Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“Grace!” I heard Shelly say from somewhere inside. “Don’t make him stand on the doorstep, honey!”
Grace’s mouth twisted to the side, and she looked into my eyes with a hesitant expression that seemed to say, You’re on my side, right? Please?
“She’s not, Shelly,” I called past her, not taking my own eyes from her face. “We’re just saying hello!”
Grace’s tentative look turned into a radiant smile that brought a surge of warmth into my chest.
I held the flowers out.
“For you,” I said, despite it being completely obvious. I lowered my voice. “Shelly will like it if you put them right into some water.”
Grace
Yet another blush came into my cheeks—a gentler one this time, though. Not like the blazing lava feeling that had come over me when I saw Cal’s face, and his flowers, at the same moment.
No one had ever brought me flowers, obviously. The fact that they clearly came from a field—that he had picked them himself, and gathered them into something that looked almost like a professional bouquet… I pretty much couldn’t handle it.
I reached out both my hands for them, almost like a little girl about to pray. I kind of felt that way, too—as if I wanted to ask some higher power to make sure I didn’t regret the strange, pure happiness I felt at having gotten flowers from an older guy. As I took the stems into my grasp, and Cal let go of them, our fingers brushed against each other, and a little shiver traveled through my whole body as at the same time I noticed that he had just a tiny bit of grease stuck in one of his cuticles.
Time seemed to stop, because the single tiny moment, the microsecond when I shivered and noticed the grease, grew into a sort of meditation. I couldn’t tell whether I had shivered because our fingers had touched or because I had noticed the grease—or maybe just because. It made a little wrinkle on my forehead as I thought about it, even though at the same time I knew it didn’t matter at all and I should be paying attention to a zillion other things, the first among them being Cal’s incredibly handsome, bearded face.
“Damn,” he said, pulling my focus back up to that face, framed in tousled, light brown hair that seemed to set off his blue eyes in a way that should have been as illegal as my shoplifting. “I missed a spot, didn’t I?”
My lips parted, but no sound came out; too many different things fought to get said. My eyes went down again as Cal spread out his left hand in front of him to inspect the speck of grease.
“You…” I started.
Cal’s eyes rose to meet mine, as he put that hand down to his hip and rubbed the nail briskly against the faded denim of his jeans. I watched his face as he studied mine. At first his expression seemed a little guarded, and even stern—as if he wondered whether I would judge him for having the grease on his finger, and he felt perfectly prepared to teach me to respect the hard work he put in every day at his shop. Then he seemed to realize that my own reaction had nothing to do with disrespect, and the side of his mouth quirked up into a smile.
“I’m a mechanic, yeah,” he told me, his voice easy.
“Grace!” Jake called, his voice a little menacing.
“Go ahead,” Cal told me. “Put the flowers in some water.”
The thing that struck me hardest about the way he gave me this instruction was that he didn’t seem to consider that I might want to do something else—something other than what he thought I should do. He had issued his command in the obvious knowledge that he knew precisely the right thing for me to do, and any different idea I might have would be simply foolish in comparison.
It brought a new wave of heat to my cheeks, and a new crease to my brow. I nodded quickly and turned away with the flowers, suddenly wanting Cal not to see how easily he could bring that flaming red embarrassment to my pale complexion.
Shelly and Jake were sitting at the kitchen table shucking peas. Terribly conscious of Cal’s eyes on my back—it seemed like I could hear each of his footfalls on the farmhouse’s old floorboards—I walked to the table with the flowers out before me, in both hands until I realized I must look like a bridesmaid, or a bride. I hastily dropped one hand.
“Look at those!” Shelly said.
“Aw, you shouldn’t have, Cal,” Jake said in an easy, joking sort of voice I hadn’t heard him use before. “But you know I love wildflowers.”
“Jake!” Shelly said, reaching across the table to give him a little jostle on the shoulder. “Don’t make fun.”