Schooling the Jock (Nerds Vs Jocks #1) - - Eli Easton Page 0,31
away with me. “They came along unexpectedly. I think my mom secretly believes she was too old to have them, and that’s why they have problems, but that’s bullshit. Nobody knows what causes autism, and she wasn’t that old. No, it could have been me just as easily, or none of us.”
I shouldn’t have said all that. Dobbs didn’t want to know about our family insecurities and drama.
After a minute’s awkward silence, Dobbs leaned over and turned on the radio. He searched around the dial, and then the sounds of Drake singing “Laugh Now, Cry Later” filled the car.
Dobbs looked at me with his mouth open. “I figured everything would be country. Hank Williams and John Wayne.”
“John Wayne was an actor, not a singer,” I scolded.
Dobbs just winked at me and grinned. Shit, he’d gotten me. I swallowed a laugh. “Anyway, you can probably find some Luke Combs or Kane Brown on there if you search.”
“But Drake? Seriously? Indie rap in Iowa?”
“Most popular music genre in the state.”
“No shit?”
“Corn don’t mean corny, my man.”
He laughed. “Okay, but that line definitely is. Ironic that.”
We listened to the whole song before I guided us through the not very busy main street of Mercy Creek, Iowa.
Dobbs stared out the window like he was at Disneyland. Man, he had a nice profile. “You’ve really got a general store? That’s so Little House on the Prairie.”
“Yep. Think of it as small-town Walmart. The nearest one of those is over an hour’s drive. This one carries everything from generators to hair dye.”
“Like a prehistoric 7-Eleven!”
I had to laugh he was so awestruck. And so damned cute when he was. “Come on, the general store’s an experience not to be missed in this life.”
I pulled into an angled parking spot in front of the store. Hattie’s store. Was Dobbs ready to do Mercy Creek together? Was I?
The front bell jingled just as it had when I was a little kid, and the voice I remembered so well floated down from the balcony above. “Hold your horses. I’m not as young as I used to be.”
That was exactly what she said when I was five. I called. “No hurry, Miss Hattie. We’re just looking around.”
The screech came from the steep staircase. “Oh my God, is that my Jesse?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I grinned and looked at Dobbs, who was staring at me like a stranger in a strange land. I called, “Don’t rush, I’m not going anywhere.”
She yelled, “Did you see my new display inside the front door? Go Badgers!”
I looked at the display table she had set up complete with stuffed badgers carrying pennants and a large framed picture of me in front of an even bigger poster on the wall of me in mid-run reaching up to grab the football from the air. The poster read, Give ’em the Hard Knox.
Dobbs snorted. “Does she light candles? Do the women of the town do dances with flowers and incense?”
“Ha! You’re just jealous you don’t have your own vestal virgins.” I pushed as much snark into the comment as I could muster, but my cheeks still got hot.
At that moment, Hattie Gravy made it to us, proprietress of the general store, who had been old when I was young and now had to be somewhere in her nineties. She wore coveralls over a long-sleeved underwear shirt, and layered on top of that was some kind of pinafore dress in what I remembered my mom calling dotted swiss, forget it was January. Her red hair, which had never behaved, was beaten into submission by a host of combs and barrettes, but the ends still stuck out in some eternal expression of surprise.
She marched up to me and reached for my head, which she could barely stretch to from her lofty height of just over five feet, but she dragged my face down and planted a kiss on my cheek. Then she stepped back, hands on her hips. “Let me look at you. Hmm. Look kind of tired and still too scrawny for your height, but otherwise mighty handsome.” Her sharp gaze moved to Dobbs. “Who’s this?”
“Hattie Gravy, meet Dobbs. We go to school together.”
She stuck out her hand. “Hi, there, Dobbs. I’m betting you don’t play football, right?” She waved a hand the length of his body. “’Cause you’ve got more of a bookworm, naughty professor thing going on.”
I barked a laugh so hard I should have broken a rib. The exact words I used in my mind to describe Dobbs.