Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CORMAC
THE FAIRY GODMOTHERS GROUP CHAT
Dottie: Don’t worry, dear boy. It will all go splendidly well.
Dottie: Ann thinks so too.
Ann: Remember to show off those forearms.
Ann: And open the damn door for her.
Ann: Don’t be like my son-in-law, slamming doors this way and that, right in my daughter’s face.
Ann: Women want a GENTLEMAN in the streets.
Ann: And a bad boy in the sheets.
The rest of the week flies by. The guys and I practice a couple of new songs on Wednesday night, and our parts blend together seamlessly.
Nora’s presence in my life seems to have juiced everything up, but I’m trying not to get too excited. We pulled some weeds together, and I helped her rescue my dog over the phone. Big whoop. But it feels like something is shifting between us, and it’s finally shifting in the right direction.
On Thursday afternoon, Nora’s already outside of her apartment building waiting for me when I arrive to pick her up.
My first thought:
She looks unbelievably tempting, dressed all in black, with those bright red lips.
My second:
Well, this sucks. I was kind of hoping she’d invite me up to see her apartment. I’ve wondered what it’s like. You can tell a lot about people from what they choose to surround themselves with.
I’ve found little signs of her all over my house this week—the scent of ginger on the couch, a stash of chocolate-covered pretzels in the freezer, and a half-mauled mystery left behind. (I flipped through it, and the ex-boyfriend did it.)
But I don’t have any time to dwell on my disappointment, because as soon as she sees me, she strides toward the car with purpose.
I get out, because Ann was so adamant about the door thing, I’m questioning my own judgment. Nora has the door open before I can get to it, though, so I’m left standing awkwardly beside her as she lowers into the passenger seat.
I shrug and shut the door behind her, figuring I might as well since I’m already up.
When I climb back into the car, she’s smiling at me, and the whole interior already smells like her, spicy and sweet.
“Well,” I say as the enormity of the situation dawns on me.
Nora Leigh is in my car.
She’s going to be sitting next to me, alone, for the forty-five minutes it’ll take us to get to Apple Ridge.
She’s my captive audience.
Oh shit, it probably says nothing good about me that I like that idea.
“Well,” she repeats with a broad smile as I pull out of the lot and start following route guidance.
“So…” Suddenly, I have no idea what to say, so I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Tell me about your cousin Hazel.”
Her expression freezes. “Oh. You did like her. Well…you know, my aunt’s actually kind of famous. She’s a lifestyle guru, and Hazel’s basically her manager.”
“Oh, I’m not interested for me,” I say. “Mick has asked about her a few times. He thinks they had a moment at the wedding. Maybe you could give Hazel his number?”
I sneak a sidelong glance at her. She looks pleased, her cheeks slightly pink and her eyes bright. Maybe she’s really invested in getting this Hazel laid. “Yeah, sure.”
Silence lingers between us for a moment as I navigate the car. Nora’s the one who breaks it. “Have you figured out what question you’d like to ask me? We have plenty of time to discuss it.”
I don’t have to ask what she’s talking about. She’s referring to our wager at Nathaniel’s the other day.
Obviously, I have thought about it. Truthfully, there are many questions I’d like to ask Nora.
I want to know whether she has a favorite color—mine is the orange layer of a sunset—and if she thinks they’ll ever make Half-Life 3.
I want to know if she drinks her own ginger beer, if she enjoys hiking, and how on earth she has convinced Cookie to like her so much.
I want to know her dreams and her fears. Her hopes.
But I’ve been told I can be too intense, ironically by the same women who have accused me of being inattentive, and I don’t want to overwhelm her. Even if the not-so-little-and-old ladies seem to believe this is a real date, I know better.
“Yes, I’ve given it some thought,” I say. “But I haven’t decided on a question yet. It may take a few years.”
She smiles at me, and I look at her for a second too long and soak it in.
It’s almost comical how easily I convinced myself that I was completely over her. That, indeed, I found her obnoxious. I guess I wanted to believe it was true. The mind is capable of great feats of self-deception.
“All right,” she says, leaning back in her seat and settling her arm against the window. “In that case, we can discuss our secret fake relationship. They’ll have questions, and we need to get our story straight.”
“Oh, joy.”
“We met in high school,” she begins.
“Try elementary school.”
“We never had a single interaction back then, so it doesn’t count. It was when you told me that I had pepper between my teeth that you really made an impression on me.”
I groan as I stop at a red light, because I’ve unfortunately relived that moment dozens of times. “I was an idiot. Sorry about that. But my mother always got upset when she walked around for half the day with spinach or something in her teeth, so I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. I didn’t want to have pepper in my teeth, obviously. I just thought…” She shrugs. “Anyway, back to our story for Pansy.”
I steal a glance at her. “How’s this? I had a hopeless crush on you in high school, but I didn’t know how to talk to women, so I didn’t say anything.”
She inhales sharply, then nods. “Yeah, that’s good.”
No need to tell her it’s true.
The light turns green, and I start driving again. “And we were thrown back into each other’s lives when our parents started dating. I wasn’t happy at first, because—”
“Of your robot,” she finishes.
“Indeed. But then we saw each other at that party my dad threw, and you looked just like you had in high school. Obviously, I’d seen you around town before that, but it was the first time I’d seen you up close after all those years. Everything about you was exactly the same.”
“Splendid. Everyone wants to hear they haven’t changed since high school.”
“At least you didn’t change for the worst. Have you seen your ‘dreamy’ Justin Greene?”
“Be careful, Cormac,” she says in a teasing tone. “I might start thinking you’re jealous.”
Heat floods my face. I’d hoped I wasn’t being obvious.
“Good, it’ll help with the act, because your boyfriend would be,” I bluster.
“Anyway, you looked exactly the same, and I knew it was time to tell you what I hadn’t been brave enough to say all those years ago.
So I admitted I used to have a crush on you.
I expected you to blow me off, but you…” I trail off, at a loss.
“Help me out. What happens next in our secret relationship?”
“I admitted that I used to have a small crush on you too. Before the science fair incident, obviously.”
“That’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think?”
“That a woman would still be into you after you told her she had pepper in her teeth and acted like she was stupid?”
I clutch the steering wheel more tightly. “I’ve never, not once, thought you were stupid.”
“Not once?”
“Maybe when I saw you making out with Justin Greene. He thought an ‘elective’ meant you could ‘elect’ whether you wanted to go to class or not.”
She laughs, pressing a hand to her chest, so fully capturing my attention that I almost plow into the car in front of mine.
I return my focus to the road, giving the driver of the other car a wave. He flips me off in his rearview mirror.
“I’ve never thought you were stupid,” I repeat. “Never. I just didn’t know how to talk to women. Or…anyone really.”
“Oh,” she says, her voice soft and breathy. And Christ, I really wish we were having this conversation anywhere but on the road. At the same time, the need to focus on traffic is making it easier to be honest with her.
She clears her throat. “So, anyway, you asked me to go to one of your shows—”
“No, I wouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, sometimes you go anyway, with Hannah and Sophie. It wouldn’t be much of a date, and you already know performing makes me nervous.”
“All kinds of performing?”
I shoot her an incredulous look. Is she…
Could she be asking me if my dick works?
She must realize what that sounded like too, because she starts laughing. “I mean, like…speeches. You know, for work.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ll have to try my new NPC trick if the Nikola people like me.”
“Did you make a speech when you got your honorary PhD?”
I dart another sharp glance at her. “Were you snooping?”
It’s an accusatory question, but I’m mostly amused. I hadn’t thought she’d be interested enough to poke around. Otherwise, I would have left some fun surprises for her.
“How do you know I wasn’t just grabbing another roll of toilet paper? It was in the bathroom closet.”
“Good point.”
“Why was it in the bathroom closet?”
“When I got that call from the dean, I felt like bugs were crawling across my skin. People shouldn’t get things like that if they didn’t put in the work. It wasn’t right.”
“You don’t like praise, do you?”
“Not if it isn’t earned. People devote years of their lives to earning doctorate degrees. I’m sure I could have earned one, but I chose not to, so I shouldn’t have one.”
I can feel her observing me. I glance over, our eyes meeting for half a second, and then she says, “So what you’re saying is that you have integrity. I’d like to praise you for that, but I have a feeling you’d object to that too.”
“You’re right.” I adjust my glasses. “Now, let’s change the subject and focus on the lie we’re about to tell two unsuspecting people.”
She laughs softly, without much humor. “So if you didn’t ask me to one of your shows, what did we do?”