Stepping Out : Young Adult Romance Books (A New Adult Romance Story "Swanson Sisters Series" : Book 2) (2 page)

Howard watched the two girls walk away. He looked at the scrap of paper in his hand with the phone number. Then he walked to his sporty red two-seater convertible. He debated calling the number right then. He began punching the numbers in but stopped just before the last number.

He would go back to his place
and try to get a good night’s sleep. He was scheduled to play a game of golf in the morning with his father and he knew exactly what that involved. It involved his father nagging and cajoling and threatening, but all done in what was supposed to be a friendly and teasing manner. Howard didn’t find it particularly friendly or teasing.

He
sat on the side of his bed and thought of Alicia. He felt that he had to make contact with her right then, while the mood of the evening was still upon him. He wondered if she was still with her friend. It was just before midnight when he realized it really was now or never. He had to call. If nothing else, he had to assure himself that was not a fake number that Sophie had given him.

The phone
rang three times before Sophie answered. They had already dropped off Alicia and she was struggling with the desire to give Howard Alicia’s number but she knew that Alicia had been on edge already and she didn’t want to push things. From the way that she asked if Sophie was going to visit their parents, she’d known it would not take much to have Alicia really annoyed with her.

Sophie said nothing and neither did Howard.
They both paused. Both of them knew that either of them would have to come up with something to say or hang up. Finally he spoke, “Would you please let her know that I called.”

“
Okay. If you give me your number, I’ll ask her to call you back.”

***

By late Sunday afternoon Alicia was exhausted. She had a headache and her shoulders were burning with tension. She went into the lab and carried out some preliminary tests. Sometimes lab work calmed her. She’d had another visit with Sophie but Sophie steadfastly refused to go to visit their parents with her and instead wrote out Howard’s phone number and threw it at Alicia.

“Call him. Spend time with him instead of with Mom and Dad.”

Alicia felt the same resentment she always felt at Sophie when she had to deal with her parents on her own. It wasn’t reasonable. Sophie had spent most of her childhood taking the slaps and kicks for her younger siblings. But now, Sophie was gone so far away and even when she came home, she didn’t want to deal with them.

After three hours of her mother nagging and complaining, Alicia needed to be calmed. The pot of tea Alicia had made was not suitable for her mother. Her mother poured it out and made it the way it should be made – according to her. When Alicia added the tiny bit of cream she liked in her tea her mother said, “Really Alicia. I thought if you are going be a nurse you would know better than to use cream. Don’t you know anything about cholesterol? You’re going to be so fat no man’s ever going to want you.”

She’d bitten her lips to keep the retort at the tip of her tongue from spilling out. She’d wanted to point out to her mom that
she
wasn’t fat, but no man seemed to want her either. That would have triggered another level of whining and moaning, and she just hadn’t had the energy to deal with it. So she’d given up the pretense of a smile and had tuned off instead.

Her mother wasn’t done though. She’d
followed that with a litany of complaints about the unfairness of life and how she could have been anything she wanted to be if only she hadn’t given up her career and devoted her life to raising three ungrateful daughters and catering to their miserable father.

When
Alicia suggested that it wasn’t late, that her mother was still a young woman capable of finding a second wind that would allow her to fulfill her dreams, her mother snapped at her. “And so what if I did? Who’s going to hire a woman in her 50s? You’re just like your father – rubbing it in that I am a failure.”

This was followed by another hour of criticism and misery.  Soon it would be capped off with a series of comments about how the only reason
Alicia was where she was is that her mother gave up everything for her. When Alicia had taken a year off to work, her mother harped endlessly about her lack of ambition.

Alicia
looked at her mother. She could see the bitter unhappiness in her mother’s eyes and in the set of her mouth and the lines of her face. Alicia wished her father would have stayed home for a least part of her visit but he used it as a release from having to be trapped with her mother.

S
he knew that he welcomed even an afternoon’s respite from her mother’s endless harping. It would never change. Her mother set down the teacup.

“Mom, I hate to rush
off, but I have work to do.” There, she’d said it. She’d had to. Any more of the negativity and her head would have exploded. Alicia stood up and had begun clearing away the tea things. Her mother had scowled at her and complained that Alicia was completely ungrateful.

As
Alicia rearranged the charts and tubes in her lab, she thanked her lucky stars for the joys of bio-chem. She felt completely lonely and alone. Usually being in the laboratory brought Alicia the sense of well-being that she needed. However, she was haunted by the memory of the happy souls she saw at the patio party. And the memory of her mother’s invective as she’d left the house where she had grown up.

It was
not unusual for Alicia to rush away from a visit with her mother. The conversation was about to switch into that same old discussion that had no logic. On one hand, her mother complained about the effort of looking after everyone and on the other hand, she complained that Alicia chose to live in residence when she could have lived at home and commuted to classes.

Even in the lab, all alone, one of her favorite moments of the week,
Alicia felt agitated. She turned her mind to the party only to drive thoughts of her mother out of her mind.

As much as she
’d hated the idea of being at the party at first, she’d later found it interesting and it had somehow shone a great bright light on the narrowness of her own life. Briefly she wondered why Howard was there. Then frustrated that she’d even wondered anything about the man or her mother or life in general, she buried herself in her work.

On the other side of town, Howard was having a similar kind of
weekend. The golf date with his father was unfortunately just as he predicted. His father had a great idea for his son’s life. He would go into the family business, just like daddy had always imagined he would. This was not a new idea but his father had this special skill of presenting the same old discussion as if it were a brand new idea that he had thought of that morning.

Maybe it was part of the reason he was so successful in business but it was a huge aggravation to Howard.
Howard’s major was in computer science. It was the one point of agreement that he had ever had with his father – his decision to study computer science. At the time, he saw his father beam with approval of his son’s choice and he heard the words, “It will be great to have someone I can trust manage the company network and security.”

Leland Wentworth
had gone on to describe the types of custom software that the family’s business needed and Howard just listened. The continued goodwill between him and his father depended on him never talking to his father about his life goal.

So far, so good. Howard
had managed to keep all contact with his parents light and easy. He dressed and acted like the campus playboy and this pleased his father. Howard was at least as skilled as his father in playing whatever part he needed to play to charm those around him. As he swung at the golf ball, he concentrated on deflecting his father’s plans for his life.

He focused his mind on the woman he had met last night. He
made a mental note to call Sophie again. There was something about Alicia’s face that clung to his memory and thinking about her provided a buffer between his mind and his father’s constant talk.

He felt
as if he had known her before, in some other context. He managed to keep his cool with his father during their golfing adventure by remembering his brief encounter with Alicia. He smiled as he remembered her stubborn refusal to let go of her glass.

His father was telling him about the company adding a new factory to produce a line of knock-
off clothing for export at precisely that moment. He was aware of the impact of the smile, generated by his memory of Alicia, on his father. He could see the old man’s delight in what he thought was Howard’s approval of his empire expanding.

Howard felt like his skin might burst. He felt a sense of disgust w
ith himself. He was too old to be such a child in front of his father.  What was Leland going to do? Cut off his allowance? Well, maybe. And this was where Howard always came to the knot in his thought processes. He wanted to be a good person, a person of integrity, but his old argument with himself about practicality was wearing thin.

Howard could tell himself as often as he wanted to that he was protecting his father’s feelings but the reality was, and he knew it, he was being a coward.
Sooner or later he would have to break the news that he was not going to be part of a business with weak ethics. But not just yet.

After the day with his father was over, he still needed a distraction.
There was nothing to gain from going over the same territory in his mind, again and again. At the thought of the distraction, he smiled. Alicia was perfect as a diversion from negative thoughts. He logged in to the campus database, and did a simple search to find Alicia’s class list and course list.

In a matter of a very few minutes, Howard had a pretty good idea of her schedule, classes and labs. However it was
the weekend and there were no classes. He also had her home address and her campus address. He took a drive along the street where the nurse residences were.

It was borderline intruding in her life to just be driving along her street. And how could he explain to her that he was simply trying to avoid dealing with his own life
? He spent Saturday night with his computer buddies, playing video games. Sunday he worked on the programming he needed to get finished up for his current job.

He
drove to the science building and parked the car in one of the professors’ parking spots.

The
science building was deserted except for a couple of students who were walking down stairs chatting to each other. He was about to walk up to the third floor with the vague thought that he might accidentally encounter Alicia.

He stopped on the second floor. It was happening. He was reaching the point in his life where he had to take a stand. Everything had been so easy, evening conning his father into thinking that he was actually to go into the family business. The thought of the family business infuriated Howard.

The Wentworths’ had been industrialists for generations. In his father’s day, the transition to providing inexpensive clothing started out as a great idea. On the face of it, Howard was in favor of providing well made clothing at reasonable prices for the mass market. His problems began when he realized that some of the factories providing the clothing relied on child labor.

Howard stopped in his tracks. It was if a light bulb had just snapped on his head. The time had  come for him to grow up. He swung around on his heel and as he did, the elevator at the end of the hallway opened and
Alicia stepped out. They looked at each other both of them standing still as if frozen in time.

“What you doing here?”
Alicia asked. As he opened his mouth to reply, she put up her hand. “And please don’t answer my question with your question.”

Howard had indeed been just about asked her what she was doing there. He followed her instruction and did not ask this question. Actually he said nothing.
Yesterday with his father, he thought of her. Now here, with her standing in front of him, he was thinking about his father with such intensity, he was actually surprised to see her.

Alicia
gave him a half smile and said, “Well. What are you doing here?”

Howard regained his composure and slipped into the role that was so much like the uniform that he wore, the playboy. “If I were a smooth and slick kind of guy, I come up with something clever and say that I was here looking for you.”

He shrugged. “However, as much as I wish that were the case, the truth is much more prosaic. But then isn’t it always? I’m supposed to meet friend of mine to help him with his laptop.” To prevent her from asking the name of this purported friend, he continued.

“However since he’s a no-show and you’re a surprise appearance,
how about having a cup coffee with me?” He held his hands up, palms facing her, in a gesture of surrender. “But I bet I can guess your answer. You’re going to say not a chance.”

“Why
; would I be a surprise appearance? I told you I was in premed.”

“What does biology have to do with premed?” he asked. He grinned so that she would know he was teasing. The fact is, even though he had entered the building in the hopes of seeing her, when the reality of the situation struck him, he banished all thought of her or seeing her. He was just trying to keep his thoughts sorted.