More Than This: Contemporary Christian Romance Novel (9 page)

And then she stopped cleaning the tables. She leaned against one, looking at him as if he might disappear if she looked away. Her soft smile only made it to her eyes. “I had fun tonight.”

“You were working.”

“Yeah, well, I had fun working.”

Tenderness for her touched his heart. “Me too.” Then he straightened and reached over to her. He had planned to just put his hands on her arms, but she mistook the gesture and came all the way in for a hug. The rightness of it drained all the way through him. He pressed his hands into her hair and onto her back, closing his eyes, liking how it felt to hold her next to him and how she smelled like apple pie.

A moment and she backed up, seeming to remember her other friend whose sweeping had slowed to nearly nothing. Liz put her gaze on the tiles at their feet. The effort it took to get it up to his was obvious. “Take care. Walk carefully.”

Jake nodded, lost in the midst of her. “You too.” One more look, and he forced himself to move though he truly did not want to. He walked out without a single look back, only waving to the other waitress. “Night.”

She waved back but said nothing, looking positively shell-shocked. But he couldn’t think about that now. He was too intent on keeping the memory of her in his arms and storing it in a place in his heart he would never, ever lose.

Liz stood stock-still for a long moment after Jake’s departure finished ringing in the air, just holding the feeling of him close to her. When she finally came back to reality, she found Mia looking at her, staring, wide-eyed. Quickly Liz went back to work. “Don’t say it.”

Mia dropped her chin and shook her head. “I ain’t saying nothing.” And she went back to her sweeping.

Through every class on Thursday Liz wondered if he would in fact come back, but she need not have for just after seven he appeared once more, in the sunlight. Her heart bounced like a roomful of out of control crickets. Had breathing just been easy seconds before? How come she had suddenly forgotten how?

“Hey, there,” he said, nodding to her.

“H-hey.”
Stop it, Liz. Stop acting like you’re in middle school.
“You made it.”

A small nod. “That I did.” He stood as if trying to figure out what to do next.

“Um, would you like some coffee?” The question was halting as if she hadn’t asked it a million times since taking this job.

“Sure. I’ll just be…”  He nodded toward the corner.

“K.”

Jake sure wished he knew how to do this. He always felt so awkward. It was even worse because she was surely used to smooth guys who knew the ropes and every move in the book. He’d never read the book. The thought jabbed into his brain like a dagger.
Don’t, Jake. Not here.
He slid into the little chair and put his laptop on the table. At least he would have some plausible something to do rather than look like the pathetic stalker he was becoming.

“So, you shape-shifting tonight?” she asked with a smile as she poured his first cup of coffee.

“Gonna try. Not that it will do any good.” He spun the laptop toward him and opened the lid. That was the easy part. It was what came next that scrambled his courage. “You just get in?”

“About an hour ago. It’s been pretty slow.”

He nodded. “Well, if you need a place to take a break, I’ve got a corner here all to myself.”

“You sure I won’t be bothering you?”

How could she even ask the question? “If you can put up with me, I think I can survive it.” He made sure to smile to soften the statement in case she didn’t catch the humor.

Her smile teased her lips. “That’s good to know.” The bells jangled, and she jerked her attention that way.

Before she could say anything, Jake said gently, “Go. I’ll be here.”

“Looks like loverboy’s back,” Mia said when Liz made it back to the counter. “You taking an early break again?”

But Liz was in no hurry. He would be here. She didn’t have to worry about him leaving. “No.” She couldn’t stop the smile. “Whenever’s fine.”

“Whenever?” Mia lifted her eyebrows. “Wow. Someone’s sounding very sure of herself.”

Liz gave only a little smile. Sure might be overdoing it, but okay was in the realm of possibility.

“So are you getting anywhere with the shape-shifting project?” Liz asked as she made it to his table sometime after nine. It would be awhile before the next crowd showed up. She brought her book in case she ended up reading, but she hoped she didn’t get to.

He let out a soft, barely audible snort. “Not anywhere I want to go. How’s coffee sales?”

“Eh. It’s been better. Good night for studying.” She lifted her book. He tilted his head as if to read it, so she chose to help him out. “Practical Applications in Educational Psychology.”

Jake backed up, looking almost wounded. “Wow. You don’t go for the easy stuff like basket weaving 101, huh?”

“Nah, I tested through those.”

He looked confused and then defeated so she quickly moved to explain that.

“I’m kidding. I did test out of a couple of English classes.” She shrugged. “Saved me a ton of money.”

Understanding laced with something she couldn’t read rained down his face. “So you’re a good reader then, huh?”

Liz wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I guess.” She shrugged. “Except when it’s about stuff I’d rather not read.”

“Like Proactical Prosetics.”

She laughed. “Practical Applications.” She stressed each word and then laughed again.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “That.”

A moment to decide how far to let him in and she sighed. “I don’t know. I guess it’s interesting.”

He looked interested as he pulled forward on his elbows. “You guess?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, her enthusiasm flagging. “It’s for my education classes. It’s one of those ‘Why do I have to take this?’ kind of classes. Just tell me what I need to teach the kids and let’s get on with life.”

“I thought you weren’t going to teach.”

She shrugged and flopped the book onto the table. “Just keeping my options open.”

“Oh. So, what’s it about? The class, I mean.” He settled backward, looking immensely marvelous and like there wasn’t a single other thing in the world he would rather be doing.

“Well, some of it is about testing— you know standardized tests versus verbal versus written. What types of questions work, what types don’t. That was pretty interesting. Now we’re into different styles of learning— how people learn the best, and it just seems kind of like, ‘How do you even do this in a classroom?’ I mean, you’ve got 30 kids and one teacher, and that teacher is not only supposed to teach all of the content but she’s supposed to teach each kid the way they learn the best— without even really knowing what that is.”

Jake was absorbing. She could tell by the intent, interested look on his face, so she continued.

“Like some kids learn best visually.”

He nodded, his face stone-hard with seriousness.

“And some kids learn best auditory— with their hearing. Then others learn best by doing. Picking up something and doing it with their hands. Kinesthetic with manipulatives. And the teacher is supposed to incorporate all of those into every lesson. Then there’s the whole left brain-right brain thing which is just more mumbo-jumbo about different ways kids learn and how you’re supposed to do all of that too.” She put her hand on the book on the table and shook her head. “Makes me question why I signed up for an education minor in the first place.”

“So do you want to change?”

“I don’t know what I would even change it to. Business?” She shivered. “Engineering.” She raised her eyebrows. “Yikes. Not for me. I don’t know. I just thought, ‘Teacher’ you know. Get the books. Stand up there and explain what’s in them. I could do that. But the more I think about it, the more I’m not so sure.”

Jake wanted to ask a million other questions. He’d never known there were different ways of learning. He figured there was one way and he was pitiful at it so what was the point? However, before he got the chance to ask more, she lifted her chin to indicate his still open computer.

“So I’ve told you my pathetic life-story. What world-changing thing are you working on?”

Trapped. He suddenly felt cornered. “Oh, well… I…” He put his head down and ran his hand over the back of his head. “It’s not really that big of a thing. Just a… story.”

“A story?” Why did she suddenly look so interested? “Really? Oh. You’re a writer then? So, what’s it about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just this girl who’s a crime fighter, and she’s on this island trying to piece this case together. It’s not very good.”

“Really? Wow.” She sounded genuinely impressed, which frightened Jake further. “How long have you been working on it?”

“A year or so. I have a couple of others, too but they’re not really that good either.”

Now she looked even more impressed. “You’ve written more than one?”

“Yeah. A couple. But really they aren’t very good.”

A moment stretched between them. It was probably time for her to go.

“So. Do you…” Her gaze came up to his, searching. “…ever let other people read your stuff?”

His eyes went wide as his heart hammered to life. “Like editors and stuff?” His gaze was suddenly searching for anywhere to be that didn’t include looking at her. He shook his head and shrugged. “I’ve tried, you know. But they don’t like most of the stuff I write.”

Her gaze dropped as her fingers found a napkin holder to play with. “I wasn’t really thinking about editors. I was kind of thinking about…”

He waited, but she didn’t continue, so he said, “About…?”

When her gaze came up and embraced his, it stunned him with the sincerity and hope. “Me?”

“You?” It was like a bomb had gone off in the center of his heart, and Jake swallowed the disbelief. “You want to read my stuff?”

The shrug was small, barely there. “Yeah. I’d love to if you don’t mind.”

Bells from the door sounded, and she jerked around and then stood. “I’d better get back to work.” She spun his cup to check it as she did. “I’ll be back with a refill.”

“Oh. Y-yeah. Okay.” He could hardly catch back onto reality. Had she really just said she wanted to read what he had written? That couldn’t be. Could it? And if it was, what should he do? He couldn’t give her something that wasn’t perfect. She read. She was a good reader. She would know how stupid he was to even think he could write.
No
, he decided as he watched her take care of the new customers. He would come up with some excuse, something so he could turn back time and not tell her anything about his stupid writing. Letting her read what he’d written was a great way to destroy whatever it was they had going, and he definitely didn’t want to do that.

They had left on good terms. At least Liz thought they had. She had been so sure he would come on Friday, but when he didn’t, she couldn’t figure out why not. Mia told her it was probably nothing. He had something to do, something else. But what could that something be? She struggled to make herself believe it had nothing to do with her, but deep down, she knew it did. She had obviously said something wrong, something she shouldn’t have. Or maybe she hadn’t said something he wanted to hear.

Relationships were so impossibly impossible. She hated all of this, the hope, the letdown, the wishing and the knowing it would never work out the way she wanted it to. To top it all off, she felt so stupid about all of it. At Bible study on Sunday night, she was a mess— not physically. Physically she looked all right, but the rest of her was scattered and frustrated.

“You freaking out about next Saturday?” Tracy asked after the prayer session had broken up. “Studying like mad?”

Liz wished. If she could just keep her mind on school, that would surely help. “Oh, you know, burning the midnight oil.” Which was true enough. She simply didn’t include the why of that phrase.

“I don’t know how you do it all— school, studying, working. I’ve got a part-time job on Saturdays at the church, and I’m a basket case.”

“It’s not so bad. Sometimes I get the chance to study at work.”
Unless I’m left pining for some dark, handsome stranger who doesn’t bother to show up.
Ugh. This was silly. She was making far too much of it. He was a guy. There were a million guys in this city who were single and eligible. Besides that, she didn’t even want a guy.

“You know, when this whole test thing is over, Danny has this friend who’s dying to meet you.”

“Me?” Liz pointed at herself with her fingers and her cup.

“Yeah.” Tracy let her gaze fall. “I may have kind of mentioned you once or twice. He’s a really great guy, graduate law.”

Graduate law? Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. She bet he didn’t hang out in the back corner of coffee houses, saying he’d see you and then never show back up. Yanking that thought up, she knew she was being harsh, but she couldn’t help it. “Well, let me get through the test first. Who knows? I may have to take it again.”

“Not you. You’ll ace it. But I’ll wait. Don’t want to freak you out any more than you already are.”

Liz laughed. What else could she do?

Jake sat in his dingy, cramped apartment. It was fitting, he thought without bothering to put effort into it. He could see her at the coffee shop on Thursday when he had folded up at ten, long before she would get off. Why had he done that? Why? Because he was scared? Because she might want to read something he’d written?

His mind showed him that screen as if it was right in front of him, filled with wavy red and green lines that he had no way to know how to correct. And then it careened him backward into high school and elementary before that. He felt again the humiliation of sitting in the back, his desk turned to the wall because the teacher thought he was “being silly again” trying to read out loud when he couldn’t. He’d never been able to do that— the whole reading out loud thing was so foreign to him. So he got into trouble every time he tried.

Lazy.
The word went through him like a knife.
Undisciplined. Doesn’t put enough effort into learning the material. Not serious. Not trying. Seems bright but puts no effort into his work.
He could hardly ever read their comments, but he knew what they meant, and they all wound around to one word: 
Stupid.

Of course, they didn’t say that to his face, but that’s what they meant. Pushing back in the recliner, he tried to focus on the television show; however, it held no fascination for him. Instead his mind was intent on bringing up in full, living color every single heart-crushing moment he’d survived all the way through junior year. That’s when he gave up. They had given up on him long before. It was only fitting that he confirm what they all believed about him.

No. He wasn’t going back to The Grind. She was better off that way, and so was he.

By the next Wednesday, Liz had to face facts. He wasn’t coming back. She wiped the counter slowly, her gaze anchored as it was so often into that empty back corner. Her mind wondered where he was, if he was okay. Something could have happened to him. A car accident maybe, or a forklift accident at work. The possibilities were endless, but in the end, she always came back to the only explanation that really made any sense: 
He has no interest in you, Liz. He never did. He’s just letting you down easy by not coming back.
Not that he was the first guy to ever just disappear. She hated that, but what could she do? She still didn’t even know his last name.

Jake took the little laptop, the one he had slaved for, saved for, dreamed of, the one he had thought would change everything. If he just didn’t have to write things down… that’s what he had thought. And spell check had sounded heavenly. Too bad you had to know how to spell things to work it. So on Thursday night, he took the thing that had mocked him for a week and stowed it in the top of his closet under two boxes he hadn’t looked in for years. Then he shut off the light and went back to the living room. Life would go on without it.

He dropped into the chair, hoping something good was on the television, something that would keep his brain from thinking about the computer or worse the alcohol. He had come so close to stopping in at the little convenience store on his way home. One drink. His mind begged for it, pleaded for it. Yet thoughts of rehab and all that had gone along with it kept him from indulging. If he gave in now, there would be no parents to pull him back this time. No, if he did that, he would surely end up on the streets, and from just this side of sanity, he did not want that.

“Did he say anything?” Mia asked on Thursday night. “Anything about not coming back?”

“No,” Liz said, deflating on the word. “I’ve gone over that night a million times in my head, and there’s just nothing there. I mean, he asked about my school, and I told him some of it. And then we talked about his writing.”

“Whoa. Wait. His writing?”

“That’s why he has the laptop. He writes. He’s a writer.”

“A writer like what? An author?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t really say exactly. He just said he was a writer, and I said I’d like to read something he wrote sometime. I didn’t mean it like, ‘Let’s get married.’ You don’t think I freaked him out by saying I wanted to read his stuff, do you?” Then she deflated for real. “Oh, I did. I did. I messed everything up.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What other explanation can there be, Mi?”

There were a thousand other explanations, but Liz didn’t want to hear those. She was too intent on making it all her fault as she had every other problem in her life.

“So are you ready for your test?”

“No.” Liz went all the way down to the counter. “I’ve been studying, but I’m so fried about everything else… Ugh. I knew this was going to happen. I told you this was going to happen.”

“Liz, girlfriend, chill. Okay? It’s all gonna be all right. You’ve just got to get a hold of yourself and realize that some things you can change and some things you can’t. Concentrate on the things you can change.”

And so, with effort, she did. She went on Saturday, and she took the test. By the end of the next week, she had all but forgotten about Jake and the corner and writing.

~*~

“Today we will turn our attention to a problem that affects nearly one in five students in every classroom.” Practical Educational Psychology was starting off with a bang. Liz tapped her pen to her paper, wishing she had just skipped today. With the weather turning cooler and the leaves falling, getting up to go to class was getting more and more difficult. Especially this one.

It was becoming increasingly clear that she had chosen the wrong minor. She didn’t want to teach. Not that she had found anything to substitute in its place, but this was definitely not it.

“Some of you may have heard of this issue before.” The professor, a short gray-haired man with paunchy skin and a paunchier belly, wrote the word on the board in very large letters.
Dyslexia.
“Dyslexia. Does anyone know what this means?”

“It means someone who flips letters around.”

“Or numbers,” someone else offered.

“They can’t read.” This answer came from behind Liz, and she drew a little star on her paper and colored it in slowly.

“No. No. Yes,” the professor said, pointing at each in turn. “Dyslexia is having difficulty reading, but it’s not because they flip letters so much as they do not see the letters in a word.”

How could they not see the letters in a word? Liz was already tuning out. Sounded like someone should tell them to get off their butts and work a little harder to her.

“They see a word like ‘cat’ not as three individual letters, but as a unit. Younger children with dyslexia often don’t realize that words are even a combination of letters. They see each word as a unit, so they begin to memorize units rather than individual letters combining in different ways to make a word. Further, they do not see the word ‘cat’ as a cat. They see a cat as a cat. They see the world in objects, not in written words. If the word they are working with has a corresponding object, they can often attach the word that names it, but get farther out from concrete objects, and their ability to memorize the concept and the written word that goes with that concept diminishes greatly.

“These children, who remember account for up to 20% of all students, go through the early learning-to-read stages seeing the forest but never the trees. They do not decode words like many of us do— like you are supposed to do to learn to read.” He wrote the word “text” on one side of the board, “decode” in the middle, and then “intelligence, understanding, and context” on top of each other on the right. To the far right, he wrote
Meaning.
“Because there is an issue with the decoding part of reading, dyslexic children skip over that and use their intelligence, memory skills, and the context they can glean from what they can read to try to compensate.”

“Are you saying they can’t decode words?”

“No, not ‘can’t.’ In most cases, they can, but they are never taught to decode words the way they have to be taught to learn it. They are taught the way most of us learn it, only their brains do not work the way most of ours do. They rely heavily on the right brain, which we learned earlier in the semester means…?”

“The creative side,” someone in the class echoed.

“Right. They are, in fact, highly creative people. They see the world in pictures and sounds and colors. They do not see the world in terms of words— especially written words. For example, Ms. Savoy.”

Liz’s attention jerked up from the fifth little star she had drawn.

The professor smiled at her. “If I asked you, what did you do yesterday, please tell me how you would go about retrieving that information from your brain?”

“Yesterday?” Her eyebrows shot up in concern and confusion. “Well, yesterday was Tuesday, so I got up at 7 and I got ready for school so I could be here by 8.”

“Very good. Now, did you see all of that in pictures in your head or in words?”

She had to think about that. “Words, I guess. I mean I can see the things I did if I think about it, but you only asked me what I did.”

“So you think in words?”

“Well, yeah. Doesn’t everybody?”

His smile broadened. “No. Some people think almost exclusively in pictures. The more a student thinks in terms of pictures, the more likely it is that that student will be dyslexic.”

“Have you ever heard of dyslexia?” Liz asked Mia when the 7:30 crowd thinned out into the boring 8:30 hour.

“Dyslexia? Isn’t that that reading thing where people flip around letters and stuff?”

Liz laughed softly. “That’s what I thought.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. We were talking about it today in class. I’ve just never thought about what it would be like if you couldn’t read, you know? I mean I’ve known kids in class that couldn’t read. I just always thought they were lazy or they didn’t care. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Sounds like you just stumbled on something that actually interests you.” Mia flipped the towel she was holding into quarters.

“Yeah,” Liz said softly. “Maybe I did.”

It had all sounded so great, and Liz really was interested. The problem was her roommate came down with a horrible cold that morphed into the flu and promptly shared it with Liz. So two Mondays before Thanksgiving, she found herself in The Grind, sneezing, wheezing, and generally ready to collapse. Dyslexia and class seemed the farthest thing from her mind. She was now focused solely on survival.

“Wow. You. Look. Awful.” Mia came back to the counter where Liz was laying with her head down, trying to get up the energy to move. It wasn’t working.

“Thanks.” She ran her nose over her sleeve and was glad the counter was there to catch her head when it fell back.