Page 13 of It Started with a Sunset
He was probably visibly gaping at her when a man who was about fifty got out of his car right in front of the shop and walked through the front doors. Summer pointed at him. “I don’t know that guy.”
Brock glanced back out at the man’s car and noticed the out-of-state license plates. “Probably because he’s from Nebraska.”
“Oh. That’s why. Should we go say hi and introduce ourselves?”
He was pretty sure she was just kidding.
Well, mostly sure.
They got some light rope to tie the pool noodles together to make arches and obstacles and then headed over to a shelf with boxes of garden stakes that they planned to use to help stand up the pool noodles as needed.
As they were counting out the sticks, Summer glanced up at him for a moment, then tried to say in a casual way, but didn’t quite succeed, “So, have you decided what you’re doing for your presentation?”
A smile tugged at his lips. “I have. But I’m not going to share my secrets.” All the prospective students and their parents would get the information on the scholarships that the school offered based on their grade point average and their ACT or SAT scores in the packets they gave out at the beginning.
What he really wanted to talk about, though, was the page on the Lake Baldwin State website that he’d helped develop that made it easy to apply for all of the private scholarships in one place. He was hoping he’d find a kid in his presentation who had already applied, been accepted, and knew his login information. Then he’d have them apply for scholarships right in the session, showing it on the big screen, so they could all see how easy it was.
“Oh, I see. Okay, mister, keep your secrets.” She held out her hand. “Competition on.”
He shook her hand. “May the best presentation win.”
She gave him a smile that told him he might have unleashed a pretty tough competitor with that comment. A part of him really couldn’t wait to see how it turned out.
They headed over to the hula hoops that they were going to tie from the trees in the area of the quad where they’d be doing the obstacle course, and Summer tossed one to him. And then she somehow convinced him to have a hula-hooping contest right there in the store. And he somehow didn’t hate it. In fact, he was actually kind of having more fun shopping than he possibly ever had.
As they got everything in the cart and headed to the checkout stand, Summer saw some 16-foot jump ropes on a shelf and picked one up. “We should get these! We can tie them between two of the gallon jugs, and they can be an obstacle they have to step over. Or tie them between garden stakes at different heights so it’s more of a challenge. They have eight of them, which is perfect.”
“We didn’t plan for them in the budget.”
“Everything’s on clearance, so we don’t have to worry about that.”
“No, that’ll just give us a buffer for the other expenses.”
“We have plenty of money for it.”
“I’ll tell you what—if we get everything for the event paid for and are still under budget, we’ll get the jump ropes.”
She narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t say a word. She just put the jump rope back on the shelf and pushed the cart to the check stand. The clerk started ringing everything up, and Summer said, “And we’d like all the pool noodles you’ve got. Oh, and can we borrow the cart for a few minutes to get them all out to our car?” She glanced back at the bin of pool noodles. “Or maybe two carts.”
A few minutes later, they were back out on the sidewalk, each pushing a cart filled with hula hoops and garden stakes and rope and pool noodles of every color squished in tight, rising more than six feet high, and they were both trying to peek around the sides of the carts since they were completely blocking their view.
Summer stopped her cart with a gasp, and Brock looked over, alarmed. But nothing seemed wrong—she was just staring at a dress in a shop window that they had somehow not noticed on their way to Taheny’s. “Isn’t that the most beautiful ball gown ever?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.” It was a rather happy shade of yellow, and poofed out really big in the skirt part, like a princess dress in a movie. It had shiny beads sewn in it, too. It was every bit as sunshiny as Summer was, and he was already imagining her in it.
“I so want it.”
“But it’s impractical. Where would you ever wear something like that? Come on, our thirty minutes for the parking space are about up. Let’s get this stuff loaded into your car.”
Summer threw him a look before turning back to the dress. “That thirty-minute time limit is much more flexible than you are. We aren’t going to get a ticket.”
“No, of course we aren’t.” Nowhere in Lake Baldwin City were there meter checkers—it was only a problem if a shop owner reported that a car had been there forever. “It’s more of an unspoken contract, and by parking there, you’re agreeing not to break that contract.”
“I want to try it on.”
The timer on his phone went off just then. Their thirty minutes were definitely up.“No, we’ve got to go.” He knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that they were the wrong ones. It wasn’t the first time in the past week that the two of them had clashed over him being a rule-follower and her being a rule-breaker. As soon as he said it, she turned her shopping cart and pushed it through the doorway into Best Dressed, the tall pool noodles brushing the top of the doorway as she did.
So, he sighed and pushed his cart full of pool noodles and other supplies into the dress shop, too.
