Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

I handed her the keys. “Ma’am, you must live near some rough roads.”

“Oh, posh,” she said. “I live in La Jolla. I just hate speed bumps.”

Bud coughed to hide his laugh and I kept a poker face. “Well, I guess we’ll be seeing you again in about twenty thousand miles,” I said.

“Works for me!” She winked, the blue eye shadow over her eyes as bright as a peacock’s feather. “Maybe I’ll mess up something else just to come back and get another gander at you!”

Bud passed her a clipboard. “Sign here, Mrs. Peters.”

I turned to head back to the bays, but the woman grabbed me by the arm. “It wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of you if you didn’t see me to my car and make sure it is in good working order, now would it?”

Bud waved me on. “Start it up for her, Gavin.”

Mrs. Peters continued to hang on my elbow as I opened the door and led her out to the Camaro, all red and sparkling in the late afternoon sun. “What a grand day!” she said. “I don’t guess I can sneak you away for a drive!”

I pictured her wrecked and broken motor mount and imagined jumping creek beds with Mrs. Peters behind the wheel, her white hair flying. “I’m afraid I am much needed here.”

“Well, poo.” She waited by the car as I opened the door, then she slid inside. “Let’s see what she’s got.”

I handed her the keys and winced as she cranked the motor, stomping the gas so the engine revved loud enough to make people across the street turn to look. I leaned in the open door. “You might want to take it easy.”

“This car is going be around longer than I am!” she shouted over the roar. “Life is short. Go after what you love and ride it as hard as you can!”

I barely managed to close the door and jump out of the way before she shot backward across the parking lot, then slammed it into drive and careened past me again, heading for the exit.

That woman was going to kill someone. Still, I had to laugh as I headed back inside. Bud was stuffing her papers in a file folder. “She’ll be back. Drivers like her mean good money for us.” He turned around. “Let me guess, she gave you some sort of advice about life being short, and she was about to die?”

“Yeah.” Of course, that got me thinking about Corabelle. Hell, everything did.

“She’s been saying that for a decade. She’s going to outlive us all.” He glanced at the clock. “You can go ahead and head out. I’m sure whatever kept you all morning is still nagging at you now.”

I suppressed a smart-ass reply. “All right, Bud. See you tomorrow.” I wondered where Corabelle might be, at work still, or on campus. Maybe I could get that pink-haired girl to tell me where she lived.

I should leave her alone. I knew it. But something in me just couldn’t let it go. 

I crossed the quad, anxiety rising as the engineering building grew close. Gavin would be in there, just a few seats down. The two feelings for him warred inside me. Anger that he’d called me easy, when I hadn’t been with anyone but him. And an urgency to get him alone, to feel, if only for a little while, the way we had when we were young and innocent of all the ways life could fail us.

The stairwell echoed with my footsteps, and I couldn’t help but run my hand over the part of the rail where Gavin caught me trying to black out. I had to get control of that now. Gavin showing up again was the sign that my little fits of crazy had to end. I needed some other way to cope.

I thought I’d be able to sneak in close to the start of class and slip into my chair without having to talk to him. But Gavin was waiting outside the door, his lab assignment in his hand. He looked more amazing than ever. Every detail about him was seared into me, the blue T-shirt fitting across his chest and arms, the dark stubble on his jaw, the sideburn near his ear.

He held out the paper. “You turned this in for me?”

I nodded, grasping hard on the strap of my backpack.

“Why?”

“I felt bad that I upset you.” I drew in a deep breath. “By talking about Finn.”

It was so hard to say his name. And not easier on Gavin to hear it. I could see it in how his eyebrows drew together.

A couple other students cut between us to enter the door. “Thank you.” He hesitated. “Can I see you later?”

Panic rose from my belly. “No. I can’t. Please, Gavin. It’s too hard.”

He pressed his lips together. “This isn’t over.”

“It is. It has to be.”

He whipped around and went back in the room.

I leaned against the wall, eyes on the ceiling, trying to pull myself together. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t be with him. There was too much past, and I was barely holding it together before he showed up.

Unless maybe Austin really could help. He seemed so much easier to manage than Gavin, and my secrets had no power with him.

I pushed away from the wall and hurried to my seat, trying not to look Gavin’s way. While the professor talked about supernovas, I tapped out an e-mail to Austin on my iPad. “Are you on campus today? I get out of Jacobs Hall at 10. Corabelle.”

I could feel Gavin’s eyes on me as I took notes and tried to focus, already regretting involving an innocent boy to make life easier for me. I stole a guilty glance down the row. Gavin was still watching, intense and brooding. His eyes dropped to the strap of my tank top, and I knew he was remembering the moment at the coffee shop.

Fire licked through me again, and I focused back on the screen. Gavin always had that effect on me.

After that first kissing session in my closet, we were crazy with it. Every chance we got, we pressed against each other feverishly. When a movie or television show showed a couple clutching each other, we’d stop everything to pay attention, only to act the scene out later in my room.

The first time Gavin touched me was completely by accident. I’d just started wearing training bras. He teased me about it and threatened to pop the elastic. When he reached for the back, I whirled around and his fingers grazed across my chest.

The touch had been so electric, I almost screamed. Gavin immediately backed away, sure he’d done something wrong. All I really wanted was for him to do it again.

A lot like now. The scene in the dish room had played over and over in my mind all night. Surely Gavin wasn’t the only way to feel so intense. I had always been too afraid of giving any other boy a chance.

My screen popped up with an e-mail notification. Austin. I kept my head down as I opened it. He didn’t have class, but he’d come down anyway. He lived close to campus.

So it was done. I’d engaged him, and I couldn’t just back away. This was for the best.

I suffered through the lecture, taking frenetic notes to avoid looking at Gavin. At last class ended and Jenny bounded over to me. “You haven’t asked me how I am!”

“Oh, that’s right! Star party! How did it go with Lumberjack?” From the corner of my eye I could see Gavin loading up his backpack. I wanted him long gone before I went outside and met up with Austin.

“He was a dream!” Jenny glanced over her shoulder. Robert stood talking to Amy and the third TA. Jenny pulled me toward the door. “I have to tell you about him!”

This would work. As long as Jenny and I were absorbed in a conversation, Gavin would pass on by and I could wait to go outside to meet Austin.

When we were out of earshot of the TAs, Jenny said, “I got him! We’re going out Saturday night!”

“That’s great. Is he okay with you being a student?”

“Rules are made to be broken. We’re discreet.”

Jenny was about as discreet as a fire truck. “You sure about that?”

She hugged her messenger bag to her chest. “Completely. After all the other students left the lab, we stayed up on the roof until midnight!”

“Wow.”

“He kisses just like Westley in The Princess Bride.”

“You kissed him already?”

“Of course!” Jenny slung her strap over her shoulder. “I’m not into taking things slow.” She threaded her arm around mine. “And based on the dish room, neither are you!”

The hall was clear, so I let her lead me down the steps.

“So what about the guy from the coffee shop? You seemed all serious coming from the alley with him despite serving up suds with hunk boy.” Jenny sighed. “I should have been taking notes from you.”

“Austin is meeting me here.”

Jenny halted by the door to the stairwell. “Seriously? Man-meat looked ready to kill him yesterday, and you’re putting them in the same zip code?”

“Gavin’s probably already halfway across town on his Harley by now.”

Jenny tugged on the handle to the stairs. “Your funeral. Or his.”

I winced at the word, refusing to let the image of a powder-blue casket stick in my mind. “It’ll be fine.”

Still, we took our time on the stairs, killing a few more minutes. “Let me scout ahead,” Jenny said. We walked down the hall and approached the main doors. “I’ll come back when the coast is clear.”

“Corabelle?”

I turned to the voice. Austin was coming down the hall.

“Hey,” I said, not sure at all I was doing the right thing. But I’d committed.

“Hey.” He reached out like he would take my hand, then pulled back, closing his fingers around the strap of his pack.

“So you said you live close?” I asked.

He nodded. “You want to go there?”

My face burned. “No! I — it was just conversation.”

Austin laughed a little. “I’m glad you wrote me. I’m glad I could come.”

A few other students passed by us, and we moved to a corner. I relaxed a little. Finally I’d do something like normal girls. Meet a regular guy, have a normal conversation, and just be another college student. This was going to be all right.