“Was I right? Why are you here?” Dare asks.
“Is that your first question? Because turn-about is fair play.”
Dare smiles broadly, genuinely amused.
“Sure. I’ll use a question.”
“I brought my brother. He’s here for… group therapy.”
I suddenly feel weird saying that aloud, because it makes my brother sound less than somehow. And he’s not. He’s more than. Better than most people, more gentle, more pure of heart. But a stranger wouldn’t know that. A stranger would just slap him with a crazy label and let it be. I fight the urge to explain, and somehow manage not to. It’s not a stranger’s business.
Dare doesn’t question me, though. He just nods like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
He takes a drink of his coffee. “I think it’s probably kismet, anyway. That you and I are here at the same time, I mean.”
“Kismet?” I raise an eyebrow.
“That’s fate, Calla,” he tells me. I roll my eyes.
“I know that. I may be going to a state school, but I’m not stupid.”
He grins, a grin so white and charming that my panties almost fall off.
“Good to know. So you’re a college girl, Calla?”
I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about why you think this is kismet. But I nod.
“Yeah. I’m leaving for Berkeley in the fall.”
“Good choice,” he takes another sip. “But maybe kismet got it wrong, after all. If you’re leaving and all. Because apparently, I’ll be staying for a while. That is, after I find an apartment. A good one is hard to find around here.”
He’s so confident, so open. It doesn’t even feel odd that a total stranger is telling me these things, out of the blue, so randomly. I feel like I know him already, actually.
I stare at him. “An apartment?”
He stares back. “Yeah. The thing you rent, it has a shower and a bedroom, usually?”
I flush. “I know that. It’s just that this might be kismet after all. I might know of something. I mean, my father is going to rent out our carriage house. I think.”
And if I can’t have it, it should definitely go to someone like Dare. The mere thought gives me a heart spasm.
“Hmm. Now that is interesting,” Dare tells me. “Kismet prevails, it seems. And a carriage house next to a funeral home, at that. It must take balls of steel to live there.”
I quickly pull out a little piece of paper and scribble my dad’s cell phone on it. “Yeah. If you’re interested, I mean, if you’ve got the balls, you can call and talk to him about it.”
I push the paper across the table, staring him in the eye, framing it up as a challenge. Dare can’t possibly know how I’m trying to will my heart to slow down before it explodes, but maybe he does, because a smile stretches slowly and knowingly across his lips.
“Oh, I’ve got balls,” he confirms, his eyes gleaming again.
Dare me.
I swallow hard.
“I’m ready to ask my second question,” I tell him. He raises an eyebrow.
“Already? Is it about my balls?”
I flush and shake my head.