seed of regret in my heart doesn’t blossom into an untamed forest. “Whenever you want to stop, just tell me.”
Clearing the air must’ve revitalized her confidence because—still Velcroed to my side—she picks up her untouched food, finally digging into her wrap of perfectly grilled chicken and melted Monterey jack. Her sigh seesaws on the edge of a moan.
Staten muffles her words, her cheeks puffed out like she’s a chipmunk hoarding nuts. “This is the best chicken quesadilla I’ve ever had.”
She elicits a full-fledged laugh from somewhere deep within my belly. “I’m glad something about this night went right.”
“Don’t say that. Watching you play wasn’t totally terrible,” she jokes. “You’re actually really good.”
Did she just…compliment me? Without her usual side of sarcasm?
Am I breathing? It doesn’t feel like I’m breathing. It’s as if every vital function in my body is close to shutting down. If you told past me that I’d be casually chatting with the girl I almost killed, I wouldn’t believe you.
“I don’t know. I ate shit pretty badly in the second period.”
She quirks her head at me, a little dollop of jalapeno sauce by the corner of her lips. “You did?”
Oh, thank God she didn’t see it.
I don’t think before I wet the pad of my thumb and rub it over the piquant casualty.
The second I contact her skin, her big, Bambi eyes regard me with caution, the circumference of her pupils enlarging due to the close proximity or the limited lighting or who knows what.
My disproportionate reflection ripples in those dark vortexes.
She doesn’t shy away, nor does she scream in disgust—a respite for my tattered ego.
“I, uh, got distracted,” I eke out, hand still hovering midair.
“By what?”
By you.
I shove my arm into my lap. “By…nothing important.”
It’s like Staten’s smile is engineered to make my heart race and stop at the same time. “Well, if it’s any consolation, I don’t think one mistake undermines your performance.”
After everything, she still gives me the benefit of the doubt. This is all fake. I can’t get attached. We both have an objective, and nursing feelings isn’t one of them.
While she starts to make a decent dent in her Mexican rice, I savor the warmth from her body that transfuses through my arm, wishing on all the stars in the universe that the night isn’t quick to end.
“One double scoop of caramel cookie crunch,” the cashier announces, handing off the diabetes hazard that is Staten’s choice of dessert.
A waffle cone swaddles two heaping vanilla scoops, which are speckled with Oreo crumbs and interspersed with swirls of golden brown. A drop diverges from the nest and races down the raised, crisscrossed surface of the wafer.
My unimpressive, small cup of mint chip is next, and I rummage around in my pants pocket for a rumpled twenty, depositing it into the outstretched hand that hovers before me.
I don’t have a big sweet tooth, but when I glance over to see Staten already carving out a gulley in her ice cream with her tongue, overdosing my body with sugar seems like a pretty fair tradeoff.
Despite me being normally acclimated to low temperatures, the frigidity of the shop clots my sinuses—a worthy opponent of the bleak weather that sieges outside.
Marianne’s is a postcard-worthy little shop.
Two display cases bearing compartments of homemade flavors flank either side of the register, the bottom trimmed in a backsplash of pristine, white tiles.
A black, chalk-scribbled menu hangs overhead—embellished with hand-drawn doodles of miniature ice cream cones—and a sit-down counter protrudes off the adjacent wall, hidden beneath a built-in arch.
The walls themselves are made of eggshell-colored combed brick, whereas the ceiling is a bare bones exoskeleton of joists and hanging bulbs.
Lastly, a mural of Maple Grove is painted on brickwork in shades of coffee grounds, the bumpy topography stippled with a fine brush.
“Keep the change,” I say, tailgating Staten as we duck out of the entrance and emerge beneath the scalloped awning, locating an aluminum bench that will serve as our temporary shelter for the time being.
I take my spoon and begin to tackle my modest mound of mint, though the writhing in my stomach isn’t because I’ve substituted my clean diet for a sugar-filled one.
Staten plops down on the cold metal, humming happily under her breath, and I join her at a respectable distance.
“How are you feeling about the literary analysis essay due in a few weeks?” she asks in between licks, still oblivious to the fact that any talk of schoolwork makes me clam up.
“I feel like I’m gonna add another F to my growing grade graveyard,” I mutter, feeling as picked apart as a diamond under a jeweler’s loupe. Something to be fixed. Something that doesn’t just need a good polish but a total deconstruction.
I don’t analyze literature. I take what the author says at face value, because, hey, they’re not around to answer whether or not the color of the curtains symbolizes the main character’s stupid trauma or some shit.
Essays are on par with exams, but at least I have a twenty-five-percent chance of getting a multiple-choice question correct on a test.
Staten’s lips wobble into a frown, and she pauses her journey to the center of her ice cream cone. “Don’t say that. If you set yourself up for failure, you’re going to make yourself fail.”
I think a sensible part of me knows that, but the truth still smacks me with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. I guess fate’s finnicky dice roll operates the same way for hockey: if I go into a game expecting to perform badly, I’m so demoralized that I don’t try as hard.
I laugh. “You’re working with a lost cause here, Ace.”
“Ace?”
“I don’t know, it suits you.”
Suddenly, there’s a micro-shift in her expression, and she levels a look at me that’s dead serious. “Would you be able to teach me how to play hockey?”
“Of course I would,” I respond, slightly offended.
“But I have no athletic ability whatsoever. I get winded going up a flight of stairs.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m a great teacher.”
“So am I,” she insists with fine-tuned confidence, the set of her brow similar to the way Coach glowers at me before demanding suicide drills across the ice.
“None of my clients have ever been disappointed with their grades, and I intend to keep it that way. You have to trust me, but more importantly, you have to trust yourself.”
Damn. My colloquial coworker just handed me my ass, and I couldn’t be more impressed. I mean, I know that Staten would never steer me wrong. I’ve also come to acknowledge that she’s usually always right.
“You know, if this tutoring thing doesn’t work out for you, you could be a helluva good life coach.”
She preens, grinning smugly. “I do give pretty good advice, don’t I?”
“You’re different than anyone I’ve ever met before,” I tell her in a hushed voice, the words raking up my throat with the resistance of a dry heave. I knew it from the moment of our not-so-meet-cute, but saying it out loud gives it a certain kind of power over me.
“Different good? Or different bad?”
Warmth unspools in the safe house of my chest. “Different good.”
Staten doesn’t treat me like some hockey showpiece. She isn’t one of my blind yes men. She challenges me in a way that isn’t bound on diminishing my ego but is instead bound on strengthening my flaws.
“I guess I’m the only one impervious to your charm,” she teases before suctioning her lips around her concaved confectionary.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The wind begins to pick up and seethe, rustling through a neighboring copse of trees and rattling against the underside of the parlor’s roof tiles.
Unlike other hangouts I’ve had with Staten, I don’t feel the need to fill every interval of silence with hollow sentences.
Pressure doesn’t tighten around my neck like a pipe wrench.
We’re just kind of existing next to one another. Perhaps coexisting, if you will.
I take a break from my ice cream, a runoff of condensation from the cup drenching the palms of my hands. It’s my turn to watch her squirm. “I know you were pretty dead set on those rules of yours, but I think they’re subject to change with the new development.”
“New development?”
“This whole fake dating ploy?”
She sobers. “Right. We don’t—we don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty of it. It’s fake for a reason.”
I don’t think I do a good job of hiding my disappointment. “How are we supposed to make this thing believable if I don’t know anything about you?”
We assume a familiar rhythm—I poke around like a dental probe inspecting a dry socket, and she dodges accordingly, revolted by any form of intimacy.
“I don’t know. Make something up?”
“Leif’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.”
“Ugh,” she groans, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You have a point. I hate it when you have a point.”
“Are you really going to make me work for it?” I grumble.
“First time you’ve ever worked so hard for a girl?”
“Yeah, actually. By this point, your legs would’ve already been up on my shoulders.”
Staten pantomimes a gag. “Keep dreaming, Hot Stuff.”
Oh my God. I think we’re on a nickname basis.
There’s something addicting about this push-and-pull, tantalizing—like picking at a scab even though you’re not supposed to.
The truth is, maybe I proposed this whole arrangement at first because I wanted to make Leif jealous, but now I realize that it’s the perfect segue into chiseling away at Staten’s hard outer shell.
She sure as shit wouldn’t tell me anything about herself under other circumstances.
Goading her, I turn to face her fully, hoping that she was half-lying earlier about that whole unaffected charm thing. “Come on, you owe me at least one fact about yourself.”
She pretends to contemplate me, swiping a finger through her melting cookie crunch and popping it into her mouth with, ironically, all the unintentional sensuality in the world. “Mmm, how about this: you impress me during our next tutoring session, and I spare some ammunition.”
“I’m already pretty impressive,” I brag.
“We need to work on your arrogance.”
“And we need to work on your transparency. You do want to make Leif sick with jealousy, don’t you?”
“Can’t you just kiss me whenever he’s looking? You know, keep things strictly physical?” she asks, not knowing the goddamn ramifications of what she just suggested.
Something ratchets in the lower half of me, surprisingly combative against the cold that doesn’t make my balls shrink. I don’t need to be getting a boner during our late-night rendezvous.
Dear God, Knox. Think about anything else. Please.
“No man has that much control,” I croak without further elaboration.
Staten shoves me on the shoulder. A show of playfulness at best, yet a gesture that has me sweating in forty-five degrees. This girl has the nuclear launch codes to vaporize me completely, and she’s not afraid to use them. “Don’t need you falling for me, Mulligan.”
“Trust me, that’s never going to happen.”
Oh, I’m so screwed.