Chapter 10 Bottle Rockets
Bottle Rockets
WALKER
By the time I get back to my place, Sadie’s back from dropping off Jonah at camp.
She's at the kitchen island, surrounded by notebooks and books and what looks like three different colored pens. Red hair piled up on top of her head now, a pencil tucked by her ear.
I tell myself the way my heartbeat kicks up is just habit. Not excitement at seeing her again.
She looks up. Her gaze does a quick sweep of me, but I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
“Tires are done,” I tell her, tossing her keys on the counter.
“I’m gonna pay you back,” she says.
“No, you’re not.”
“I can. It will just take me a few months.”
“I’m not taking your money, which is just my money at this point anyway. You needed new tires in your capacity as my son’s nanny. So that means I pay for it.”
She looks like she’s waging some internal battle. But finally, she just says, “Okay.” She fishes my keys out of her pocket and hold them out to me. “Here you go.”
Our fingers brush as I take them from her. I ignore the little volt of electricity that goes through me at the contact.
“What are you working on?” I ask.
“Reading work for Jonah. A lesson plan that doesn’t feel like a lesson plan, ideally.”
“How do you design that?”
For the next ten minutes she explains it to me, and I find myself actually listening. Not the half-present listening I used to do in label meetings, nodding at the right moments while my mind is somewhere else entirely. Actually listening.
I'm also watching her lips while she talks, and taking in the copper eyelashes framing her eyes, and thinking about what I glimpsed beneath that transparent white fabric when she came wading out of the lake and…
Fuck.
Concentrate.
This is important.
Sadie is talking about how Jonah isn’t struggling with the words so much as with the feeling of being the kid who struggles.
“The trick,” she says, “is finding the thing he already cares about and making that the vehicle.
For Jonah it's science. Dinosaurs, yes, but also space, volcanoes, how things work.
He's a kid who wants to understand the mechanism behind everything.” She taps her pen on the counter.
“And somewhere in the middle of figuring out how a volcano works, he forgets he's supposed to find reading hard.”
“You’re gonna be a great teacher,” I tell her.
She looks up at me, surprised. Like she’s checking to see if I’m being sarcastic. When she understands I’m not, her cheeks go a little pink and she drops her eyes.
“Thank you,” she says.
She's looking at her notebooks but not writing anything. Maybe I should leave her to her work, not distract her, but I’m finding it hard to pull myself away from her.
I want to know everything that made her who she is. The teaching instinct, the stubbornness, the way she talks about kids like they're worth every ounce of effort. I want to know where it all came from.
“What made you want to be a teacher?” I ask.
“I’ve always loved words and learning. I had some teachers who made a huge difference in my life. School was my escape.”
“Your escape from what?”
My blunt question sends her guard straight up.
“My home life wasn’t easy,” she says. “School was better.”
She doesn't look at me when she says it. She's looking at the counter, at her notebooks, somewhere that isn't my face.
I have to tread carefully here. The urge is to keep drilling down. To open her up. Examine everything that made her the way she is until I can make sense of it. Make sense of her.
Or maybe it’s that protective instinct I tend towards. It’s that concerned parent alarm going off inside me when she gives me that opaque “home wasn’t easy” line.
There's a whole world of hurt packed into that one sentence.
One of the things you learn as a songwriter is how to say the most with the fewest words. How it can be more powerful to leave some things unsaid entirely.
I steer us back to safer ground.
“Bet you were a much better student than I ever was,” I say. “I swear, I tried to be good. For about fifteen minutes. Then I discovered girls and the guitar and realized I was a lot more interested in all that than algebra.”
That gets a small smile out of her. Still not looking at me, but the tension in her shoulders drops a fraction.
“Somehow I'm not surprised,” she says.
“My eleventh grade chemistry teacher told my dad I was either going to be famous or end up in prison. Dad said probably both.”
She shakes her head, but she's smiling now. A real one. Nothing like the fake-sweet smile she aims at me when she's being a brat. This one she doesn't know she's giving me. Those are my favorite ones.
“At least you never ended up in prison,” she says.
“Well.” I rub the back of my neck, feeling a little sheepish. “There was this one incident. Ended up spending the night in Marble Falls’ lone jail cell. Sheriff called Dad to come pick me up. Which he did. The next morning.”
She stares at me. “He left you there all night?”
“Said it would build character.”
“Did it?”
“Debatable.”
She laughs. A real one, surprised out of her. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“What did you do?”
“Which part?”
Her eyes go wide. “There were multiple parts?”
“There was a sequence of events that started with a dare from Tanner, involved about two hundred bottle rockets and the Hendersons' stolen tractor, and ended in the slowest police chase in the history of Marble Falls.”
She's laughing properly now. The kind that takes over her whole face, crinkles the corners of her eyes, makes her forget for a minute that she's supposed to be keeping me at arm's length. I want to keep going. Think up every stupid thing I ever did in this town just to keep that look on her face.
“Tanner's idea,” I say. “Obviously. And he got off scot-free. Of course.”
“Of course,” she agrees, still smiling.
Her pen rolls off the counter. We both reach for it at the same time, and end up crouched on the same side of the island, faces level.
Close enough that I can see every freckle across her nose, the way her eyes aren’t just blue but dark at the edges and lighter at the center, like they’re lit from within.
I have the pen. I hold it out for her.
She takes it.
Neither of us straightens up.
She smells so good. Sweet and fresh. I want to lean in. I want to know how her skin feels beneath my lips.
Without meaning to, my eyes wander across her. Down the column of her smooth throat as she swallows. To the swell of her breasts against her tight tank top.
Fuck. Her nipples are stiff and visible beneath the fabric. Her breathing is shallow and quick.
Mine isn't much better.
This is the point at which I’m supposed to stand up. To hand her the pen and walk away and go check the fence line and not look back.
Instead I watch her breasts rise and fall. Watch the color climb her throat, her cheeks. Watch her tongue touch her bottom lip in a way that she doesn’t mean as an invitation but that my body’s receiving as one anyway.
Her eyes drop to my mouth. Come back up.
Two things are true right now. I've never wanted anything the way I want to kiss this woman. And I absolutely cannot.
We straighten up together and I take one step back and she takes one step back. We put the kitchen island between us and find separate things to look at with great focus, like two people who’ve both suddenly developed an intense interest in opposite corners of the same room.
The pen is still in her hand.
“I'll be back by dinner,” I say. My voice comes out like gravel.
She nods. “Okay.”
I put my hat on. Walk to the door. Put my hand on the frame.
I should just go.
“Sadie.”
She looks up. Still pink-cheeked, still not quite meeting my eyes.
“Thank you. For everything you're doing for Jonah,” I say. “I'm glad you're here.”
“Me too.”
The soft, sweet smile that comes to her face right then has me feeling way too fucking happy that I put it there.