“No!”
“That if I get you in my room, I’ll lose complete control in your presence and—”
“All right!” He’s making me feel stupid. And a tiny bit hurt even if I don’t want him to like me in that way. “I think we’ve already established that you’re not my type and I’m not yours.”
“Did we?” His eyes lazily move up and down all five eight of me. An unwanted flush covers my skin everywhere his gaze touches. When our eyes lock, there’s something different…uncertain…in the way he’s studying me. “You smell good.”
I swallow. “You shouldn’t be smelling me.”
“No,” he says. “I shouldn’t be.” Then he smiles and whatever was there is gone, like a sound you’re not really sure you heard. “I’ll see you after school.”
Chapter Twenty
Garrett lives in the custom neighborhood where the houses are a little bigger and a lot older. They sit back from the street with big yards and trees that have had time to grow thick and tall. They feel settled. Permanent.
Garrett’s walkway is lined with potted flowers and fairy lights. There’s even a couch outside the front door. I make a mental note, not that we have room for a couch, but maybe a bench. An old one that’s weathered.
My love of vintage isn’t just T-shirts. We left almost everything when we moved from Florida and found most of our furniture at consignment stores. Filling our house with older things gave us a history, even if it wasn’t our own.
“Come on in,” Garrett says when he unlocks the front door. “My mom’s at work, so it’s just us.”
“Your sisters?”
“Both at ASU—they live near campus in an apartment.”
A moving shadow catches my eye. “Someone is home.”
A small gray cat saunters around the corner of the foyer, meowing loudly.
“There’s my girl.” He squats by her. She looks at me suspiciously. “This is Wild.”
“You named your cat Wild?” I squat beside him.
“Officially she’s Wildcat, named for the University of Arizona’s mascot because that was where I wanted to play college ball.”
“Oh.” I glance at him, but he’s focused on Wild. Does that mean he’s given up on the idea of playing?
The cat sniffs my fingers and then nudges my hand with her nose.
“Demanding,” I say, complying with a rub around her pointy ears. “My mom and I might get a cat this summer.”
“Before you go to college?”
“I’m taking online courses from ASU, so I’m going to live at home. And before you ask, yes, it’s my idea.” Wild purrs and gives me greater access to her neck. “What about you? Know where you’re going yet?”
“Not sure.” His mouth thins with frustration. He scoops Wild into his arms, standing as he rubs her belly. I stand, too. “I told you my dad wants me to come to Dallas. In May, it’ll be a year since the injury. He thinks it’s time I give up my boyish dreams and get a job.” He says the last word like it’s a disease. “He’s been pushing that since I was sixteen.”
“A job?”
“I never had time for one.” His eyes meet mine. “You know how it is. If you want to compete in baseball, you got to play summer club and pitch on travel teams. He doesn’t get that. He’s insisting I spend the summer in Dallas working in his office as an intern. In August, I’m supposed to enroll in college there and get my accounting degree.”
Wild meows in complaint as if he’s squeezed her too tight. “Sorry, girl,” he murmurs, setting her down softly.
“What does your mom think?”
“She’s backing him up.”
“Even about college? Why can’t you stay in Phoenix for that?”
His eyes shift away. “He thinks I need more structure than I’m getting here.”
My mind flashes to the math test I saw in his backpack. Just how bad are his grades? Instead I ask, “So what are you going to do?”
He starts toward the kitchen. “Still working on that. You need anything to drink?”
“I’m good.”
We pass through the kitchen and family room, and into a hallway full of photos. I slow to look—most are family pictures of him, his mom and two sisters. “Your mom never remarried?”
“Not yet. She’s dated the same guy for years. He has a daughter who’s a freshman in high school so they’re waiting until she graduates.”
“What about your dad?”
“He got married a year after the divorce. Heather is his wife. She’s okay. I have a half brother, Chase, who’s eleven now. I don’t see him very much.”
I slant him a look. “Is that weird?”
He straightens one of the frames. “It is what it is.”
I take a few more steps and come to a strip of handwriting on the wall with black slashes and dates. “What’s this?”
“My mom used to measure us every year, growing up. She marked our heights and ages along with the date.” He points to a fading black marker and I follow the lines down, sinking into a crouch. The penmanship at the very bottom is different. I glance up and Garrett must read the question in my eyes.
“My dad started it.”
“You were two?”
He nods. “Felice was six. She wanted to know how tall she was before a trip to Disneyland. That gave him the idea and my mom kept it up over the years.”
The very next line was written by his mom. His next words confirm what I’m thinking. “My dad quit on us when I was three.”
Maybe there are no charmed lives—not even the ones that look like they are. I trace a finger up the line of Garrett’s history, standing as I do. “But this is cool. One day I want a wall like this.”
“You moved around a lot?”
“Never stayed in a place more than two years.”
“Must have been hard.”
“It is what it is,” I say, using his earlier words.
A smile flickers over his lips. “What was it really like?”
I lean against the wall, letting myself remember. “It was hard starting new schools, hard to make friends.
