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I shrug. “I wish I knew.” Sigh. “Perky thinks it’s because I won’t make myself smaller.”
Appreciative eyes look at my body. “You don’t need to be smaller. You’re… great.”
Did Will Lotham just size me up?
“No, no, not this,” I say, patting my hips. “Not my body. I mean me. My mind. My way of talking.”
“Way of talking?”
“I don’t… hide it.”
“Hide what?”
“The fact that I’m smart.” There. I said it.
“Why would you hide the fact that you’re smart from a guy?”
Laughter, fourteen years of it, all bottled up and fizzy, comes shooting out of me like I’m Diet Coke and his words are Mentos.
“Are you kidding me? You of all people are asking me why I would need to play dumb?”
“What makes me so special?”
Talk about a loaded question.
Nodding toward the door, he motions for me to follow him. We walk down the hallway and into the kitchen, where he grabs something to drink from the mostly empty fridge.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean? You just said you in a way that was loaded with some hidden meaning.” Opening a soda, he raises his eyebrows, then flinches. “Want a drink?”
“No, thank you,” I choke out.
We move over to the breakfast area and sit at the antique pedestal table, beautifully scarred from generations of use. I think briefly about all the important conversations that must have taken place around it, before this one.
He really doesn’t know. Really, really doesn’t know. I knew I was shy. I knew I was also careful. But to sit here ten years after graduation and realize I spent four years of my emerging adulthood hiding my feelings about this guy and being extremely successful at it makes a part of me feel so stupid.
Mostly the teenage part.
A mature, worldly woman would admit it. Make it a joke. Turn the past into a whimsical ha ha, a shared laugh that would display how far she’d come since high school graduation. A mature, worldly woman would invite Will out for drinks, talk over martinis, and wax nostalgic about those carefree years.
I, unfortunately, am neither mature nor worldly.
“I just mean, you know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Remember ninth grade? When we had to debate in English class?”
“You mean the debate about animal rights in laboratory research to cure cancer?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“You said, in front of the entire class, that I couldn’t possibly make a reasoned argument because I was emotionally attached to the animals.”
“You were!”
