Batter of Wits (Green Valley Chronicles #22) - Smartypants Romance Page 0,13
had a list of how life was going to play out, one she'd been working on (with the help of her daddy) since we were sixteen and met in marching band. Me on trumpet, her waving one of those big stupid flags and wearing glittery white boots over top mile-long legs.
That list, the one I'd never contributed a single item to in the last seven years of dating, added the 'rocks on my back' tally well into the three hundred range. And I still wasn't entirely sure how to offload some of them.
Before the knob turned, before the hinge creaked on the right side of the door, I straightened my tie and smoothed my hand through my hair.
Just as I did, there was the turn and the squeak, the smile and the eyes, a brown paper bag clutched in her hands, looking drab and inconspicuous against the mint green and white of her perfectly tailored dress.
"I hope you're hungry," she said, coming around the corner of my desk. I stood, sliding one hand around her waist to drop a kiss on her waiting cheek. "I made your favorite sandwich."
I smiled, because I knew exactly what was waiting for me in that bag. Tuna salad on rye, and it was absolutely not my favorite sandwich. I'd complimented it once, the first time she tried her Grandma MacIntyre’s recipe. From that day on, she'd cemented it in her head that any time she wanted to butter me up for something, that tuna salad was made in bulk.
"Sounds great, thank you." I took the bag and settled back into my seat. "You didn't have to come into town just for this, did you?"
Magnolia took a seat on the edge of my desk, daintily perching one hip on the corner so that she could cross her legs and face in my direction. "It's no trouble. What's the rest of your day look like?” Her gaze sharpened on my face when I paused before answering. “Your eyes are tired. Are you feeling all right?"
As she said it, she leaned forward to trail her finger underneath my eyes and I sighed. They probably did look tired. All night, I'd tossed and turned, an itch at the back of my head that I couldn't scratch. There was nothing left undone in my day, nothing I hadn't finished, but I slept as if there had been.
Carefully, so she wouldn't feel like I was rebuffing her, I clasped her hand in mine, pulled it away from my face and rubbed my thumb over the soft skin of her knuckles. “Just tired,” I answered, studying her hand in mine.
I used to tell her—when we were younger and hadn't realized that skin could be compared to something other than the color of food—that we could make a Neapolitan ice cream sandwich, between the two of us. Especially in the summer, her normally golden skin turned into something more like burnt caramel, and if I wasn't careful, I'd get red as a lobster, except the skin covered by my swim trunks, which stayed marshmallow white. She used to think it was funny, the thought of us as an ice cream sundae, and I did as well, but sometime in college, the things we found funny, just kinda … stopped.
Magnolia pulled her hand back to root around in her purse, and I opened up the bag with a quiet exhalation. The last thing I wanted to do, in this office, in this building, on this day, was eat that damn tuna salad sandwich.
"You didn't stay over last night," she said quietly, after she'd shut the clasp on her purse.
I stared at her when she said it, eyes trained down on her lap, but I knew her too well to think she was afraid to ask. Magnolia wasn't afraid of anything, and I wanted to catch just one glimpse of that fearless girl that I met on the football field, instead of whatever she'd been molded into now.
"I had some work to do before I came in this morning."
The rise and fall of her chest picked up at my quietly spoken answer, one that clearly didn't hold enough weight with her. Her lips, soft and pink from the lipstick she probably reapplied just before coming into my office, opened to say something, when my father walked into my office with a brisk knock on the door.
"I need you to step in for me on something, Tucker," he said, winking briefly at Magnolia.