Page 14 of The Cadence
That was lucky, because my own car would not have made it all the way to almost the tippy-top of Michigan, which was where we were heading today. It had barely made it to the scrap yard, and I’d gotten some money for it but nowhere near enough to buy anything new.
“Do you know how to swim?” Will asked me.
“No. Do you go in the lakes there? Is it safe?”
“You have to be careful in any body of water, and the Great Lakes can have strong currents. You can learn to swim,” he said, but I wasn’t sure about that. I had been, after all, the girl who had nearly failed PE. “I get in the water as much as I can.”
“I might like to lay out on a beach. I never really did.”
“You’ve never been to a beach?” he asked. He sounded doubtful, like maybe he thought that I was pranking him.
“Will, before I went to live with my grandmother, I’d never seen a building taller than a couple of stories. I never went to the beach, in an elevator, or up in an airplane—oh!” This airplane banked and jerked, and a woman screamed. The captain made another announcement about climbing to look for smoother air, and I hoped he would find some.
“Look. This is my kitchen,” Will said, drawing my attention back to his pictures.
“You could make anything in there!” I marveled. “It’s huge! Wait, is that the refrigerator? The whole wall?” It was glass so you could see in, like at a grocery store but a lot more elegant.
“I mostly use a meal delivery service instead of cooking,” he said. “I don’t have much in those cupboards.”
“I wish I had brought my grandma’s stuff, then,” I said wistfully. “Not that I’ll be using your kitchen. We probably won’t see each other too much outside of work. Speaking of, do you want to give me a better idea about what I’ll be doing?”
He’d already told me a few things: I’d check emails and regular mail, and do some filing. He’d also said that he didn’t have a separate office building but instead used one of the rooms in his house to run his business. From the pictures I’d seen of it, there seemed to be plenty of—
“Oh!” I’d said that very loud in the confines of this airplane. But a lot of people had screamed because that last jolt had been hard and I’d heard something fall with a clang in the area where the flight attendants sat. “Is that normal, too?”
“I expected some turbulence,” he admitted. Before we’d taken off, the captain had also warned us about “bumps” but I hadn’t really understood. “There’s a system of thunderstorms moving across our flight path.”
“Oh. Ok.” So far I wasn’t really enjoying my inaugural trip on a plane, despite being in first class and being with Will. I knew that everything was normal and there was nothing to be concerned about because he kept saying so, but I couldn’t help being scared.
Then the plane dropped like we were falling from the sky, and everyone screamed again. I reached over and grabbed his arm just like Miss Mozella did to me.
“Sorry,” I told him, and took my hand away.
“It’s ok. You can do that.”
He sounded uncomfortable, though, as you would be if a stranger latched onto you. We really didn’t know each other, which was the point that the ladies from church had made. Frequently.
“He’s a stranger,” Miss Theresa had stated. “You only knew him briefly in high school, and you’re so young that we have to look at this in a relative way. It’s like how dogs age in comparison to humans, that the years don’t mean the same thing.”
“I’m not a dog!”
She went right on. “High school would be a century ago in the span of your short lifetime.”
I understood that her sarcasm masked worry. “Will Bodine is a public figure,” I reassured her. “He can’t do anything too bad, or people would find out and get upset.”
She’d stared at me then rolled her eyes. “This is what I was afraid of,” she’d remarked to her friends. “She’s so naïve! When I think of all the Bodine scandals…”
I wasn’t naïve at all, but she was right that there had been more than a few negative incidents in his family’s history. His father’s drunk-driving accident was just one in a string of problems—but Will wasn’t like that.
She was right about something else, too. He and I had been out of touch for a long time. And seven years before (or a hundred, as some claimed), he had been my tutor. Not my boyfriend, of course, but not even a friend. He’d had a group of other large-sized and revered athletes that he hung out with, as well as a beautiful and much-admired girlfriend, Carlee.
But there were a few hours left on this flight and then we had another one after it, too. There was no time like the present to get to know each other better. We had already talked a bit about his football schedule, which was packed with training, meetings, practices, games, travel, and sessions with various healing-type people to get him back into shape to do those things all over again. He’d shown me these pictures of his house, which I liked a lot despite the emptiness of the rooms. But I wanted to know more.
“Tell me about—ok, I’m sure that was normal,” I said, as we bounced in the sky. “Tell me about your friends on the team.”
“I would say that I’m friendly with most of the guys.”
“Who’s your best friend?”
