100 Days of Cake (27 page)

In my defense this is all a lot to take in. Alex and Veronica
not dating. All this time V has just been worried about me? Then why is she always so yell-y and hostile? What's with all that pent-up anger Dr. B. keeps saying she has against me? There's definitely something huge that I'm missing. Again, I wish I'd read her note, but it was gone this morning. She must have gotten it last night after catching Dr. B. and me.

Alex presses his lips together in this frustrated smile. “So, what? For a week you've been pissed at me because you thought V and I were kicking it behind your back, and yet it never once occurred to you to just ask me about it? That's pretty screwed up, Molly.”

It is.

I'm pretty screwed up, but that isn't exactly breaking news. I'm just the screwed-up girl who ran away from the divisionals meet and got the team disqualified. The screwed-up girl who couldn't even keep a hermit crab alive.

The floor is really interesting. One of the Goldfish crackers from the party must have made it downstairs and missed our broom efforts; there are orange crumbs on the floor under the counter. Also a few teeny tiny drips of the blue-green paint (the paint Alex said reminded him of my eyes), which must have landed outside the range of our tarp.

“Molly?”

When I finally look up, Alex is grinning at me as if I weren't the world's most stubborn idiot.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“Don't be. I'm pretty stoked you were so upset when you thought I was seeing someone. At least it means I haven't been that off base about us.”

He puts his hand on top of mine on the counter, and I'm too confused to move it. The minute Alex explained he wasn't dating V, this almost ecstatic sense of relief flooded me. I used to get really bottled up before a race during swim meets, but then when I would hit the touch pad at the end and pull off my goggles, it was the most amazing release to look up at the board and see a time that didn't suck, and to know I'd survived. That's
exactly
how it feels to know that Alex and V aren't together, like all that worrying was for nothing.

But now we're right back where we were two months ago, when Alex asked me out and I blew him off. When I wasn't sure if I could live up to being
Alex's Molly
. Nothing has changed. The thought of him pulling a T. J. Cranston still wrecks me.

And I can say anything to Dr. B., and he'll still like me; he promised (and he didn't not kiss back!).

“Molly,” Alex is saying. “You have to know how I feel about you, and I think that you feel the same way. So can we please stop pussyfooting around and give us a shot?”

My heart is racing; panic flooding my throat, making it difficult to breathe.

You're a great girl, Molly. You're just kind of different from what I thought before I got to know you.

“I don't—”

“If you're worried about blowing up our friendship, I hate to break it to you, but the fact that I'm in love with you has been blowing up our friendship for a long time now.”

“What?”

He's in love with me? How is it possible to be so dizzyingly excited about something and still filled with enough dread to sink an ocean liner?

“Molly.” He leans in, his hand still on mine. “Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't want to kiss me that day we were painting, or last night in the car.”

“I . . .”

So close. The slight oily smell from the house special lo mein on his breath. There are these little tan freckles on his forehead that I never noticed before, the slightest fuzz on his cheeks.

No, no, no. This will ruin everything.

“I can't.” I back away, and he lets go of my hand.

“Why?”

“I'm not good enough for you. You won't like me.”

“What does that even mean? I'm telling you I like you.” He sounds so frustrated. Already I am fucking up everything!

“I just . . . can't.”

“So it's not okay for me to date someone else, but you don't want to date me.”

“No. I mean . . . Alex . . . I just—” The words catch in my throat.

“Fine, if that's the way you want it, I'm done.” Redder and angrier than I've ever seen him, Alex grabs his bag from behind the register, knocking over this old margarine container where Charlie keeps thumbtacks and spare pennies. Everything splashes onto the ground, creating a mildly dangerous obstacle course.

He starts for the door, but I reach for his arm.

“Alex, wait.”

“Wait for what? Huh, Molly? Until you get jealous because you
think
I'm dating someone else again? Is that what I should wait for?”

“Alex, stop. . . . I . . .” I can hardly breathe, everything all circular and twisty in my head.

“Look, Molly, I know that you've got problems, and that has never once been an issue for me. I dig
all
of you. But that doesn't give you the green light to jerk me around like this, to give me
just
enough hope to keep me hanging around.”

“I . . .”

“So you can go play mind games with some other guy, because I'm through letting my heart break.”

“Stop,” I beg.

“You know, I'm glad this place is closing, because it means I won't have to waste one more second of my life on you!”

Then he's gone, the bell on the door chiming behind him.

I want to run after him, but I can't move, the spilled thumbtacks somehow pinning me to the floor.

Gasping for breath, like I finished the two-hundred-meter butterfly and I can't get enough oxygen. Everything is a slurry of lights and sounds and suck. Alex's face bunched with anger. T.J. calmly telling me I wasn't like he thought I would be. My mom and her perfectly adorable baking skills. V telling me to make life easier for everyone else by pulling the plug on myself.

Dr. B.

He can make this better. He'll make this better.

This has to qualify as an emergency.

Hands shaking, I pull his card out of my wallet and punch his cell number into my phone.

He picks up on the third ring. “Molly, I'm so sorry. I meant to call you today.”

I try to calm down as I explain that I need to see him, that there's no way I can wait until our Monday afternoon appointment.

With that same soothing voice from last night, he tries to talk me down, calls me “sweetheart” again. Almost immediately I feel a little better.

“Where are you now?” he asks. When I tell him FishTopia, he sighs. “I'd pick you up and take you to the office, but I've had a few drinks, and I probably shouldn't be driving anywhere. I'm sorry.”

“Oh.” My heart drops to my sneakers, and the panic starts again. My breathing kicks up like when characters on sitcoms start hyperventilating and have to breathe into a paper bag. I
need
to see him. “Maybe I could come to your place? I have my bike.”

Even as I ask, I know that I'm being totally inappropriate. He's my doctor, not my boyfriend, not my dad. But I
have
to.

“I guess you could do that.” He doesn't sound at all convinced that this is a good plan, but after a pause he warms up to the prospect. “Yeah, sure. I'm near the old downtown in that strip of condos on Otter Bay Drive. Pretty close to you.”

I don't even bother locking up the store. I'm out the door and unlocking Old Montee before he even finishes giving me the address.

Knowing that I'm going to see him, I start to get excited in a good way, not the panicky can't-get-oxygen way. Dr. B. really is so much better than the Xanax from Dr. Calvin.

It's only a ten-minute bike ride down the road to a row of old attached brick buildings with new, cheery paint jobs. There aren't a lot of apartments or condos in Coral Cove—mostly single-family homes—so this is where everyone's dad temporarily moves after a divorce. Elle's father made a stop here before going to Jacksonville; so did Mom's dad before he went out West. If Dr. B.'s fiancée does decide she's done with him, he's all set.

Finding the right unit, I lock my bike to a
NO PARKING
sign.

I'm heading in, but then I realize I must look awful. Why didn't I take a second to do something with my hair or make sure that I wasn't all snotty before charging over? Fishing through my backpack, I find a hair thingie and twist my frizz up into a sloppy topknot; Mom says it “shows off my pretty face.” I put on some tinted ChapStick and wish I'd thought to bring some of the makeup I wore last night.

Dr. B. opens the door, looking more casual than I've ever seen. He's wearing worn jeans and an old Penn T-shirt. It's clear he hasn't shaved since yesterday, and his red eyes make me wonder if he's slept at all. For added weirdness, he's got a wad of bloody gauze wrapped haphazardly around his right hand, and a tumbler of something amber and alcohol-y in the other.

“Welcome to my humble abode, Molly Byrne,” he says, and lets me in.

The condo isn't at all what I was expecting. It looks like Shabby Chic threw up on a Pottery Barn. Pale blue slipcovered couch and wing chair with vintage floral throw pillows, antique-looking wicker tables, a fireplace with a lavender vase on the mantel . . . and a heap of broken ceramic-and-glass-type stuff on the white stones of the outer hearth and scattered on the surrounding floorboards.

“I'm sorry,” he says when he notices me staring. “I was trying to straighten up. I didn't realize you'd get here so quickly. I . . . uh, had a little accident.”

“Is that how you hurt your hand?”

“Something like that,” he says, and I follow his eyes to a fist-size depression in the wall, chunks of plaster on the floor underneath it.

“Is everything okay?” I ask. “Did you talk with your fiancée again?”

“As a matter of fact I did.” He smiles the world's saddest smile and shakes his head. “Just this morning she called, and I started to tell her about what happened last night—I didn't name you, obviously.” Suddenly he looks at me, worried. “I'm sorry. I guess I should have asked for your permission first—”

“No, it's fine.” If he's telling her about it, that has to mean that something
did
happen, right? That there
is
something to tell and I didn't just invent the whole thing.

“Anyway, she stopped me and said I didn't need to apologize. Would you like to know why?” He gives this big forced grin that doesn't really make me want to know why at all, but I nod. It appears he's really over that whole thing about not sharing personal stuff with me.

“She said she can't go on lying to me and giving me false hope. Because she's not really thinking things over; she's already thought and decided. We're done-zo because she's
in love with this new Dolphins running back and they're moving in together.”

“That sucks; I'm sorry.” In my pocket my phone is vibrating with a new call, but it seems rude to look at it while Dr. Brooks is pouring his heart out.

“Apparently, she met him covering a charity event a few months ago.” Dr. B. gulps the majority of his drink. “She doesn't even like football. In the entire six years we dated, she complained every fucking time I turned on a game.”

Six years. Wow. No wonder he's taking it out on the wall. In the fireplace pile of broken things, there are a couple framed photos, and I can almost make out part of her strawberry-blond head.

“Seriously, that's not cool,” I offer.

“What ya gonna do?” Dr. B. says to his empty glass, but after a minute he straightens up. “Enough about me. You sounded really upset on the phone. What's going on? Is this more of what you were saying last night, about how you felt you failed the store?”

“Sort of. I went back to clean up today, and Alex . . . Well, it turns out he isn't actually dating my sister after all. . . .”

Looking at the disaster in the fireplace and in the wall, where Dr. B. very obviously punched a hole, I feel heat on my cheeks. He must think I'm such a high school moron. Here I am having a panic attack because Alex
isn't
dating my sister, and Dr. B.'s girlfriend of six (SIX!) years—who
he was planning to spend his life with—told him she's leaving him for some football star.

“Uh-huh.” Dr. B. nods, but he looks like he's entire galaxies away.

“Yeah, they were only meeting to talk about me. I guess they were worried or something . . .” I peter out.

“And that makes you feel violated?” he asks absently.

Shrugging, I tell him I guess so. Saying anything more about Alex seems mean, considering what Dr. B. is going through. “I'm sorry. It . . . it seemed like a much bigger deal an hour ago. Maybe I should go.”

Dr. B. shakes his head emphatically. “No, I'm glad you're here.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

My heart swells.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he asks, looking at his own empty glass.

“I'll have whatever you're having.”

“Somehow I don't see you as a straight Jack Daniel's kind of girl.”

“Then how about a Jack and Coke?” I say, the teeniest bit proud that I know that is a drink.

He raises an eyebrow at me.

“What?” I try to sound casual. “I've had alcohol before; I'll be eighteen in a month.”

“A fact that I am painfully aware of.” He gives this small, knowing smile like we share a secret, but I feel like I've missed something.

Still, I grin back and follow him into a generic galley kitchen, where he refills his glass with straight whiskey and makes me one that's about two thirds soda. I'm not sure if it's a lot of Jack, but it tastes absolutely awful—worse than the sacred FSU punch at Chris's party. For the second sip, I hold the glass up to my mouth and don't actually swallow anything. Hopefully Dr. B. doesn't notice.