“Wow, that sucks. So what did you do?”
“Called Dad,” she said, grimacing at the memory. “He said, ‘I’m going to kick your butt from here to Kingdom Come, Robin Elaine! You get your ass back here right now!’” Robin laughed at the memory. “Needless to say, I didn’t rush right home.”
“You did go home, though, right?” Jake asked.
“Oh yeah, Mom got me home—she sent a plane, and I got a cab to the airport. And then, I hid in Rebecca’s room until Dad calmed down.”
“What happened to Bozo?”
“Who knows? He’s probably in the pen now,” she said and immediately caught herself, her eyes going wide with mortification. “Oh, sorry . . .”
Not as sorry as he was. Jake waved a hand at her, dismissed it.
“Well, anyway, I guess I’m not the best judge of character.”
She didn’t seem to hear the irony in her statement, but it slapped Jake square in the face. He looked straight ahead, wondered about a home life in River Oaks that was so bad she would want to run from it. It occurred to him, as they turned into the parking lot of Java the Hut, that perhaps they weren’t so different after all. Perhaps they were more alike than he could have hoped.
Inside, Robin ordered her usual quadruple foo-foo chocoloco skinny steamed nutmeg coffee, waited until he had ordered as close to Folger’s as he could get, straight up, before putting a full-court press on him about accompanying her to Burdette. She laid out all the reasons he should go: (a) she was going, (b) she was going to Burdette alone, and (c) she did not want to go to Burdette alone.
“I don’t know. I’ve got a class I’m trying very hard not to flunk out of.”
“You can study on the plane.”
“The plane? Burdette is a two-hour drive.”
“Two hours you and I don’t have.” She smiled, and a dimple appeared in one cheek.
“And I promised to make baseball practice this week—”
“See? I’m saving you time. Anyway, you don’t need to practice! Sheesh, you practically handed them a win with one hand tied behind your back!”
Jake laughed. “It wasn’t quite like that.”
“Come on, Jake,” she said, and lowered her head, looking up at him through her lashes. “Don’t you want to be a member of the mile-high club?”
That idea kicked his testosterone levels up a notch or two. “Okay,” he said instantly, felt his heart melt with Robin’s smile, and was painfully aware that the more he was with her, the more impossible it was to be without her. Damn. He was in for a fall.
Later that afternoon, when Jake went looking for Cole, he had a moment of panic when he couldn’t find him anywhere. His first thought was that Cole had run off again—he’d been sour and resentful all day. And the kid’s mood had not improved with the double whamoburger Jake brought him. If he’d run off and was wandering around this neighborhood, someone had probably already called the cops.
When Jake couldn’t find him upstairs, he searched the bottom floor, then went out onto the front lawn. No Cole.
Now the panic was beginning to swell in him. He walked around the east lawn and saw no one. He proceeded to the back, certain now that Cole had taken off, but what he saw on the back lawn drew him up short. It wasn’t that Cole was with Robin, or that they were busily rearranging the pink flamingos like maniacal little beavers. What shocked him was that Cole was talking, and from where he stood, it looked like a blue streak. Robin seemed to be adding a comment here and there, but for the most part, Cole talked while she made a herd of flamingos in the corner of her lawn.
Jake watched for several minutes, then backed up, turned around, and went back the way he had come He was awestruck. No one had been able to connect to Cole, not his teachers, not Mom, and certainly not Jake. But there he was with Robin, talking like they had known each other a lifetime. She had that effect on people, could breathe life into the world again, make you want to open up and let her in. It was an effect that he really adored, so much so that it sort of frightened him.
He wondered if it frightened Cole, too.
That night, before class, Jake ran into Lindy. She politely asked after him, but Jake felt like an ass. She smiled, but he could see that wounded look in her eye, and Jake wondered for the thousandth time—was he really going to pass up a woman like Lindy for this fling with Robin? The question ate at him; he could hardly focus on the calculations the instructor was reviewing on the board. He finally realized what was bubbling inside him was fear—fear that he was out of his freaking mind, that he was playing with fire that could destroy him, and his business, too.