“Come on, Lucy!” Frankie hollered at her. “You can do it.”
“Lu-cy! Lu-cy!” the people around them chanted as they clapped and cheered her on.
Holding her arms out as if that could stop the ground from weaving this way and that, she stumbled and bumbled her way toward the blurry redheaded giant urging her forward. Thank God he was a big target, because otherwise she wasn’t sure she would’ve made it. But she did.
She nearly knocked Frankie off his feet with the force of her clumsy impact, but she made it. Best of all, she beat Bryce, who had stopped three feet in front of Constance and was upchucking all the pie he’d gobbled in an attempt to win that contest.
By the time the next to last contest of decathlon, a game of cornhole, ended, she and Frankie were tied with Constance and Bryce in points. It was all going to come down to the big finale to be held during the dance tonight.
“So, are you ready to go home and get psyched up to win?” Frankie asked as they made their way to his car.
She thought about it. When the invitation to her reunion had arrived in the mail, the only goal she had was to show all of the people who had given her a hard time in high school that they didn’t matter to her anymore. Of course just by thinking that, she was pretty much confirming, to herself at least, that they did.
But the past few days of participating in the decathlon had shown her something.
She’d gotten to talk—actually talk—with a lot of the people she’d graduated with. They weren’t the same people now that they’d been then, any more than she was. Everyone had changed and grown. She wasn’t unique in that aspect. And with that realization, something a lot like contentment settled into that spot and shoved out a lot of the old bitterness.
“You know, it doesn’t really matter,” she said, stopping at his car while he unlocked and opened the door for her. “I thought it would, but what matters is my life back home in Waterbury, not showing up people I went to high school with for the sake of my ego.”
“I hope I can still help you have fun tonight,” he said, a sexy rumble in his tone.
She got into the passenger seat. “Does that mean you’re going to sing karaoke for the final event instead of me?”
“Hell no,” he said with a grin. “But I’ll help you have plenty of fun later.”
Now that, she didn’t doubt for a minute.
…
Frankie hadn’t gone to a prom after his freshman year—not because he didn’t have plenty of date options, but because the nuns of St. Mary’s had banned him from the big dance his senior year after an unfortunate experiment in what would happen if someone in a snorkel mask got sprayed down with a fire extinguisher in the middle of the cafeteria. He and Finian might have gotten away with it, too, if they hadn’t picked their younger and way-too-rule-following brother Ford to test out their hypothesis—without Ford knowing.
Now Frankie was standing in the Kavanaghs’ living room in a suit and holding a corsage made from a trio of bright red ranunculus flowers. He’d never heard of them before, but earlier when he stopped in at Wolfsbane Antiques and Collectibles to ask Henrietta where he could get a corsage for Lucy, the grumpy old biddy had snarled when he said he wanted to get a rose corsage.
“That woman, she deserves something a little more special than the default flower for people who’ve never had an original thought in their head, don’t you think?”
As much as he hated to admit it, Henrietta had been right.
She’d sighed and had shaken her head. “Men are so easily stumped. And that is why I never said yes to Henry, no matter how many times he asked. Well, that and the fact that our names were practically identical. Could you imagine?” She’d pulled out an iPad with the largest screen possible. “Let’s check the Google, shall we?”
Like the idiot he’d been feeling right about then, he’d nodded and kept his mouth closed.
“So how would you describe our girl Lucy?”
He hadn’t even had to think about it. “Pretty. Funny. Smart. Amazing.”
The older woman had typed away on her screen, her fingers moving faster than he’d expected from a woman Henrietta’s age. Then she must have hit on something, because her fingers had stopped moving and she’d dragged her finger down the screen. When he’d tried to peek, she’d shot him an annoyed glare.
“Don’t suppose I can add sexy-as-all-get-out to that list?” she’d asked.
He’d laughed. Not because what she’d said was funny—it was really fucking true—but because hearing it from someone who had probably spent the last million decades surrounded by antiques hit him right on the funny bone.