LITMIR.BIZ

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hand…

      “So what about that cup of coffee we talked about the other day?” he asked.

      She nodded, not sure if she could continue to jog and speak at the same time.

      “Great. How about tomorrow. You don’t work on Sunday, do you?”

      She shook her head this time.

      “I’ll have to,” he said, “but I can take a break around four if that works for you.”

      Again she nodded. This time throwing in a smile.

      “Great. I’ll call you. You’re in the book?”

      More nodding.

      “Okay, then.” He turned to Hope. “Great seeing you again.”

      “Yeah,” she said, her voice as even as his. “Nice to have you back.”

      “Have a good run,” he said, then he put on some speed, leaving her and Hope in the dust.

      At least he gave Emily something terrific to look at as he raced away. She kept moving her legs, swinging her arms, all the while looking for an escape plan. At the next curve in the track, she headed for the girls’ locker room, and she didn’t stop until she was safely inside.

      She made her way to a bench and collapsed, her lungs burning like fire, her legs like Jell-O, her face so hot she could fry an egg on her forehead.

      The door slammed and Hope found her still gasping for breath.

      “Oh, my God!” she said. “What are the odds? But hey, he asked you out. That’s something. That’s incredible.”

      Emily looked up into Hope’s beautiful, sweatfree face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

      “Tomorrow. I heard him ask you. And you said yes.”

      “For the record, I said nothing. There’s no way I’m going to coffee with him tomorrow.”

      Hope sat down on the other side of the bench. “Emily—”

      “Don’t start. Don’t quibble. Just know that I quit. Right here, right now. It was a stupid idea.”

      “Gee, thanks.”

      “You know what I mean.”

      “Yeah, I do. But what I don’t understand is why you want to quit.”

      “You were right there!”

      “Where?”

      “Don’t be dense, Hope. He thinks I’m his buddy from English lit. He’ll never see me any other way.”

      “You don’t know that.”

      Emily gave her a look, but she didn’t argue. In fact, all her arguments ended right then. Except…

      “It’s completely unacceptable. You’re going to see him if I have to drag you to the coffee shop by your hair.”

      “You and what army?”

      “Lily, Sam, Zoey, Julia—”

      “Sam and Zoey aren’t even in town.”

      “They’ll fly in for the occasion.”

      Emily let go a troubled sigh. She’d had such dreams about meeting Scott. How she’d look, her hair, her nails. How cool she’d be, sophisticated enough to sit next to Dorothy at the Algonquin. She’d imagined his reaction dozens of times. His eyes widening, his jaw slackening. His inability to string three words together. It was supposed to have been heaven. A meeting so gorgeous songs would be written about it.

      Instead, she’d sweated and gasped, panted like a dog. She could have gotten over the incident in the school hallway. But now she was two strikes down. She wasn’t anxious to go up to bat again.

      “Are you listening to me?” Hope asked.

      Not only had Emily not been listening, she hadn’t even seen Hope get up and take her shirt off. Her dark hair was a mess, but it still managed to look sexy and sleek. Hope, who considered her looks average, who thought that she was too short and her nose too big, wasn’t any of those things. She was beautiful. Everyone saw it but her.

      “Why do we do this to ourselves?” Emily asked, surprised that she’d said it aloud.

      “What?”

      “Think of ourselves in the worst possible light.” Hope grabbed her T-shirt and pulled it on, then came back to the bench. “I don’t know. We do, though, don’t we?”

      “All the time. It’s never about how happy we are with our eyes, but how miserable we are with our nose.”

      Hope nodded. “Men don’t do that.”

      “I’ll say. They think if they can stand upright they’re hot stuff.”

      “So go see him, Em. Why not?”

      Emily met her gaze. “I don’t know.”

      “I do. Go. Go with no expectations except to see an old friend. Go without making yourself nuts, just like you were meeting one of us. Go and talk to him, and let him see who you are now. The very worst that’s going to happen is you’ll have a new friend.”

      She nodded. “Okay. Why not? I’ll go, and I’ll talk and I’ll leave my expectations at home.”

      Chapter Three

      Scott handed Mrs. Newberry her package of green beans then forced a smile. The immediate reward of a return smile did little to elevate his mood. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plane tickets sitting in his suitcase. First class, round trip from Los Angeles to Bristol, Connecticut. The plane would be in the air right now, with some other passenger in his seat.

      “Are the tomatoes ripe?” a strident voice said from behind him.

      He turned to find Dora Weeks, one of his mother’s closest friends. She was his mother’s age, but right now, she looked years younger. She was a tiny thing, not even five feet tall, with completely white close-cropped hair. The biggest thing about her were her glasses, which were so thick they made her eyes look twice their size.

      “Yes, Mrs. Weeks, they’re ripe.”

      “Not too ripe.”

      “No. In fact, if you’d like I can help you pick one out.”

      She nodded. “Your father always picked out my tomatoes.”

      “He was good at that,” Scott said, an unexpected twinge hitting his heart.

      “That’s right.” Mrs. Weeks followed him toward the produce department, forcing him to slow his walk to a crawl. “He knew his vegetables.”

      “He also taught me, Mrs. Weeks.” They passed the bread aisle, and Scott noticed the stock was low. Of course that meant he had to fix it, because there was no stock boy anymore. Not for a month. His mother hadn’t even tried to hire a new one.

      He finally reached the tomatoes, and he looked for a beauty. All the produce was good, that hadn’t changed, but there were tomatoes and there were tomatoes.

      He sniffed a contender, searching for a distinct aroma he knew intimately but couldn’t describe. Years of working part-time and summers in the store under his father’s watchful gaze had made Scott a grocer, whether he liked it or not.

      “Your mother must be so proud.”

      “Thank you. I had a good run, before the old ankle blew.”

      Mrs. Weeks looked up at him, her huge Mr. Magoo eyes confused. “A good run? I meant she must be so proud that you came home. That you’re here when she needs you. She’s not well, you know. She tries to hide it, but I can tell.”

      Plane tickets flashed in his

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