I didn’t know what to do with this heady combination of attraction and lust. I sure as hell couldn’t let it continue. Maybe I would spend an extra hour on circuit training tonight, see if I could sweat out the impure thoughts.
5
Laura
I went straight to the diner and made a beeline for a booth in Rachel’s section. I didn’t even pause to say hi to the people I knew—Trixie from the flower shop sitting with the librarian whose name I didn’t remember, and Drew and one of his employees from the auto body place. I just waved to them, in too much of a hurry to do more than nod in acknowledgement.
Rachel hurried to my table and poured me a cup of coffee, “So?” she demanded. I nodded, grinning broadly.
“I got the job,” I whispered.
“It doesn’t do you any good to whisper around here, girl. This is Rockford Falls. Everybody in here probably already knows you got hired—the grapevine here is short and effective in case you forgot. Let me get you some pie and I’ll take my break.”
I smiled as I watched her head to the kitchen. Rachel and I had been friends since we were little, and I loved being back in town where I could see her more. FaceTime just wasn’t the same. She’d worked in the diner forever, just biding her time and saving up to buy it when the owner finally retired. You can’t fake that kind of loyalty. She was the best.
She slid in across from me and passed me a fork, bringing a slice of warm apple pie with a scoop of vanilla sliding across it into cinnamon-y melting puddles onto the plate between us. I took a bite and made an appreciative noise. Delicious.
“They do not have your pie in Charleston,” I said with a sigh.
“How many sit-ups do you have to do to work that bite off?” she teased, indicating her own more generous curves.
“Babe, if I worked here I’d weigh three hundred pounds. Everything is too good. All they have around a police station is stale donuts and Diet Coke. Nothing to tempt me. This place—that’s a different story.”
“So, what’d you think about Brody all grown up?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.
“I think he’s the chief and my new boss,” I said.
“Are you saying you didn’t get so much as a twinge of that old crush? You had the biggest thing for him growing up. I swear you kissed his yearbook picture every night before bed.”
“I did NOT!” I said, laughing. “I may have gazed at it and had conversations with it—his picture always agreed with me and thought I was gorgeous even when I had braces and bangs. But I never kissed it.”
“I am pretty sure you used to kiss it.”
“Nope. I’ll deny it to my grave. Maybe my Nick Jonas poster but not Brody’s yearbook pic. Besides, what about you and that guy on the basketball team, the one that moved away our junior year? You used to prank call his house.”
“Yeah, but he’s not my new boss, is he?” she asked.
I dropped my head onto the table for a second and groaned. “It won’t be a problem. It really won’t. I’m not twelve. I’m thirty. I don’t have crushes anymore, and even if I did, I wouldn’t waste them on him. They don’t come any more off-limits than your widowed boss who is also your big brother’s best friend. There might as well be a barbed wire fence around him as far as I’m concerned.”
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that, girlie,” she said mischievously. “Because it’s not like you ever found the forbidden appealing or did anything you shouldn’t, right?”
“That’s right. I was a good little rule follower.”
“So when you broke into the bio lab and let the frogs loose before the dissection, that was totally in line with the rules?”
“I was a child,” I protested.
“What about when you kissed Abel Trench even though he was going out with Kelly?”
“That was just a shitty thing to do. I have no excuse for that. But I regret it. And I apologized. And washed my own mouth out with soap, which didn’t make me feel any better. I was a sophomore, and I was pissed at her because she made volleyball and I didn’t. So I did the crappiest, most immature thing I could think of. But thanks for reminding me of that. Please tell me she moved away, because if I have to run into her at the grocery store or something, I’ll die of embarrassment,” I moaned.
“She moved. Pretty much everyone did, except me.”
“That is not true. I’ve seen a bunch of people we grew up with since I came back. What about Michelle what’s-her-name from the library? She was always really smart and won that speech contest in school.”