Love, Lies and Texas Dips (27 page)

He didn’t answer, just blew his cheeks out and said nothing.

“I think we’re done here.” Though it took every ounce of strength she had, she drew away from him and rose, smoothing her plaid skirt. He had come to her, and that was something. But if she’d hoped for more than that, she didn’t get it. She brushed a tear from her cheek, angry at herself for expecting so much from him. “I’m not pregnant, okay? So now you know. If that’s the only reason you came, well, you can leave.”

For a while, he just sat there, looking up at her dumbly, like he was too confused to move. Finally, he nodded. “If that’s how you want it to go down. But you’ve gotta know that if I could make this go away, I would.”

“Well, you can’t fix this,” Laura said, or maybe it was more like “you won’t fix this.” That was the whole problem between them, why it never seemed to work out when it should. Avery couldn’t or wouldn’t see the bad in Jo Lynn Bidwell, even if the bitch were to walk around with slithering snakes on her head in lieu of hair.

But there is someone else who could help
, she thought, realizing then that the only guy who could get Jo Lynn off her back wasn’t the man standing before her now.

“All right, I’ll go, if that’s how you feel.”

Avery came off the bench and softly moved tear-damp hair from her face, sweeping it behind her ears. Cupping her face, he pressed his mouth against her lips, holding her there until it seemed to Laura that he might never leave her.
Stay, stay, stay
, every one of her heartbeats seemed to cry, until he released her. Then, wordlessly, he walked away, brushing a willow branch aside as he crossed the stepping-stone path to the front drive.

Laura followed behind him, stopping to watch as he opened the door to his Corvette and slid into the driver’s seat. With a thwack, the door closed, and he gunned the engine. A second later, he drove off, motor roaring as the ’Vette raced up the street until he was gone.

Laura didn’t even wait a full minute before she hurried over to her own car and started it up, thinking of something Avery had said, about the team having a short workout today but some of the guys had gone to the cave to press iron.

Instead of pulling her Roadster around to the garage, she put the Merc in reverse. She knew where she had to go and who she had to talk to: the only person who had any control at all over Jo Lynn Bidwell.

Glancing in the rearview mirror, Laura stared at her pained blue eyes, telling herself,
I am who I am, and I will push back when I’m shoved
.

That settled, she put the car in drive and headed straight to the Villages Country Club, just minutes away. Once there, she slowly wound her way through the parking lot, looking this way and that. It didn’t take long before she spotted the black Mustang convertible. She couldn’t see much beyond the tinted windows, only the vague shadow of someone’s
head, or maybe a headrest. But at least she knew Dillon was on the grounds.

Perfect
, Laura thought. She’d make this quick and easy.

She parked her Roadster between a Cadillac GTS and a Hummer ironically painted with racing stripes. Without further thought, she got out, slammed the door, and marched over to where the Mustang sat, backed into a spot overhung by an oak tree. Ignoring the anxiety that had her pulse skidding double time, she walked right up to the driver’s side and rapped on the window.

With a quiet whir, the glass came sliding down, revealing Dillon Masters’s angular face, slick with sweat, and, beyond him, a guy in the passenger’s seat. Laura recognized him as the dude who’d been working out with Dillon on Labor Day morning.

“Um, hi, can I talk to you?” she asked, slightly blindsided at not finding Dillon alone.

Dillon hardly looked happy to see her. “Look, we’re just on our way out, so if you wanted me to train you—”

“No, it’s not about that.” She bent over, leaning into the window to look at him eye to eye. She glanced at his friend, who turned his head, ignoring her completely. “What I want,” she said quietly, “is for you to call off your bitch of a girlfriend. Tell her to stop harassing me … make her retract that lie on MySpace or else you’ll be sorry.”

“I’ll
be sorry?” Dillon tapped a hand on the steering wheel, and Laura saw his jaw muscle twitch. “You think Jo spread that rumor?” He sighed and shook his head. “She knows I’d be pissed if she had anything to do with that.”

“Women,” she heard Dillon’s workout pal remark with a laugh, though Dillon acted like he hadn’t heard.

Laura’s spine stiffened. “This isn’t a joke,” Laura told him, turning shrill, on the verge of totally freaking out. “Get Jo Lynn to back off, or there’ll be no private hunting trip with the good ol’ boys from UT for you. In fact, I’ll have my daddy tell his buddies in the athletic department that you’d make a lousy recruit for the Longhorns and to pass on signing you if they know what’s good for them!”

“Whoa, wait a minute. C’mon now,” Dillon said, reaching to open his door, and Laura backed up as he got out of the car. He shut the door and stepped toward her, catching her by the wrist and grabbing hold of her hand. “Calm down, all right?” he begged softly before he let her go. He swiped fingers through blond hair slick with sweat. “I’m tired, I’ve got our first game of the season tomorrow night, and all I want is to get home and take a shower. So let’s talk fast, okay?”

Make it fast so he can go home and shower? Well, that sure beats having to go over to Bootsie Bidwell’s house in, like thirty minutes to take a pregnancy test, doesn’t it?
Laura thought, but bit her tongue.

“Just get her to stop,” she begged, holding down the fluttering hem of her shirt as the wind began to pick up. Leaves from the oak tree above Dillon’s car spiraled down and skittered across her Mary Janes. “Tell Jo Lynn to pull the MySpace page or our deal is
off
. That’s all there is to it.”

He rubbed his forehead. “You know how Jo is. I can’t promise anything. I’m not even sure she’s behind it.”

But Laura was as sure as she’d ever been about anything in her life.

“That’s your problem, not mine,” she told him as rain pattered on the asphalt around them. Without another
word, she left Dillon standing in the drizzle and ran back to her car.

She flung herself into the driver’s seat. The drum of raindrops pelted the car, splattering across the windshield, cleansing away the traces of pink lipstick that remained. As she put the Roadster in reverse and started to back out, a horn blared, and she hit the brakes. Her heart beating a hundred miles a minute, she caught a blur of blue as a sedan flew past.

I don’t have a love life.
I have a like life.

—Lorrie Moore

It’s hard to kiss and tell
when you haven’t really kissed that much.

—Mac Mackenize

Fifteen

Why does doing the right thing—or, at least, what I think is the right thing—always seem to blow up in my face? Why are there so many shades of gray in between black and white? If life is going to come with so many iffy rules, there should be a guidebook you get the day you’re born, like the GSC’s debutante handbook. Let me know flat out what every action’s going to cost me. Then I’ll understand what’s expected of me, and I won’t risk embarrassing myself any more or ticking off my friends
.

Mac finished furiously scribbling in her notebook before hooking her pen over the page and closing it up. If her mom had been around, she would’ve been here to open the door when Mac pulled into the drive after a horrible Thursday at school, asking, “How’d your day go?” and always listening to whatever Mac told her.

Instead, Mac had come home to an empty house. Honey had left a note about getting a massage to rub out the tension caused by last night’s debacle at her “Dip-ity Do” class,
and Daniel Mackenzie wouldn’t be home from work for hours.

Mac had changed out of her school clothes, grabbed an apple from the fridge, and holed up in her room. She reached for the shoe box with her mom’s letters just as the rain started coming down, pattering on the windows and making Mac feel lonelier than ever. She pulled out the envelope with the last note her mom had written, reading it once all the way through, though it was the final ’graph that stuck in her head:

Live your life, darling girl. Don’t be afraid to take chances. Sometimes the best surprises come from standing on your tiptoes and reaching for the stars. I don’t want you to miss out on anything because you were scared to try
.

For some reason, Mac didn’t think Jeanie Mackenzie had been talking about the Rosebud Ball, not this time. Don’t be afraid … reach for the stars … don’t miss out. The phrases struck a chord deep within her, and she realized it was time to take a stand with Alex. She had to go for it or she’d never answer the questions she’d been asking herself, namely, what were they to each other now? Did Mac have real feelings for Alex beyond being his oldest friend? Or was she afraid of losing him to Cindy Chow when he wasn’t really hers to lose in the first place?

“Time to face the music, Mackenzie,” she told herself, and got up from the bed. She picked up her book bag, retrieved her wallet from inside it, and slipped out the Star Trek coin Alex had given her, which she’d folded in the letter
from her mom. After she’d retrieved her cell, she put everything else back. Then she rubbed the coin for luck, stuck it in her back pocket, and used her cell to text Alex a message.

Can U meet me @ the tree house?

Within seconds, his answer: When?

5 min, she wrote him.

Do U know it’s raining?

R U scared of getting wet???

Hell no!!! C U Soon

Before Mac left the house, she brushed her hair until she’d gotten all the tangles out. Then she popped an Altoid and used her pink lip gloss from Origins, which tasted like peppermint.

She raced down the stairs, across the foyer, and into the kitchen, stopping only to grab an umbrella before throwing open the rear French doors. Her tennis shoes slapped through damp puddles on the stone patio as she ran across it. Falling rain dappled the pale blue of the pool as she dashed past it, the patter on the water and on branches seeming the only noise around. Mac breathed in the scent of wet grass as she headed toward the hedge border between her house and the Bishops’.

She paused to close the umbrella before using the old path she and Alex had created from slipping between the shrubs so many times through the years. Droplets splashed on her skin as she pushed back tiny branches, and she felt her hair starting to frizz as the drizzle came down on her head.

So much for keeping dry with the umbrella!
she thought.

As she walked farther into the Bishops’ yard, she had to sidestep Elliott’s toys—rubber balls, plastic horseshoes, and a
hula hoop—all left out and now rain slick. The closer she got to the old tree house, the more her heart thundered in her chest, and she swallowed hard, willing herself not to be nervous.

It’s just Alex
, she chastised herself when she reached the midpoint of the yard. She stared up at the small wooden structure built into the crotch of an old oak, nearly twelve feet off the ground. Half the size of her walk-in closet, the house had seemed big once, when she and Alex were kids and had played pirates up there, pretending it was a captured warship filled with ill-gotten treasure. They’d fashioned swords out of sticks and made eye patches out of black construction paper and string.

Why is it so easy to be ten and so much harder to be seventeen?

Maybe part of Mac wanted to recapture that sense of connection with Alex again. It had seemed so simple once.

“Hey, you’re getting wet down there,” she heard a voice from above, and she glanced up to see Alex sticking his head out the window of the tree house. “It’s dry as toast in here. Come on up!”

“Can I take the elevator?” she joked as she approached the wooden ladder permanently attached to the tree house deck. Leaving her umbrella at the base of the tree, she started up, her fingers tightly gripping the damp rungs as she carefully ascended. By the time her head surfaced above the platform, she was out of breath. Sweat dampened her armpits, and she felt a splinter sticking in the palm of her right hand.

“Welcome aboard, matey,” Alex said as he reached for her, helping to pull her the rest of the way up.

“Oh, man, this seemed so much easier when we were kids,” Mac said, ducking beneath the doorway and into the
boxy space. It was dark with the canvas flap lowered over the window and only gloomy light seeping through the cracks between the boards.

The roof was so low Alex had to hunch over to move around.

“Have you been renting out to squirrels?” she asked, and wrinkled her nose at the musty smell.

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to meet here. Besides, it’s not that bad.” Alex grinned, his pale eyes bright behind his wire rims as he waved her over to the two folding chairs that he’d apparently brushed off. “Take a load off, Cap’n Mac, and tell me what’s on your mind.”