She's With Stupid Page 12

  Leo poked his head up from the side of her neck and, when the phone continued to ring, halted his quest to pinch her nipple as hard as he possibly could.

  When it became obvious that whoever was calling wasn’t going to give up (and that there hadn’t been a matching answering machine in the pile when Leo had fished that phone out of someone’s trash), Leo gave her an apologetic smile and a quick kiss on her tight-lipped mouth before stalking back to the living room.

  The second he stepped away, Emilie leaned weakly against the wall in relief. She knew something must be seriously wrong with her, but she was immensely grateful to whoever was calling for granting her a reprieve.

  She could hear him heatedly whispering into the receiver, but his voice was pitched too low for her to really make out what he was saying. Quickly righting her clothing and picking her discarded coat up off the floor, she tried to come up with some excuse to get out of here in the most diplomatic way possible.

  Emilie quietly moved to the living room where Leo was huddled on the couch —which she now noted had several rips, tears, and bits of stuffing leaking out of it— and covering the receiver with his hand. Her eyebrows rose marginally as she contemplated who or what could possibly make him look so annoyed.

  He glanced up, saw her standing there, and visibly paled. With a weak smile for Emilie, he shouted “Okay!” into the phone and abruptly slammed the phone back into its cradle.

  Rubbing his palms on the thighs of his jeans, he stood up and wouldn’t quite meet her stare, which made him look decidedly shifty.

  “I’m really sorry, Emilie. There’s been a kind of family emergency. I know how disappointed you are.” Fortunately, his eyes were on his toes so he didn’t see the flash of grim amusement on her face. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut this short and do it again some other time.”

  Leo’s eyes finally met hers, plainly pleading with her for forgiveness, which Emilie was more than inclined to give considering how astonishingly happy she was to get out of this apartment with her virtue still mostly intact.

  “I totally understand,” she quickly assured him. She slipped her arms into her coat sleeves and glanced around for her purse. “I’ll just call a cab—”

  “Don’t be dumb.” Leo picked up her purse, which was lying on the floor by the couch, and sidled up to her. He loosely linked his hands behind her head and failed to note the rising panic in her expression. “I can take you home on my way to the—er, emergency.” He smiled slightly and placed a soft kiss on her cheek. “It’s the least I can do for my girl.”

  Feeling truly horrible about how badly she wanted to get out of his place, Emilie returned his smile and allowed him to pull her into another bone-crushing hug. “That’d be great,” she murmured obligingly.

  Emilie knew she had dodged a bullet. She just wasn’t entirely sure why she had felt the need to dodge it at all.

  Chapter 8

  Emilie was still managing to dodge that sex bullet a few weeks later, although Leo was becoming increasingly surly about it as the weeks passed. She didn’t really blame him — she was well aware of how unreasonable she was being. But she couldn’t shake that uneasy sense of wrong whenever Leo tried to take things to the next level. Though she had a vague idea that it had something to do with her unresolved feelings for Ethan, Emilie still didn’t understand how that was even possible. She hadn’t heard a word from him since that disastrous engagement party.

  Not that she had expected to, obviously.

  Even if he had been serious about wanting to stick around and convince her he was a changed man (which Emilie was certain he was not) he was officially still in the Marines. Kate had mentioned that he was currently doing some kind of military training in South Carolina, but that he intended to move to New Bern as soon as he received his honorable discharge at the end of the month.

  Emilie scoffed at the very idea of Ethan suddenly deciding to settle down anywhere, least of all in New Bern, Ohio. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he would be roaming around like an alley cat looking for some new thrill just as soon as he had the freedom to do so, which was why she had to force herself to put her unwanted feelings for Ethan aside and move on.

  Even if she did still occasionally think about his uncharacteristically persistent behavior the night of Kate’s party —okay, she thought about it a lot— she had resolved to write it off as a hysteria-induced hallucination on her part. Ethan was never moving to New Bern, no matter what Kate said to the contrary, and he was not going to fall into Emilie’s arms even if he did because he had made it clear years ago that she was not what he wanted.

  Not that she cared.

  She didn’t need Ethan or any other man to make her life complete. Nor was she lacking for male companionship with Leo, who was now constantly reminding her how much he loved her, was in the picture. Leo was stable, with a secure job and an uncomplicated view of the world, and that was what she needed in her life. Of course, knowing this on an intellectual level did not prevent her from constantly fretting about her inability to trust him already.

  Predictably, Lana and Kate laughed uproariously when she revealed her dilemma to them on a cold Saturday afternoon in late January. They were supposed to be addressing wedding invitations, but they had barely made a dent in the stack due to their preoccupation with Emilie’s love life. Instead, they were sprawled out in her living room with the invitations strewn all over the coffee table and floor. Lana and Kate were sitting on the Oriental rug, at least pretending to work on the invitations, but Emilie had long since retreated to the comfort of the couch to relay her problems to them.

  Seeing Emilie’s wounded expression when her lack-of-sex-with-Leo confession seemed to elicit merriment rather than concern, Lana quickly reassured her that they weren’t laughing at her.

  “Right,” Emilie said waspishly. She snuggled deeper into the couch cushions and munched on barbecue potato chips to dull her misery, while her friends looked at her with mildly pitying amusement.

  “We’re not!” Lana insisted. “But didn’t you say you asked God for some kind of sign about whether or not you were supposed to be with Leo?”

  “Yeah…” Emilie did not like where this was going.

  “Well, not being physically able to stomach the idea of sleeping with a guy seems like a fairly straightforward answer from above to me,” Kate said frankly.

  Before Emilie could reply, Kate reached over to snatch the chips from her hand and then dug in with an annoyingly loud crunch.

  Emilie gave her a dirty look, crossed her arms, and nestled even further back into the cushions. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she protested weakly.

  Kate stood, stepped over the invitations and envelopes scattered on the floor, and settled on an armchair beside the couch while Emilie continued to try to explain away her tepid feelings for Leo. This had been going on for the past hour.

  “We have a good relationship otherwise!” Emilie insisted.

  “How do you figure that?” Kate asked sarcastically.

  “Well…” Emilie paused to consider the question, causing Lana and Kate to share a knowing glance. “Stop it! He loves me, for one. And we get along really well, and before you” she pointed an accusatory finger at Kate “started making me relive my past with stupid Ethan and inviting him to your stupid party so that he could get into my head and mess with me, I was perfectly content with Leo.”

  Her declaration was met with heavy silence.

  “I was!”

  “Ha,” said Kate. “You can lie to us all you want, Emmy, but please don’t lie to yourself. You were never all that thrilled with Leo. You only liked the idea you had of him before you actually knew him, and you’ve been treading water with him for months hoping he might miraculously transform into someone interesting.”

  Emilie really hated it when Kate got all psychoanalytical on her, and she hated it even more when she actually seemed to be making sense. “That’s not true,” she fibbed. “We have a connec
tion.”

  Lana had been curiously silent up to this point, but she finally chimed in. “Em, are you sure you’re connecting? Because I kind of noticed when he came over here the other night that he doesn’t really talk much.”

  “He’s shy! When did that become a crime?”

  “It’s not about what he doesn’t say, Emilie,” interjected Kate. “When he does speak, it’s about his stupid car or his stupid frogs or his stupid — no wait, those are his only topics of conversation.”

  Emilie opened her mouth to argue, but she immediately shut it again because she could feel herself getting defensive, which was the very thing that was irking her in the first place. Why did she always feel the need to defend Leo? Why was she always making excuses for their differences and for the strange, unexpected lack of physical chemistry between them? Why did she get the feeling she was asking questions she should already know the answer to?

  “Look, Em,” said Lana. “We’re not trying to hurt your feelings, but you’re the one who keeps saying that something is off about him.”

  “Not off exactly, just, I don’t know. I feel like he’s holding out on me or something, but I’m not exactly Susie-Shares-A-Lot with my feelings, either.”

  Kate snorted —rather unflatteringly, Emilie sourly noted— and gave her a pointed look. “Maybe there’s simply nothing more for him to share. I think you need to consider the distinct possibility that Leo is exactly who he appears to be: a boring guy with whom you have nothing in common. I can’t figure out why your impossibly lofty standards have taken such a nose dive with Frog Boy.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you’ve never dated a lot because you’ve got these very specific qualities that you want in a guy, qualities which I will be the first to tell you are way too impossible for any human being to meet,” Lana said as she nudged her way onto the couch and placed a consoling hand on Emilie’s knee. “But you’ve had those standards since you were twelve, and you’ve always said you’d never settle for anything less than extraordinary when it came to love. Now it seems like you’re settling for way less than mediocre.”

  Because her friends were giving her identical looks of concern and because she knew they were only saying what she would have said if the tables were reversed, Emilie decided to take the high road. “Maybe you guys are right; maybe I’m still waiting for something else to come along.”

  “Someone else,” Kate corrected.

  Emilie shrugged helplessly. She wasn’t even going to pretend she didn’t catch Kate’s drift. “I honestly wanted to believe that I had gotten past moping around about Ethan.” Her voice sounded unmistakably sad. “Maybe I was kidding myself about that, too.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Emmy. Love’s a scary thing. None of us have done such a good job navigating its murky waters,” said Lana.

  Kate snorted again as she got up and went to the kitchen to scrounge for more snacks. “Did you write that crap?” Her mouth twisted cynically. “Love’s murky waters—ha!”

  “I beg your pardon! I was being poetic.” Lana said with a haughty toss of her hair as she got up and followed Kate into the kitchen.

  Emilie absently listened to her friends argue over who ate the last chocolate chip cookie, but her mind was elsewhere. If she was one hundred percent honest with herself, she knew that her friends were right. She wasn’t over Ethan.

  I am such an idiot, she thought with a disgusted shake of her head. One stupid encounter under an oak tree and she was acting like a little girl again. Why couldn’t she take a hint and grow up? It was beyond ridiculous for her to grasp at his apology like a lifeline, especially when it was more than likely that he’d only said it to placate her and end the decade-long silence between them. She knew better than to pretend otherwise.

  Emilie had to get past her fears and her doubts and make this thing work with Leo, if only to prove to herself that she was done waiting for Ethan. Then everything was going to work out fine. It had to.

  ***

  Four days later, Emilie walked into the teacher’s lounge hoping a cup of coffee might ease the wintry chill in the drafty old building and learned that everything was not, in fact, fine and that she had not, unfortunately, been wrong to feel that Leo was hiding something from her. She had just never expected it would be something so horrible and wretched and common. His secret made him a total jerk, but it was terribly average as secrets went. This, Emilie knew, made her a terribly average dolt for not figuring it out on her own.

  At first she did not notice anything out of the ordinary. A few of the female math and science teachers and two teacher’s aides were huddled together by the coffee pot, oohing and ahhing over something. It was not until Emilie reached around them for the creamer that she saw Leo standing in the middle the circle, the object of their sudden devotion.

  He caught her eye and something akin to panic flared on his unusually pale face. Emilie smiled at him, vaguely curious as to how the shy biology teacher had somehow managed to become famous and also pleased that he was wearing his new gray suit — they had gone shopping last weekend, and she had insisted he update his wardrobe of wrinkled shirts and ill-fitting pants. Now he looked more like a grown up.

  “What’s the buzz, girls?” she asked with a smile. “Did Mr. Foster here have a major scientific breakthrough?”

  “Not quite,” giggled Clarissa, one of the aides. “It is so much better than that!”

  “A miracle, I’d say,” Annie, one of the other aides, muttered.

  “Well, it can’t be more important that my morning coffee,” a voice grunted from behind Emilie.

  She turned and smiled to see Rich Patterson practically growling at the simpering women assembled around Leo. Rich was one of the other English teachers on staff and Emilie guessed him to be about seventy years old. He was what some of the other teachers called “curmudgeonly,” but Emilie had always been fond of him.

  “Move aside,” he ordered the flock surrounding the coffee pot. All the other ladies scattered at his grumbling, not wanting to deal with a lecture from the gruff old man, but Emilie gave him an indulgent smile.

  “Now, Rich,” said Emilie, “don’t be rude.” She winked at him as she reached for his cup and moved to fill it up for him. “It seems Leo has been involved in a minor miracle of some sort. I’m waiting with bated breath to hear all about it.” She glanced over to Leo, her eyebrows raised in question.

  Instead of recounting his story, Leo continued to mutely gawk at her as if she had asked him to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory. Emilie looked at the other women, who were staring at Leo with the same expression of confusion that she knew was on her own face.

  The odd moment was broken by another bout of Clarissa’s shrill giggling. “Go on, Leopold! Tell her the news!” Clarissa was practically bouncing off the walls. Emilie momentarily questioned whether the girl needed to be wearing a helmet to protect her tiny head.

  “Well?” Rich snapped his fingers in Leo’s face. “Spit it out, boy, so we can all get on with our lives.”

  All eyes were now on Leo, who still had that look of a cornered doe. Instead of following Rich’s advice and spitting it out, he took a huge gulp of the scalding coffee and started coughing and gasping for breath.

  Clarissa reached behind him and rubbed his back. “You’re such a dope,” said Clarissa with…wait, was that affection?

  Emilie looked between Leo and Clarissa, a feeling of dread beginning to creep up on her.

  “Since Leo’s being so silly.” Clarissa giggled. Again. “The miracle is that we’re getting married! Leo asked me a few weeks ago, but he finally got around to giving me the ring last night. So now it’s official! Isn’t that amazing?”

  Everyone was looking at Emilie. She felt lightheaded and it took her a moment to comprehend that she was supposed to respond. Trying her best to sound normal, she nodded and said, “Wow. That’s really…wow. I’m so… surprised.”

  Everyo
ne laughed, seemingly unaware that Emilie’s brain function had stalled at about the same time Clarissa pulled Leo down for a kiss. At the last second he turned his head so that it landed on his ear.

  Emilie was definitely going to be sick.

  “They surprised everyone,” Annie was saying. “They’ve been dating for how long, ‘Rissa?”

  “Oh, for months now! Since last spring when I finally wore him down and convinced him to go out with me.”

  The girl actually simpered when she spoke. Emilie had never experienced loathing to such an extreme degree before, but she could feel bile rising in her throat every time ‘Rissa opened her mouth. And every time she looked at Leo’s deceitful face.

  Leo continued to stand stock-still, looking at the wall, the floor, the coffee pot, the scuffs on his shoes, refusing to meet Emilie’s eye.

  The roaring in her ears was so loud that it was a few seconds before she realized that Ballerina Barbie was still chirping away. “…I mean we have so much in common! I love NASCAR and football and science and, well, just all of the things he loves! So that’s why we’re so perfect together, you know?”

  “I thought you hated sports and cars, and didn’t you fail science twice in high school?” asked Annie, with a look of disgust that nearly rivaled Emilie’s.

  Clarissa, who normally looked quite sweet with her pale white hair, pale blue eyes, and pale, wholesome, Little Bo Peep expression plastered on a head that was just a shade too large for her fragile, wispy little body, managed to give Annie a look that could have frozen the Mississippi River. “Well,” Clarissa practically hissed, “all that changed when I found Leo. Now, I love whatever he loves.”

  “How wonderful for him.” Rich deliberately yawned to let everyone know how boring he found this topic. “Well, if that’s it, I’ll be getting on with my day. Coming, Emilie?”