Solving for Ex (10 page)

None of the guys here had ever wanted to hang out with me. Probably the combination of math, the camera, and that being around me was pretty much all depressing all the time. Unless they loved a girl who randomly stared off into space and couldn’t hold a conversation particularly well, they weren’t gonna want to go out with me.

All signs pointed to Vincent being exactly the kind of guy I should want to be with—the kind of guy who wanted to treat me exactly like I should be treated.

Which is why it was a total mystery that, whenever I saw him, I tried to duck out of his line of sight. Every time I saw that golden mess of curls, chiseled jaw, and strong, wide shoulders, my heart sped up. And not always in a good way.

Instead of letting it stop me in my tracks, for the first few days, I made my feet speed up right along with my heartbeat, only feeling calmer when I caught a glimpse of Brendan. Being near him was certainty. It was my safety in this school that I’d always been too scared to find my own place in.

That kind of faded when, every day, I ran into Brendan talking with Sofia. Or walking with her. Or carrying her books.

So the next week, when Vincent stepped up to my lunch table and looked at the empty seat beside me with a question in his eyes, instead of looking away, I smiled. When he talked, I listened. And when he offered to walk me to my car, I didn’t say no.

Every day, Vincent walked a little closer to me, smiled at me a little bit wider. Every day, I smiled back at him a little more and wondered when I’d see Brendan a little less. Every day, more eyes followed us. And every day, I cared less.

A full week after I accidentally asked Vincent to Sadie, I’d almost started dropping the “accidental” part when I thought about it. I’d asked Vincent to Sadie. Vincent was cute. Vincent thought I was cute.

Brendan was barely freaking looking at me, and, for the first time since I’d met him, he was making me feel worse instead of better.

Three days before the dance, Vincent sidled up to my locker as the last bell rang. Crazy how the guy always seemed to find some noise or event to announce his arrival. I’d planned to head out to the water tower that afternoon, since the woods surrounding it had begun to edge themselves with autumn gold. The camera bag just barely fit into my locker, and apparently it was tougher to wrench out than it was to squeeze in. Vincent’s voice, low and velvet, breezed in over my shoulder.

“Need some help with that?”

I looked back at his face, just a foot away. Close, but not too close. I couldn’t even find fault in how close he was standing. His face looked like patient understanding, didn’t set me on edge at all. I needed that. Needed to feel like someone really wanted me for a change.

I gave him a grateful smile and stepped to the side. He had beautiful hands—not too big, and not too small, strong fingers. Seriously, he could be a freaking hand model if he was so inclined. I watched as he patiently fit them between the bag and the walls of the locker—was it weird that I was so focused on his fingers?—and shimmied the bag, hefting it out of its metal bounds so carefully I would have thought it was a bird’s nest with just-laid eggs.

“Can I carry it for you?”

I nodded and smiled again. “Just be careful. That’s my baby.”

“A junior girl at Mansfield who calls tech, I’m guessing, her baby?”

I smiled, and patted the camera bag he’d just slung over his shoulder. “Just the DSLR.”

“Yeah, that camera. I meant to ask. You on yearbook or something?”

“Nah. I’m not into deciding who gets immortalized in the popularity handbook every year. I’d rather hunt down beauty outside the school walls.”

“Well, from my experience, not enough people are looking for beauty inside the school walls.”

I turned to him and raised my eyebrows, with a smile playing on my lips. “Okay.”

“I’m just glad I found you. I mean, it. I mean…you know.” That gentle smile on his face, that look that said he wasn’t actually stammering or having trouble getting words out, didn’t match his confession. I knew that he knew the difference between “you” and “it.” But hell, those words were beautiful. .

“So, what were you thinking for dinner? Before Sadie?”

My panic must have been evident on my face, because he immediately jumped in with, “I mean, if you don’t have anything planned, it’s cool.”

Oh, thank God. My car was in sight. “I guess I…I mean, it’s very casual, right? So we could just…” We reached my car, and I clicked the alarm off. He laid my camera bag on the floor of the backseat, and I could swear he peeked in it one more time as he did. Then he reached up and opened my door for me, helping me into my seat with the other hand.

“Hey,” he said, “you have a lot on your mind.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I wanted to see where this was going.

“Let me take care of dinner. Okay?”

I was raising my eyebrows again. Even though I had no idea about the exact expression on my face, he laughed.

“Nothing big, nothing fancy.”

I nodded. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

I’d meant to get up in the early in the morning on the day of Sadie Hawkins to go for a run, pick my cutest pairs of jeans, concentrate on a shower and makeup. But I just….didn’t. Vincent was picking me up at six, and I only really rolled out of bed at three.

Mansfield Prep had a uniform, one we all bought from the same place, and so no one really would have noticed me wearing my dirt-cheap clothes my mom had found on the clearance rack of the discount superstore for most of my life. It was one of the reasons I didn’t go to that many parties—these were the kind of kids who noticed which stitching patterns on the pockets of which washes of jeans equaled “designer.”

Sadie at Mansfield Prep wasn’t fancy, but I had some idea of what the other girls wore from watching Julia get ready for last year’s. She had dragged me to the store with her after grabbing her mom’s card from her purseand obsessed over a pair of pristine, dark jeans with silver stitching. They hugged her in all the right places, as opposed to my beaten-up worn ones, which hung instead of clung. I looked ruefully at my small stack of jeans. One pair was nice and dark, and I’d almost never worn it. When I unfolded those, I remembered why—I’d bought them my own freshman year, and two months later, promptly gotten the curves every girl who started freshman year on the thin-as-a-stick side dreamed of.

Those jeans clung to my hips in a way that would make any guy look at me. I knew it even then. And that wasn’t anything I’d ever wanted—I’d only ever cared about whether Brendan was looking at me.

A few weeks ago, that was still all I cared about. But Brendan wasn’t taking me to Sadie. Vincent was. Or, I was taking him.

But he was definitely taking me out to dinner. No one could argue that.

I gasped and my eyes flew open wide at the realization. He’d volunteered to take care of dinner so that he could say he’d asked me on a date. Was this one more attempt at keeping new gossip away from me?

If it was, it was working. Both to keep the gossip away, and to make me like him.

I imagined a perfect pre-Sadie dinner—a picnic at the park, watching the early autumn sunset, feeling the air chill as the sun dipped below the horizon. There would be crackers and cheese and fruit. The guy would offer me his coat, and sit right down on the ground not caring about damp grass or dirt. I pictured Vincent there. I’d never seen him even close to dirt, or dirty or sweaty or otherwise disheveled in any way. But I supposed it could happen.

Right. Vincent. Taking me to Sadie, now, technically. Where I had to wear cute jeans and shoes. Right.

The dark pair of jeans fit exactly as I’d remembered. When I combined them with the T-shirt and a pair of fabulous heels on I’d snagged from Aunt Kristin’s closet, and some big flashy sliver earrings I’d grabbed from her costume jewelry box, I had to admit it. There, in the mirror with my leg popped out to the side and my hand on my hip, I looked good. Even with the geekiness of my shirt.

Mathlete sexy. It was something I could get used to.

I walked down the hallway and back again, watching the sway of my hips in the mirror. Not too bad. I somehow managed to look like I knew what I was doing in those heels, and not really be in any pain. It felt good to have control over something, even if it was something as stupid as that.

Surprise number five kajillion of this year, crazy as it was already. For the first time in a long time I felt comfortable in my skin again. I liked it. I liked feeling like the old me, that I was strong and desirable just as I was. Strange how everything that had happened last year had made me forget it.

Ω

I carefully heel-toed my way down the stairs, to test the stair factor, and also because I was starving. Aunt Kristin was standing in her yoga pants and sports bra, throwing frozen strawberries in a blender with protein powder and spinach leaves. I made a face. She always swore you couldn’t taste the spinach, but the weird greenish-brown color alone made me want to puke.

She looked up, gave me the once-over, and grinned.

“Are those my new Adrien Abelle heels?” Her eyebrows pushed up, but she was still smiling.

I looked at her sheepishly. “Um, yes? For Sadie? If it’s okay?”

“Sadie’s tonight?” I could almost reach out and grab the excitement from her words as they floated on the air toward me. “You never told me,” she said, her eyebrows drawing in.

“Yeah, well, it’s not really a big deal. You know.”

“I don’t know, first dance of the year? When I was at Mansfield it was always a big to-do. Not dress-wise, obviously, but still. Set the tone for the rest of the year.”

I rolled my eyes before I even realized I was doing it. Thankfully, Aunt Kristin was more like a teenager sometimes than an adult who knew everything about what I should be doing and who I should be doing it with. She threw her head back and laughed. “Point taken. So, where’s Brendan taking you for dinner?”

A burn flared in my chest and shot straight up to my cheeks. I looked down, memorizing the grain of the leather against the careful lines on Aunt Kristin’s shoes. “It’s not Brendan.”

“What do you mean, it’s not Brendan, aren’t you guys kind of…you know…”

“A thing?” Heat crept over my face as I rummaged through the fridge and grabbed the first thing my hand fell on to eat—carrot sticks. Great. I focused all my energy on opening the zip-top bag they’d been relegated to, but it wouldn’t come open. “No,” I mumbled, “there’s this girl…”

“Oh, Ashley. Honey. I had no idea he had a girlfriend.”

“She’s not his girlfriend,” I said, a little too forcefully, as my fingers scrabbled at the godforsaken strips of blue and green plastic that had somehow joined forces to keep me from eating this snack I really didn’t want. “She’s not…she’s just some stupid new girl, they’re not…whatever.” I threw the bag down on the counter, blew my hair out of my eyes, and stood up straight, looking at Aunt Kristin.

“So, it’s okay if I wear these?”

“Yeah. And the jeans…that’s a good look for you. Your dad might think a little too good, but coming from your younger, funner aunt…a good look.”

I pushed my hip out to the side, feeling the stretching tightness of the denim against it. It was definitely a close fit. I turned to walk back upstairs, swaying a little more with my steps.

“When are you picking him up?” Kristin called after me.

“Oh, he’s getting me.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh. And taking me to dinner. Said he’d be here at six.”

“Wow. That’s…not common. For Sadie. You’re supposed to pick him up. We used to bring a picnic.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Isn’t that kind of sexist? I don’t even know what to put in a picnic lunch.”

Kristin laughed. “Everyone should know what to put in a picnic. Boys and girls.”

I shrugged, anxious to get back upstairs, to be alone, no matter how easy Kristin was making this whole thing. “He wanted to deal with dinner. I don’t know.”

“And who’s ‘he’?” she asked, smiling a sly smile.

“Oh. Right. Vincent. His name’s Vincent.” I told her his name like I would have read an item off of a menu—with mildly interested casualness and zero excitement.

“Will I like him?”

I laughed. “I guess we’ll see.” I was still trying to figure that out myself.

nothing could be more obliging than your manner

Vincent arrived at exactly one minute before six o’clock. I knew because I was watching our driveway through my bedroom window, holding the curtain back from the edge just a bit. And Vincent, apparently, liked to do things in style. Instead of his usual spotless Porsche, he’d hired a freaking limo.

He stepped out and leaned against the shining black side of the car. He looked perfect, as usual. He turned around and leaned over, using the tinted windows outside as a mirror, and ran his fingers along the fringe of curls at his forehead. He took the chewing gum out of his mouth and carefully wrapped it in a paper, which he stuffed in the trash can hanging on the back of the passenger’s seat. Then he looked at his watch, nodded, picked something up off the passenger’s seat, and walked up the driveway.