Great-Aunt Sophia's Lessons for Bombshells (19 page)

Touching:

Sophia advises touching own hair, lips, and sternum while conversing with Andrew. He will read this as a sign that Author is attracted to him, and his attention will be drawn to all areas touched. This is supposed to be performed with such subtlety that no conscious note is made of self-touching actions. Overt displays of this sort can be read as signs of mental unbalance: drunkenness, desperation, easy virtue, social clumsiness
.

Author has firsthand reason to doubt the veracity of this theory. Author believes that, given proper circumstances (i.e., the woman is attractive enough that the man would be willing to have sex with her—this is not a high bar to surmount; even Agnes Gooch got laid), the more self-touching the better. Declan may be an anomaly, however, easily stimulated to sexual excitement. One wonders about his childhood
.

Sophia also advises frequent light touching of Andrew on the hand or arm. This will let him know it’s okay to touch Author in return. No mention made of what grabbing Andrew’s dick would let him know, although Author suspects the meaning is clear
.

Why didn’t Declan ignore his “I can make you come without touching you” and go ahead and touch Author? Why didn’t he even ask, when he so clearly wanted to do it? Obviously, proving himself right was of greater importance than physical gratification. This fits with Author’s earlier experience of him as arrogant pig. Conclusion must be that he has an abnormal disconnect between heart, body, and mind
.

Note: Must find a copy of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and determine whether Declan meets the criteria for personality disorder. Despised male may also be a psychopath. This might also explain Author’s incomprehensible attraction, as psychopaths are known to be preternaturally charming when they wish to be
.

Grace chewed her lip. That last bit seemed a little harsh. She shrugged, then closed the file. She stored her files on the University of Washington’s server, just in case someone got snoopy with her laptop. The only other person with access to it was her advisor, Dr. Joansdatter, but she never opened files unless Grace asked her to, to review her work.

Grace opened her e-mail and found the draft of a letter to her mother.

To answer your question about how the dissertation writing is going, well, Sophia has been giving me a lot to think about, and I’m wondering how to work it into my thesis. I’m still trying to get her to open up about her past, but she keeps changing the subject. She says she’s more interested in the present, and only fools and the nearly dead dwell on times and people long gone
.

I know that Sophia was always considered the black sheep (black ewe?) of the family, and that Grandma hated her. Did she ever give you a hint as to why (beyond the obvious flaws of Sophia’s character)? I know your relationship with Grandma was strained, but I just wondered if before she died she softened up a bit and shared more about her sister
.

I like Sophia more than I thought I would. I think there’s a heart under all the venom, and whether she’s being kind or cruel, she’s never boring
.

No mention yet of when she’s actually going to get her hip replaced, by the way
.

Much love to you and Dad
,

Grace

She sent the e-mail, then, with a sigh, forced herself to respond to the latest “What’s the evil bitch up to now?” message from Cat.

Cat
,

Don’t worry so much! I wouldn’t want Sophia for an enemy, but fortunately she seems to like me, and in her own perverse way she wants to help me. I’ve been taking copious notes on her, and really think my summer here is going to add a valuable dimension both to my dissertation and to my thinking as I move forward in the field of Women’s Studies. Sophia is making me look at things in a whole new way, and that’s always important. I think when we’re in an academic environment we run the risk of our viewpoints becoming too narrow and inflexible, and too divorced from concrete reality. We get wrapped up in our theories and see people only through that filter. We forget what a variety of ways there are of being in the world—or worse yet, we never get to see those ways of being at all
.

I guess that’s true of anyone living their life, academic or not. But I have realized that I was too emotionally invested in being right where Sophia was concerned, and wasn’t having as open a mind as I should have. Which isn’t to say I’m unaware of how treacherous dealing with her can be or how warped some of her ideas are. Don’t worry, I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid! Sophia’s a genius in her own way, though, and it would be a waste not to learn what I could from her
.

We’ll have lots to talk about when the summer’s over. You’ll probably be appalled by what I’ve learned, but don’t worry, I haven’t been transformed into an evil mini-Sophia
.

Not quite yet, anyway
.

Ha-ha, just kidding!

Love
,

Grace

CHAPTER

14

“A
nd then Brooke told Chandler that I was hanging out with Brandon, so now he thinks I like
him
instead of
him
, and I don’t know what to do.” Lali threw up her hands, then dropped them onto Andrew’s arm and looked imploringly into his eyes. “What do you think, Dr. Andrew? Should I tell him how I feel?”

“Er . . .” Andrew cast a helpless look at Grace, who shrugged. They were walking down the path onto the beach in Carmel, joining dozens of others who’d gathered for a volunteer beach cleanup. It had been Lali’s idea to go, and she’d swept Grace and Andrew along in her wake, for which Grace was grateful; her own halting attempts to speak to Andrew had resulted in foot-shuffling awkwardness on both their parts. All Sophia’s advice the night before on how to handle him had fled from Grace’s mind, chased away by the embarrassment of their last meeting and the knowledge that he thought she looked bloated.

Her confidence was further lowered by remembering his comment on the day she’d arrived, about how it wasn’t the beauty of the face across the dinner table that mattered. It no longer seemed quite so sweet. If a guy liked you, you should seem pretty in his eyes, even if you were a bit out of shape and liked the occasional chocolate chocolate-chip banana cookie.

Lali shook Andrew’s arm. “You’re a guy. What do you think? Would he like that or be turned off?”

“I . . . uh, tell which one what?”

Lali rolled her eyes and turned to Grace. “
Men!
They act like we speak in tongues. Ooh! There’s Kristie. If I don’t see you later, don’t wait for me! I’ll get a ride with Kristie.” She dashed off across the sand to her friend, leaving the two of them alone.

Grace and Andrew headed toward the tables where the organizers were handing out trash bags and directing the volunteers. Grace glanced shyly up at Andrew, hoping to catch his eye or at least exchange a smile, but his attention was elsewhere and he seemed oblivious to her presence. Or maybe he, too, was just too shy to look at her.

But then Andrew’s face lit up with recognition and was transformed from coolly distant to warm and vivacious. “George!” he called as they approached one of the tables, behind which stood a skeletal, wildly bearded man in an old T-shirt declaring
LIFE’S A BEACH, AND MOST DUMB SUCKERS ARE CRAPPING THEIRS UP
!

“Dr. Andrew,” George answered, and pumped his hand in enthusiastic greeting. “Good to see you out here!”

“Just doing my part,” Andrew said as Grace smiled by his side, waiting to be introduced. The thin man had squirrelly eyes, open a little too wide, so that the whites showed at the top of his irises.
Was he on drugs?

“Excellent, excellent,” George said, handing Andrew two bags. “See you at Thursday’s meeting?”

“Wouldn’t miss it!” Andrew moved away from the table, leaving Grace standing there, still expecting to be introduced. George’s eyes skimmed over her, then looked past her at the next volunteer coming up for a bag.

Grace felt a small stab of hurt. Was she invisible today?

“Who was that?” Grace asked as she caught up to Andrew and they moved out of earshot. “He acted like I didn’t exist.”

“Don’t take it personally. He’s probably hungry.”

Grace felt a stab of shame and looked back over her shoulder at the man, whose skeletal frame and ragged clothes now made sense. A homeless man was volunteering to help save the environment, and here she’d been silently calling him Squirrel Eyes. “You mean, like homeless hungry?”

“No, I mean he hasn’t had his midday nutritional allotment.”

Grace swung her gaze back to Andrew. “What?”

“His midday—”

“Oh, lunch!” she laughed, and suddenly remembering Sophia’s advice to touch him, gave him a nudge with her elbow. “You had me for a moment.”

“I guess you could call it lunch. He follows CRON.”

“Is that a guru?” Grace asked, lurching through the soft sand. She could already feel sweat starting to break out. She was wearing a big straw hat, an apricot cotton sundress, and pale green Havaianas flip-flops. She grabbed Andrew’s arm to stop him as she slipped out of the flip-flops and bent to pick them up. When she glanced up at him this time, still bent over, she was rewarded by his gaze on her chest.

Ha! He wasn’t so impervious to her after all!

“It’s an acronym: Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition.”

“Oh, a diet. No wonder he’s grumpy.” They resumed their walk toward the south end of the beach, Grace walking a little closer to him so that their arms occasionally brushed. Apparently her question had distracted him from the allure of her feminine self, though.

“CRON isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle,” Andrew said, becoming animated. “Calorie restriction is the only proven way to slow the
aging process. You cut down on your food intake by about forty percent—while maintaining maximum nutrition—for the rest of your life.”

“How perfectly horrible.”

“You think cancer, heart disease, and death aren’t horrible? CRON might give you a long life free of all those things.”

“I’d throw myself off a cliff if I was never going to be able to eat pizza again, and I mean pizza on a fairly regular basis,” she said teasingly.

He met her eyes. “When you’re seventy-five, you might think a little differently about whether or not you should have eaten those pizzas.”

Grace bit the insides of her cheeks, clamping down on the urge to argue, and forcefully shoving aside the thought that Dr. Andrew was a wack job on the topic of food.
Open mind, Grace, open mind . . .
She made herself smile and entwined her arm in his, and felt his surprise at the contact. “You seem to know a lot about it,” she purred. “Is George a patient of yours?”

“I met him at a CRON meeting.”

“You’re one of them?” she squeaked before she could control herself.

“There’s some sound science to back it up, although of course no one is sure yet if it’ll work the same way in humans as in animals.”

“But how could it possibly be good for you? I’d feel awful if I ate so little. I wouldn’t have any energy or be able to think.”

“Not at all! You get great energy doing CRON, and until you try it, you don’t realize how much the processed crap that makes up the standard American diet is fogging your brain. About the only complaint people make is of a loss of libido.”

Grace stared at him in shock. “No libido?”

“The body doesn’t want to reproduce when its calorie intake is low.”