10. Cal
Chapter ten
Cal
Cal
T wo hours passed by much faster than I expected. For the most part, we listened to “Stuff You Should Know,” and chatted about the random facts they discussed. I found out that Ruth had lived with her parents in Colorado for the first eight years of her life, and then after their violent divorce, had been placed with her grandmother for safety. I related to that hardcore. I’d been on my own for years before my parents had found me. But to have lost her only reliable parent in her twenties? Unthinkable.
We finally made it to Newport after passing through rolling green hills swathed in pines and bushy trees. My favorite part about the coast was the way it started off in the misty mountains and then out of nowhere, the terrain grew rocky and sparse before falling dramatically away to the endless ocean. Coming through the mossy cliffs and into the seaside town felt like a warm sheet from the dryer settling over my cold skin. It felt right and comforting.
A lot of Newport had been designed with tourists in mind, from the cute gift shops that lined the narrow streets to the bed and breakfast locations and a plethora of seafood restaurants. A new one had just opened on the docks two months ago, and my parents had been on the waiting list for weeks.
I followed my GPS to the location, rolling slowly through packed streets and narrow, one-way avenues. We finally arrived, and predictably, parking was a pain. We found a paid lot a short walk away, and while I pulled up the app to pay, Ruth looked out her window in interest. “Are those… sea lions?”
I followed her gaze to the docks below us where dozens of blubbery, barking sea lions lounged, swam, and inched along the docks and boulders. I puffed out a laugh. “They are. And they probably just got back from mating. July is usually the only month we get some peace and quiet around the town.”
“You guys just casually live with sea lions? Like they’re pigeons?” She cocked her head, studying the docks and sandbars that were so packed with sea lions, they could be collections of boulders along their surfaces.
“Yes, giant, illegal to feed, definitely do not try to touch pigeons.” I tapped the payment button on my screen. “Okay, we’re good to go. The restaurant is just down there.” I pointed out of my windshield, down a sloping hill to a glass and wood restaurant that had been built on piles overlooking the bay. Sea lions barked and rolled under the outside dining area, and guests milled around, pointing to them and talking while they sipped their drinks.
“This is amazing. I’ve never been to this part of the coast.” Ruth got out of the car, and her eyes stayed glued to the orange and pink splashes of color over the seaside horizon.
I followed her, coming around the car to stand at her side. “Yeah, it’s pretty great. I was lucky to live here while I did.”
Ruth turned to me, and the setting sun washed over her skin with an irresistible golden glow that momentarily stole my breath. She raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t you live here now?”
“Um.” My brain puttered and chugged, lagging for a couple of seconds before firing back to life. Goddamn, she was gorgeous. “I did my residency in Eugene, and then I fell into the urgent care practice with my friend, Dr. Reynolds. Once I got going, especially with my at-home PCP service, I just couldn’t find it in myself to derail that.”
Ruth dipped her chin in acknowledgment. “I get it.” Her eyes coasted over the vista below us, darting back and forth as she took in the sunset. “I wouldn’t have changed if I’d had a choice.”
My brows drew together. “You never should have had to.”
As if pulling herself from a memory, Ruth lifted her shoulders and smiled over at me. “It’s alright. I’m now the world’s worst matchmaker, and really, what more could a girl ask for?”
I laughed. “I don’t know. A job you like?”
“That doesn’t sound right,” she mused, starting forward and down the hill. “Adulthood is supposed to be miserable, right?”
For Ruth? Something small and warm in my chest whispered that Ruth deserved nothing but happiness. And it also kind of wanted to be the one who provided it. My parents had found me a damaged, angry, rebellious fifteen-year-old, and they had handed me the world when I had done nothing to earn it. It wasn’t nearly the same, but something in me wanted Ruth to know what that felt like, to know that someone gave a shit about how she felt and what she was going through.
And once that thought had me in its grip, I suddenly found myself unable to escape it. It consumed my mind as we walked down the hill, across a lower parking lot, and across the street to the restaurant. I had a feeling my parents were going to really like Ruth. I hadn’t been kidding when I’d told her she was my type, but I’d left out one little detail—she was their type too. Smart, genuinely nice, and a little on the weird side. My parents ate that shit up. Speaking of which…
“Oh, um,” we paused just outside the restaurant where cars crawled slowly along the narrow road behind us. I curved my fingers around her elbow, drawing her to a gentle halt. “I should probably mention—I’m adopted.”
Her eyebrows jumped up. “Oh. Okay. I mean, that’s great.”
“And the only reason it matters is because my parents get weird about food, and they’re going to make both of us eat more than we can handle.” I rubbed the back of my neck ruefully. “They adopted me when I was fifteen after CFS pulled me out of my rundown, abandoned house. I was basically starving to death. They fostered me, and it took them years to catch me up with a better diet.”
Her mouth dropped open, and then she quickly closed it. “Cal… oh my word. That’s—I mean they must have been…” she paused, her brow furrowing. “Wait a second. So, the expectations your parents have for you are literally that they want you to find someone and be happy because they love you?”
I searched her expression, confused. “Yeah?”
She palmed her face. “Cal, I thought this whole time that you had like… asshole parents who expected too much of you. I was all prepared to march in there and defend your honor or something.”
My mouth curved up to the left in disbelief. “Shortstop, you were going to defend my honor ?”
She let her hand slide down her face, heedless of the blush and mascara she’d applied. “Well, I was . I didn’t realize they were perfectly loving and normal. I can’t do normal. I haven’t known a normal person in my life… ever. My grandma was super weird and then she died. Gemma is basically a feral barn cat.” Her eyes went wide with panic. “What do normal people do? What if I completely embarrass you?”
“Ruth.” I placed my hands on her bare arms, angling her to face me. “Quit panicking. Look at me.” She did, dancing her eyes between mine in a quick staccato rhythm. “It’s just dinner,” I reminded her.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “Yeah, okay.”
Just dinner , I thought, mocking myself internally. Like they aren’t going to be unbearably embarrassing and gush over this woman in ways she is fully unprepared for. In this case, better to ask forgiveness than permission.
As we headed into the restaurant, Ruth got a text, and she pulled her phone out from the pocket of her jumper shorts. After glancing at it, her features pinched together, and she shoved it back into her pocket. I held the door open for her. “Everything alright?”
“Yeah, good,” she clipped in a way that clearly stated things weren’t.
I skipped a look from her pressed, pink lips to her red cheeks, and my intuition alarms blared in the back of my brain. Something was definitely up with Shortstop. Despite my suspicions, I let it be because my parents had spotted us from their table by the panoramic windows that overlooked the bay.
“Cal, sweetie!” My mom waved from the table, her wide smile as inviting as her hand that gestured for us to join them.
I pulled in a breath and leaned over to whisper in Ruth’s ear. “Ready?”
“No,” she whispered back.
Chuckling, I wrapped her cold hand in mine and led her up a short flight of stairs to the main floor. The restaurant was an older building, probably built in the seventies, but it had been updated several times over the years. The tables had been set with crisp, white linen and twinkling dinnerware. The carpet looked a little older, but it made the space feel warm and inviting, and the restaurant stretched out longer than it was wide and inviting diners to gaze out at the choppy, sunset-drenched water. With every table packed with patrons, we had to weave our way through them to make it to the seaside table my parents occupied. I kept a hold of Ruth’s hand, glancing down at her now and then to make sure she wasn’t on the verge of bolting.
She looked like she wanted to.
My mom stood from the table, gesturing with both her hands for me to come in for a hug. She looked older, somehow, than I remembered. It surprised me every time I’d been away from home, but more and more, Mom’s springy, black hair was being replaced by thick strands of white and gray curls, and the lines in her soft brown skin got deeper, too. She was wearing a loose, plaid button-down, and she wore the same locket she always did—the one I’d given her for her and Dad’s thirtieth wedding anniversary.
I indulged her request, keeping a hold of Ruth’s hand as I wrapped her in a one-armed bear hug. “Hey, Mom.”
“Look at you.” She squeezed her thin arms around my neck before stepping away to look at Ruth. “Hello! You must be Ruth.”
“Hi, Mrs. Reed,” Ruth said, holding out her hand.
My mom, predictably, ignored her proffered hand and swept her into a hug that forced me to relinquish her hand. “Come here, cute girl. You are absolutely gorgeous.” She set Ruth away with a bright smile. “Call me Jayla. And then tell me how this troublemaker tricked a pretty thing like you into dating him.”
“Oh, here we go,” I muttered rolling my eyes as my dad stood and joined us. Dad had ridiculously bright white teeth that gave away his dentist profession, and he pulled me into a gruff hug. His jet-black hair was going white, too, and he kept it cropped close to his scalp these days. “Hey, Dad. How are things?”
“Oh, you know,” he grinned, pulling away. “Just trying to keep up with your mother.”
“Your father just discovered that furious bird… mad bird… whatever. That app game,” my mom said, waving her hand and going back to her seat.
Ruth rolled her lips between her teeth, clearly trying not to laugh. “Angry Birds? That is fun.”
“That’s like fifteen years old, Dad,” I laughed.
“I like it,” Dad said, pulling out his phone and holding the screen like two feet away as he peered at it. “I like knocking those stupid, fat bubble creatures over.”
“Better late than never.” I held out Ruth’s chair, and she sat down quickly. She gathered her hands in a tight fist in her lap, and I gave her an amused glance before I sat beside her in the seat closest to the window and across from my mom. I pried Ruth’s right hand away from her left and brought it to my thigh. I let my thumb caress the back of her soft, pale hand, hoping to soothe her nerves.
“So,” Mom said, her warm, brown eyes fixed on us with zealous interest. “Tell me all about it. How did you meet?”
Ruth opened her mouth, and I could tell her brain went copy paper blank. I jumped in quickly. “Actually, remember that matchmaker who set me up with Aniyah’s ex? ”
Ruth turned enormous, “Are you crazy?” eyes on me.
My mom scoffed. “ Yes , how could I forget?”
I forged on before she could say anything insulting about Ruth. “Well, it’s kind of a funny story, but Ruth is the matchmaker.”
My mom’s cranberry-colored lips popped open. She rotated a stare to Ruth. “No.”
My dad chuckled. “Oh, that’s funny.”
“I went there to completely ream her out for it, and then I just,” I paused turning to look at her. Gray eyes sparked with sunshine yellow drank me in with round surprise. I smirked. “I kind of got tangled up.”
“Oh,” Mom put a hand to her chest, looking between us with a gooey, sentimental expression. “That is absolutely precious.”
Ruth kept her eyes glued to me for a beat. Then, shaking herself loose from her thoughts, she turned back to my mom. “Yeah. I guess you could say we sort of stumbled into this thing.”
“I love it,” Mom grinned.
The waiter came and took our drink orders. With the way my mom was eying Ruth—there was a definite baby-hungry glint there—I ordered an Old Fashioned. My dad gave me a reproving eyebrow raise over his glasses, which I studiously ignored. And truly, by the time our catch-of-the-day meal arrived, I was glad for the drink. It took impossible amounts of patience to run interference between Ruth and my mom’s probing questions.
“How old are you?” Mom asked.
Ruth hesitated. “Well… twenty-eight. Just last month. ”
Mom made a surprised sound. “So young for a professional doctor. Was that by choice?”
“Mom,” I groaned. I finished off my drink, grateful for the buzz in my head. It had been a hot minute since I’d had a real drink. “Let her breathe.”
“I’m just asking,” Mom said with an unconvincing attempt at an innocent expression.
Dad made a sound of appreciation after taking a bite of the ceviche. “This is fantastic. Have you tried this?”
Ruth looked massively uncomfortable. It almost made me laugh, but I silently encouraged her to take a bite. She did, and then nodding, she said, “Oh, yeah. It’s really good. Very… toothsome.”
I snorted, coughing out ceviche. I grabbed for my napkin and noticed that my dad was trying not to laugh, and my mom was looking at Ruth like she’d never seen anyone more adorable in her life. “Sorry,” I choked.
Ruth sank her teeth into her bottom lip after swallowing. “I mean… it’s… salty.”
I laughed again, this time, not bothering to hide it. “Guys, I’m pretty sure Ruth hates the ceviche.”
Mom and Dad laughed in tandem, and then my mom reached across the table to pat Ruth’s hand. “Love, you don’t have to like the food. We promise you won’t offend us.”
Ruth grimaced apologetically. “I have a thing about raw meat. I mean, I know it’s not really raw,” she rushed to add, straightening. “But I can’t seem to convince my brain of that. ”
“The nerve,” I murmured with heavy sarcasm, angling a smile down to her.
Ruth shot me a half-irritated, half-amused look in return.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Dad asked. “We can order something else.”
“No, no,” Ruth held up her hands. “I’m fine. Really. Cal fed me a ton of food on the way here,” she added with genuine amusement.
I chuckled. “You were eating chips for lunch when I found you.”
“Snooty,” she shot back with an eyebrow twitch.
“I’m a doctor. We’re all snooty.”
“I’m a doctor too,” she said before taking a sip of her water. “I guess some of us are just better behaved.”
“You earned that,” Mom said with a point of her fork.
I grimaced through another smile. “I did.”
After that, Ruth happily chatted with my mom about the sea lions in Newport, which my parents were usually proud to inform people about, and I proved that I truly wasn’t any smarter than Speed Date Ruth when I ordered another Old Fashioned and realized a little too late that my head was swimming.
“Should we go to the pier and get a closer look at the sea lions?” my mom suggested.
Ruth agreed readily, and after we paid—and my dad tipped with cash because he was nine million years old—we walked out onto the wood balcony that had a stairwell leading down to the pier. The sun had dipped almost all the way behind the horizon, and blue swatches of darkness stretched out from the railing and the glowing building behind us. I tried not to think about how tilted the world had gone. I’d only had two drinks. What the hell?
My worries turned into soap bubbles, and as they popped and fizzed away, I hooked an arm around Ruth’s waist, pinning her to my side. I loved how itty bitty short she was, but curvy and soft at the same time. She was all round curves and sloping sweetness, and it was hard to not stare at the way her thighs filled out those shorts so nicely.
Mom went on and on about conservation and the funds they had raised to build a new pier because sea lions were a little hard on infrastructure, and I moved my gaze down to Ruth’s waist where it sloped in but tucked with a little bitable roll, and then up to her breasts. Fucking hell. She was perfect.
Suddenly, Ruth stumbled on the pier, and her sandal caught in one of the planks. I tightened my hold on her, but I was tipsier than I thought, and my balance went askew. We both went down, and I did my best to take the brunt of her fall. She caught herself on my chest and on her knees, and I landed hard on my ass with her half on top of me. I wrapped my arms around her and let out a surprised, “Oof.”
Ruth burst out laughing. “Oh my God.”
“Ruth!” My mom rushed over, but I had already joined Ruth in her laughter, and we both collapsed to the pier.
I kept my arms around her, and she let her forehead fall to my chest. We dissolved into completely unjustified, goofy laughter. “ I’m so sorry,” I wheezed out.
“I can’t,” Ruth laughed, clutching my black T-shirt and pressing her face to my chest. “I can’t breathe. I’m sorry. That was me.” She paused, her voice thick with laughter. “That was so funny, though.”
My mom blurted out a reluctant laugh. “Are you two alright?”
Still laughing, I nodded and sat us up. Ruth’s chest was pressed against mine, and I realized it would take only the smallest maneuver on my end to put her ass in my lap. My laughter died slowly, and I let myself drown in her eyes, lined with thick lashes and shimmering with laughter as she looked up at me. I swept one of her stray curls away from her pink cheek. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, and one corner of her mouth curved up.
Mom’s tightly coiled, wild curls bobbed as she tilted her head. “You sure? You fell pretty hard.”
I swallowed, and my eyes followed the heart-shaped lines of Ruth’s face. That little warm spot in my chest blossomed suddenly, and I tightened my hold around her waist. “Yeah,” I said, my voice husky. “I did.”