Chapter 1-6
541 Words
Greg kept to the shadows after locking the door behind the last customers. It was almost eleven; the Baxters had taken their time. Jessica and Monica Baxter walked across Beach Way. Except Jessica didn’t walk. She…
He wasn’t sure what she did, but it was doing strange things to his thoughts.
Her sudden reappearance had hit him as hard as any slap—and he’d earned a few before he’d learned decent manners while still a high school sophomore. Seeing her so out of the blue took him back to when he was in seventh-grade and she was already an over tall and impossibly sophisticated fifteen; even then she’d had an amazing sense of style that set her apart from all of the other girls. That was the age when he’d started thinking that girls weren’t just different than boys, but that the differences were very interesting.
Today she wore light slacks and a blouse that looked loudly…Hungarian, though he had no idea what a Hungarian blouse might actually look like. Perhaps it was the blue scarf loosely knotted about one wrist that made her look a bit like a blond gypsy.
Half of the fights he and Harry had as kids, and there’d been plenty, didn’t have a thing to do with being brothers. Though he’d forgotten the reasons until this moment.
He’d seen Harry kiss Jessica Baxter, and a need to pummel his brother had burned to life inside him. They’d battled often enough over the next three years before Harry went to college for Greg to completely forget the reason behind it. Even after he’d grown up enough to stop getting into fistfights with his own blood-kin—an offense the Judge had curiously left completely for them to work out—Greg had never been able to explain why he’d begun in the first place. By the time he and Harry had discovered that they actually liked each other, about the same time Greg graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, Greg hadn’t remembered the Jessica-based origin.
He did now…and felt incredibly stupid. He’d have to apologize to Harry the next time they talked. Jealousy, deep and dark green as the Coast Range forest. Impressively stupid, even on his personal, deeply sad scale of stupidity.
Out the window, Jessica slid into the far side of her mother’s blue Toyota hybrid. Just before her face disappeared below the roofline, she looked back toward the diner. No—she looked right at him. Without noticing, he’d moved up to the diner’s front window until his nose was practically pressed against the glass between the black-and-gold “e” and “C” in “Eagle Cove.”
He could feel her laugh like a blow to his chest even if he couldn’t hear it through the glass. Her sparkling laugh had him retreating once more into the shadows.
When he turned, his father was watching him watch Jessica, the grill’s wire brush clenched in one yellow-gloved fist and a large sponge in the other.
“What?”
The Judge offered one of his thin, unreadable smiles.
“What?” Greg was sufficiently aggravated with himself for getting caught staring that the word came out loud and sharp. He half expected to be banished from the room.
Instead his father simply raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and said softly, “You always did have a soft spot for that girl.” Then he turned back to cleaning the grill.
Greg didn’t have a “soft spot” for Jessica Baxter.
She’d been his first mad crush and just now he’d learned that he’d never gotten over it.
- Writer
