Eighteen
Winslet
I took a deep breath before opening my apartment door after hearing the doorbell. Time to get through this.
Toby had sent me a string of text last night, which I ignored. This morning, however, I had read them and found that he planned on bringing me breakfast and coffee. Just peachy. We’d get to eat together too.
With the best smile I could muster after just one cup of coffee, I opened the door to see Toby holding a tray with not just two cups, but three, along with a white paper bag under his arm. He also held another bag, this one plastic, in his other hand. He was smiling sheepishly.
“Uh, I might have gone overboard, but I wasn’t sure what you wanted, and I got your text after I bought the food,” he replied.
I had told him that a chocolate chip muffin would suffice and thanked him. It seemed he had brought a buffet instead. I stepped back to let him inside, which I had not been planning on, but he’d brought the food to me so that meant we weren’t eating in his truck.
“Sorry about that,” I replied. “I went to bed early last night. My head had hurt, and that stomach virus had kind of taken it out of me. I’m not a hundred percent yet.”
He walked inside, his eyes doing a scan of my body as he did so. I saw his throat bob as he swallowed, and I decided I shouldn’t have chosen the shorts. I should have gone with the longer skirt. But it was going to be in the high eighties today, and I didn’t want to be hot.
I also didn’t want Toby thinking that the way I was dressed was in any way meant to impress him. This was a means to staying cool. That was it.
“Don’t apologize. This will all keep in the fridge. We can eat what we want, then tuck the rest away for later.”
If he meant my fridge, then it would only be me eating anything later. I didn’t like his insinuation that he would be walking back inside my apartment again. Because this was a one-and-done situation.
He sat the bags on the counter, then began to pull things out and place them so that they were in fact buffet-style. My gaze went to the three cups. I wanted to know which one was mine so I could have it. This entire activity was exhausting me, and we hadn’t even started. I had woken up this morning after another naughty dream about Oz and had to take out Oz Jr. from the nightstand to get some relief.
“Luckily, when I stopped by the bakery, I picked up one of every muffin they had out, and chocolate chip was one of them.” He beamed at me.
That was at least a bit of good news. I did enjoy a good bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich in the morning, but my stomach still wasn’t ready for that much food. The chocolate chip muffin was something I could nibble, and, well, if it was chocolate, I would always eat it.
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to gape at the array of food he had set out. “Wow, you did get it all.”
He let out a small, nervous laugh. “Yeah, I got started and couldn’t seem to stop. The doughnuts were fresh. They had just pulled them out and are still warm if you want a taste of one.”
I peeked over to see if there were any chocolate ones, but they all looked simply glazed. “I’d better not. I am not sure how much my stomach is ready for, and I don’t want to ruin the day by making myself feel sick before we even get there.” Although if there had been a chocolate one, I’d have taken the chance.
“Oh, and this is your coffee,” he said, taking one of the cups and holding it out to me. “I, uh, also got you what I always get there. It’s a matcha tea, infused with lavender. It’s amazing. Thought you might want to try it.”
I wasn’t nauseous, but if he kept talking, I might be. I managed a smile and put my cup to my mouth to cover my grimace.
No thank you, Toby.
I found matcha nasty, and adding lavender to it? Who the heck wanted to drink something with lavender? I mean, I loved a good lavender bath soak and even a lavender candle, but I wasn’t about to drink the crap.
He seemed disappointed that I didn’t snatch up his suggested drink and try it. He was going to need to move past that. I was a nice person and all, but I was not a people pleaser. If I didn’t want to try something, I wasn’t going to. One of the perks of being an adult.
“Here’s the chocolate chip muffin. There is also blueberry, cranberry orange, banana nut, and a cinnamon and sugar one.”
I took the chocolate chip one without even giving the others a glance. It’s all about the chocolate, dude.
There was a good chance I was going to break open a bottle of wine at five tonight and drink it all. Toby was too much of everything. He was trying so hard to impress me, but when you weren’t attracted to someone, it didn’t change anything.
I’d listened to him tell me about his baseball fame, which had ended with a shoulder injury his sophomore year in college. He had lost his full-ride scholarship and had to go to a more affordable school that his parents could help him pay for. It was then he had decided to teach. He had always thought he was headed for the major leagues and hadn’t planned on anything else.
He had finished his long autobiography by saying he now knew it had been God’s will. He was supposed to teach young minds, and he felt this job was more fulfilling. I wanted to call bullshit on that, but I refrained.
I wasn’t against the God’s will mantra, but I also didn’t exactly believe that was the case every time. I didn’t think God gave us injuries to stop us from following a lifelong dream. I thought bad things happened, and we found a way to survive it. Just like I didn’t think that children dying of cancer was God’s will—because if that was the case, then I didn’t like the man, or God, or whatever his proper description was. Because if I believed that, then I’d have to believe that it was God’s will that my mother became an alcoholic and forgot to feed us, left us for days at a time, abused us, and eventually fell to her death in a drunken stupor. I refused to think that way. Mom had chosen that life. She’d given in to her addiction and not wanted to get help or fight it for her kids or herself. It’d had nothing to do with God.
Toby brought me over to the milk bottle ring toss so that he could show off his skills, I assumed. Each booth was sponsored by one of the church or school departments. It was their biggest fundraiser of the year. This specific game was sponsored by the school’s athletic department, so of course it had the best prize. The booster club at MCS consisted of wealthy parents who wanted the football, baseball, and basketball teams to have the best. They weren’t real concerned about volleyball or softball, I had noticed, seeing as they didn’t have new uniforms and the best equipment.
There were many games with stuffed animal prizes, but the booster club had taken it up another notch, it seemed, and because of it, the cost to play this game was a whopping six dollars for three rings. That was steep for a church festival game. The other games were five tries for three dollars. Their prizes were cheaper and bought in bulk.
This booth’s was not. The boosters had donated Jellycat stuffed animals for the top prizes and tiny Squishmallows for the lower-tier winners. Both very popular brands among the kids. There was a peach-and-purple dragon Jellycat sitting on a display above the workers’ heads, and on the right of it sat a sloth, which I wouldn’t mind having. I mean, it was cute and looked soft. Then, on the left of it was a green dinosaur. My kids in class talked about them often, and I knew that the dragons were a very sought-after theme as of late due to a book series.
I stood and watched Toby as he tossed the first ring. He’d have to get all three to win a Jellycat. When the first ring hit a bottle, swirled around the rim, then sank down, he clapped his hands once and gave me a big grin. I tried to show enthusiasm, but I was kind of done with the festival. As I stood there, my eyes drifted over the crowd—until they stopped, and all the oxygen around me seemed to be sucked from the vicinity when they landed on a face I hadn’t seen in eight weeks. At least not in real life. I’d had plenty alone time with it in my fantasies.
He was watching me as he tossed a piece of popcorn into his mouth. I blinked, thinking I had started hallucinating, but he was still there. A smirk appeared on his face. I realized my imagination hadn’t done him justice. I’d forgotten just how gorgeous the man was…and seductive.
I heard Toby’s cheer, but it sounded far away. The entire festival had managed to fade out, and there was a humming in my ears instead. Oz tossed another piece of popcorn into his mouth as we stared at each other. When a hand touched my arm, I jumped, startled, and ripped out of the strange haze I had been pulled into.
My gaze swung back to Toby, and he gave me a sheepish shrug.
“Missed that last one,” he said.
Then, his eyes did a quick check to see who or what I had been looking at. I didn’t follow his gaze, not wanting him to see me stare at Oz because if I turned my head, I would stare directly at him. He was impossible to overlook.
“But you get one of the smaller ones,” he said, his eye back on me, then nodded toward the display of Squishmallows.
I didn’t want to take one. The girls loved those things, and one of the boys could easily win those over the much more difficult items above. But Toby seemed so keen on me picking one out that I felt I had no choice. Forcing a smile, I pointed at the least-desirable-looking one they had. It was brown, and I thought perhaps it was a dog or maybe a bear. I couldn’t tell really.
When they handed it to me, Toby looked displeased with my choice, but said nothing. I thanked him, and he touched my elbow to lead me to the next game. I wasn’t a fan of this contact. My gaze went back in the direction of Oz of its own accord. I had no control over it. When I found him, I wished I hadn’t.
His eyes were no longer on me, but the stunning brunette beside him. He handed her the popcorn he was holding and took a black-and-white Jellycat stuffie from her. They were together. Oz was on a date at the church-hosted festival. This seemed rather relationship-like to me, and he’d said he didn’t have those. I seriously doubted he brought one-night stands to a festival and bought them popcorn and won them expensive stuffed animals.
Just then his eyes shifted back on me, as if he could tell I was watching him. The weird feeling in my chest was bothering me. There was no reason for it. I barely knew the man. The time we’d spent together felt much longer, but it had been brief, and the majority of it, I had been in a dark basement. Still watching the beauty beside him, I was—I didn’t know—unsettled maybe. This was the last place on earth I would have expected to see him. And it wasn’t as if I had been having a good time to begin with.
She placed a hand on his arm and leaned in to tell him something. He bent down so she could talk close to his ear, but his eyes didn’t look anywhere but at me. And I liked it. I needed to snap out of this. She turned her head then, and I could see her face completely. She was drop-dead gorgeous.
A smile touched her lips, and I hated that it seemed genuine and only made her stand out more. What had I expected? This was Oz, Greek god incarnate. Of course the women he dated would look like that. I wondered if she knew he was in the Mafia.
“That sound okay?” I heard Toby ask, and I jerked my eyes off them and back to him.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I was afraid to pretend I did and agree because it could be something like, Why don’t we go back to your place? or, What about dinner and a movie?
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I zoned out. My head is starting to hurt,” I lied. At least about my head. I had in fact zoned out on what I was afraid was jealousy. Over Oz. The man who should have been a cause for nightmares, but instead only showed up in my dirty dreams. Those were not scary at all.
He glanced in their direction, trying again to see what I kept looking at, then back at me. “I was seeing if you wanted to go watch the sack race,” he said, sounding unsure now.
I knew we probably both had students in it, but, no, I didn’t want to go watch the sack race. I had been here for four hours with him, and I was ready to go home. I’d been seen and done my duty, and I didn’t want to people anymore.
“My head is getting worse, and I need to lie down,” I explained.
The disappointment on his face was loud and clear, but apologizing for this would only give him some hope there would be a next time, and there would not be. This wasn’t a date, although he seemed to think it was.
“Yeah, uh, if you’re sure,” he said as if he was agreeing to a root canal and not a five-minute drive to drop me off. His gaze went back toward Oz and Miss America. “Is there someone here you don’t want to see? I’m good with leaving and finishing the day with a movie. Maybe at your place. I can go pick something up for dinner—”
I shook my head, cutting him off before he went on any further. That sounded like a form of torture I was never going to be up for. I was a good listener. I always had been, but Toby liked to hear his own voice and talk about himself more than he liked to breathe. I didn’t want the details of his life anymore today—or ever.
“This is going to be a migraine. I can feel it. I need to be alone in a dark room for the rest of the day.” Major lie. I didn’t get migraines, but when Marley did, that was how she dealt with them.
The concern in his expression now matched his further disappointment. While I was having an internal struggle NOT to look back in Oz’s direction. Toby had noticed already, and if I looked again, he would be certain it was Oz I was looking at. Even if he didn’t have a gorgeous woman with him, he drew attention all by himself. The two of them were like a bright, obnoxious beam that said, Soak in our perfection. Envy what you will never be.
“Yeah, okay. Let’s get you home then,” he replied.
I wanted to weep with relief. This was over, and the next time a mandatory school event was happening on a weekend, I’d be armed and ready with my excuse if he asked me.