One & Only (Canton) (8 page)

Stop saying it like that. Just stop.

“Like I told you last night,” he went on, “you can ask around if you want. I’m certainly not going to pressure you into anything. But I think with the two of us working together, we can really wow them, knock them on their biomedical asses.”

I chuckled. He beamed. Somewhere across the room, Elaine Sun was scowling.

And I could do this. I knew I could. Two years ago, I’d had enough willpower to keep my hands off Dylan the entire time we were working together. Two years ago, I’d had enough willpower to walk away from a relationship with him because I knew it would be bad for my future. I certainly had just as much willpower now. Besides, all that was back when Dylan had actually wanted me.

This time, he had a girlfriend, and even if he didn’t—well, I’d screwed him over. Broken his heart. Dumped him. And though he didn’t seem bitter about it at all, he also didn’t seem
interested
. I was ancient history, water under the bridge, whatever other thing meant he could laugh and tease and introduce me to his girlfriend like he’d never once told her the name of the first person he’d ever slept with.

Wait—he
hadn’t
, right? I thought about my ex-boyfriend Jason, who’d definitely told me about both of his prior girlfriends. Just as I’d told Jason about Dylan. Didn’t everyone do that? But if Dylan had told Hannah, then wouldn’t she have been a little more interested in me when he’d introduced us the other day?

Just like that, my mind was filled with images of Dylan in bed with my sister, having pillow talk with her about the time he lost his virginity…to me. Oh, God.

“Ms. McMann?” Dr. Yue’s voice broke into my waking nightmare. “Care to give us your thoughts on cell surface plasmon resonance?”

“Yes!” I said, relieved to be flipping through notes tangled with chemical equations rather than my even more tangled thoughts. “When you’re dealing with a dissociation constant higher than the expected value of K-delta…”

Even when I was done answering the professor, I kept all my focus on the rest of the lecture. I might have written down every word spoken in that classroom for the next fifty minutes.

It was nice for my brain to have something to do other than worry about what Dylan may have told Hannah, or wonder if I could be the disinterested scientist I longed to, or process the aggravatingly delicious scent of the guy sitting way too close.

***

That afternoon, I did something that I’d somehow managed to avoid doing for my entire life. I looked up Hannah Swift on Facebook.

There wasn’t much there. Her profile pic was one of those candid shots that had clearly had other people in it originally. I saw the corner of someone else’s arm near her shoulder—maybe even Dad’s. It listed her schools: the high school that served the nice part of town, Canton U. She was “in a relationship” with Dylan, and there were a bunch of pictures of him there, too. Her wall was filled with posts from friends, pretty girls with pouting selfie profile pics, sending her exclamations points and Xs and Os and clippings of news items about her favorite TV shows and movies.

Hannah liked horror films. That was unexpected. She read a lot of books—or at least, she wanted everyone on Facebook to think she had. I tried to imagine Hannah in my father’s house, nose stuck in a book. It didn’t jibe with the image I had of her. Or maybe the image I wanted to have. Hannah, the beautiful rich girl, living in my dad’s house, spending his money, smiling out from a silver frame on his desk at work. I wanted to know who this girl was who had attracted Dylan. He wasn’t into Ladies Who Lunch, that much I knew. So what did he see in her? Maybe he liked the girl who listed
One Hundred Years of Solitude
as her favorite novel. I’d never read it, but I’d heard of it. Maybe he liked the girl who didn’t squeal when the murderer ripped the co-ed’s guts out in the slasher flick. Maybe he liked her tennis serve.

I didn’t know anything about that girl. She was my sister, and I didn’t know. I glanced at her friends list—other Canton kids, other kids from high school. Did she have exes in this list? Her senior prom date, her first kiss, the guy she’d lost her virginity to? God, I hoped it wasn’t Dylan. It wouldn’t be though, would it? Not if they’d only been together for six months.

No way, Tess. She’s twenty years old.
Probably hadn’t even waited as long as Dylan and I had to start having sex. Hannah was too outgoing, too pretty, too popular, too
Swift
.

But that wasn’t the info anyone ever put on Facebook.

***

That evening at Verde, I helped Sylvia with prep work and gave her the latest scoop. She chopped lemons, threaded olives and pearl onions onto toothpicks, and listened patiently until I was through.

“You know, Tess,” she said at last, “for someone who isn’t interested in dating Dylan, you sure care an awful lot about what he told his new girlfriend about you.”

I chose not to dignify that with a response. Besides, I didn’t care because of Dylan. I cared because of Hannah. “But if he did tell her that we’d slept together, don’t you think she’d have been a bit more interested when she met me? I mean, wouldn’t you be?”

“Yeah,” Sylvia agreed. “So then he probably didn’t tell her.”

I shook my head. He would have told her. Dylan—frank, honest, open Dylan—would have given her the names of the girls he’d slept with. Then again, that was teenaged Dylan. And since then, he said he’d slept with lots of people. Maybe that list was just a tad too long to trot it out these days.

But number one—I mean, that was worth a mention, right?
I
was worth a mention. What we’d done had meant a lot to me, even if I hadn’t called him again. I’d always thought that since Dylan had wanted to keep the relationship going, it had meant a lot to him, too.

Oh God, was I bad in bed? Maybe it hadn’t been those other guys’ fault.

“And anyway, who cares?” Sylvia asked, breaking me out of my spiral of neuroses. “Are you worried that if she knows, she’ll freak about about you two working together?”

“Yes.” This, at least, was most of the truth. Added scrutiny from Hannah Swift was bad on any level, and there’d be enough chances of us running into each other if I worked with Dylan. If she was suspicious of me because Dylan had told her our past history…well, that was definitely against Dad’s rules.

“You know what you can do, of course.”

I waited, hopeful.

Sylvia blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and started in on the trays of nuts. “You can
ask him
.”

“Excuse me?”

“‘Hey, Dylan,’” she quoted in a falsely casual tone, “‘before we commit to this science fair thing, can you tell me how much your girlfriend knows about the nature of our former relationship, and, if she does know, if she’s cool about us working together now? Because I don’t want a beaker of acid in my face.’” She shrugged. “Like that.”

“A beaker of acid?” I asked dryly. “Seriously?”

“You’re right,” she replied. “A Lady Who Lunches wouldn’t be smart enough to blind you with science. She’d just key your car or something.”

“That’s okay then,” I said. “The paint job’s so bad, I wouldn’t know if my car had been keyed.”

Syliva laughed at that, and we finished our prep work. Tonight, Sylvia had me on bar training, and soon my head was filled with formulas for various cocktails, the difference between sweet and dry vermouth, how many seconds of pouring equaled one or two or one-half of a jigger, according to the recipe booklet behind the bar. Sylvia, the more experienced bartender, would be making most of the drinks tonight, but I had been assigned the role of barback, pouring beers and wines and helping her out when things started getting rushed.

“This should be easy for you,” Sylvia said as people started showing up. “Just pretend you’re in a lab.”

“Labs are quieter,” I said. “And not full of guys looking to flirt with you.”

“Really? Isn’t that how you met Dylan?”

“Good point.” And that was pretty much the end of all conversation that wasn’t “two draft beers and a pinot grigio” or “pass the lime juice” for the rest of my evening.

After my shift had ended, I drove home, yawning and wondering how much coffee I’d need to consume to be able to finish my homework that night. What I didn’t expect was to find my mom waiting up for me. She was seated at our kitchen table, reading a magazine and having a cup of tea.

“I know, I know,” she said, giving me a dismissive wave. “You’re all grown up. But somehow, now that you’re living here, it’s harder to keep up this fantasy that you’ve been home in bed at 8:00 p.m. every night for the last two years.”

I smiled. “Is there any coffee?”

“At midnight?” She clucked her tongue. “Tess, you can’t keep this up. You’re going to burn out.”

“It’s my only option if I want to stay at Canton. Dad won’t help.”

She pursed her lips and looked down at her magazine. I knew that look. It was the one where she cast Dad’s latest edict in the most positive light possible. “He’ll come around eventually. I think the other night he was mostly just mad you went behind his back. You’re his daughter, Tess. He wants to talk over big decisions like that with you.”

More like he wanted to
make
big decisions like that for me.

“It’s hard to feel like his daughter when just mentioning my sister’s existence gets him angry.”

She gave me a long, thoughtful look. “It’s hard for him too, Tess. He’s so proud of you—of all your accomplishments. He’d love to boast about you to everyone.”

Hard.
For him
.

“You don’t know. There were lots of times, when you were younger, where he’d wonder what he could do to get…her…to act more responsibly, be a little more focused on her schoolwork and her goals.”

Well, at least Hannah was lucky enough to be spared the stereotypical parent “why can’t you be more like your sister” lectures.

“And what did you say, Mom? That it was due to your superior parenting skills and maybe he’d married the wrong woman?”

She smiled. “Should have said that, you’re right.” She cocked her head to the side. “Do you really think that? I always thought I just got lucky. You certainly didn’t get your ambition from my genes. I was never the scholar you are, and I couldn’t have cared less about science in school.”

“But you never dissuaded me from trying to achieve the most I could,” I replied. Unlike my father.

“Oh, sweetie, I don’t think I could have. You always go after what you want.”

I bit my lip. “Not always, Mom.” I’d walked away from Dylan once, and I was trying my hardest to do it again.

***

At the first planning session with Dylan, in the Photonics lab after class the following week, I decided that Sylvia had the right idea. Before I spent the next few months fretting about secrets when I should be formulating equations, I should just find out from Dylan what he’d said to Hannah about me.

“Before we get too far into this,” I said, tapping my pencil a bit too hard against the page, “I have to ask you something.”

“Oh…kay,” Dylan said slowly, looking a bit worried.

It came out in a blurt. “Did you tell Hannah about us?”

“About how I was doing this project with you?”

“No,” I said. “About…
us
.”

“Oh.”

“Because it usually comes up,” I rambled on. “With girlfriends. And…histories.”

“It does?”

I looked up, not even realizing until that moment that I’d somehow become fascinated with my notebook. “Doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Tess,” he teased. “You’re the one who made that claim. I assumed you had data to back up your hypothesis.”

“Well, you’re the one with all the experience!” I shot back. “‘Lots of girls,’ remember?”

He laughed. “Right. I did say that.”

My mouth dropped open. “It’s not true?”

“Well…” He rolled his shoulders. “‘Lots’ isn’t an exact number, Madam Scientist. What is the precise definition of ‘lots’?”

I straightened and looked him in the eye. “Ten.”

He blinked. It was a guilty blink.

I threw my pencil at him. “I knew it!”

He ducked. “What did you want me to say, Tess? I’m standing there, minding my own business, and a girl I hadn’t spoken to in two years suddenly appears across the cheese tray like some sort of hallucination in a gray miniskirt.”

“It was a dress.”

“It was a
shock
, is what it was.” He folded his arms. “Okay, fine. Three. Not including Hannah.”

I didn’t say anything, partially because
three
changed my perception of the situation a lot, and partially because the “not including Hannah” part made me cringe a bit on the inside.

He was staring at me, and when he spoke again, his voice was much softer. “And now you know a lot more about my sexual history than my girlfriend does. Does that answer your question?”

I nodded wordlessly, because I couldn’t trust my voice not to say all the things whirling around in my brain, especially the biggest—
why
? Why hadn’t he told Hannah about me, if we were so firmly and forever in the past?

“Now you tell me if what you said over the cheese tray about dating girls was true. Because I think it would help my ego a lot to learn that your real issue was that you had decided guys weren’t your thing.”

Okay. So I hadn’t exactly told him the truth, either. I took a deep breath. “No. No girls.”

“Well, there goes that fantasy. And my whole prepared speech about how, as a friend, I think you can do way better than Elaine Sun.”

I forced a smile. “Not into girls, Dylan.”

He said nothing, but I heard the question anyway. I saw it in his deep, blue eyes. And I knew I owed him an answer, after all these years.

“I…wasn’t ready for a relationship,” I admitted. “Truthfully? I was kind of scared of where we were going. I was only eighteen, and… I just wasn’t ready.”

He seemed to mull this over for a bit. “Yeah. I get it,” he said at last. “Well…it all worked out for the best.”

“Yes!” I agreed, relieved. “Now we’ll be partners and friends, and it’s perfect.”