Page 8 of Lies and Lullabies
When I handed the bag with his food over the counter, he reached right in and plucked the whoopie pie off the top. “Mmm,” he said after taking a big bite. “Sweetness.”
“It’s nottoosweet, though,” I argued. “Most of them are, but mine have dark cocoa and cream cheese in the frosting. For tang.”
He licked his lips. “It’s perfect.You’rethe sweetness.” He winked at me as he walked out.
And that naughty wink did funny things to my insides.
After that, he called me “sweetness” from time to time. The man was a charmer. I looked forward to his visits so much that I soon found a way to prolong them. A trip to our dusty attic at home produced an old card table and two chairs. I set these up on the screened porch at the front of the store.
I was too shy to let on that I’d put the table there just for him, but he figured it out right away. From then on, he ate his meals sitting on the porch, instead of carrying his food back to his room at Mrs. Wetzle’s. After I locked up the store at eight, he would often be sitting there, staring out into the darkness and listening to the crickets.
“Can I ask you a favor?” I said the third time I found him relaxing on the porch an hour after he’d eaten his dinner.
“Shoot.”
“If you’re walking back to the B&B, can we walk together?” I’d been nervous to ask, so all my words tumbled out in a rush. “There hasn’t been a… mugging here for years. But I’m creeped out anyway. And I asked the guy at Kreemy Kone to walk me home a couple of times, but he thinks I’m hitting on him.”
John laughed. “The teenager who wears that Metallica T-shirt with the arms cut off? He ought to know better than to think you’re hitting on him.”
“You’d think.” I smiled at him to cover my own embarrassment.
“Happy to help,” he said, rising to go.
And that’s how our friendship began. Never mind that he was devilishly handsome, with wind-tossed hair and a sinful mouth. Even though he let his beard grow out all summer, that brilliant level of attractiveness could not easily be dimmed.
I’d begun to worship him even before June turned into July. But we remained strictly friendly, even as our chats grew longer, night by night. Instead of walking home after the store closed, I began sitting with him at the table. Sometimes he bought a six-pack of beer and we’d drink it on the porch after I locked up. We spent hours just shooting the breeze and talking about our lives.
Of course, John/Jonas left out some very crucial details. In the beginning, I left out a few doozies, too.
Even so, we never lacked for conversation. I told him that I was majoring in hospitality. “Although I hate that word,” I said with a giggle. A giggle! Like a school girl. But it was hard to keep my head when he was nearby. “I want to open a restaurant someday.”
“If you’re opening a restaurant, I’m eating there,” he promised.
He told me he was a composer in Seattle. That explained the strains of the guitar that I often heard drifting into my window in the morning. Or late into the night. He had the most beautiful hands, with long, supple fingers. I was dying to watch him play the guitar, but he never volunteered, and I was too chicken to ask.
Even if I’d managed to gather enough courage to ask for a private concert, I still wouldn’t have figured out the man playing the guitar had already been nicknamed “the golden kid,” byRolling Stone. Or that his first album had been compared to early work by U2.
He was just a guy named John, who I was crushing on.
One evening, he bought a Maine souvenir pack of playing cards. That’s when we started playing rummy and canasta on the rickety little porch table. The card games somehow made my secrets flow faster. I told him that my on-again off-again high school boyfriend would soon be back from a two-year deployment in Afghanistan, and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back together. But I was considering it.
And John confessed that he’d just been dumped by his girlfriend.
“She… left you?” I asked, disbelieving. Even then, when I had no idea that the man sitting in front of me was a rock star, it was impossible for me to imagine a woman rejecting him. Not only was he outrageously sexy, but there was a light in his eyes that I knew was special. He was smart, as well as warm and funny. How could any girl turn that away?
“Well, I was a rat bastard,” he admitted, his voice low.
“Maybe you just slipped up once?” I asked, embarrassed for him.
“Nope. Honestly, I’ve been going through a dark time. I would have dumped me, too. I don’t even know if she ever loved me.”
I was dumbfounded. “Then why are you…?”
“Thinking about her?” He smiled ruefully. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to be the jerk she’s accused me of being. Maybe I want to call her when I get back, just to let her know that I’m not the thoughtless whore she thinks I am.”
“Maybe she’ll take you back,” I said. And he just shrugged, like it didn’t matter.
But after that, I was careful to keep the discussion away from girlfriends or sex. Because I didn’t want him to read my raging crush right off my face.
