My Favorite Mistake

  “No wonder you two are friends. She sings in the shower, too,” he said, slowly coming in. Instead of the couch, he grabbed a crappy falling-apart chair the guys used when they had game night.

  “So, Joe,” I said.

  “Joe.” Hunter took a breath. “Joe is my lawyer. Well, he’s really my parents’ lawyer. When they died, he was put in charge of managing their money until I came of age. Now that I am, he’s still in charge of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want any of it.”

  “How much money?”

  “I don’t even know. Millions.”

  I nearly choked on my tongue.

  “Millions?”

  “Yes. My dad was an oil executive in Texas. So he had a lot of money.”

  “Why don’t you want it?” Who wouldn’t want millions of dollars? I couldn’t think of anyone.

  “Because it’s blood money.”

  “How?” Maybe his father had been involved in organized crime. Maybe that was it. That wouldn’t surprise me too much.

  “Because my father killed my mother and then killed himself.”

  Time stopped for a second after he said it. I had to have heard him wrong. That couldn’t be it.

  And then it all made sense. The nightmares, the reluctance to talk about them, his rich aunt and uncle.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, there isn’t much to say. It is what it is. It happened a long time ago, and I’ve moved on. At least I thought so.”

  “What happened?”

  “My dad thought my mom was having an affair. She wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Things were getting tight at the company, and he was under a lot of scrutiny. He got drunk one night, and they had a huge fight. He shot her.” He paused for a moment.

  “I was in my room and I was trying to plug my ears so I couldn’t hear them anymore. Then I heard the pop. I knew what it meant. I ran out and saw her on the floor in a puddle of blood. I tried to save her, but it was too late. Dad just stared at me, at her. And then he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, horrified. It was so much worse than what I’d thought.

  “You’d be shocked what happens to a person’s face when it’s blown off by a gun.” He plucked a guitar string. “So there it is. You know everything there is to know. The only other people who know about it are my family, and of course that town in Texas where I lived. I was the kid with the dead parents for a long time until Hope and John moved up here and I got to start over. Joe only comes up a few times a year to give me updates on investments and such. He keeps trying to get me to be more involved, to take some of the money for myself, but I don’t want it.”

  Oh. That was what he didn’t want. The money.

  “What does he want you to do with it?”

  “Invest it and make more money. Joe’s very into that sort of thing. Playing the stock market and all that. He thinks I’m crazy for not wanting it. If he’d let me, I’d give all of it away. I give as much as he’ll let me.”

  “You give it away?”

  “Well, yeah. What am I going to do with millions of dollars I don’t want? I feel like…” He paused and thought for a second. “I feel like if the money can do some good in this world, then they wouldn’t have died for nothing. The money destroyed them. It made Dad crazy and angry and stressed, and he just snapped that day. I know I should blame him and be angry, but I can’t. I have too many good memories of him to let that one bad one ruin everything.”

  Wow.

  “So there you have it. My deep, dark secret. Well, one of them at least. A man has to keep some mystery, doesn’t he?”

  “I… I had no idea.”

  “No, you didn’t. But it’s okay. I should have told you. You deserved to know.”

  No, I really didn’t.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You know, you’re one of the few people I believe when they say that. When your parents die when you’re young, especially if they are well-known, all kinds of people tell you they’re sorry, but it’s mostly bullshit. They have to say that. But I know you feel it.”

  “I do. I’m so sorry I pushed you.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Taylor. I should have known you’d be so curious you were going to use other ways to find out.”

  “I spied on you. At your uncle’s house. I told Hope I was going to the bathroom, but I went down the hall and listened at the door.”

  “Of course you did. I didn’t expect anything less. What did you hear?” He was completely unfazed. He knew me better than I thought.

  “Just you saying that you didn’t want something. I know what that was now.”

  “Ah, so you didn’t hear me calling Joe a pushy asshat?”

  “You called him an asshat?”

  “Yeah, this really cool girl I know uses it, and I decided to steal it.”

  “She approves.”

  “Does that mean you forgive me?”

  “I want to,” I said, being totally honest. “When you… when you looked at me… like that…” I shook my head, remembering. It made me think of that night. “You can’t touch me like that ever again, or else I will rip your balls off and hand them to you.”

  He nodded.

  “It reminded me of something I’ve spent almost eight years trying to forget. I… can tell you about it if you want.” I wanted to swallow the words back once I said them.

  “Taylor,” he said, his voice and eyes soft. Nothing compared to last night. I never wanted to remember that night again. I wanted to erase it from my life.

  “You don’t have to. I can see that it hurts you and it weighs on you, but if you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to. Just listening to me tell you about my parents is enough. I’ll take you no matter what. I’m so sorry for how I acted. I never want to be that guy again.”

  “I don’t want you to either.” He moved onto the couch.

  “I just… I don’t know if I can tell you. I don’t know how.” He’d made it look so easy. He’d just sat down and told me. God, he’d watched two deaths. I had nothing on that.

  “I want to take you out to dinner. Someplace nice where I can continue to grovel and show you that you can trust me. I want you to trust me. I need it. I need you more than anything. Everything makes sense when you’re around. Everything is better. I couldn’t even cook dinner last night because you weren’t there. I had a nightmare, and there was no one to wake me up from it. It’s not your job to save me, but… I want you around.”

  “Me too.” I didn’t tell Megan, but I’d woken up with my face pressed to the pillow and my teeth clenched in a scream. Luckily, or else she might have thought someone was trying to murder me.

  “So how about it? Will you let me take you on a date?”

  “Will you help me pick out something to wear?”

  “Absolutely.” His face turned up into the smile I knew was trouble.

  “I’m not wearing lingerie, so you can just get that image out of your head.”

  “Damn. It was worth a shot.”

  “I have the right to veto any of your choices.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Okay then. We’re going on a date.”

  “Okay then.”

  I didn’t tell him that it was technically my first date. I’d been on group things, but never where a guy picked me up and was expected to pay and pull my chair out and give me a chaste kiss at the end.

  Hunter got up from the couch as Megan turned off the shower.

  “You still alive out there?”

  “Yes,” we both called.

  “Have you sliced off any limbs?” she asked.

  “No. He’s intact.”

  “Well, tell him if he ever hurts you again, he won’t be.”

  “Got it.” I turned to Hunter. “She says —”

  “I got it. Will you come home now? There’s a pot of blacker-than-sin coffee waiting for you.”


  “I’ll meet you there, okay? I just want to thank Megan and get my stuff together.”

  “Okay, Miss. I’ll see you at home.”

  He left and I fell back against the couch. Megan emerged from her bedroom with her hair wrapped in a towel.

  “Well?”

  “He apologized in the most romantic way possible and he’s taking me out to dinner.”

  “You still need to be careful.”

  “I know.” I knew what she was saying. “He’s not Travis.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Still.”

  “I know, Meg.”

  “Okay then.”

  I got up to grab my bag and my clothes from last night. I was still wearing my pjs.

  “Thanks for letting me crash,” I said, giving her a hug.

  “Anytime, girl. You know I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Call me. I want to hear all the details. Make him work for it.”

  “Oh, believe me, I will. He’s going to be on dish duty for at least two weeks. I’ll see you later.”

  “Bye.”

  Twenty-One

  “I’m excited,” Hunter whispered in my ear during human sexuality.

  “Well, we are talking about STDs, but whatever blows your whistle,” I hissed back. It didn’t really matter if we talked at normal volume. Most of the class did, so there was a constant hum of conversation that the professor didn’t bother to hush.

  “About our date. I know just what you should wear.”

  “Are you sure you’re not gay? You have intimate knowledge of my closet.”

  “No, I just have intimate knowledge of you. I mean, we do sleep in the same room.”

  It was true. I knew pretty much his entire wardrobe, including his boxers, which I saw way too much of or not enough, depending on the day.

  “You look really beautiful today. I mean, you do every day, but I don’t say it enough.”

  “Wow, you are really buttering me up,” I said as Marjorie motioned for the TAs to pass around little baskets of condoms. You could do things like that in colleges. I just hoped she wasn’t going to give us a demonstration with a banana.

  “Wrap it before you tap it, pass it on,” said Carissa, one of the TAs, as she handed me the basket.

  “Think you can remember that?” I asked Hunter.

  “You’ll have to remind me,” he said in a way that made shivers crawl up and down my spine.

  “I’ll give you a banana lesson later,” I whispered as Marjorie tried to call us to order so she could talk about chlamydia. Delightful.

  “Looking forward to it,” he said with a wink.

  We walked back to the apartment together, and Hunter was strangely quiet.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” I said.

  “I was just thinking that my mom would have loved you.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Beautiful. I have this black and white picture of her I’ll have to show you. She spent most of her time doing charity work, but she also had a degree in architecture. She always joked that people thought she was a trophy wife until she opened her mouth and set them straight. Sharp as a whip, Dad used to say. She had a comeback for everything. I don’t think that woman ever lost an argument in her life.”

  “What did she look like?” I pictured dark hair and Hunter’s smile.

  “I got my blue eyes from her. And some people say my smile. I look more like my dad than I do her. I have a picture of him too, if you want to see.”

  I did. I wanted to see where he had come from, since I couldn’t meet them. If he wasn’t going to let what his father did define how he felt about him, I wasn’t going to either.

  “You aren’t mad at him? Really?”

  “I was, for a while. I did a lot of thinking and talking with my aunt and therapy and so forth. I used to break things and set them on fire. I was in detention more than a few times.”

  “Imagine that,” I said, pretending to be shocked.

  “I was a punk for a while.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, turning around and walking backward so I could watch him. “You were a skater boy with a Mohawk, and you may or may not have had a pierced ear. Your pants also probably fell off a lot.”

  He glared at me.

  “I was not a skater boy. I was just a boy who rode a skateboard frequently.”

  “Same thing. So I’m right about everything else?”

  “Still have the scar from the earring.”

  He stopped walking and tipped his head down so I could see the minuscule hole that dotted his left earlobe. I turned my head and realized how close my lips were to his and how much they wanted to be attached to his. No. Bad lips.

  I turned and started walking again.

  “Do I get to do the same thing?”

  “Go ahead.” He’d never get it right.

  “Let’s see. I bet you wore torn black fishnets and lots of eyeliner and you were into really deep poetry and studied French.”

  “Way off,” I said, scoffing. He wasn’t even close.

  “I know. I was just messing with you. I bet you did a little bit of everything. Art, maybe a sport like tennis, and you read a lot and I’m guessing National Honor Society. Oh, and I bet you did dance. You move like you danced at one point in your life. How did I do?”

  Holy shit. He’d gotten it exactly.

  “Stalker,” I said, walking faster. There was no way he could have known that without doing some heavy research.

  “Hold up. I swear I didn’t stalk you. I told you, I’m just really observant. Think of me as Sherlock Holmes, only without the bad social skills and cocaine use.”

  “Holmes was into cocaine?”

  “How else was he able to stay up all night and solve crimes?”

  “True.” He moved into stride next to me. “So you didn’t stalk me?”

  “I may have checked out some of your old Facebook posts, but that’s it.” I forgot about that. Damn social networking. No one was anonymous anymore.

  “I did dance for a few years, but it got too expensive so I had to stop. I also got kicked out.”

  “You got kicked out of dance?”

  “Yeah. I kind of told a girl I was going to rip her throat out.”

  He started laughing, throwing his head back.

  “Why?”

  I sighed.

  “Because she said that my dad had been cheating on my mom even before the divorce, and my mom had something on the side as well.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. She was just repeating something her mom had said, but she was old enough to know what she was saying.”

  “God, girls are bitches.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “So anyway, I tried to yank her snotty platinum ponytail out of her head and that was that. I was asked to leave and never come back. Thus ended my career as a dancer.”

  “Shame. You’ve still got the moves.” I stopped and did a little shimmy. “You could always take classes.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “You should. If you liked it.”

  “I did.”

  “Well there you go.”

  Renee was studying on the couch as Paul was spread out over the dining table with what looked like some sort math conundrum. Paul was crazy smart and was majoring in both mechanical and chemical engineering. Renee always joked that he was going to get a fancy job as an oil baron or something and then she’d be his trophy nurse. All she wanted was to work in a neo-natal intensive care unit, taking care of babies.

  “Hey, you made up yet?” Renee said, her eyes not leaving her textbook.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Hey,” Paul said, waving and not looking up from his calculator. Two peas in a pod.

  “We’re going out tonight and then back to Paul’s, FYI, so we won’t be here for dinner.”

  “Got it. We’re not going to be here either,?
?? I said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “I am taking Taylor on a date.” Hunter smiled as if he’d won the lottery.

  “Good. You owe her about a million dinners. I hope you’re taking her someplace nice.”

  “I am.”

  “Ooh, tell me, tell me,” she said.

  “No way! If I don’t get to know, you don’t get to know,” I said.

  But Hunter leaned over and whispered in Renee’s ear.

  “Very nice. You have good taste, dude.”

  “Thank you. Now, if you don’t mind. We both need to do some homework before said date.”

  “Enjoy,” Renee said, her eyes drifting back to her book.

  Hunter made a snack while I got my homework crap together. Somehow we were able to function and study without distracting one another. At least, most of the time. Every now and then I’d find him looking at me, or I’d steal a moment to stare at him. I loved watching him concentrate. His face got so calm and beautiful. I couldn’t deny the power of his smirk, but I loved watching him study.

  I settled on my bed, propping up my pillows to prepare myself for a bunch of reading for medieval European history, and then I had a bunch of notes to review for French on the subjunctive. Gag me. I was going to do the French first since it was the suckiest. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the country, but conjugating verbs wasn’t my activity of choice.

  Hunter came back with my no-fire-required s’mores, which were made with Nutella, Fluff and graham crackers. He also had two glasses of iced tea.

  “Here you go, Miss Caldwell. Happy studying.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Zaccadelli. Same to you.”

  We retired to our separate beds and got to work. Our desks were crammed so tight under our beds that you couldn’t sit comfortably. Bed studying was much preferable.

  The only sound was the turn of a page, the scratch of a pen and our breathing. Every now and then I’d feel Hunter’s eyes on me and I’d look up only to meet those intense blue eyes. I always looked away first.

  I finished what I wanted to do for French and got started on reading about medieval clothing. It was fascinating, but not as interesting as watching Hunter study his boring economics books. Yum.

  “You’re staring,” he said.

  “Not for very long. I’m admiring your sexy brain.”

  “Go ahead. I don’t mind. I do it enough to you.”