Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“My house,” he told me, looking over with a quick smile that turned into a slight frown at the hard expression I had fixed my face into. “I’ve got a couple great steaks waiting to go on the grill.”
To my dismay, my mouth started to water immediately. Annoyed, I turned to look straight out the windshield so that I wouldn’t even know if Cal had his eyes on me.
“Not a restaurant?” I asked, trying to put just a tiny note of city-girl contempt into my tone.
Cal laughed. “Nearest restaurant is two towns over,” he told me. “Hour’s drive.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t keep a little disappointment out of my voice. I hadn’t been to restaurants more than a handful of times, and I had always thought that if I ever had an actual date, of course he would take me out to eat. Especially for the first date.
I tried desperately to figure out what to think about this first date, and about Cal Perkins, and how to act toward him. The idea that he wasn’t even taking me to a restaurant pushed me towards a sort of silent resistance. I remembered with a twist of my stomach about the reports Cal and Jake were going to file about my ‘conduct,’ though. I had no desire to go back over the arm of Jake’s easy chair, anymore than I wanted to give Cal any excuse to make use of his apparent right to discipline me himself. But I could simply go along, and ‘behave myself,’ couldn’t I? Get through it and make it clear that I didn’t belong in Grasskiln?
“How about this?” he asked, though, his voice easy and pleasant. “If we hit it off, we’ll take that drive over to Heathville and eat at the Lion’s Mane in a few days. It’s a good restaurant, too. I mean, I don’t know what you’re used to, like that fine dining stuff you see on TV or whatever, but they make a hell of a burger.”
I looked over at him, despite myself.
“Would you like that?” he asked, glancing in my direction before returning his attention to the road. I thought I could see in his eyes that the sudden change in my face, the way I had set my mouth into a tight line, had confused him.
“Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as I could.
Don’t fall for it, I told myself. He’s just trying to…
To what? Make me feel good? What could be wrong with that?
Everything. I don’t want to feel ‘good’ in this bizarre town.
Cal’s house, in a cute little subdivision on the edge of town, wasn’t big. I could see, though, as soon as he pulled into the driveway and the garage door opened like magic, that he took really great care of it. Even the garage looked as neat as a pin.
“Potato salad is ready to go,” he said, when he had turned off the truck. “How do you like your steak?”
“I… I don’t know,” I said. “Medium? That’s when it’s still pink, right?”
Cal smiled. “That’s right. Beef’s pretty expensive in the cities these days, I guess.”
I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
His smile faded for a moment, but then came back with a wry twist. He turned and started to get out of the truck. I watched, emotions whirling in my head, my chest, my stomach, as he crossed in front of the windshield. I didn’t know why a stupid little conversation about how I liked my steak could rile me up that way. Cal’s assumption—his completely justified and true assumption—that I had never had steak because my family couldn’t afford it had touched a nerve, or something, though.
And what the fuck was he doing now? Just leaving me in his fucking truck?
He came around toward my door. I looked at him with a scowl on my face. Was he going to taunt me, or something?
He opened the door for me. When I understood that he was just behaving like a ‘gentleman’ from some old movie, heat flooded my face. I looked at him with wide eyes, and he returned the stare with a puzzled little smile, as if he very much wanted to understand me, but hadn’t had a lot of success yet.
“Isn’t beef expensive everywhere?” I demanded, not moving to unfasten my seatbelt or to do anything else that suggested I intended to get out of the truck and go into Cal’s pretty little house and eat his probably delicious potato salad and his perfectly grilled steak.
He tilted his head to the side, and the slight confusion in his eyes started to look like disbelief.
“Well, yeah,” he said, “except where you can get it direct from the rancher, the way we do here.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I’m just a city girl who doesn’t know shit like that.”