The Bargain (20 page)

But this time she was not the only one affected by it, because Michael seemed out of breath, too, when they finally separated — and he did not go far. He touched her face with his fingers, and then ran them through her hair as he looked at her searchingly. “You sure about this?” he asked her softly, and the tentative look in his eyes made her want to wrap her arms around him all the more.

She nodded, unable to speak so soon after the way he had just kissed her.

“I’m pretty screwed up, you know. I’m not sure I’m worth the — ”

Shannon shut him up with another kiss, her feelings for him overcoming her shyness, and any hesitation that might have plagued Michael seemed to vanish then because all Shannon knew after that was that his lips and his hands seemed to be everywhere at once. And yet somehow it still didn’t feel like enough of him.

“I hated the idea of my brother doing this with you,” he said finally against her mouth. “It drove me crazy.”

His words sent a little thrill down her spine. “Really?” she managed, her voice somewhat breathless but not so breathless that she couldn’t hear the undercurrent of delight in it. She was sure Michael must have heard it, too.

“Yeah,” he said, his lips traveling over her jaw and down to her throat. “And this … ”

Her skin felt like it was on fire wherever he touched it. “Anything else?” she asked him, wishing her voice didn’t tremble quite so much but glad she had gotten it working again.

“Oh, yes,” he whispered against her neck, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Let me show you … ”

Two months later

She was as ready as she was ever going to be for this night.

Shannon examined her reflection in the mirror in her bedroom, twisting this way and that to make sure there weren’t any wrinkles or loose threads that needed attention — or worse, any part of her skirt accidentally tucked into her pantyhose.

Nope. Everything appeared to be as it should be. Including her hair, which she deliberately left down. It was getting easier to do that now, and if she wasn’t exactly a full-fledged woman of confidence yet, she liked to think she was making strides in that direction.

Despite its lack of wrinkles, she smoothed the dress’s silky jade green fabric anyway, more out of nerves than anything else. It was a pretty dress — “It is now,” Michael had said when she tried it on for him for the first time. He had then tried very hard to coax her into slipping back out of it.

She smiled now at the memory. It gave her a little boost of confidence, which she sorely needed tonight.

Her ten-year reunion. She had been dreading it since she first got the invitation in the mail weeks ago, which was one reason why she was making herself go. It was ridiculous, she had decided, that one single social event should strike fear into anybody’s heart like this, particularly if that person was no longer an insecure teenager.

So she was going. But she had lost count of the number of times she had nearly blurted it out to Michael and asked him to go as her date. It would have been a lot less intimidating — and, quite honestly, kind of fantastic — to walk into a room full of her former classmates on the arm of the heartthrob of their high school years, but he’d spent years being treated as little more than eye candy. She was not about to treat him that way, too.

Besides, it was better this way, she told herself. More fitting. It meant she wasn’t afraid to stand on her own two feet around the people who used to intimidate the crud out of her, right?

Right. It sounded good anyway, even if her subconscious wasn’t buying it.

It wasn’t as if she would be totally without allies there, she reminded herself as she gave Bo a pat on the head and collected her purse. Drew would be there, too, and now that she wasn’t tongue-tied around him anymore they were genuinely becoming friends. He was even softening toward his brother, which Shannon knew was no small thing to Michael.

So even if she was going stag tonight, it was comforting to know that she could at least count on a dance or two with the former prom king and student body president of the McKinley High class of 2003.

Going downstairs, Shannon grabbed a sweater from the hall closet and opened the front door.

And saw Michael reclining against the porch railing, dressed to the nines in black slacks and a dress shirt that was missing a tie and open at the collar but still somehow amazingly dashing on him.

She stared at him in shock while his eyes travelled over her appreciatively, and he smiled in greeting. “Wow,” he murmured in a voice that sent delicious shivers down her spine. “You look like every man’s fantasy come true.” He straightened and came over to where she still stood speechless, then bent to kiss her, slowly and very deliberately.

She blinked at him when he finally separated his lips from hers.

“So, are you ready then?” he asked her, offering her his arm.

“I — what?”

“Are you ready to go?” Michael checked his watch. “Doors open at eight, right?”

“What doors?”

“At the high school. It is eight, isn’t it?”

“How did you know … ” She trailed off, confused as to what he was doing there. Delighted, but confused.

“Drew told me. Or did you forget that he and I are on speaking terms now?”

“
Drew
told you?” That would teach her to confide in her boss.

“Yes, he did. He also told me why you neglected to mention it to me.” Michael’s voice softened along with the light in his eyes as he looked into hers.

“Oh.” Yes, she was really going to have to think twice before spilling anything to Drew again, or at least anything more personal than her grocery list, she thought as she felt her cheeks grow warm. “Well … ”

“You’re very sweet, you know that?”

Her cheeks grew even warmer.

“And I appreciate you trying to protect my feelings,” he continued, with a solemn look but a suspicious twinkle in his dark eyes. “But I’m afraid you’re just going to have to get used to being seen in public with me.”

“Well, if I have to, I have to,” she conceded gravely, and then she grinned and put her arms around him. “Thanks for coming tonight. I was dreading going alone.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Although — ” He trailed his fingers down her back. “I wouldn’t mind cutting out early.”

Yes, early was good, she thought with another lovely shiver as his fingers left a trail of heat on her skin. Then she took the arm he offered her and followed him off the porch.

He stopped halfway to his truck and turned to look at her in the deepening twilight. “Shannon … ” he started, and this time his voice was soft and halting. “I — ”

“Yes?”

“You and me, we … ”

She held her breath. The look in his eyes was so earnest, it made her heart do a funny sort of flip inside her chest. He almost seemed, well,
shy
. Michael Kingston, heartbreaker, was clearly struggling to say something he wasn’t used to saying to a woman, and his awkwardness at that moment was all the more endearing for that. “Yes?” she said again, more softly.

“I’ve never — I mean … ” He cleared his throat and tried again, the rising color in his cheeks obvious even in the growing darkness. “I just want to say … I … ”

“Yeah,” she told him, her heart thumping pleasantly fast. “Me, too.”

“I — yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Michael took a deep breath. “Well, good. I’m glad we had this talk … ” And he drew her toward him. She went quite willingly.

Several minutes later, Shannon tore her mouth away from his. “We’re going to be late,” she told him breathlessly.

“So then we just get to make more of an entrance — ”

She laughed and pulled him in the direction of his truck. “Come on. I promised myself I’d go to this thing, and I meant it.”

He sighed but gave in and followed her. “I guess it would be a shame to waste the sight of you in that dress. You’re going to outshine everybody else there.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

Michael opened the passenger’s side door for her. “Nowhere?”

“Well maybe somewhere,” she admitted. “But I need to get to this reunion before I lose my nerve, so — ”

“Understood.” He closed the door after her and then rounded the truck to get in on the driver’s side. “It might actually be fun, you know. Seeing old faces, catching up on what people have been doing for the past ten years … ”

“Uh huh. Sure.”

“Hey, keep an open mind.”

“Catching up shouldn’t take long. Not much has happened to me in the last decade.”

He turned the key in the ignition. “Wait until your next reunion. You’ll have all sorts of news to tell people then.”

“Will I?”

“Oh, yeah,” he told her, giving her a look that was full of promise. “I guarantee it.”

Christine S. Feldman writes both novels and feature-length screenplays, and, to her great delight, she has placed in screenwriting competitions on both coasts. When she is not writing, she is teaching kindergarten, puttering around in her garden, ballroom dancing with her husband, or doing research for her next project.

“Girl, you’re lookin’ better than a body has a right to.”

Callie didn’t look up from the notepad she was scribbling in. “I’m all for recycling, Kalvin, but you’ve used that line one too many times within my earshot for it to work on me.”

“Ah, baby, but you’re the only one I ever really meant it with.”

“Mmm.” She kept writing and ignored the teenager’s insincere protests of love. He had wandered into the store a few weeks ago, spotted her, and then found an excuse to return almost every afternoon. Points for persistence, she thought.

It was a lazy and very hot afternoon at Vintage Records Your Way, and Callie had little to do behind the counter except write, which was the main reason why she took the job in the first place four months ago. Other than Kalvin, the only other people in the store seemed to be browsing through the merchandise merely as an excuse to avoid the intense heat radiating off the New York City pavement, and that was fine with her. The job was enough to help her make rent, once it was split three ways among Callie and her two roommates. Her boss might be a jerk, but she’d managed to save up enough money to be moving along soon anyway. And the music was good, too. She cocked her head slightly to better hear the strains of Janis Joplin coming over the store sound system and closed her eyes, pencil poised above her paper as she waited for inspiration.

She got more of Kalvin instead.

“Come on, aren’t you ever going to go out with me?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t want to ruin the friendship,” she said dryly, raising one eyebrow.

“Well, it’s not like we’re
close
friends … ”

Giving up on her writing for the moment, she looked at him with fond exasperation. He grinned at her hopefully. The expression was rather adorable on his gawky, young face, and she suspected that he knew it. “Kalvin, why don’t you go hit on that girl over there? The one in the pink skirt who’s trying to pretend she knows who Blue Oyster Cult is. She’s cute, and she’s your own age,” she added pointedly.

He shrugged and leaned on the counter with his elbows. “Already tried. Struck out.”

Callie let out an incredulous laugh. “So I’m your sloppy seconds?”

“Technically,” he corrected her with one finger raised in the air, “I think the term ‘sloppy seconds’ would mean that you were passed on to me after some other guy had you. Which I’m fine with, by the way.”

“That’s so open-minded of you. Go away now, please, so I can concentrate.” She bent over the notebook again.

He strained to see what she was writing. “What are you working on this time? Politics? The environment? Sex and the single girl?”

Suddenly self-conscious, she flipped the notebook over before he could read anything. “It’s personal this time, Kalvin.”

“Oooh. Like a diary? Going to send it off to
Cosmo
when you’re finished?”

But she only waved him off with one hand and scooted her stool back further from the counter so she could write in peace. Grumbling under his breath, Kalvin finally wandered away to give the girl in the pink skirt another try. When Callie was sure he was safely away, she turned her notebook over again and reread what she had already written:

After a while, you start to doubt yourself, to wonder if — on some level — you’re looking for him in every man you meet. Looking for his approval. Looking for answers. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a passing acquaintance or someone who is more of a permanent fixture in your life. You begin to wonder if you’re hoping that this time, you’ll get it right. Or maybe that this time he’ll get it right.

She frowned. It was more wistful than she’d originally intended, which she found vaguely unsettling. This was supposed to be a more clinical piece to submit to a particular journal, a reflection on the effects of absent fathers. They would never accept it this way. Flipping over to a fresh, empty page, she touched her pencil to the paper to try again.

The phone rang then, interrupting her, and she reached absentmindedly for the receiver. “Vintage Records Your Way. What can I do for you?”

“Callie? Oh, good, it’s you. This is Tina.”

Callie blinked in surprise. It was the more unreliable one of her two roommates. She wasn’t very close to either one of them, really. They kept very different hours and rarely crossed paths, and the only other time Tina had called Callie at work was when a pipe had burst in their apartment. A prickle of dread crept down her neck, and she tried to keep the wariness out of her voice. “Tina? What’s up?”

“You got a phone call a few minutes ago on the landline, and — look, is there someone else there who can finish your shift for you or something?”

Callie’s tension grew. “Manager’s in the back. Why?”

“There’s been an accident. Your mom’s in the hospital.”

“What?” she asked sharply, jerking up from the stool and dropping her notebook on the floor. “What kind of accident? Is she all right?”