I thought about how much I hadn’t told him. I mean, about Craig and Neil Jankow, not to mention Paul and Dr. Slaski and the shifters.
I should have told him about Paul. At the very least, I should have told him his whole fresh-start theory. Then again, maybe not. Paul was definitely up to no good, as my aching feet could attest.
But I was, I’ll admit, a little bit peeved with Father Dominic. You would have thought he’d have shown me a little bit more compassion. I mean, he’d basically just broken my heart. Worse, he’d done it on Jesse’s order. Jesse didn’t even have the guts to tell me to my face that he didn’t love me. No, he had to make his “confessor” do it. Nice one. Really made me sorry I’d missed out on life in the 1850s. Must have been sweet—everyone going around, making priests do their dirty work.
I couldn’t, of course, run along, as Father Dom had suggested. I couldn’t technically run anywhere. But I hobbled out of his office, feeling extremely sorry for myself. I was still crying—enough so that when Father D.’s secretary saw me, she went, with motherly concern, “Oh, hon. You all right? Here, have a tissue,” which was a lot more comforting than anything Father D. had done for me in the past half hour.
I took the tissue and blew my nose, then took a few more for the road. I had a feeling I was going to be bawling my eyes out until at least third period.
Stepping out into the breezeway along the courtyard, I tried to get a hold of myself. Okay. So the guy didn’t like me. Lots of guys hadn’t liked me in the past, and I’d never lost it like this. And, okay, this was Jesse, the person I loved best in all the world. But, hey, if he didn’t want me back, that was just fine. You know what it was? Yeah, it was his loss, that’s what it was.
So why couldn’t I stop crying?
What was I going to do without him? I mean, I had totally gotten used to having Jesse around all the time. And what about his cat? Was Spike going to go live at the rectory, too? I guess he would have to. I mean, that ugly cat loved Jesse as much as I did. Lucky cat, getting to go live with Jesse.
I wandered along the length of the breezeway, looking out at the sun-soaked courtyard without really seeing it. Maybe, I thought, Father D. was right. Maybe it was better this way. I mean, let’s say, just for a minute, that Jesse liked me back. Better than liked me. Loved me, even. Where was it going to go? It was like Paul had said. What were we going to do? Date? Go to the movies together? I would have to pay, and it would just be for one ticket. And if anyone saw me, to all appearances sitting by myself, I would look like the biggest dork in the world. How lame.
What I needed, I realized, was a real boyfriend. Not just a guy people besides me could see, either, but a guy I liked, who actually liked me back. That was what I needed. That was exactly what I needed.
Because when Jesse found out about it, it might make him realize what a colossal mistake he had just made.
It’s kind of funny that as I was thinking this, Paul Slater suddenly leaped out at me from behind a column, and went, “Hey.”
chapter
fourteen
“Go away,” I said.
Because the truth was, I was still sort of crying, and Paul Slater was just about the last person in the world I wanted to see me doing so. I was totally hoping he wouldn’t notice.
No such luck. Paul went, “What’s with the waterworks?”
“Nothing,” I said, wiping my eyes with my jacket sleeve. I’d used up all the tissues Father Dom’s secretary had given me. “Just allergies.”
Paul reached out and jerked my hand away. “Here, use this.”
And he passed me, of all things, a white handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket.
Funny how, with everything else that was going on, all I could focus on was that white square of material. “You carry a handkerchief ?” I asked in a voice that cracked.
Paul shrugged. “You never know when you might need to gag someone.”
This was so not the answer I expected that I couldn’t help laughing a little. I mean, Paul creeped me out a little…okay, a lot. But he could still be funny sometimes.
I mopped up my tears with the handkerchief, more conscious than I wanted to be of the proximity of its owner. Paul was looking particularly delectable that morning in a charcoal cashmere sweater and a chocolate-brown leather coat. I couldn’t help looking at his mouth and remembering how it felt on mine. Which was good. More than good.
Then my gaze drifted toward his eye, the one I’d jabbed. No mark. The guy didn’t bruise easily.
I wished the same could be said of me. Or of my heart, anyway.
I don’t know if Paul noticed the direction of my gaze—I suppose it had been pretty obvious I’d been staring at his mouth. But all of a sudden, he lifted his arms and placed both hands against the three-foot-wide column I’d been leaning against—one of the columns that hold the roof of the breezeway up—sort of pinioning me in between them.
“So, Suze,” he said in a friendly way. “What did Father Dominic want to see you about?”
Even though I was definitely in the market for a boyfriend, I wasn’t so sure Paul was the guy for me. I mean, yeah, he was hot and all, and there was the whole mediator thing.
But there was also that whole thing where he’d tried to kill me. It’s kind of hard just to let something like that go.
So I was sort of torn as I stood there, imprisoned between his arms. On the one hand, I wouldn’t have minded reaching up and dragging his head down and laying a big fat one on his mouth.
On the other hand, giving him a good swift kick in the groin seemed equally appealing, given what he’d put me through the other day, what with the hot pavement and the Hell’s Angel and all.
I didn’t end up doing either. I just stood there, my heart beating kind of hard inside my chest. This was, after all, the guy about whom I’d been having nightmares for the past few weeks. That kind of thing doesn’t go away just because the guy put his tongue in your mouth and you sort of liked it.
“Don’t worry,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound at all like my own, it was so hoarse from all the crying. I cleared my throat, then said, “I didn’t tell Father Dom anything about you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Paul visibly relaxed as my words soaked in. He even lifted one of his hands away from the wall and fingered a coil of my hair that had been curled against my shoulder.
“I like your hair better down,” he said approvingly. “You should always wear it down.”
I rolled my eyes in order to hide the fact that my heart rate, when he touched me, sped up considerably, and I started to duck beneath the one arm he still had caging me in.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, moving to corner me once more, this time by taking a step closer, so that our faces were only about three inches apart. His breath, I was close enough to note, still smelled of whatever toothpaste he’d used that morning.
Jesse’s breath never smells like anything, because, of course, he’s not alive.
“Paul,” I said in what I hoped was an even, completely toneless voice. “Really. Not here, okay?”
“Fine.” He didn’t move away, though. “Where, then?”
“Oh, God, Paul.” I lifted a hand to my forehead. It felt hot. But I knew I didn’t have a fever. Why was I so hot? It was cool in the breezeway. Was it Paul? Was it Paul who was making me feel this way? “I don’t know, okay? Look, I have…I have a lot of stuff I have to figure out right now. Could you just…could you just leave me alone for a while, so I can think?”
“Sure,” he said. “Did you get the flowers?”
“I got the flowers,” I said. Whatever it was that was making me feel so feverish also forced me to add, even though I didn’t want to, since all I wanted to do was run away and hide in the girls’ room until it was time for classes to change, “But if you think I’m going to forget about what you did to me, just because you sent me a bunch of dumb flowers—”
“I said I was sorry, Suze,”
Paul said. “And I’m more sorry about your feet than I can say. You should have let me drive you home. I wouldn’t have tried anything, I swear.”
“Oh, yeah?” I looked up at him. He was a head taller than me, but his lips were still only inches from mine. I could meet them with my own without much of a problem. Not that I was going to. I didn’t think. “What do you call what you’re doing now?”
“Suze,” he said, playing with my hair again. His breath tickled my cheek. “How else am I going to get you to talk to me? You’ve got this totally mistaken impression of me. You think I’m some kind of bad guy. And I’m not. I’m really not. I’m…well, I’m a lot like you, actually.”
“Somehow, I seriously doubt that,” I said. His proximity was making it difficult to talk. And not because he was scaring me. He still scared me, but in a different way now.
“It’s true,” he said. “I mean, we actually have a lot in common. Not just the mediator thing, either. I think our philosophy of life is the same. Well, except for the whole part where you want to help people. But that’s just guilt. In every other way, you and I are identical. I mean, we’re both cynical and mistrustful of others. Almost to the point of being misanthropic, I would go so far to say. We’re old souls, Suze. We’ve both been around the block before. Nothing surprises us, and nothing impresses us. At least—” his ice-blue gaze bore into mine “—nothing until now. In my case, anyway.”
“That may very well be, Paul,” I said, as patronizingly as I was able—which wasn’t very, I’m afraid, because his closeness was making it very difficult to breathe. “The only problem is, the person I mistrust most in the world? That’d be you.”
“I don’t know why,” Paul said. “When we’re clearly meant for each other. I mean, just because you met Jesse first—”
“Don’t.” The word burst from me like an explosion. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand hearing his name…not from those lips. “Paul, I’m warning you—”
Paul laid a single finger over my mouth.
“Shhh,” he said. “Don’t say things you’ll only regret later.”
“I am not going to regret saying this,” I said, my lips moving against his finger. “You—”
“You don’t mean it,” Paul said confidently, sliding his finger from my mouth, over the curve of my chin, and down the side of my neck. “You’re just scared. Scared to admit your true feelings. Scared to admit that I might know a few things you and wise old Gandalf, aka Father Dominic, might not. Scared to admit I might be right, and that you aren’t as completely committed to your precious Jesse as you’d like to think. Come on, ’fess up. You felt something when I kissed you the other day. Don’t deny it.”
Felt something the other day? I was feeling something now, and all he was doing was running the tip of his finger down my neck. It wasn’t right that this guy I hated—and I did hate him, I did—could make me feel this way…
…while the guy I loved could make me feel like such absolute—
Paul was leaning so close to me now, his chest brushed the front of my sweater.
“You want to try it again?” he asked. His mouth moved until it was only about an inch from mine. “A little experiment?”
I don’t know why I didn’t let him. Kiss me again, I mean. I wanted him to. There wasn’t a nerve in my body that didn’t want him to. After being dissed so hard back there in Father Dom’s office, it would have been nice to know someone—anyone—wanted me. Even a guy of whom I’d once been deathly afraid.
Maybe there was a part of me that still feared him. Or what he could do to me. Maybe that was what was making my heart beat so fast.
Whatever it was, I didn’t let him kiss me. I couldn’t. Not then. And not there. I craned my neck trying to keep my mouth out of his reach.
“Let’s not,” I said tensely. “I am having a very bad day, Paul. I would really appreciate it if you would back off—”
On the words back off, I laid both hands on his chest and shoved him away from me as hard as I could.
Paul, not expecting this, staggered backward.
“Whoa,” he said, when he’d regained his balance—and his composure. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“Nothing,” I said, twisting his handkerchief in my fingers. “I just…I just got some bad news, is all.”
“Oh, yeah?” This had clearly been the wrong thing to say to Paul, since now he looked positively intrigued, which meant he might never go away. “Like what? Rico Suave dump you?”
The sound that came out of me when he said that was a cross between a gasp and a sob. I don’t know where it came from. It seemed to have been ripped from my chest by some unseen force. It startled Paul almost as much as it did me.
“Whoa,” he said again, this time in a different tone. “Sorry. I…Did he? Did he really?”
I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. I wished Paul would go away—shut up and go away. But he seemed incapable of doing either.
“I kind of thought,” he said, “that there might be trouble in paradise when he never showed up to kick my ass after, you know, what happened at my house.”
I managed to find my voice. It sounded ragged, but at least it worked. “I don’t need Jesse,” I said, “to fight my battles for me.”
“You mean you didn’t tell him,” Paul said. “About you and me, I mean.”
When I looked away, he said, “It has to be that. You didn’t tell him. Unless you did tell him, and he just doesn’t care. Is that it, Suze?”
“I have to get to class,” I said, and turned around hastily to do just that.
Only Paul’s voice stopped me.
“Question is, why didn’t you tell him? Could it be because maybe, deep down, you’re afraid to? Because maybe, deep down, you felt something…something you don’t want to admit, even to yourself?”
I spun around.
“Or maybe,” I said, “deep down, I didn’t want a murder on my hands. Did you ever think about that, Paul? Because Jesse already doesn’t like you very much. If I told him what you did to me—or tried to do to me, anyway—he’d kill you.”
This was, as I knew only too well, a complete fabrication. But Paul didn’t know that.
Still, he didn’t take it the way I’d meant him to.
“See,” Paul said with a grin. “You must like me a little, or you’d have gone ahead and let him.”
I started to say something, realized the futility of it all, and spun around again to leave.
Only this time, classroom doors all around me were being flung open, and students started streaming out into the breezeway. There is no bell system at the Mission Academy—the trustees don’t want to disturb the serenity of the courtyard or basilica by having a Klaxon ring every hour on the hour—so we just change classes every time the big hand reaches twelve. First period was, I realized, as the hordes started to mill around me, over.
“Well, Suze?” Paul asked, staying where he was, in spite of the sea of humanity darting past him. “Is that it? You don’t want me dead. You want me around. Because you like me. Admit it.”
I shook my head incredulously. It was, I realized, hopeless to argue with the guy. He was just too full of himself ever to listen to anyone else’s point of view.
And then, of course, there was the little fact that he was right.
“Oh, Paul, there you are.” Kelly Prescott came up to him, flinging her honey-blonde hair around. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Listen, I was thinking, about the voting, you know, at lunchtime. Why don’t you and I stroll around the yard, passing out candy bars. You know, to remind people. To vote, I mean.”
Paul wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to Kelly, though. His ice-blue gaze was still on me.
“Well, Suze?” he called, above the clanging of locker doors and the hum of conversation—though we were supposed to be quiet during period changes, so as not to disturb the tourists. “Are you going to admit it or not?”
“You,” I said, sh
aking my head, “are in need of intensive psychotherapy.”
Then I started to walk past them.
“Paul.” Kelly was tugging on Paul’s leather coat now, darting nervous glances at me the whole time. “Paul. Hello. Earth to Paul. The election. Remember? The election? This afternoon?”
Then Paul did something that would, I realized soon after, go down in the annals of the Mission Academy—and not just because CeeCee saw it, too, and filed it away for later reporting in the Mission News. No, Paul did something no one, with the possible exception of me, had ever done in the whole of the eleven years Kelly had been attending the school:
He dissed her.
“Why can’t you,” he said, pulling his coat out from beneath her fingers, “leave me alone for five freaking minutes?”
Kelly, as stunned as if he had slapped her, went, “Wh-what?”
“You heard me,” Paul said. Though he did not seem to be aware of it, everyone in the breezeway had stopped what they were doing suddenly, just so they could watch what he’d do next. “I am freaking sick of you and this stupid election and this stupid school. Got me? Now get out of my sight, before I say something I might regret.”
Kelly blinked as if her contact lens had slipped out. “Paul!” she said with a gasp. “But…but…the election…the candy bars…”
Paul just looked at her. “You can take your candy bars,” he said, “and stick them up your—”
“Mr. Slater!” One of the novices, who are assigned to patrol the breezeway between classes to make sure none of us gets too noisy, pounced on Paul. “Get to the principal’s office, this instant!”
Paul suggested something to the novice that I was quite sure was going to earn him a suspension, if not expulsion. It was so inflammatory, in fact, that even I blushed on his behalf, and I have three stepbrothers, two of whom use that kind of language regularly when their father isn’t around.
The novice burst into tears and went running for Father Dominic. Paul looked after her fleeing, black-gowned little figure, then at Kelly, who was also crying. Then he looked at me.