Paper Airplanes (8 page)

Okay, maybe I understood a little bit. Brooke was incredibly insecure, and she masked it with her tough attitude, pretending that she didn’t care what anyone thought of her. In truth she cared too much, and I knew that. I knew how little self-esteem she had and how she dressed like she did to make people pay attention to her. It was why I’d looked in the first place, but then I’d gotten to know the person she had the potential to be. Unfortunately, her insecurities kept her from being that person all the time and turned her into someone I loathed.

“Do you miss me?” she asked
then in the baby voice that used to do me in when we were together. Not anymore.

“
I’m not interested in getting back together,” I told her honestly, glad I’d said it and glad I hadn’t told her the truth. Yes, I missed her.

She sighed. “Then what about a summer fling
? No strings attached? Just sex. The sex was always soooo good with us.”

I had to swallow to fight off the urges I suddenly felt when she talked about the sex we used to have. It had been good – damn good. And I hadn’t had sex in months – not since
the weekend I’d visited Evan at school. He’d hooked me up with one of his girlfriend’s sorority sisters. We’d had a meaningless one-night stand. I’d gotten shot the next day.

Sex with no strings with Brooke sounded tempting, b
ut I couldn’t do what she was asking –no matter how much I wanted to.

I shook my head
before I changed my mind. “Brooke, with you there are always strings. That’s the problem,” I said and turned around and walked into the kitchen, leaving her standing there, probably stunned that I’d turned her down. Brooke wasn’t exactly used to hearing no. Then again, she wasn’t used to saying it either.

Okay, that was mean.

But it was also true. Brooke had brought ten times the experience I had to our relationship. Before her I’d only kissed a handful of girls and had one hot make-out session that might have turned into sex had Scott not interrupted us. So Brooke had been my first – in pretty much every way imaginable.

I leaned against the counter where Scott was prepping salads and stole an olive from the huge can on the counter.

“Brooke trying to get back together with you?” he asked, not looking up from his task. I knew he liked to time himself to see how many salads he could make in a minute. His personal record was twenty.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, grabbing another olive at the same time he did, and our hands collided.

“Dammit, Jared, you messed me up,” he whined.

“Whatever, dude,” I said as I pushed off the counter. I had to go roll silverware before we opened.

“Maybe you should just sleep with her for a few months,” Scott suggested as I started to walk away, and it was weird, but instead of an image of Brooke filling my brain, an image of Cassie Witter popped into it.

I turned around to face Scott
, puzzled that he’d suggested that. “What?”

Scott looked up at me. “Brooke,” he said, as if it was obvious, and it really should have been.
“You should sleep with her.”

Why had I thought he’d meant
Cassie? He’d kill me if I slept with her. Besides, I didn’t like her – at all.

I waved him off. “Nah, been there, done that.”

“And someday soon you’ll tell me all about it?” he asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “Dream on.”

I did not kiss and tell no matter how much Scott be
gged me. He was still a virgin, and he’d asked nine million questions after he’d found out Brooke and I had slept together. I hadn’t given him anything. I just told him to Google ‘sex’ and see what came up. I was pretty sure he’d actually done that.

“Come on, Jared,” he whined. “I have to live vicariously through you
. I could never get a girl as hot as Brooke Stiller – or any other girl for that matter.”

“Sure you could,” I said, hating when he put himself down. We weren’t that different.

He shook his head. “No way, man. You went and got all buff and sexy, and I’m still the same dorky guy I was two years ago.”

I laughed out loud. He was such an idiot. Yeah, I’d started working out, and I had muscle tone, but I was still the same guy I’d always been. People didn’t change that much. Besides, Brooke and I hadn’t happened overnight. We’d been friends first before we’d hooked up one night
over Fourth of July weekend. She hadn’t gone after me for my looks, I knew that much.

Just then
Cassie burst through the kitchen doors looking breathless. “Hey Cassie!” I heard Scott yelp from behind me. “How are you?”

A smile lit up her face. “Hi Scott!” she said cheerfully. “I’m great. How are you?”

Good, she actually remembered his name. About time.

“Awesome!
” he responded. “Today I’m the salad master, and I’m going to beat my personal record.”

“Personal record?” she questioned.

“Don’t ask,” I mumbled, and she turned to me in surprise.

“
Oh, you’re speaking to me politely?” she questioned.

I raised an eyebrow at her. She considered that polite? I was just giving her fair warning not to get Scott started. He’d go on for an hour about his triumphs with lettuce and tomatoes.

“Sure,” I said, because I didn’t really want to get into a real conversation with her. It was bad enough we had to work together and I had to train her. We weren’t going to be friends. “You’re late, by the way.”

“I know,” she breathed out. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Whatever,” I said, walking past her.

I
almost stopped short when I inhaled her vanilla scented body lotion. I don’t think I’d ever smelled something quite that intoxicating before. Dammit. What the hell was I doing?

“Hey
, so what are we learning today?” she asked, trailing after me.

“We’re going to roll silverware,” I told her with just a bit of sarcasm in my tone. “Get excited.”

I grabbed a plastic bin full of silverware and gestured for her to grab the large stack of paper napkins next to it and follow me. We sat down at a nearby table across from each other, and I started rolling. Hopefully she’d be a quick learner. This wasn’t exactly rocket science.

“I
am
excited,” she said after a few seconds, as she started to mimic what I was doing. Knife, fork, spoon, tuck the end and roll. A monkey could do it.

“
Oh yeah?” I asked, not looking up at her.

“
Yes. This is my first job, and I want to do it well. This seems like a fun place to work, and I’m sure with a great trainer like you, I’ll be a master server in no time.”

I l
ooked up at her with obvious skepticism, and she rolled her eyes in response.

“Yes, I’m sucking up,”
she said sarcastically. “I want you to like me.”

Cassie Witter wanted me to like her? That made no sense.

My eyes narrowed involuntarily. “Why?”

“You don’t say much do you?” she questioned instead of responding to what I’d asked.

“Not really.”

She let out a big breath of air. “Okay, well, the thing is,
I don’t have any friends here, and I think it’s high time I made some.”

Yeah, like I believed that. She was the freaking Homecoming Queen and was voted Best Smile senior year. She had friends.

Okay, how the hell had I remembered that? I must have dug those facts out of the recesses of my brain, because I hadn’t given one conscious thought to Cassie Witter in the two years since we’d graduated high school. Of course, Scott had drooled over her for years, so subconsciously I’d probably filed away more facts than I cared to remember through osmosis alone, but still.

“What about Nicole
Daniels?” I asked her, and she gave me a funny look, possibly wondering how I knew they were friends. I probably need to hold back on the knowledge I had of her as to not make her think I was either interested in her or a stalker – either one would be bad.

But then she shook her head, making me think her look meant something else entirely.

“We’re not really friends anymore,” she said after a few seconds. Then she sighed and shrugged, and she looked so sad all of a sudden. “Sometimes things happen and people change as a result, and they realize that the friends they had maybe aren’t the people they should be friends with anymore.” She shrugged again.

That was slightly cryptic, but I had a feeling I knew where it was coming from. I’d hoped to avoid this subject. I didn’t want to get into it with her, but it seemed like it might be inevitable.

The shooting had changed me, and I was fairly sure it had changed her too. How could it not
have? But I think what it did for me was make me realize how fragile life could be, and in a second it could be gone. I didn’t want to have any regrets in life. But I wondered if it hadn’t had an opposite effect on Cassie.

She seemed more timid than I remembered her, almost as if she was afraid
of living. She’d never been like that before. She’d walked around with confidence, she’d spoke up in class, and she’d commanded rooms. This was not the same girl sitting in front of me.

“I actually do have a best friend – Marley Andrews,” she continued
when I didn’t respond. “Do you know her?”

I
shook my head. The name didn’t ring a bell.

“
She lived here until we were fourteen, but then she moved to Seattle. She’s back there for the summer, but I’m hoping she’ll come visit me. We’re roommates at school.”

I nodded.

“We go to Coleman College in Wisconsin,” she said cheerfully, continuing to keep the conversation going even though I would have been more comfortable with silence. “Have you heard of it?”

I started when she said
that because everyone knew about Coleman College. It had been all over the news for weeks after the shooting. I wondered if that was Cassie’s way of trying to get me to ask her about the shooting. Did she need someone to talk to about it? I wasn’t sure if I was the right guy for that.

Or maybe she just wanted attention. I had a feeling she was just like Brooke. In fact, they’d probably be best friends
once they met. They were both self-centered bitches in my experience, and I was the sucker who’d let one of them take me down. I wouldn’t let the other get the best of me. No, I had to keep Cassie at arm’s length. I’d train her, be cordial to her when we worked together, but that would be it.

“
Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” I said begrudgingly, hoping I wasn’t opening myself up to a conversation I didn’t want to have. “My brother actually goes there.”

Dammit, why had I volunteered that information?

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. She had to have known I would have heard of Coleman, but the fact that I knew someone who went to school there had thrown her for a loop. I should have kept my mouth shut.

“He does?
” she questioned. “What year is he?”

“
He’s a senior. He’s graduating in August.”

I watched a dark cloud pass over her face
that I didn’t know the source of when I said that, but she forced a smile on her face and faked the cheerfulness in her voice when she said, “That’s so great. I love it there. What’s his name?”

“Evan Lansing.”

She shook her head. “That name doesn’t ring a bell. Is he in a fraternity?”

I shifted in my seat, not lovi
ng how personal we were getting. “Uh, yeah. He is. He’s a Sigma Lambda Phi.”

She nodded again. “I know some of them. They’re good guys.
Have you ever visited him at school?”

I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke or not, but Cassie
didn’t look like she was kidding. I raised an eyebrow at her, genuinely surprised that she didn’t know that I’d been involved in the shooting. Hadn’t she watched the news? I knew they’d focused more on the victims who’d lost their lives, but there had been some coverage on those of us who were injured too. It was how I’d known she’d been shot – especially since the media had really played up her story of being in a coma with her life hanging in the balance. They’d celebrated when she’d pulled out of it relatively unscathed.

But then reality slammed home
for me. She had no clue who I was. She’d never noticed me in high school. When I’d seen her name on the victim list, and recognition had dawned on me, she hadn’t had the same reaction at all in seeing my name. I doubted she’d even known my last name until I’d told it to her thirty seconds before.

But could I fault her for that? No, and it was probably better that she didn’t know I was involved. I didn’t want to talk about what had happened
that night with her. It was not something that would bond us together – solidarity in trauma. I was looking to move past what had happened, not relive it. I’d done that enough with my therapist.

“I’ve been there a few times,” I said
vaguely.

“Cool,”
Cassie said cheerfully, but it sounded like she was still forcing the cheer into her voice.