Sugar Daddy (Travis Family #1)(29)

When I graduated, my choices weren't going to be any better. I had no special talents that would afford me a scholarship anywhere, and so far I hadn't even taken any summer jobs that would have given me experience to put on a resume. "You're good with babies," my friend Lucy had pointed out. "You could work at a day care, or maybe as a teacher's assistant at the elementary school."

"I'm only good with Carrington," I said. "I don't think I'd like to take care of other people's children."

Lucy had pondered my possible future careers, and had decided I should get a cosmetology degree. "You love doing makeup and hair." she pointed out. That was true. But beauty school would be expensive, though. I wondered what Mama's reaction would be if I asked her for thousands of dollars of tuition money. And then I wondered what other plans or ideas she might have for my future, if any. It was pretty likely she didn't. Mama chose to live in the moment. So I stored the idea away, saving it for a time when I thought Mama would be open to it.

Winter came, and I began to go out with a boy named Luke Bishop, whose father owned a car dealership. Luke was on the football team—in fact, he had taken the fullback position after Hardy's knee had gone out the previous year—but Luke wasn't considering a sports career. His family's financial status would allow him to go to any college he could get into. He was a good-looking boy with dark hair and blue eyes, and he bore enough of a physical resemblance to Hardy that I was drawn to him.

I met Luke at a Blue Santa party just before Christmas. It was the local law enforcement's annual toy drive to collect presents for poor families with needy children. For most of December toys were donated, gathered and sorted, and on the twenty-first, the presents were wrapped at a party at the police station. Anyone could volunteer to help. The football coach had ordered all his players to participate in some capacity, whether it was to collect toys, attend the wrapping party, or deliver them the day before Christmas.

I went to the party with my friend Moody and her boyfriend Earl Jr., the butcher's son. There must have been at least a hundred people at the party, and a mountain of toys stacked around and beside the long tables. Christmas music was playing in the background. A makeshift coffee station in the corner featured big stainless steel carafes, and boxes of cookies plastered with white icing. Standing in a row of present-wrappers, wearing a Santa Claus hat someone had put on my head, I felt like a Christmas elf.

With so many people cutting paper and curling ribbons, there was a shortage of scissors. As soon as a pair was set down, they were immediately snatched up by someone who had been waiting for his or her turn. Standing at the table with a pile of unwrapped toys, and a roll of red and white striped paper, I watched impatiently for my chance. A pair of scissors clattered on the table, and I reached for them. But someone else was too fast for me. My fingers inadvertently clamped over a male hand that had already grasped the scissors. I looked up into a pair of smiling blue eyes.

"Dibs," the boy said. With his other hand, he flipped the tail of my Santa hat away from my eyes and over my shoulder.

We spent the rest of the night side by side, talking, laughing, and pointing out presents we thought the other would like. He chose a Cabbage Patch doll with curly brown hair for me, and I picked out a model kit of a Star Wars X-wing fighter for him. By the end of the evening, Luke had asked me out on a date.

There were many things to like about Luke. He was average in all the right ways, intelligent but not a geek, athletic but not muscle-bound. He had a nice smile, although it wasn't Hardy's smile. His deep blue eyes didn't have the ice-and-fire brightness of Hardy's, and his dark hair was crisp and wiry, instead of thick and soft like mink fur. Luke also didn't have Hardy's outsized presence or restless spirit. But in other ways they were similar, both tall and physically self-possessed, both uncompromisingly masculine.

It was a time in my life when I was especially vulnerable to male attention. Everyone

else in the small world of Welcome seemed to be paired up. My own mother had been dating more than I had. And here was a boy who resembled Hardy, without the complexity, and he was available.

As Luke and I began to see more of each other, we were accepted as a couple and other boys stopped asking me out. I liked the security of being half of a pair. I liked having someone to walk through the halls with, someone to eat lunch with, someone to take me out for pizza after the Friday-night game.

The first time Luke kissed me, I was disappointed to discover it wasn't anything like Hardy's kisses. He had just brought me back home from a date. Before getting out of the car, he leaned over and pressed his mouth to mine. I returned the pressure, trying to summon a response, but there was no heat or excitement, just the alien moisture of another person's mouth, the slippery probing of a tongue. My brain remained uninvolved from what was happening to my body. Feeling guilty and embarrassed by my own coldness, I tried to make up for it by wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him harder.

As we continued to date, there were more kisses, embraces, tentative explorations. Gradually I learned to stop comparing Luke to Hardy. There was no mysterious magic, no invisible circuitry of sensation and thought between us. Luke was not the kind who thought deeply about things, and he had no interest in the secretive territory of my heart.

At first Mama hadn't approved of my dating a senior, but when she met Luke, she'd been charmed by him. "He seems like a nice boy." she told me afterward. "If you want to date him. I'll allow it as long as you keep to an eleven-thirty curfew."