Waylaid, Page 3

  And—wow—a pair of startled gray eyes gives her the once-over. “Hi there. I sure hope you're Daphne Shipley, and not a carjacker.”

  “I am,” she says a little breathlessly. Handsome men have always made her a little nervous. “And you’re Richard Ralls?”

  “That’s my dad. I’m Rickie.”

  “Do grown-ups call themselves Rickie?” She meant it to sound flirty, but it comes out sounding a little bitchy. Story of her life. Daphne has never been able to figure out how flirting works.

  “Who says I’m a grown-up?” Then he smiles, which only makes him more dazzling, and her stomach does a strange swooping thing.

  “I can tell you’re eager to get to Vermont,” he says. “But maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to just hop into a car with a stranger? You didn’t even check that it was me. I had my ID all ready to prove it, see?” He holds up a photo ID from the US Tactical Services Academy.

  The photo on the ID is even more handsome, if possible. Because he’s wearing a dress uniform.

  But Daphne isn’t the type of girl who likes people to see her emotions. And she’s really not the type of girl who lets a man tell her she’s done something stupid. “Let’s review,” she says. “Your Vermont license plate and that haircut really cut down the odds that I’ve gotten into the wrong vehicle.”

  Another blinding smile. “I suppose you're right, Daphne. And you're Carla's friend?”

  “Sort of.” Friend was too strong a word. Carla was one of Daphne’s high school classmates—one of the confident girls who’d always made Daphne feel nerdy and awkward in comparison. “Colebury High School is so small that everyone knows everyone.”

  Carla had mentioned once this past summer that she knew a college guy who would also be making a lot of car trips between Connecticut and their part of Vermont. So Daphne had taken down Rickie’s email address, because she’s a practical girl.

  “Carla dated my twin brother for ten minutes or so,” she says. “Everyone does.”

  Rickie chuckles, and the sound bounces around in Daphne’s chest. “I think I'd like your twin brother.”

  Everyone does. She pulls out a twenty-dollar bill and puts it in the cup holder. “This is for gas. Thanks for the ride share.”

  “My pleasure.” He puts the car in gear, and they begin their three-hour journey home. There's some kind of low music thumping through the radio, and it's warm and dry in the car as they slide down the rainy street.

  The college slips away behind them, and Daphne is happy to see it go.

  “So, how do you like Harkness?” Rickie asks. “And what are you studying there?”

  “I’m getting a BS in biology and a master's degree in public health on the fast track program.”

  “Ah, ambitious. Funny that you didn't answer my first question. How do you like it?”

  “It's only been six weeks.”

  “That well?” He chuckles.

  She doesn’t know him well enough to tell him the whole truth. That Harkness College is intimidating. That she's always thought of herself as an intellectual, but now she's worried if she has what it takes. And she definitely doesn’t tell him that she feels like a country bumpkin among the slick rich kids who graduated from prep schools all over the country.

  “I hear it's snobby,” Rickie says, giving her an opening.

  “Well, the first week somebody asked me where I was from, and when I said Vermont, they said, ‘Oh, my buddy summers there.’”

  “Yeah, summer as a verb. That’s a look. Very Hunger Games.”

  Daphne smiles at the reference even though she hated the first book and didn’t finish the series. “All right, so how about you? Do you like the Tactical Services Academy? And what are you studying?”

  “Philosophy and psychology—double major.”

  “I notice you didn't answer the first question.”

  “You are a quick one. But here’s the thing about USTSA. You're not supposed to like it. You're supposed to endure it. It’s also very Hunger Games, but the later books.”

  “And you chose this willingly?”

  His chuckle is dry. “Mostly. It’s free, you know. So the price appealed to me. And I’m used to the military ass-kissing and jargon. My father was a colonel in the Air Force before he retired.”

  “Oh, at the base outside of Burlington?”

  “Sometimes. I was born in Vermont but didn’t grow up here.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Everywhere. Japan. Germany.”

  “Where’d you go to high school?”

  “Choate. Where they use summer as a verb.”

  “Ah.” This unsettles Daphne a little, because she’d assumed he was more of an ally—a Vermonter sneaking home for a weekend in rural Vermont, where everything still made sense. “So how do you know Carla?”

  “I dated her for about ten minutes last summer.”

  Daphne should really have seen that coming. The Carlas and the Dylans and the Rickies of the world are naturally drawn to one another. They all know how to let loose and have fun. Daphne had never quite gotten the knack of it. She’d assumed that once she found her people—the nerds of the world—that it would be easier to make friends.

  Maybe it takes longer than six weeks.

  “Big plans for the weekend?” Rickie asks as they head up highway 91.

  “Not exactly. It’s peak season at our orchard. I’ll probably spend the weekend driving a pony cart around the orchard so that apple-picking families don’t have to walk very far to find the Honey Crisps.”

  “That could be fun?”

  “Sure—if you like whiny kids and horse poop. The pony cart is everyone’s least favorite job, but it’s a crowd pleaser.”

  “Then what’s the best job?”

  “The cider tasting room. Or cashier. I’m good with numbers. I don’t mind making change.”

  He’s quiet for a second. “What’s your other reason?”

  “For what?”

  “For going home on a random November weekend.”

  “Veteran’s Day—we’ve got Monday off. That’s all.”

  “Okay, sure. But when a girl wears makeup on a rainy Saturday morning, it usually means there's a guy.”

  Daphne’s face heats. “Wow, six weeks of psychology classes and you’re already putting everyone on the couch, huh?”

  “Tell me I’m wrong.” He leans back against the headrest and grins.

  “Sorry, Sigmund. There’s no guy.”

  “What? Impossible. Wait—a girl, then? Sorry, I should have been more inclusive.”

  Daphne laughs. “Nope. Maybe I really just like makeup.” She doesn’t. But Rickie doesn’t know that.

  “Nah. There has to be someone. Six weeks into freshman year…” He thinks for a moment. “You're going home to try to keep a guy, or you're going home to try to catch him. It has to be one or the other.”

  Daphne looks out at the wet highway as her heart flutters. The guy in the driver’s seat is really not her type. He’s got a bad boy glint in his eye that she’d usually avoid. But his quick wit is an awfully good time. Sparring with him is fun. “Listen, I think your analysis lacks subtlety.”

  “Tell me where I went wrong,” he insists.

  “There’s this guy—”

  He hoots.

  “Hey! I wasn’t done. There’s this guy who works on our farm. And I spent all of high school thinking I was in love with him.”

  “An older man,” Rickie says with a wink.

  “Exactly. He never looked twice at me. But I didn’t do a very good job of hiding my crush. A few weeks ago I found out that he’s seeing someone. And I had, uh, a bad reaction.”

  “Ouch.” He has the decency to flinch.

  “Yeah. Not my finest hour. It’s worse than that, because in the middle of my tantrum I was horrible to my sister, too. She’s probably never speaking to me again.” For good reason. Daphne is deeply ashamed of what she’d said and done. If she could rewind time and undo the d
amage, she would.

  “So the makeup is like body armor,” he says. “You have to walk back into this mess you’ve made, and you want to look confident.”

  “More or less.”

  “I get it. I’m stopping for gas at the next exit. I’m going to grab a drink. Want anything? Soda? Terrible gas station coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  He pulls into the gas station a few minutes later. Daphne is overly aware of the muscles in his forearm as he pops the parking brake. A hint of a tattoo peeks from beneath the sleeve of his uniform shirt.

  I don’t even like tattoos, Daphne tells herself, even if it’s less true now than it was an hour ago.

  Rickie sets up the pump and then heads into the store. His walk is cocky, and his uniform pants make his backside look muscular.

  Daphne drags her eyes off his butt and sits back in the seat to wait. But now she’s second-guessing the makeup she put on this morning. Is it really so obvious? If Rickie noticed it, maybe her family will, too.

  She reaches down to unzip her duffel, and pulls out her makeup bag, setting it on her lap. Inside, there’s a packet of makeup remover wipes. She uses one of these to dab at her mascara.

  “Hey,” Rickie says a couple minutes later, setting a paper cup into the cupholder. “Don’t do that. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  “It’s not nice to psychoanalyze your new friends,” she grumbles as the mascara comes off.

  “I thought it looked hot,” he says. “I should have led with that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she argues. “It’s out of character for me, anyway.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Rickie reaches into her makeup bag and removes her eyeliner pencil.

  “What are you doing?”

  He uncaps it. Then he grabs the rearview mirror and tilts it toward his face. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping everyone guessing.”

  Daphne watches, open mouthed, while Rickie begins to do a surprisingly good job of lining his right eye.

  “Don’t give them that kind of power,” he says, switching to his left eye. “If you’re someone who wears makeup today, then that’s who you are.” He caps the liner, returns the mirror to its former position, and then turns to look at Daphne.

  Her heart stutters as she gets a full-on view of those fiercely bright gray eyes, enlarged and accentuated by the tease of black liner. He looks twice as dangerous as he did before. “You are not what I expected,” she stammers.

  “Good,” he whispers. Then he hands her the liner pencil and gets out of the car to put the gas cap back on.

  A moment later they’re on the road again. Daphne had expected him to wipe the liner off. But he doesn’t bother. As they cruise up 91, he sticks an actual cassette tape into the dashboard stereo, and then sings along to Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You.”

  The song seems fitting enough, so Daphne joins in.

  Four

  Rickie

  The first restaurant on our list is a steak place outside of Burlington. And when I pull up behind the building, Daphne refuses to let me carry the crate of alcohol into the restaurant. She insists on doing it herself.

  She’s in a mood today. I think she’d expected to spend the day alone. And she doesn’t trust me. She can’t believe I don’t remember meeting her that first time.

  Girl, same, I think as I watch her disappear into the back door of the restaurant. My life has been a crazy ride since those days I spent in Connecticut. I don’t tell the people in my life the whole story, because I’m sick of being that guy who lost six months of his memories.

  Honestly, it’s easier to be a rude asshole than a freak.

  Something tells me I’m not the real root of Daphne’s unhappiness, either. Something else is bothering her, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with me.

  I have a few ideas for cheering her up, if only she was open to it.

  Daphne reappears just as I’m having this thought. She’s wearing a serious frown that doesn’t invite discussion. And I know how to read the room, so I stick to the business at hand. The moment she returns to the truck, I point us downtown.

  Our second and final delivery is to a wine bar. Vino and Veritas is on Church Street, where cars aren’t allowed to go. But there’s an alleyway behind it that makes the drop-off easy enough. Daphne disappears again into the back door of the place and reemerges a minute later.

  “Why are we delivering this stuff by hand?” I ask as I carefully back out of the alley. “Griffin has a distributor for his cider, no?”

  “The applejack is a beta product,” she says. “He can’t make enough of it to meet the distributor’s minimum.”

  “Oh. Your brother is a fun guy. He’s a tinkerer, right? Always experimenting with the chemistry behind various alcoholic beverages. What’s cooler than that?”

  “So cool,” she mutters. “Can you drop me at the social sciences complex? I don’t want to be late for my first day.”

  “Sure, gorgeous. No problem.”

  I do even better. A few minutes later I pull up right in front of the School of Public Health. “I’m parking in that lot,” I say, pointing at the garage on the next block. “When do you want to meet me back there?”

  “Um, is five o’clock too late?” She glances nervously at the building.

  “No, that’s fine. I have errands. And I’ll kill some time in the coffee shop.”

  “Uh, thanks.” She swallows hard, and I realize that even Daphne Shipley is capable of first-day jitters. Who knew? She shoulders her backpack and gets out of the truck.

  I roll down the window. “Hey, Daphne?”

  She turns back, a tiny crease of irritation on her forehead. “What?”

  “You’re a badass.”

  “What?” She blinks.

  “A total rock star. Now go on. Be early. Impress the world of public health. You know you want to.”

  “Thanks.” She gives me a smile so small that you’d practically need an electron microscope to find it. And then she strides off, long legs like honey in the sunshine, and disappears into the glass doors of the building.

  And I just sit here like a bonehead, wishing I could have gotten a kiss goodbye.

  The class I’m taking this summer is Ancient Philosophy, and the first lecture is a lot of fun.

  After my injury, I lost two semesters of school. It took me a year to reboot my life, enroll at Moo U, and settle into Burlington. So even though I’m twenty-two, I’m not yet close to graduating.

  But school has always appealed to me. And ninety minutes in a lecture hall listening to the professor explain Sophocles is entertaining.

  Afterward, I spend some time in the bookstore before heading to the coffee shop like I said I would do. But only for a little while. I have another appointment in Burlington that I neglected to mention to Daphne.

  It’s time to visit my shrink.

  Lenore is a young postdoc in clinical psychology—which is precisely what I hope to be in a few years. Sessions with her are useful in more ways than one. Not only is Lenore helping me with my issues—and there are quite a few of those—I learn things from her as well. She’s smart and she speaks to me like a future colleague as well as a patient.

  “My God, you’re so tan!” she shrieks as I walk into her office. “And so healthy I hardly recognize you.”

  “So you’re saying I was pale and ghostly before?” I plop myself down in my chair.

  “Oh, please. You’re very prompt today, Rickie. I think you missed me.”

  “For sure. Nobody has asked me any prying questions in a month.”

  “Well let’s fix that. How’ve you been? Tell me everything. Are you milking cows?”

  “I mostly shovel their shit. But it’s still a good time.” I tell her all about the Shipley farm, and my aching muscles, and yesterday’s bear sighting.

  “Something tells me this bear gets more ferocious every time you tell that story,” she says, playing with the pendant she�
�s wearing around her neck.

  “Are you calling me a liar? Is that good patient interaction?”

  “Not a liar,” she says with an eye roll. “An embellisher.”

  “Fine. Sure. I cheated death, but you think I’m embellishing it. I see how it is.”

  She gives me an indulgent smile. “You seem content, Rick. And it looks good on you.”

  “Thanks,” I say softly. And I guess she’s right. These last three years have been hell. Contentment is something I thought I might never find.

  “Have you seen your parents?” Lenore asks suddenly.

  “Nope.” I feel a stab of guilt over this. They live maybe forty minutes from where I’m staying. But things are so strained between us that I don’t make visiting a priority.

  “Could you have lived at home this summer?” she asks, holding me to this uncomfortable subject.

  “I guess. Yeah. I would have had to find a summer job, though. At the Shipleys, the job is built in. Plus, the Shipleys aren’t disappointed in me for bombing out of the Academy, and then taking a settlement.”

  She doesn’t weigh in, yet. She waits me out, like a smart shrink would do.

  “I suppose I should go visit them, just so this shit doesn’t fester, right?”

  “That depends,” she says quietly. “There are parents who absolutely deserve to be cut out of one’s life. There are toxic people in the world, and you don’t owe toxic people anything. But if you think your relationship will matter to you in the future, then maybe it’s time to find some common ground.”

  Outwardly I’m as calm as ever. But I’ve only been in Lenore’s office for three minutes and she’s already found a sore spot and pressed it. I used to have a great relationship with my parents. I’m their only kid, and we spent my childhood traveling the world together. We were tight.

  Then I went off to my father’s alma mater, the US Tactical Services Academy. I wasn’t that excited about choosing it over Middlebury, where I’d also been accepted. I wasn’t a military kind of guy, like my dad. But a few things weighed in its favor. One, the price tag. It’s free. I could’ve graduated with no loans at all.