Stepping Out : Young Adult Romance Books (A New Adult Romance Story "Swanson Sisters Series" : Book 2) (3 page)

Alicia said, “If you don’t know, then coffee with you will be an interesting adventure.” She frowned, “We could talk about – oh – well, nothing.”

“We could. Let’s go? Do you want to go to the coffee shop here or shall we be daring and drive some place?”

“I need to get away from this place,” she said.

As she settled into Howard sport
y little car, Alicia struggled with the tension that was so much a part of her life. She could feel her shoulder blades pulling together and her neck muscles knot up.

Conversation was difficult in the car. They talked about the weather. It was warm, they agreed, and then there was silence. Howard maneuvered the car through the campus traffic, which was light but tedious because of the way the area was laid out.

They were on the street and when they came to a stop light, Howard said, “I’m sorry to admit that I’m not a very good conversationalist today.” He was surprised at his candor. “I’m in one of those family-created moods.”

Alicia laughed, “Well, so am I.” Her laugh was tinged with bitterness.

“Tell me about your family,” he said, “Please.”
“Only if you tell me about yours.”

“Let’s have dinner,” he said. “It’s going to take a while.”
They were on a main commercial street by now and he pulled into a family restaurant. “Is this okay with you?”

Alicia
saw the look on his face and she didn’t have the heart to tantalize him. “So long as you don’t mind if I listen and don’t talk too much.”

He grinned at her and they went into the restaurant. They sat in a booth, facing each other and ordered coffee and water and took the menus to look over. In the car, not facing each other, they were quiet
and that seemed acceptable. Now they were tensely sitting like strangers, which they were, and Alicia was all too aware of the silence.

Her head was pounding. Her neck was on fire. She ran her hands up over her shoulders and tried to massage the knots out of her neck muscles.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Just got a tension thing going on in my neck. It happens.”

“I know a great masseuse,” he said. “I’ll make you an appointment.”

She looked at him as if this was some sort of suggestive comment but she saw no sign of it. “Or, if you prefer, I can give you the number and let you call her.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Long hours at the lab table. It does me in.”

Howard sat and stared across the table at her. He had been charming the ladies since he was old enough to know that they were worth charming but today he felt completely off his game.  He felt like he was at some sort of command performance but forgot how to behave.

He reminded himself that this was the first day of his new way of being. He was barely aware of the decision to change but he had the realization that it was upon him. The thought that he was in the process of changing surprised him. Somehow he always thought it would be something he planned and then implemented not something that seemed to take on a life of its own.

Here
he was in what should have been the most satisfying situation of his life. This was his métier. This was where he shone the brightest. Here he was, with a woman who intrigued him, and he was talking about getting his masseuse to help her. He smiled ruefully.

It was a family restaurant, not a fancy restaurant with low lighting, muted music and a lover’s menu.
I am definitely losing my touch, he thought.

“So tell me about your family angst,” she said.

He shrugged, “It’s nothing really.”

“It’s like this, Wentworth, you tell me or I tell you about my mother. And believe me, you don’t need that….”

“How about this?” he suggested. “We take turns comparing parents?” As soon as he said it, he realized he made a faux pas. He should not have said parents. What if she only had one parent? In his entire privileged life, he had never felt ill at ease; except when he was with his father. Maybe his awkwardness was a leftover from yesterday with dad.

“Unless you have really annoying parents, it won’t be a fair comparison,” she said. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth. In her entire life, she had never complained about her parents to anyone. Well, she thought,
Sophie had seen her mother in action and they had talked about that.

But to just open up and say anything about her parents that were not approved comments – that just did not happen.
She felt herself blush. And she silently apologized to her father. He had always been kind and gentle. He wasn’t annoying quite so much as he was invisible.

The waitress came to take their order and each of them spoke at the same time. They
each said, “you first.” Then they each laughed.

“Okay,” Howard said, “you go first.”

Alicia ordered first. “Baked salmon with lemon.”

Howard nodded, “Me too.”

After the waitress left, Howard said, “Why did you order that?”

Alicia
frowned at him and said in a slow deliberate tone, “Because it is my favorite meal….”

“But that is my favorite meal….”

“I knew I liked you.” She blurted it out and then laughed. “This is just weird.”

“It is.”

“Let’s see how weird it is,” she said. “You start talking. Let’s see what else we might have in common.”

He looked at her and nodded. “Okay.”

But he didn’t speak.

The waitress came with their
coffee and water and that broke the tension of the moment. After they were alone again, Howard said, “I’m a computer programmer.” Alicia nodded. She didn’t know what to say. It was a good field to be in.

“My dream is to
find a way to bring innovative technology to children in third-world countries so that they can get the education they need to improve their lives and, well, the future of their own countries.” He said it as if he were admitting something shameful about himself.

Alicia
opened her eyes wide. “I want to join one of those doctors without borders type of programs. There is so much that good medical care can do in disadvantaged areas.”

The two of them became animated as they entered into a heated shared discussion about how the gaps
in society created an unfair situation. They talked through the food that they ate and they talked through coffee that the waitress kept refilling and they talked through the change of patrons at the surrounding tables.

The only personal question e
xchanged was when Howard asked why she called him Wentworth and not Howard. She just looked at him and said, “I don’t know. It just seems like the right thing to do.” But she did know. It was to keep it all at arm’s length.

In her classes and labs, the students tended to call each other by their last names. It was some unspoken expectation and she liked it.
Sophie called her Alicia or Am but just about everyone else she knew on campus called her Swanson.

Alicia
was, well, just too personal. When he asked, “Should I call you Swanson?” she was about to say yes but having just spilled out her soul about how urgent it was to her to be a doctor, she realized she should feel some sort of camaraderie with this man.

“I’ll leave that up to you,” she responded.

When the waitress came over with the bills for the meal, Howard reached for both bills and Alicia protested. “Please,” he said, “let me get this. I’m just lucky you’re not sending me a bill for the therapy.”

“Who says I won’t?”
Alicia said, surprising herself with this tiny joke.

“I better give you my address, then,” he said. Then as he handed the waitress the cash for the bills, he asked
Alicia, “Would you like some more coffee?”

She was surprised that she did and only because she didn’t want the evening to end. She remembered reading something somewhere about how people will tell strangers in airports things that they would not tell their best friends and now she had an inkling of just how that might happen.

She knew that this evening with Howard was an anomaly. It would never be repeated and she did not have to impress him. She could do imitations of her mother and if he judged her for being a bad daughter, an ungrateful brat, then so be it.

She did one right then, an impromptu impression of her mother criticizing a couple who were paying their bill at the register. Howard laughed.
Alicia turned to him. “Now I feel badly on several levels. It’s none of my business if that lady wants to wear bright yellow pants with those hips. I actually applaud her for having a sense of daring. I feel a little guilty about mocking mother, but just a little. And I realize that this might turn into a part of my personality and I’ll spend the rest of my life whining and complaining.”

“I think you’re just finding a way to let off some of that pressurized anger that has been giving you a headache.”

She touched her head, surprised. “You might be right. My headache is completely gone.”

Howard then did his rendition of his father, being pompous and condescending. He concluded his imitation by saying, “Yep, I feel a bit of that guilt too. But it was worth it.”

Then he reached over and placed both of his hands on top of one of hers that was resting on the table. “Thank you, Alicia,” he said, “this has been incredible being able to say all these things out loud.”

Alicia
placed her other hand over his and said, “I know. It has been fantastic to…,” she had been about to say, “…share my dreams” but that seemed too intimate. But that was what it was. Sharing things that she barely managed to tell Sophie about. She finished the sentence with “…talk.”

Alicia
was suddenly shy and she felt her usual agitated feeling return. It was as if she had been in a bubble where time stopped. Sometimes she felt like this when she was swimming. Howard became quiet as well. The waitress returned with fresh mugs and a pot of coffee. She indicated that she would pour more coffee for them. Howard nodded.

They drank their coffee quietly and Howard said, “Well, I was hoping you would get my message that I left with your friend and call me back. But this was better.”

“Oh, I haven’t talked to her since Friday night.” She smiled. “But I would call you back.”

“Great. Because I was hoping you would so I could ask you out on a real date?”

“But what would we talk about?” Alicia asked.

Alicia called Sophie on Monday and the first thing Sophie said was, “did you call Howard?”

Alicia
says, “Yes.” She hadn’t told Howard that Sophie had called her the instant after he called Sophie. She had no intention of ever calling him. At least that was how she felt before the dinner with him last night.

“You really did?”

“Well not exactly.” Alicia gave her a stripped down version of her evening with Howard.  And then changed the subject. She did not give Sophie the full replay of her afternoon with her mother. “I did. I had to do something to get the visit with Mom out of my system.”

“She was her usual charming self?”

“She was. You are so lucky to be three hundred miles away. Mom is way too close.” Alicia had the same push-pull feeling inside her when she mentioned their parents to Sophie. It was unfair of her to ask Sophie to bear the brunt of their nasty parents all the time. But Alicia didn’t want to be the only one there to cope with the guilt of not wanting to be near them. Even their younger sister had escaped.

Something
had happened at dinner with Howard when she was doing her imitation of her mother. She had turned to look at the couple paying the bill in the restaurant and she saw the slightly overweight woman in the tight yellow pants. Instantly she slipped into the critical tone of her mother complete with the annoying chortle of smug condemnation.

Maybe it was the speed at which she assumed her mother’s persona, or the contrast between being mean, even though she was pretending, and their conversation about trying to improve the world.

She tried to remember her mother the way she had been when Alicia was a little girl. She could not conjure up any memories that were peaceful so she stopped trying to remember. Instead she thought about her life.

Alicia
loved Mondays. The whole week spread out in front of her filled with seminars and workshops and labs. She could stay up all night and study if she wanted. The only restrictions on her time were the classes. She wondered how she’d feel if she had to give this up. Her feelings would begin with outrage. She let her thoughts roam, trying to follow the emotions that her mother must have felt when she gave up her studies to get married.

She had followed this train of thought in the past but it never seemed to make sense.
Alicia’s father was a distant man, who spoke quietly and Alicia had never seen him be anything but supportive to his wife. Rotten to his kids but he always backed up Mom no matter how miserable she was.

Once upon a time,
Alicia tried to figure out if her mother had been pregnant when she got married but she had done thorough research and it seemed that Sophie had really been born a good solid fourteen months after her parents got married.

She
had also wondered if perhaps there had been another pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage shortly after they got married but further research indicated that the wedding had been planned for a full year before it took place.

She had been surprised to discover that her mother had actually completed her degree before she got married. Most of
Alicia’s childhood friends came from families where the mothers worked and her mother always gave the impression that she would have worked outside the home too, if she had been given a chance.

Once she had asked Sophie what her thoughts on their mother’s life choices had been.
“I was wondering why Mom never tried to do something outside the house.”

Sophie
laughed, “I bet it was because no one would hire her.”

On the phone now,
Sophie asked. “So are you going on another date with Howard?”

“Maybe,”
Alicia said. Sophie could tell that her sister was not in the mood to be forthcoming.

***

Howard debated confronting his father the first thing Monday morning. His reluctance might have been part of his usual way of dealing with his father’s aggressive approach to life. Leland Wentworth was not a man to take no for an answer.

Howard had to test every nuance of his reluctance to tell his father what his life choice was. On Saturday, it had been fear of his father’s anger mixed with the certain knowledge that his father would mock him for being
such a child with such childish feel-good dreams. Leland would ask him for details about his plan and what steps he had taken.

The
reality was that he had taken no steps at all. It was a vague plan and while he could see himself carrying out his work in a third-world situation, the images were only clear in the  specifics. He could see himself in a small office, working, for instance but he could not see anything of his overall project.

To confront his father this way, Howard was condemning himself to failure. He would be nothing more than a small child who was announcing that he was running away from home and asking for taxi fare to do so.

One of the reasons Howard was so good at computer science was that his mind was logical. He applied that logic to his current problem. He began sketching out the work flow for his education project and by the end of the day, although he had missed all his classes, he had a good strong grasp of what he had to do.

He drew up his plan of action and broke all the work flow steps into smaller units. As his plan took shape, he realized two things. One was that he had never been so energized in his life. The other was that he didn’t know anything at all about getting involved in
a humanitarian project. There was a lot more to his dream than just writing a computer program.

It would be a busy week, he told himself. He began making the lists of the people he could contact and he should contact. He was almost embarrassed that he had never volunteered to work with disadvantaged children. Even worse, he had never even thought of it.
He was burning with excitement and he wanted to tell someone about his plans.

He reached for his phone. He wanted to call
Alicia to tell her about his – and then he stopped. To tell her what? That he had taken a few preliminary steps toward his chosen life’s goal? Then he realized that he still did not have her phone number. He did have Sophie’s. Then he realized that it was after midnight.

It was too late to call anyone tonight. However, tomorrow would be another day and he made a list for himself.