Great-Aunt Sophia's Lessons for Bombshells (20 page)

“So you—er, I mean people who do CRON, they don’t have sex?”

“I don’t mean
that
.”

“Phew! Long life is one thing, but long life with no food and no sex . . . What’s the point?”

He stiffened. “To be perfectly honest, CRONies do think much less about sex than those who eat a standard diet. But that’s good, and I should think you’d approve. Isn’t civil discourse between men and women much easier if there isn’t a constant subtext of sex? Isn’t it much easier for them to be friends and coworkers?”

“You’re right, of course,” she said, even as she felt a stab of disappointment. She wanted to be friends with Andrew, but she also wanted him to ogle her, at least a little. She wanted him to have a sexual thought or two with her in the starring role.

An image of yesterday afternoon in the field with Declan made her stomach flutter. That had been
so
naughty, and nothing about the day had been about building a stable friendship.

But Declan was bad. Andrew, and his ideas, were good. She squeezed his arm and leaned a little more against him, looking up at him with as open an expression as she could muster. “Tell me more about CRON. I’m very interested.”

He happily obliged, just as Declan had in talking about his car. Gesturing with his free hand he said, “It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it, the idea of living to be a hundred and twenty, or even longer. It’s conceivable that you could extend your life so far that with the medical advances of the next fifty years, you could live past two hundred! Can you imagine?”

Sadly, Grace could. “At one pizza a week for fifty-two weeks
in a year, for two hundred years, that would be more than ten thousand pizzas a girl wouldn’t eat. Probably not much bacon, either,” she added faintly.

Andrew put his hand over hers on his arm and stopped walking, looking down at her with eyes moist with emotion. “Your body is a beautiful temple designed by God, Grace. You should not spoil it with poisonous foods.”

She gazed back, feeling the warmth of his regard. He thought her body was a beautiful temple . . . but he also thought she was vandalizing it with her eating habits.

“You don’t truly want to put destructive garbage like pizza in it, do you?” he said.

Yes, she did, she very much did. She would slather her temple with tomato sauce and melted cheese, given half the chance. But she stuck to Sophia’s advice, and said, “I’m a vegetarian already.” She shuddered, suddenly overcome by a
lust
for freshly cooked bacon—crispy, fried, rich with salty, fatty goodness. Bacon still warm from the pan, with a thin rind of maple-cured deliciousness on the edges. Her mouth watered.
Bacon, bacon, oh, how I love you, bacon . . .

“That’s good! Grace, that’s so good.” He beamed at her as if she were a child in need of praise for using the potty.

She felt patronized, and a shard of orneriness made her modify what she’d said. “Well, flexitarian, to be precise. Declan accused me of hypocrisy for calling myself a vegetarian when I still eat fish and dairy.”

Andrew looked appalled. “There can be a lot of mercury in fish, you know. And dairy . . . Grace, no, really, you need to switch to soy or almond milk.”

“Maybe you can help me become a better eater,” she said, and batted her eyes at him even as she wanted to cry inside. Good-bye, ice cream; good-bye, cheese; so long, butter and all the
marvelous things to be made with it. She was already on starvation rations thanks to the sadistic nutritionist, and it was pushing her over the edge. She couldn’t think straight half the time, and her moods were going wonky. She sat around fantasizing about food when she should be writing her dissertation. There was no way she could face a whole lifetime of restricted calories.

“I’d
love
the chance to help you, Grace! You’ll see, this will be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.” He patted her hand where it rested on his arm.

Instead of being thrilled, she felt slightly depressed.

She forgot about Andrew’s hand on top of hers as she imagined a bacon and butter sandwich: She’d use white bread, sprinkle sugar on the butter, lay on four or five strips of bacon, then squish it all nearly flat, until the bread was as thin as a flour tortilla.
Mmm
.

Maybe Andrew could eventually be persuaded to eat proper food like that. And then his libido would fire up, and—

“I really don’t see why Declan should care whether you’re a flexitarian or a vegetarian,” Andrew said.

The mention of Declan’s name shook Grace free from her mental food orgy. So there
was
competition between the two men. Excellent. “Neither do I. He wouldn’t recognize anything as food unless it had four hooves and a brand on its butt.”

“He
is
a bit of a Neanderthal, isn’t he?” Andrew asked, glancing at her from the corner of his eye as if to gauge her reaction.

“I didn’t know men like him still existed,” she drawled, thinking of how good Declan had looked naked. “I thought they’d all gone the way of the woolly mammoth. Still, I suppose there are women who find that type of raw masculinity appealing,” Grace said, hoping to tap into that sense of competition. They were now a couple hundred yards past the last of the volunteers. “This looks like a good spot to go to work, don’t you think?”

“I’ve never understood why women are attracted to that sort,” Andrew complained, bending down to pick up a plastic bottle. “Don’t they know what a lousy husband he’d be?”

“Oh, I suppose every woman has
some
vulnerability to his type.”

“But not you, surely?”

“No, of course not,” she soothed, picking up a chunk of Styrofoam for her bag. “I can appreciate him as a physical specimen, but that’s as far as it goes. I, of course, could never be interested in a man without a graduate degree.”

“But—” Andrew started, then seemed to swallow his own words.

“What?” Grace asked innocently.

“Declan does have an MBA,” he admitted.

“Does he?” Grace said in false surprise. She took on a musing stance. “Hmm. So there’s a brain with the brawn.”

“But that’s not the type of degree you were talking about. It might as well be a glorified accounting degree. You’re more interested in ideas. You’re an intellectual and want someone you can talk to.”

She smiled warmly at him. “Yes. You understand me perfectly.”

He visibly relaxed.

“Besides, it’s not like Declan would see anything here to his taste,” she said, and touched her hand to the neckline of her dress, letting it linger there atop the mound of one full breast. The breeze off the ocean had raised her nipples into pebbles beneath the apricot fabric, and she saw Andrew’s gaze linger on the small peaks. Maybe he wasn’t quite so low on libido after all. “So I’m perfectly safe from a sexual caveman like him.”

“Perfectly,” Andrew said weakly.

They wandered through the shoreline greenery, picking up bits of flotsam and jetsam: more Styrofoam, shoes, scraps of floats
and ropes, ancient aluminum cans bleached by salt and sun, and random pieces of plastic. The ocean was calm, the waves making a gentle
shoosh shoosh
upon the shore. It wasn’t bad for a first date, Grace decided. They had a pretty setting, a nontaxing task to fill the silences, and the pleasure of sand on bare feet. It was worlds calmer than her outing with Declan had been.

And that’s a good thing
, she told herself.

“Why does Sophia like Declan so much?” Grace asked some minutes later, her mind having failed to move off the topic of the despised male.

“She feels possessive of her projects.”

“Projects?”

“Without her, he probably would have ended up selling cars after college,” Andrew said.

“Yeah?”

“He had a full-ride football scholarship. He was hoping to go pro, but his junior year he blew out his knee and, with it, all his chances. Sophia redirected him toward business and helped get him into Wharton. He probably wouldn’t have his MBA or have gotten into such a good firm on Wall Street without her, and he sure wouldn’t have been so successful in San Francisco and around here if not for her connections. Half of his clients are friends of hers.”

Grace felt a prick of disappointment. She’d thought Declan was a self-motivated achiever, not a product of someone else’s patronage. “That was generous of Sophia to help him like that.”

“Sophia can be very motherly, and like a mother, generous to a fault.”

“You think she was wrong to help him?”

“I don’t think it’s ever wrong to help someone who needs it,” he said primly.

“But?”

“But I’ve never been happy to see charm rewarded over merit.” He laughed self-consciously and gave her a rueful smile. “Maybe that’s left over from watching the popular kids in high school get away with almost anything. You’d think I’d have grown out of that type of petty jealousy by now.”

She smiled in return, warming to his admission of such a familiar weakness.
This
was why she’d been attracted to Andrew from the beginning; setting aside the food weirdness, he was just like her. “Did we go to the same school? I know exactly what you mean.”

“Weren’t you popular?”

“Geek, through and through,” she said happily. She didn’t need to pretend otherwise with Andrew. God, what a relief.

“No one would guess it now,” he said, his eyes taking a detour over her figure.

She chuckled. Those twelve pounds seemed to have made a difference in how he saw her. He
was
ogling her, which just went to show that guys were guys, geek or jock. “Thanks, I think. I liked being a nerdy girl, though.”

“Why?”

“A theory I had. I thought that smart kids were too busy following intellectual pursuits to spend time and energy developing their social skills. The social butterflies, on the other hand, weren’t intellectual enough to be absorbed in the world of the mind. I thought I’d rather be intellectual and a little awkward than popular and vapid.”

“Is that where your thesis idea came from?”

“Kind of, yeah,” she said, even as she felt a faint discomfort. The assumptions her dissertation was based on were beginning to sound the faintest bit silly to her now. Not that she didn’t think there
was
truth to her hypothesis, but maybe not the all-sweeping truth she’d once thought.

“So you think you can persuade popular girls to give more attention to their minds than to whether or not to get breast implants.”

“You think it’s hopeless.”

“As hopeless as turning one of us geeks into a sex symbol,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back, thinking of Sophia’s lessons. “I don’t know. . . . When we put our minds to something, is there anything we nerds can’t do?”

“But we wouldn’t ever pursue such ends. You wouldn’t want rewards for having a pretty face, would you?”

“I know I
should
say no, but I’ve been trying to be more honest with myself lately.” She touched his arm and leaned close. “Wouldn’t you like to live on the ‘other side’ for a bit, to see what it’s like? To experience what it’s like to be one of the beautiful people?”

“I already know what it’s like, just from observation,” he said. “Self-obsessed. Entitled. Ignorant. Like Declan.”

Grace drew back. He sounded exactly like she had a few weeks ago. She should be cheering him on, but she wasn’t.
Why not?
“You really don’t like Declan, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said, grimacing. “I shouldn’t let my dislike show so clearly. I know you spent the day with him yesterday.” He slanted her a glance.

“To please Sophia. It was nice to be shown around. I haven’t had anyone to explore the area with,” she said, tossing him a broad hint.

“The area is about as safe as safe gets. You shouldn’t have any qualms about exploring it on your own.”

She rolled her eyes under the shield of her hat brim. Maybe geeks
did
need to devote some time to learning social skills. “Declan took me to the site of his development, up in the hills. It was
very pretty out there, and I doubt I would have found such a place on my own.”

Andrew straightened up with a faded Budweiser can in his hand, his face darkening. “That development! If his type has its way, the entire county will be slathered in housing developments and private golf courses, and the only green you’ll ever see will be the containment swales for the runoff water. Destroying open land like that is a sin.”

“He says they’re going to be environmentally friendly houses.”

“The only truly green house is the one that isn’t built! Once land like that is developed, it’s gone forever. There’s plenty of space in towns that could be made into high-density housing, although it would probably be better not to encourage population growth at all. The Monterey Peninsula is in a delicate balance between man and nature as it is, with at least seventy of its plant and animal species threatened. The Smith’s blue butterflies are disappearing, and so is the Monterey pine. The Monterey pine, for God’s sake!”

Grace looked up the beach to the multimillion-dollar houses lining the shore. She’d read that Carmel used to be a bohemian art colony, but when she and Declan had driven through, all she’d seen were luxury cars and faux fantasy cottages that only the super rich could afford. She was beginning to see Declan’s point about there being nowhere for normal people to live. She didn’t know enough about it, though, to say whether Andrew’s high density or Declan’s green village made more sense.

Debating the issue wasn’t going to win her any points with Andrew, anyway, if Sophia was to be believed. Better to pretend to agree. “It
will
be sad to see houses there. It was a magical spot, so quiet except for the crickets; I’ve never heard so many in the middle of the day. The sound of them weaves a sort of spell.”

He moved down the dunes and she followed. “Monterey was once thought to have its own unique cricket.”

“Oh?”

“No specimens survive, just a drawing by Ed Ricketts.”

“Who?”

“Ed Ricketts. ‘Doc.’ Haven’t you read any of the Steinbeck stories set around here?
Cannery Row
, or
Sweet Thursday
?”