The Sweetness of Honey (A Hope Springs Novel) (17 page)

Indiana waited for him to open first the car door, then the one to the bakery. The smells of sugar and vanilla assaulted him, but he wasn’t about to complain. Not with the look of euphoria lighting Indiana’s face. Her eyes, as much gray as they were blue, sparkled as if reflecting a flute of champagne. And her smile, her lips colored a deep rose for the occasion, was just as bright.

“Do you smell that?” she asked, walking the length of the long glass display case holding thick slices of cake, tiny single-serve pies, cupcakes, cookies, macarons, and a refrigerated section with a dozen iterations of cheesecake.

Honestly. He didn’t think he’d ever seen so many.

He gestured toward a small bistro table with two chairs he thought might collapse beneath their weight. “What do you want?”

“One of everything,” she said, twirling to sit, her skirt a froth of lace that brushed her knees in a way that was more provocative than the bumblebee outfit she’d worn at Halloween, the figure-hugging dress she’d worn to his father’s show, the skirt he’d lifted to her waist in his car at Thanksgiving. The cowboy boots and sundresses that drove him crazy.

He shook his head and left her there while he went to order, cruising the cases as he might wine bottles at an auction. Since one of everything was out of the question—their table wouldn’t hold but six plates—he chose the desserts by flavor, and had to make two trips to deliver all the goods.

“This will have to do,” he said, coming back a third time with two lattes, crossing his legs and drinking his while Indiana wielded her fork, slicing into one dessert, then another, pulling the fork from her mouth slowly, licking at the tines.

“Mmm. I would say this is better than sex, but it’s probably safer if I say this is just what I needed. Thanks.”

That had him wanting to cringe. “I’d rather you not use our . . . encounters as any sort of sexual benchmark. I wasn’t at my best on either occasion.”

She took her time cleaning the back of the fork, her eyes cast down, color rising to stain her cheeks. Then she reached for the single salted-caramel macaron sitting alone in the center of a very small plate. “I was wondering if we were ever going to talk about it. The sex.”

“We talked about it. The day you came to the arts center. And the day you found me painting your bees.”

“And if that isn’t some kind of double entendre . . .”

“Indiana—”

Her eyes snapped when she looked up at him. “No, Oliver. I’m a grown woman. I enjoyed being with you. But I’m not using what happened as anything but what it was. Sex that we both, I hope, enjoyed.”

“Thanksgiving. In the car. I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t actually thinking at all. I was more”—his gut clenched as he formed the words—“forceful than I would’ve been otherwise. I need to apologize for that.”

“That wasn’t force,” she said, cutting a bite from a slice of white cake iced with lemon buttercream and filled with lemon curd. When he opened his mouth to respond, she stuck the fork inside before he could get out a word. Or tell her he didn’t like lemon. “That was force.”

He chewed and swallowed, finished off his latte, then said, “I just wanted to be sure that night wasn’t an issue.”

She went back to grazing with the same fork she’d fed him from. It was strangely intimate, though why he thought so when they’d been nearly naked—

“The only issue we have is your hair,” she said into his musings.

“What do you mean?”

She gave him a look, and he reached up, running the fingers of one hand along the side of his head, frowning when he hit a tangle. Had he even brushed it today? “I guess I need a haircut.”

“And maybe a shave?”

This time he did a better job hiding his surprise, though he did rub at his jaw several times. Wow, but he was some kind of mess. “I’ve been busy.”

Her gaze fell to the placket of the wrinkled shirt he wore beneath his suit coat, and she nodded toward it. “You’re missing a button.”

He pulled the coat front closed, only to realize it wanted to swallow him. “And?”

“And you’ve got paint on your hands.”

Enough. “What’s with the third degree?”

She shrugged, ate one more bite of the three-chocolate layered cheesecake. “Talking about the way you’ve let yourself go is easier than talking about sex.”

“Let myself go?” Was that what she’d thought he’d done, when the truth was he’d lost himself so completely in his painting that rarely did he remember to eat.

“I suppose it’s an artist thing. Never shaving, rarely bathing, only wearing pants when company comes by.”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“Like I said. It’s easier than talking about sex.” She stabbed what was left of the key lime pie with her fork. It stood upright as she blotted her mouth with her napkin. “I should put in an appearance at the reception, I guess.”

He supposed that was the signal that she was done. With the cakes. Possibly with him. He fought against the fist squeezing his throat and said, “I’ll drive you.”

“And you’ll put in an appearance, too?”

He shook his head. “I think I’m close to overdosing on sweetness.”

She got to her feet with a look that said
Your loss
, and if she’d said it aloud, he wouldn’t have been able to argue. He wasn’t able to do so convincingly, even in his own mind, because there seemed to be a knife in his gut, slicing open a big gaping hole.

They made the ride to the warehouse district listening to Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward singing Christmas classics, but the trip was short, leaving little time to defuse the tension that had followed them from the bakery into the car. He hated this.
Hated
it. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, or leave things between them so unsettled. But neither one of them was in a position for the sex to lead to anything more.

Or maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe what they needed was time together and sex done right. Maybe what each of them needed was someone to lean on, someone who understood how long it took and how hard it was to come back from the losses that had flattened them.

He wasn’t the only member of his family to have had Oscar ripped away, yet not once in the last ten years, even before Oscar’s death, had either of his parents hinted at an awareness of the chasm left in his life. Indiana shared her worry over her absent brother with Tennessee, but she was the one so torn apart that she’d hired an investigator to find him.

Was he missing something here? Had his inability to get past Oscar’s suffering retarded the rest of his emotions, too? No doubt this was where friends—if he had close ones—would tell him to work out this uncertainty with a therapist’s help. Maybe a decade ago doing so would’ve made a difference. These days, he called it a good one when he got out of bed on the first try, and that was something he would never want Indiana to see.

Guiding his car to the curb in front of the warehouse housing Luna’s loft, he braked to a stop and shifted into park, but he left the motor running. Indiana dropped her gaze from the street in front of them to her lap, tendrils of her upswept hair curling against her nape, others cupping her ear. Which reminded him . . .

“Here,” he said, reaching into the backseat and handing her an eight-inch square box wrapped festively in paper with glittery snowflakes, and a bow of sheer ribbon that glittered, too. Such forced gaiety. Such manufactured merriment.

She took the package from his hand and smiled when she looked over. “You could come in. Give this to Kaylie and Tennessee yourself.”

Of course she’d think that, he realized, shaking his head. “That’s not a wedding gift. That’s for you.”

“Me,” she said, and when she looked over this time she was frowning. “Why?”

He shrugged, not wanting to make more of the gesture than the gesture itself. “It’s Christmas.”

As if needing to let the words sink in, she stared down at the box she held, slipping one finger through the bow and back out. “I didn’t get you anything. And you paid for all the desserts.”

“Just open it,” he said. He didn’t want some kind of quid pro quo relationship with this woman. He liked her too much for this to be a game of one-upmanship. He liked her a lot. He was scared by how much he liked her. The ways he liked her.

And that was why he couldn’t let the day go without telling her how much, even if he couldn’t put it into words and had to let the gift speak instead.

“Oh, Oliver,” she said, as she broke the boutique’s red seal and pulled back the green tissue paper to reveal the scarf inside. “This is one of Luna’s. A Patchwork Moon original.” She lifted the corner with the tiny moon label, rubbed first it, then the woven fabric between her forefinger and thumb. “It’s gorgeous, and it’s so,
so
soft, and the colors are so perfectly me. But then you knew that, didn’t you? You painted my bees with almost the same ones.”

He’d hoped she’d like the many shades of yellow, with the one of orange, and the interspersed bits of knotted black. “I didn’t know if you had one.”

“I don’t. I’ve wanted one forever, even before I got to know her, but wow.” She brought it close to her face, as if wanting to nuzzle against it, but she didn’t, closing her eyes instead and returning it to the box. “I know how much this cost. I can’t accept this.”

“Of course you can. I don’t look good in yellow, and my mother doesn’t wear anything but Chanel.” He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, reaching over to pull the scarf from the box by one end.

She took it from his hand, lifting it to the car’s roof, with still more to come from the box. “This is gorgeous,” she said, and he said, “Here,” reaching for the center and using it to measure the loops he made around her neck. When he was done, the ends hung artfully on either side of the draped cowl, just as Luna had shown him they would.

“It’s perfect,” she said, laughing, a giddy, joyous sound that almost made him believe in holiday magic. “But I don’t think it goes with this dress.”

“It goes with you,” he said, because that was all that mattered. It was the reason he’d commissioned the scarf. The reason he’d been so anxious to see the look in her eyes when she put it on. She was right. It was perfect.

She snuggled her face into the fabric bunched closest to her face. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another few seconds ticked by, and she asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to come up? I mean, aren’t you staying here?”

He was, but he refused to be a damper on a party that meant so much to her. “I need to go see my folks. Stay with them a couple of days. Check on my dog.”

“Susan.”

“Susan,” he said, the car still running, Indiana making no move to leave. “Do you want me to take you back to the church for your car? Or to the cottage? Or to Buda?”

She shook her head, though he knew she’d weighed each option as she did. “I’m staying at Kaylie’s house this week while she and Tennessee are gone. It’s just me and Magoo.”

“The café is closed?”

“Till after New Year’s, yes.”

“Would you rather I take you there?”

“I’d rather you come into the reception,” she said, the honest longing in her voice nearly gutting him. “Just for a little while.”

“Indiana—”

She held up a hand, silencing him as she pulled in a breath that had even her fingers trembling. “This has been the strangest Christmas I can ever remember.”

He didn’t want to leave her like this, breaking, sad. “Listen—”

“No,” she said, adding, “I can’t,” then pushing out of the car before he could walk around and help her. “Thanks for the cake. And for the scarf.” Then she slammed the door and whirled away, hurrying inside the building.

He sat there idling for a very long time after she was gone, wondering if his car would always smell like cake and sex and turned earth, and if he’d ever get over Indiana.

INDIANA

Robby Hunt was a man in training wheels, slightly built with what could only be called a pretty face. He was nonthreatening and safe. He was the feminine familiar, not the overtly masculine unknown. I wasn’t the only girl who thought him the most gorgeous boy in school, on a physical dreamboat par with Justin Timberlake. I imagine he shaved, but doubt he really needed to until he was twenty. If then.

Other girls, girls like Shelley James and Thea Clark, preferred man-boys, boys like Tennessee and Dakota, who matured early. My brothers were the jocks with the wide shoulders. Their letter jackets swallowed the girls who wore them. I think Robby and I probably wore the same size. Though he went to school with my brothers, and hung out with my brothers, I thought of him as another one of my friends. My girlfriends.

So it didn’t make a lot of sense that he was the boy I decided to use for practice.

Watching Thea with Dakota had given me all sorts of ideas. My head was full of them, but they were fantasies. They were pretend. They were no more real than the illustrations in
The Joy of Sex
I’d seen when Shelley had smuggled her parents’ copy of the book to school. And the brief gli
mpse of a porn movie I caught once through Tennessee’s not-quite-closed bedroom door was just as illusory.

I’d learned as much about the birds and the bees from health class as I had from my mother. She was good enough to buy me tampons, with biodegradable applicators, of course, but orgasms were something I discovered for myself. I knew what went where, though had no clue as to sizes and shapes, or how something so supposedly hard could possibly be a comfortable fit for either party.

Rather than ask—my mother or my health teacher or my school nurse or my friends who’d done away with their virginity as soon as they could—I decided a hands-on lesson would be best. And since Robby was nonthreatening and safe, and a boy instead of a man, I chose him, as I would any girlfriend, to show me a new skill. Or maybe I should’ve thought of him as my tutor, though that would imply he knew what he was doing.

He had no more experience than I did. This I discovered the night I intercepted him outside near our garage door. I’d heard Dakota on the phone. I knew Robby was coming over for pizza and video games. Tennessee worked two nights a week making deliveries, and would drop off orders gone wrong. This subterfuge was all done behind our parents’ backs; we’d already been served plates of sprouts or something.

I was supposedly waiting for the pizza that night, but
pizza
was my safe word; its arrival would guarantee my assignation with Robby didn’t get out of hand. Of course, Robby had no idea we were assignating (yeah, not a real word, I know) when he arrived to find me leaning against the corner of the garage, my hands behind me and my shoulders back to emphasize my perky assets, my T-shirt riding just above the waist of my denim shorts.

It took him a minute to get out of his car, though after seeing me there, he did cut his headlights. I was breathing so hard I just knew he’d be able to tell. When he finally opened his door, my mouth was so dry I doubted I’d be able to say anything. And I’d been standing in the same position so long, my muscles were aching.

“What’re you doing out here?” he asked, and I was glad I had a ready answer.

“Waiting for Tennessee and the pizza.”

He let that settle, then said, “Thought that was Dakota’s job.”

“Usually.” I propped the sole of one sneaker against the garage wall, and sorta swung my knee side to side. “He was finishing his Spanish homework. I told him I’d wait.”

“Huh.” Robby came closer then, walking slowly, his hands in the pockets of the jacket he wore. “Aren’t you cold? Wearing shorts?”

They showed off my legs and that was the point. “I wasn’t cold inside. But, yeah. I would’ve changed if I’d known it was going to take him so long to get here.”

He’d just about reached me, and my heart was beating pretty fast, and whether it was nerves or cold, I didn’t know, but I watched his gaze fall to my chest. I wasn’t wearing a bra, and my nipples were hard, and honestly, I’d had no idea the difference it would make when it was a boy responsible for all these things happening in my body rather than me doing it to myself.

He raised one arm and braced it on the wall above my head; then he stepped so that one of his legs was between mine, and likewise. As friends, we’d never been this close, or close in this way. We’d sat next to each other on the couch watching TV, and I’d reached across him to grab more popcorn from Tennessee’s bowl, resulting in “accidental” contact.

This wasn’t accidental at all. He’d gotten my message, even if I wasn’t fully aware of sending it, or what it was. The dark night, the clothes, and the pose . . . They all seemed like something Thea Clark would do, and wasn’t that my goal? To be like Thea? To be less self-conscious, more self-confident? To go after what I wanted? To be noticed instead of invisible?

I can see all of that now, of course. How needy I was for attention. How desperate to feel something, anything, instead of being shunted aside for one cause or another because I had everything a girl my age could ask for, didn’t I? A bed to sleep in, food to eat, clothes to wear, dogs and cats and friends? And yet the one thing missing from that list was the one thing I wanted most. The one thing I didn’t know how to ask for: to be loved.

Robby made me feel all manner of things that night with the way he looked at me, the way he kissed me, his lips along my jaw, my neck, his palms beneath my breasts as he thumbed my nipples through my shirt. I was breathless and weightless and filled with a longing that had me wanting to burst out of my skin. Alive, that’s what I felt. I existed for someone. I mattered, and I had this amazing power, and I finally understood why boys went for girls like Shelley James and Thea Clark. And why Shelley and Thea did the things they did.

Only then it got scary. Robby pulled me around the side of the garage, and his zipper came down, then his pants. I couldn’t see him because I’d squeezed my eyes tight, but I felt him against my hip, tubular and hard.

“All ya gotta do is slip one leg outta your shorts, hook it around my waist, and we’ll go to heaven.”

He’d really said that about heaven.

I shook my head, but he’d lifted my shirt and his mouth was there, his tongue. All sorts of shivery things were getting tangled up in my stomach, and then he made it worse—or was it better?—by slipping his hand into my panties. He played with me, touching me, still pushing himself against me. Strange sounds rumbled out of his mouth and against my skin. I came very close to throwing up.

Just then, Tennessee pulled into the driveway behind Robby’s car, and flashed his brights as always. And though we were blocked by a hedge, Robby wasn’t having any of my jumping away. He moved slowly, pulling his hand from my shorts, his mouth from beneath my shirt, moving his leg from between mine but only after pushing his knee hard up against my spread thighs until I groaned from how good it felt to have him there.

And then Tennessee honked. “I need to get the pizza.”

“We’ll finish this later.”

But we didn’t. Not that night. Dakota had heard Tennessee honk, and he reached the car before I did. For the rest of that night, Robby and I had a chaperone, though he made certain I sat beside him when we crowded onto the couch. Made certain, too, that his hand was on the cushion beneath my very short shorts.

I could barely swallow the pizza I managed to chew. I had no idea what movie we watched in that room lit only by the TV. For two hours I knew nothing but Robby’s fingers, and the growing dampness in my panties, and the fear of Dakota realizing why his sister and his friend were sitting so close.

I’d been wrong. So very wrong. Robby Hunt was very threatening. He was not safe at all.

And I loved it.