Page 26 of Win Some Love Some
You want to kiss him.
The truth telling lobster from my dream had stuck around. The asshole.
“You have a hundred dollars?” Nick asked.
I didn’t. But I felt confident about my chances. Mind over matter and all that. I nodded.
“You hear that, Roy? She wants to work and she wants to prove me wrong. Sounds like a winning combination. Don’t mind if I tag along.”
Tag along? No way. He was not needed. Or wanted.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Why are you here?”
“He’s got to look at the boat engine. It’s making a sound,” Roy said.
“You could have just met us at the boat,” I told Nick.
“Well, what you don’t know, because you’ve been gone for so many years, is sometimes I like to come out here and have coffee with your dad in the morning. We talk about shit.”
I looked at my dad. “You talk?”
“Mostly I talk and he grunts but his grunts can be very helpful,” Nick said.
“I’m standing right here,” Dad grunted. He grabbed his keys and the lunch bag Mom packed for him every night before she went to bed. “Nora, we’ll try you out for one day and see how you do.”
And that was that. I felt good about my chances of lasting an hour, winning a hundred bucks and putting in a full day’s work. I’d done harder things.
Outside it was still dark and the fall air felt like winter. Crisp and cold. All of our breath came out in steam. I walked to the passenger side of Dad’s truck, while Nick walked down to his old Bronco parked on the street.
“Nora, ride with Nick,” Dad said over the hood of his truck. “I’ve got too much of Will’s hockey shit in the passenger seat. Don’t feel like moving it.”
“Uh…” I did not want to do this. Sit in Nick’s old car? The car I sat in every time we went surfing? Every time we went to Pappas? Every time we went down to Portland to watch a movie? The passenger seat where we fought over the radio station and the volume and the air conditioning. The passenger seat where I sank deeper and deeper in love with him.
“You’re better off with me,” Nick said, watching me like he knew what I was thinking. Like he could feel my hesitation and he wanted it to go away. “Your dad’s truck is a piece of shit.”
“Blasphemy,” Dad muttered before getting in his truck. He started it and took off toward the docks without a backwards look. Leaving me without a choice. It was Nick’s truck or walk.
We stared at each other across the frost tipped lawn. He opened the passenger side door and stood there. Waiting. I felt like if I got in that truck I was agreeing to “get over it.”
“Nora,” he said, his eyes soft. That crooked, non-committal half smile on his mouth. “It’s just a ride.”
It wasn’t, but he wouldn’t understand.
It was…pretending. I could pretendthatnight never happened. I could do that. I could pretend he never broke my heart and that I’d never been humiliated and we’d never, ever discuss it.
I could pretend that being near him didn’t hurt.
At least I thought I could.
I got into the truck and he shut the door behind me, then ran around the front of the truck to get in the driver’s side. Once he was in, the bench seat was immediately too small. He’d gotten bigger in the last six years. Broader. More substantial, it felt like.
He smelled differently too. Like he’d switched soaps. This one was cedar based and reminded me vaguely of Dior Savage.I’d done a video about it when I first got to Paris, standing in the cologne section at Halles trying to figure out why the French men smelled so good.
Did he see the video? No, that would be ridiculous.
Nick didn’t have social media accounts.
