Page 20 of Ten Years and Then…
Her anger must have been showing, because his frown—or whatever it was—disappeared, and he ran to her. Hugged her, and—against her better judgment—she let him. “I—I know I look silly. But I didn’t think you’d hate it.” She tried to keep her voice level, and almost succeeded.
“I don’t! I … it’s—I love that you wanted … I just—it just reminded me…” He pulled back from her, took her hands, squeezed them hard. She could hear him trying to calm his breathing. “Let me try again. I really do love that you got dressed up for me. And it’s great, you look—you look incredible.” Well, incredible—not credible—not to be believed, that was an accurate word for sure. “But seeing it all together, it made me think of someone. And please don’t ask me who.”
What the hell did that mean? “I thought we had—well, I thought we were working on something real. Where we actually talk to each other, and we don’t lie to each other. I really liked that, Daniel.”
It came out a little sharper than she meant, although she had meant it to be kind of sharp. He definitely heard it, and she could see the conflict behind his eyes. She had no idea what was the conflict was, though.
“It’s not a secret or anything. It’s just—I don’t want to say it out loud. You’d probably laugh about it but I just—I can’t say it.”
Nora wasn’t angry anymore; she was totally confused. She had no idea what Daniel was talking about; she couldn’t even think of a question to ask to try and make sense of his words. “Hey. It’s okay. I know it’s only been two weeks. Well, more like six if you count all the times we kept missing each other. But we’ve both told each other some really personal things. Really hard things. You can tell me anything. I hope you know that.”
“I know. But I just told you. It’s not you I don’t want to tell.”
He’d said that twice now, and it was just as incomprehensible the second time. “I don’t understand.” He didn’t answer for a moment. She let him hold her hands, gave his a squeeze, kept looking into his pretty eyes, and finally, he let go of what he was holding in.
“Because If I say out loud that looking at you right now reminds me of my sister and her jackass of a boyfriend, I’ll always have that picture of her in my head when I’m with you.” He looked away from her, glancing back towards his bed for a moment, then he turned to her again. “How can I ever be with you the way I want to be—the way you deserve—if I’m thinking about that?”
Daniel, one moment later
He was being irrational. Ridiculous. Crazy. Pick any word out of the thesaurus—not that he owned one, but Nora probably did—and it would fit.
The problem was, just because something was irrational didn’t mean you could just switch it off like a computer and it would be gone when you rebooted yourself.
Besides, now that he’d said it, he needed to tell the story, so Nora would understand. And, despite his ridiculousness, she wanted to hear it. She was sitting on his bed, gesturing for him to join her.
“It can’t be that bad,” she said.
And it wasn’t, except in his mind. “I know. I just need to get my head straight. You’ll understand when you hear the story. So this was two years ago, a couple of weeks before Christmas. Lisa—my sister, obviously—she wanted to do something really big for her boyfriend. He was home from college, and his birthday was right around then, and she got the idea…”
He’d always assumed it was her idea, but now that he thought about it, he wondered if someone else had put the idea in her head.
“Daniel?”
“Sorry, I was just thinking about it. So Lisa—if you think I get lost in my own head, I’ve got nothing on her. I don’t think it was her idea. I think somebody put her up to it.”
“To what?” Her arm was around him. Whatever anger she’d been feeling towards him was definitely gone now. “She decided to surprise him. Like I said, she wanted to go really big, and make a show of it. You know how in the movies, you see somebody jump out of one of those huge birthday cakes?”
She snorted. “No way!” Daniel couldn’t laugh with her. Even two years later, it hurt thinking about how Lisa had felt.
“Yes way,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know where she found a giant cake—I have no idea what you’d even look for in the Yellow Pages for that. But she found it. And she dressed up for him—I can’t even describe it. Like a Victoria’s Secret kind of thing. All red and lacy and—you can imagine.” She nodded. “God forgive me for saying this, and if you ever meet her you cannot breathe a word, but she—she’s not built right for that, if you know what I mean.” She pulled herself a little closer to him. He wondered if she’d focused on the part about meeting Lisa. Was she picturing some big meet-the-family moment? Did she think he was?
“I get it. I feel bad for her already.” She leaned over, kissed him, much too quickly. “And I’d love to meet her someday—but I promise I won’t say a word about how much you obviously care about her.”
Nora, a few seconds later
Everything about Daniel’s weird reaction to her outfit made sense now. She shouldn’t have jumped to the wrong conclusion the way she had. Yes, they were still getting to know each other, but nothing he’d done or said from the first moment they’d properly met justified her making a negative assumption. He’d more than earned a hell of a lot of benefit of the doubt.
“So—everything I’m telling you I heard afterwards. I was friends—well, sort of friends, you know what I mean—with Jack’s little brother.”
“Jack was the boyfriend?”
Real anger flashed in Daniel’s eyes; this was the first time she’d seen that. “Ex-boyfriend, thank God. Anyway, his brother told me all about it the next day, and he showed me a Polaroid of Lisa coming out of the cake. Her outfit, well, I already said. But she’d been sitting inside the cake for an hour, and I guess it got really warm inside, so her makeup was totally ruined, I mean, in the picture it looked like bad clown makeup. And her outfit, it kind of—she was crouched down inside the cake, and it—it moved around on her. Please don’t ask me to describe it.”
Nora didn’t need to. She had a vivid mental picture and it needed no further details. “That’s horrible. The poor girl.”
“Yeah. So she jumped out, in front of Jack and all his friends and his little brother and God knows who else, and they all laughed at her.” He looked like he was in physical pain just talking about it two years after the fact, and it hadn’t even happened to him. All she could think to do was hug him. It took a couple of minutes for him to gather the strength to finish the story.
“She came home, and Dad asked her—I don’t even know what he said. She shook her head, and she said—I won’t ever forget this—‘Eff off, Dad. You and every other crappy man in the whole world!’ Except she didn’t say eff.”
