In me?
Oh, yeah. Did you not pick up on the way he was staring at you? Those were some mutual stares, by the way, don’t try to hide it. I know chemistry when I see it.
And Leah knew it too, and had been feeling it…but it was one thing to share long looks, and wonder, and dance around, never really touching on what was happening. It was quite another to be asked out to dinner twenty feet away from her parents.
She’d panicked. Not in a stuttering, blushing, make-a-fool-of-herself way. A more controlled panic. She’d thought about Jason, about his assertions that they’d drifted apart, and that he needed to undergo some self-exploration. Thought about Carter’s nose dripping blood down onto his shirt in Maggie’s office, and Tenny’s sneer, and Maggie’s clucking. A guy didn’t go from fucking everything in sight to wanting to try a real, grown-up relationship in the span of a few weeks. That only happened in novels.
But the longer she sat there, staring at her long-cold bagel, the more she could acknowledge that she’d freaked out, plain and simple. And that, in the midst of it, despite knowing that her arguments had been good, she’d definitely insulted Carter, and probably hurt him, too. She’d seen the evidence of his unhappiness up close and personal, and then watched, over the past few weeks, as he began slowly to blossom again.
She’d handled it horribly, and there was no undoing it. She wanted to smack herself.
She sat, silently beating herself up for who knew how long; but when a fresh, steaming latte landed on the table in front of her, she glanced up to see that all but one lone patron had left, the closed sign had been turned in the window, and her mom was sitting down across from her and unlacing her apron. All her earlier exuberance had been replaced by a deep, motherly concern.
“What happened, sweetie?” she asked, softly.
Leah darted a glance to the counter, but her dad had gone in the back. Dustin was sweeping up beneath the machines.
“Carter left in an awful big hurry,” Marie pressed. “And you look miserable.”
Leah sighed and reached gratefully for the hot latte. “I’m an idiot.”
“Definitely not.”
“Carter asked me out.”
Marie’s brows went up. “Like on a date?”
“Like on a date.”
“And you said…”
“That I didn’t think he really wanted to go out with me. That his love life is so screwed up, and he’s depressed, and he was looking for a safe option.”
“Oh.” Marie’s eyes widened. “Well, that’s…”
“Bad, I know.”
“Terrible, I was going to go with terrible.”
Leah groaned and dropped her face into her hands. “You should have seen his face, Mom.”
“I kinda did. He looked really upset.”
He’d looked devastated. And wounded. It had been a big leap, asking her outright like that. No ambiguoushanging outorhooking up. A date. He’d said dinner, and that he would pay for it. It had been comically juvenile, and terribly grown-up and endearing all at once.
She lifted her head and propped her chin in her hands. “What am I gonna do?”
Marie nodded, expression becoming businesslike. She was a problem-solver, Leah’s mom, especially when it came to other people’s problems. “Apologize, for starters.”
“Obviously.”
“I can’t tell you how to do that. You’ll come up with the right words, you always do.”
“I didn’t have the right words tonight.”
Marie tilted her head, conceding the point. “No. But I think maybe you were caught off guard.”
Leah nodded. “There had been – some, I don’t know, tension, I guess. Some looks. But I really wasn’t expecting him to ask me out.”
