The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,69
on the outside. “We ought to head on over to the office.”
Laurel had a strong urge to grab David’s hand, pull him to his feet, and say, “You come on with me, Dave.”
She could peel the jacket off his lanky frame and lead him out, sticking Kaitlyn Reese with the bill. He’d been readying for this demo for weeks, but his job could go to hell along with Kaitlyn. Laurel longed to tug him through the parking lot and find his SUV. They could climb into the back, and he would kiss her and touch her while she whispered to him about regular things, what to have for dinner, should they paint the bathroom, until he remembered who she was. Who they were together.
But David had pulled out his bandless watch to check the time. “How’d it get so late?” he asked. He signaled the hovering waiter for the check. “Did she really take your car?”
“I don’t know,” Laurel said. “Probably.”
“Typical Thalia,” David said, his nostrils flaring.
The waiter came over with the bill on a tray, and David glanced at it, then took out his wallet and set money down, his movements precise and spare. He had cooled and slowed the way he did in a crisis, but this wasn’t a crisis. This was lunch. Lunch was not a crisis unless Thalia was right.
“I don’t have time to run you home. I have to get to this meeting,” David said.
“Let her take your car,” Kaitlyn said. “You can come with me in the rental.”
“Good.” David stood up. He dropped a kiss onto the corner of Laurel’s mouth, and she had to physically stop herself from jerking back. “You have a key for the SUV?”
“Wait, David. How will you get home?” she asked, a stopgap measure that paused him only for a moment.
“I’ll bring him back to you,” Kaitlyn said. She gave Laurel a tight smile and then added, as if joking, “When I’m done.”
David didn’t seem to hear. He shrugged off the ugly jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. “I’ll call you, tell you how it went,” he told Laurel. “Sorry about—” He waved one hand around, and Laurel didn’t know if he meant Thalia, or Kaitlyn, or leaving her here.
“Dave,” Kaitlyn said, impatient, already walking down the three steps into the basin full of Trish Deerbold clones.
“Sorry,” he said again, and then he followed Kaitlyn Reese.
He left Laurel standing there, the world reversed, her feet on a sky-blue floor and what felt like the whole weight of the ocean pressing down on her.
CHAPTER 12
L aurel wove the SUV through traffic, hurrying away, with no other destination. She pulled in to Albertsons but left after circling the parking lot twice, even though there were plenty of spaces. She couldn’t stop picturing David leaning across the table, words pouring out of him in torrents for a girl who wasn’t Laurel.
With his old cronies from Duke, David could yawp endlessly about quarks and how to bend space. Computer talk with other engineers made his long torso stiffen and still itself, while his arms did their odd, controlled flailing, drawing diagrams in the air; he could be so excited about a code string that his eyes bugged out. But the hard-core coders at his job were all men. He never talked to Laurel like that, and he never talked to her in the regular way people do, to say how he was feeling. If David ever began a sentence with “I feel,” Laurel could rest certain that the next words out of his mouth would be “like eating another piece of chicken.”
He didn’t talk to women; he hardly spoke in words to his own mother. Until Laurel had seen him waving his arms and all but hollering, so excited, back and forth with Kaitlyn Reese, she would have said it wasn’t possible.
Kaitlyn was such a pretty girl, and with David’s brand of smartness. Laurel knew how the male-female thing worked. Words forged connections in the brain, and then the body followed. She’d learned that lesson at nineteen. Her husband had been giving that girl who called him Dave something he’d never given Laurel, and Kaitlyn Reese was giving him something back that Laurel didn’t have.
She drove around the lots at Eckerd and the farmer’s market before she realized she wasn’t going to get out and buy shampoo or fruit, or even stop and pick up the dry cleaning through the window. She didn’t want the eye contact or to