Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
By the time Cal’s truck pulled into the driveway, though, I had settled on gratitude, and so when he stepped out of the truck I couldn’t help running from the porch to meet him.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?” he asked, looking just the tiniest bit disappointed as he gave me a warm hug. He had even dressed up a little bit: he had on an Oxford shirt rather than a flannel, though I saw a little fraying around the collar and I wondered if it might even be a hand-me-down.
“Figured out what?” I asked, feeling my mouth crook up into an involuntary smile. Then I frowned a little, because I couldn’t figure out why it had been involuntary. But it had; for some reason, though I had thought about the happiness of this moment all day, I suddenly didn’t want to show it.
“Something wrong?” Cal asked, his own brow clouding a little.
It’s because he thinks he can… well, that he can fuck me whenever he wants, now that he’s ‘accepted.’ Such bullshit.
Not that he’d given any sign he thought about it that way.
“No,” I told him flatly, feeling my smile fade.
He looked at me as if he thought I might say something more—something reassuring, maybe. As if, I suddenly thought, he thinks he’s entitled to some kind of info dump on my state of mind, because he’s ‘accepted.’
“Okay,” he said, after a few moments, a smile returning to his own face, though it looked a little bit forced, I had to say. “Well, whether you figured it out or not, we’re headed to the Lion’s Mane in Heathville, so hop in. We’ve got an actual reservation.”
The way he said it almost made me laugh. It wasn’t like I’d gotten to go to a restaurant that took reservations more than once or twice in my life, but Cal had a way of almost, but not quite, making fun of himself that part of me found really endearing.
Another voice in my head, though, kept the laugh down and made me greet the news with a tight little smile that I—the defiant part of me anyway—hoped to look merely tolerant. I understood that something inside me had taken what felt like a very wrong turn, that my reactions to Cal didn’t represent how I actually felt about him, but it seemed impossible to change them or stop them before I’d spoken coldly, or my features had assumed an expression that hid my real pleasure.
“Sounds great,” I said, consciously pretending that I didn’t mean it. I saw confusion flit across Cal’s face, and then I saw something else, something that made my eyes widen and my heart rate speed way up: understanding. I had the uncomfortable feeling that Cal had figured out something about my attitude that I didn’t know myself.
I went straight to the door of the truck and reached for the handle, so that he couldn’t see my sudden nervousness.
“You’ll have her back in the morning?” I heard Shelly call from behind me. She must have come out onto the porch just this second, when she saw me headed for the truck.
Cal had hurried around me, though, and he hastened to open the door for me, which made my face even hotter for some reason. At the same time, he called back to Shelly, “Sure thing, ma’am.”
Nothing more than that—no further details on the assumption that I would spend the night at my accepted suitor’s house, or of what would have changed about me when I returned ‘home’ the next morning. I swallowed hard, feeling my fists clench and unclench with conflicting waves of emotion and sensation, as I settled into the seat of Cal’s truck.
Cal managed to make me forget about most of my misgivings, on the ride to the restaurant and during dinner. To my astonishment, he turned out to have a really great sense of humor, or at least a sense of humor that matched mine. I remembered that he had made me laugh once or twice on our first date, but I guessed I hadn’t really paid attention since so many serious—and mortifying—things had happened on that date. Tonight, with an hour-and-a-half each way in the car, and a whole very nice dinner, to spend together, I felt like I could actually get to know him, and the way he liked to poke fun at his friends and neighbors, and at the whole world, really, without any real nastiness but in a sometimes side-splittingly funny way.
“What the heck do you think crawled up that Mrs. Brown’s butt and died there?” he asked, while we waited for dessert. My belly felt pleasingly full of the best Caesar salad and the best spaghetti carbonara I’d had in my life, and that feeling of satisfaction seemed to have warmed the rest of me, physically and emotionally. Something about the look on Cal’s face, and the way he emphasized died there caught me off guard, and I started to giggle. Every time I looked at Cal, and saw the smile on his face that seemed to widen with each passing moment of my irresistible laughter, another fit of giggles came out. The idea that my accepted suitor thought just as disdainfully of the New Modesty administrator as I did seemed to draw me closer to him, and to push away the dark thoughts attached to my compulsory enrollment in their courtship program.