Page 9 of Lucy Loves Him Not
Had he matched with anyone else on Love Local?A random thought popped into my mind.Good luck to whoever else he matched with.
“What’re you thinking about?” Olivia asked, reaching her feet across the end of the couch to nudge mine.
“Oh, nothing,” I whispered. But I was thinking about Annoying Adam way more than I wanted to be.
“Let’s go get ice cream or something to get your mind off the festival,” Gracie suggested.
“I don’t think Sprinkles is open this late,” I said, referring to our usual go to, a local ice cream shop downtown. “Let’s go grab a few pints from Sweet River Market then.” Gracie stood up, decision already made. “I’ll take ice cream however I can get it.”
Sweet River Market was a grocery store tucked into one of the downtown buildings. It was on the street corner, right between the shoe store and the diner. While it was small, it still offered a little bit of everything from produce to laundry detergent.
When we walked in shiny paper suns and flip-flops dangled from the ceiling along with multicolored streamers to celebrate the summer season.
“This way,” Olivia said, pointing toward the back of the store. Gracie and I followed her. We came for the large ice chest in the back full of ice cream cartons and frozen bars.
“Yum.” Gracie stopped in front of a shelf stocked with different bags of chips. “Do we need a little spice to go with the sugar?”
I stopped to consider, eyeing a bag of Cheetos when I saw a familiar face entering the chip aisle.Adam.
He was humming to himself as he grabbed a bag of Lays, the same button-down on from earlier only more worn in now, which wasn’t an unappealing look.
I froze in place. Gracie gave me a funny look, opening her mouth to speak, and my flight instinct kicked in. I put one hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, then grabbed her arm with the other.
Shhh, I mouthed, crouching down as I pulled her along with me as I ran us into the next aisle.
“What is happening right now?” Gracie grumbled when I dropped my hand. We were hunched down beside the canned goods.
Olivia wandered over oblivious to the fact we were hiding until her eyes landed on us. “What is going on?” She raised an eyebrow.
I grabbed her hand and pulled her down to join our crouched huddle. “He’s over there,” I whispered and pointed behind me to the other aisle.
“He?” Olivia asked. Her eyes widened as she registered whohewas. She tiptoed to the end of our aisle and leaned over toward the neighboring aisle to catch a view of him. “He’s not there anymore,” she said, way too loudly for my liking.
“Shhh!” I whispered-shouted, slowly moving out of my crouched hiding position. “I don’t want to face him right now. He cannot know I’m here.” After the awful humiliation of our last encounter, I needed at least 24 hours to recover before I could see him again. Maybe even 48 hours.
An older woman entered the aisle with us, furrowing her brows when she spotted us sneaking glances across the store. “Boy trouble,” Gracie offered by way of explanation to the fellow shopper. She nodded in camaraderie.
Olivia stepped out into the rest of the store, sneakily peering into other aisles. “Oh, I think that’s him over by the cereals!” She and Gracie headed that way.
“Guys, no, no! Let’s go the opposite direction,” I pleaded. “Let’savoid.”
“We have to see what he looks like in person,” Gracie whispered back to me as my sisters weaved through the store, their feet shuffling against the linoleum floor.
“He won’t even know we’re there,” Olivia assured me. I wanted to hang back and hide, but I also didn’t trust my sisters left to their own devices.
We got closer to where he stood and found a good view of him reading the back of a Cheerios box. The three of us knelt in hiding behind a display of summer fruit.
“So, he’s a Cheerios eater,” Gracie mused critically.
He set the box back on the shelf. “So, he thinks he’s too good for Cheerios.” Olivia shook her head. The smell of melons and stone fruit filled my senses.
He suddenly turned in our direction, glancing behind him as if he could feel us watching him. Olivia squealed and we jerked back behind the fruit stand, knocking over a few peaches and trying to muffle giggles in the process. I hid my head directly behind a watermelon. Adam looked around for a moment, his expression puzzled as he went back to deciding on a cereal.
Gracie slid her phone out of her purse and held it out in the aisle so she could get a shot of Adam.
“Gracie!” I whisper-squealed, reaching out and grabbing her phone from her hands. “Absolutely not!”
“But Mom will want to see what he looks like,” she whined.
