Mariah

Each step leads me closer to the door. Each fall of my foot has me holding my breath and waiting for the moment his palm touches the small of my back. By the time I’m halfway to the door, I itch to turn around and find him. He’s there. The ripple of whatever moves between us when we’re near each other is roaring, almost knocking me on my ass.

On its own, that’s enough. But coupled with the newfound knowledge that Lance is also History Hunk, is like going from a Category One storm to a Six in a second flat. Here I am, in a little tattered sailboat, trying to navigate this hellacious situation. The only thing that might help me stay afloat is him reaching out for me.

“Let me get the door for you,” he offers. More than enough room is taken to walk around me. “Here you go.”

I look at the floor all the way out, not sure what to think of all this distance. I hate it. But something about it feels almost normal in a really sad way. It reminds me of Eric and his lack of physical attention. “Thanks.”

The sun is bright, making me squint, as I step outside. The door snaps closed but I plow forward. It’s more than embarrassment now. It’s a fear of rejection. It’s knowing who I’m dealing with and wondering how I’m going to internalize it when he’s in my office on Monday making plans to bed some other woman. What do I do? Grin and bear it? Because there’s no doubt that’s what he’s going to do. He’s unapologetically Lance.

My pace quickens and I spy my car at the end of the row. I don’t notice the custom pearly-purple paint job on the SUV on my left until it’s too late.

“Good morning, honey.” My mother removes her oversized sunglasses, her keys dangling in her hand. “What are you doing here?”

“Just had lunch.”

I’m ten, maybe twelve steps from my car. Shuffling that way, I can cut it down to eight. Possibly six.

I can’t do this today.

“I really need to go, Mom.” A dull throb begins in my temple. “I’ll call you later.”

“You can’t even make time to say hello in a parking lot?”

Her voice is too loud, too demanding, to be ignored. We’ve done this before. If I walk away, she will just increase the volume and half of Merom will know our business. Or, by her version of it, will think I’m a complete asshole of a daughter, in a best case scenario.

“Mom …”

Her attention is diverted behind me. My hips pivot to turn but I stop. There’s no need to look. It’s Lance.

Mom’s eyes go wide, the mask she uses when she’s being watched falls effortlessly over her features. I’m distracted from her performance when his arm stretches around my waist and he pulls me to his side.

He’s warm and solid and if it wasn’t already weird, I would bury my nose in his chest and just breathe him in like a bouquet of flowers. One of my hands plants in the center of his chest to steady myself. His heartbeat pounds against my palm as roughly as mine clangs in my chest.

“I dropped my keys back there,” he says, peering down at me. The greens of his eyes are filled with some nameless emotion that I could watch swim in his irises all day. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. Who are you?” My mother shifts her weight, the front of her shirt dropping. It’s a patented move and many men have fallen for it. I glance up to see Lance’s reaction.

He’s looking at me. With a wink just for me, he turns to her. “I’m Lance. You must be Mrs. Malarkey.”

“Oh, no,” she says, swishing her hips. “I’m Taylor Stevens. Mariah’s mother, yes, but her father was hell on wheels. We haven’t been together for decades now and I took back my maiden name. Couldn’t stand to be associated with that monster another day.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Lance’s fingers dip into my hip, sending a proprietary impulse darting through my veins and pooling in my belly.

I almost don’t want to breathe this close to him. I almost don’t want to if that means pushing away and stepping back into reality. Not that I know what’s real anymore. This is surely an alternate reality if Lance Gibson has his arm around me like we’re lovers.

Mom studies Lance’s grip on my side. The end of her sunglasses finds its way to her mouth as she tries to discern why a man like him would be with a girl like me.

Panic bubbles in my gut, overriding the foreplay from Lance, and I push away. “I need to get going,” I say to him.

“Let me walk you to your car.”

Mom’s huff stops me. “Mariah, you are so rude.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I sigh. “I have a migraine coming on.”

“Always an excuse with you,” she says. “Haven’t we talked about this?”

Resigned to the fight, I steady myself. “It’s not an excuse.”

“You always have one and then you wonder why you have nothing good in your life. It’s because people don’t want to coddle you, honey.”

“Woah, wait a second,” Lance says, chuckling to cover the anger I can hear just below the surface in his voice. “Mariah has a headache. Let’s take it easy on her.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I whisper to him.

His response is to tuck me back under his arm. This time, I rest my head against him. My body sags. He squeezes me harder.

“You obviously haven’t been with her long,” Mom says, eyeing him.

“That’s true. But I know she has a lot of great things in her life. Me being one of them.”

The smolder he emits could burn down a house. It’s his special mix of cocky and confident that burrows its way into uninvited places. His rough knuckles graze the soft skin under my navel, gliding along my hip. The contact is incendiary, the friction—pure dynamite.

“Well, if that’s true, why don’t you accompany her next weekend to my birthday party?” Mom asks, trapping me.

“I’d love to.” Lance’s response is quick, too quick to allow me to intervene.

“I haven’t said I’m going yet,” I remind her and inform him. “I might have plans.”

“With whom if it’s not him?”

“I have other friends besides him.”

“You do?” he asks. He bends over as I jab him in the stomach with my elbow.

“Yes. I have more friends than just you. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I’m even your friend.” The words don’t come out without a laugh.

He pulls me in front of him, his hands locking behind me and dragging me against his body. Ignoring my mother, he grins. “I don’t need to be your friend as long as I get the benefits.”

“You mean cupcakes?” The question is breathier than I expect, huskier than I intend, but the spot in my brain that controls motor skills is host to an impressive display of fireworks going off in quick succession at the moment.

“You can call it whatever you want, sweetheart.”

I laugh, pushing him away. It’s potentially the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m the one who needs a cupcake for that bout of willpower.

“So you two will come?” Mom taps her lips with a manicured nail. “Your sister would love to see you.”

Glancing at Lance, I snort. “Oh, I bet she would.”

“Stop it, Mariah. You need to get over this. Act like the woman you are and not a child. I’m sick of your behavior.”

“Act like a woman?” I fire back.

“Yes! Chrissy is beside herself. You need to suck it up and just get over it.”

My chin tilts to the sky. It’s a perfect, cloudless blue, like my eyes, my dad used to say, and I attempt to focus on that and not punching my mother in the face.

“I tell you what,” Lance says. “If Mariah decides to come, we’ll be there. And if she doesn’t want to go, then we won’t.” He glances at me, his eyes searching mine. “But right now, we have to go. Have a good day, Ms. Stevens.”

Tears dampen the corner of my eyes as he takes my hand in his. Mom storms off toward Peaches while Lance walks with me to my car. I don’t try to slip my hand out of his grip because I’m not sure he’d let me.

The locks pop as I hit the button. My purse goes across the driver’s side seat and onto the other.

“I’m tempted to say this day can’t get any worse, but I feel like that would backfire,” I sigh.

“She’s a piece of work.”

“No kidding.”

When I turn around, he’s taking me in. Not in a way that makes me think he’s mentally undressing me, but with a gaze that’s more intimate than that. A series of goosebumps prickles my skin.

“Thank you,” I say.

“For what?”

“For coming to my defense.”

He lifts his shoulders and lets them fall. “It was really just a chance to get to touch you a lot. But if you think it was for you, then good.”

“Of course it was,” I giggle. As my laugh dies off, so does the easiness between us. The space that was filled with nonchalance is replaced by text apps and almost-kisses and fake dates exchanged between the two of us under various names and situations. “This is weird, isn’t it?”

“We’re the same two people we were last Friday.”

“That’s a bold-faced lie.”

“Fine.” He gives in. “I know you don’t like sucking cock with a rubber on and—”

“Lance,” I hiss.

“But I knew that on Friday too. I just didn’t know it was you.”

I climb into my car because I need space. When the engine starts, I crank the air conditioner, despite the reasonable temperature.

He grips the top of the door and dips his head inside. His hair has fallen to the side, and his cheeks are freshly shaven.

“You know,” I say, turning the fan down a bit, “if you kept your mouth shut, you could almost look sweet.”

“I am sweet.” A playful grin kisses his lips. The ones I almost kissed last night. “I’m settling into this role of the knight in shining armor quite nicely.”

“Is that what you are now?”

“Jonah. Your mom,” he razzes. “Who else will it be?”

Resting my head on the seat, I look up at him. A question lingers on my tongue. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yup.”

“Why were you meeting Nerdy Nurse today?”

His eyes dart first to the building, then the opposite way to the road. He swishes his lips together like he has a mouth full of mouthwash.

The answer doesn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of things. He’s still him and I’m still me. But I still want an answer.

He clears his throat before answering. “You know, I’m not sure.” The tables turn. “Can I ask you something?”

“I guess.”

“Why did you send me a message on the app last night?”

Fair enough question. One I didn’t expect to have to answer. I give the possible responses consideration, all reasonable and honest in one way or another, before settling on what seems to be the truest.

“I wanted a distraction,” I admit.

“From what?”

“You.”

He looks away, a lopsided grin splitting his cheeks.

“I have no business getting involved with you in any way, Lance. I got home last night and kept thinking about you and your grandmother and Whitney’s inopportune timing and …”

“And what?”

My stomach drops. “And what comes Monday?”

“Work? Cupcakes? Avoiding Principal Kelly?”

The swallow I force down my throat burns. Glancing around, I say a prayer my mother isn’t watching and getting enjoyment out of this. She would too because it hurts me.

“Monday is going to be a lot easier for me as a bystander than someone who’s dipped her toe in the pool,” I tell him. “Whitney interrupting us was a save.”

He runs a hand down his face, his long fingers stretching over his chin. “So the message last night was really to distract you from Monday. Not from me.”

“No, from you,” I say, wiping my palms on the sides of my seat. “I wanted History Hunk to remind me I’m desirable. That when Lance is in my office after having almost kissed me and is chatting up random girls, maybe I won’t feel so boring. Or dull. Or dispensable in comparison. Because History Hunk still wanted me.”

“You think that?”

“Think what?”

His voice lowers as he peers into my eyes. “You’re dull?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is not ending up feeling like I’m being rejected by you.”

The rumble from his throat rolls by his lips. “I’ve never rejected you. I’ve practically begged you.”

“To sleep with you. That’s not what I want, Lance.”

“Well, it is but …”

I don’t laugh at his joke. It’s not funny. Whether I want to sleep with him or not isn’t the point. The point is I can’t. I won’t.

“That’s exactly what you want and I’m not mad about it. Why would I be? I just don’t want to be one of your app girls.”

“But you’d be someone else’s? You’d be History Hunk’s and that’s okay with you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I grab the handle and he steps back. I pull the door closed. Rolling down the window while I shift the car in reverse, I look at his handsome face. “I don’t want things to be weird tomorrow.”

“Are they ever weird between us?” he asks softly. “Hell, we can even be other people and they aren’t weird. I bet we’d role play like a couple of motherfuckers.”

I try to smile. I try to hold onto the Lance I hear every day. I attempt to put myself back in that box and keep things separated but I can’t.

There’s a nod. A little wave. There’s even a fake smile as he watches me back out of my parking spot and head for the street.

There’s also a feeling in the pit of my stomach that the road ahead isn’t going to be easy.