Shiver : 13 Sexy Tales of Humor and Horror - Aurora Belle (читать книги онлайн бесплатно полные версии TXT) 📗

I saw him out of my periphery, but I didn’t work up the courage to look at him.

“Ruby?” he asked with a confident half-smile.

I peered up at him as if shocked to see him. “Oh, hello!” I said, my voice an octave higher than it usually was.

He smiled wider. “Hi, I’m Sawyer, Anne’s grandson,” he reminded me.

He even reached his hand out to shake mine, that’s how polite and adorable he was. I was completely out of my element.

“Oh, yeah, I remember,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand and cringing when I saw a bit of mustard on my thumb. I pulled back just before our hands touched. “Mustard,” I said, reaching for a napkin and wiping it away.

He laughed as I held my hand out again.

“Want to try it one more time?” I asked, mostly because I just really wanted to touch him.

We shook hands, bouncing them up and down for what felt like five minutes before either one of us thought to pull away.

“I was going to tell you that I liked your new haircut the other day, but you ran off too quick,” he said as he put his hands in his back pockets.

“What — me? This — hair?” I could apparently say words, but stringing them into a coherent sentence was another thing all together.

Sawyer laughed and glanced down to his feet before turning back to the frozen yogurt machine.

“Well, I better go get some yogurt for my grandma or she’ll kill me.”

I cleared my throat and turned back to Sandy’s sandwich. “Okay, I’ll see ya.”

He gave me one more smile before leaving.

And that’s how it went for the whole first year that I knew him. He’d visit Anne at least once a week, usually on Thursdays. So for one year, every Thursday, I put on a little bit more mascara and made sure I didn’t have anything embarrassing in my teeth in the hopes of running into him. I’d try to bring him up to Anne as casually as possible and try to plans subjects we could talk about if he came to visit so that I wouldn’t look like a blubbering idiot.

Then one year after I first met him in the hallway, Anne broke the news to me that he had a girlfriend and my school-girl crush started to crack. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter that he had a girlfriend since we hardly knew each other. But most days I’d wander through my shift at work and think about what it would be like if he suddenly appeared in front of me, single and ready to mingle.

It wasn’t easy to push him out of my mine, and I hated to admit that my crush had grown even more in the last year, but I’d kept it to myself.

It was hard to face him when he came to visit Anne. Every time I saw him, I feared his girlfriend would be by his side, but she never was. The whole time they dated, he never brought her to Paradise Springs.

But apparently now he was SINGLE again, and Anne decided to break that news to me three seconds before his arrival for the Halloween party.

Just great. I had no planned conversations, I hadn’t practiced talking to myself in the mirror in months, and I could have at least stashed my mouse ears under Anne’s bed.

I was going to have to kick some grandma ass.

Or yeah, maybe she’d kick my ass again. I wouldn’t test her.

I stood at the top of a ladder trying to hang balloons from the ceiling in the dining hall. The party was due to start in an hour, but no one had signed up for the decoration committee, which had left me as the only back-up available. I’d already blown up two dozen balloons and was feeling the effects of depleting all of my oxygen stores, but the old people needed balloons, because y’know maybe this would be their last Halloween and who was I to stand in the way of their death and one last night of geriatric partying.

My head felt woozy, and I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to catch my bearings.

“Sweetie, you don’t look so good up there,” Anne called as she held the ladder for me. I was a good ten feet off the ground, and the longer I hovered in the air, the more I realized that I should have blown the balloons up on the ground.

“I’m fine, I just feel lightheaded,” I assured her as I tied off the balloon and reached up on my tiptoes to tape it to the ceiling. You know what looks like crap? Balloons stuck to the ceiling in random spots. Once again, I thought of how strange it was that my nursing curriculum had failed to teach me party decorating considering it made up 50 % of my job. The other 50 % consisted of urine. So much urine.

“Grandma, they have you on ladder duty?” A deep voice asked from a few feet behind me. I twisted around with enough force to cause the ladder to twist out of Anne’s grip.

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” I screamed as I tried to grab onto anything around me, but I was only coming up with empty air. My life was flashing before my eyes as that ladder slowly toppled toward the ground.

“Byyyyeeee Annneeeeee,” I said in what felt like slow motion speech, just as I fell into strong arms.

“Whoa,” Sawyer said as he steadied the two of us. “Are you okay?”

AM I OKAY?!

I am in the arms of my lover. My unknowing lover. I’ve never been more okay.

“I fell,” I said lamely.

A smile broke out across his face, and I caught an up close view of straight, white teeth. “You did, and then I caught you.”

I nodded, connecting the dots.

“You’re really strong,” I pointed out, appreciating his physique. “Like the hulk.”

He laughed and then slowly set me back onto my own two feet. If I had thought faster, I would have feigned injury to stay in his arms. Oh weird, my leg just fell off, so why don’t you just carry me around all day? That would have worked like a charm.

“Sawyer! You made it!” Anne sang as she swooped in and gave him a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. I took the moment to take him in, appreciating his soccer jersey and jeans.

“Hey grandma,” he said before meeting my eye. “Hey Ruby. Cute ears.”

I instinctively reached up to feel the fuzzy, gray mouse ears. I’d forgotten I still had them on.

“Oh hi — thanks,” I said.

“What’s with the jersey?” Anne asked, eyeing his choice of clothing with an air of judgment.

Sawyer reached down to hold the loose material between his fingers. “It’s the only thing I had at my apartment that would work as a costume.”

“So — you’re a soccer player?” she asked, trying to connect the pieces.

He shrugged. “I guess. This is Liam Wilder’s jersey. He’s a forward for the LA Stars.”

Anne narrowed her eyes on him. “That doesn’t count as a costume!”

“I think it does,” I protested. The words were out before I could stop them. Anne shifted her gaze to me and raised her brow, shocked that I actually contributed to the conversation. Sawyer gave me a wide grin.

“There you have it. You’ve been outvoted, Grams,” he said, patting her shoulder.

It was always about this time in my encounters with Sawyer that I would excuse myself to get back to work, so I took a slow step backward, hoping Anne wouldn’t notice.

“No. No, don’t even think about,” Anne said, holding up her hand.

“What? I have to get back to my shift.”

“Bullshit.”

Sawyer’s eyebrows shot up. “Grandma! Let her get back to work.”

Anne shook her head, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “If Sawyer hadn’t just walked in here, you would have stayed and continued to decorate with me for another thirty minutes. You always just skiddadle as soon as he arrives.”

My mouth fell open in shock. No she did not just call me out.

“Grandma,” Sawyer warned again.

I couldn’t even look his way at that point because the old ho-bag had essentially just spilled all the beans for me.

“Oh, what’s that?” I said, cupping my ear and pretending to hear something. “Yup, I think Mr. Jenkins is calling for me down the hall. Oh, yup, he just broke his hip. Oh wow, no, both hips. I better go check on him.”