Cream of the Crop
Page 21

I could hear his deep voice coming closer, answering Leo’s questions with words like “Yeah,” and “Uh-huh,” and “About ten inches.”
I could die.
Roxie argued with me right up until Leo and Oscar were maybe ten feet away from the Jeep. I wasn’t ready to face him yet, not yet. He existed in another space and time, a space called The Market and a time called The Best Ten Minutes of My Saturday Morning, and seeing him here and now was threatening to unravel the continuum that held our fragile universe together!
I couldn’t stand him being real yet. So I handled things like any grown-up, professional, adult woman.
I pulled my turtleneck up and over my face and hid inside my sweater. I could see through the weave two very distinct shadows appear over the back of the Jeep, one impossibly tall.
I could perceive Leo looking back and forth between me and Roxie, her own shadowy figure shaking her head.
“Um, Sugar Snap?” I heard Leo say.
No use. I couldn’t stay inside my sweater forever. I took a deep breath, inhaling a hit of confidence from the perfumed cashmere, and peeked over the top.
Staring down at me with a curious look was Oscar. His gray-blue eyes had a touch of amusement mixed in with the what-the-hell. And as I pulled the sweater further down my face, his eyes changed from confusion to recognition. And as realization dawned, a flare of heat flashed through them.
“Brie,” he breathed, placing the face and my order at the same time.
“Oh. Yes.”
Roxie was shaking her head back and forth so quickly she was going to give herself whiplash. “I gave you the perfect opportunity, and I mean the perfect opportunity, to talk to him, to turn on the old Natalie charm and make him want you. You were trapped in a field, in a Jeep, surrounded by cows, his cows, mind you. You literally had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. And what did you do?”
“I ran,” I answered, laying my head down on the dashboard. “I. Ran.”
“Across a field.”
“Covered in cows.”
“Totally covered in cows!” Roxie exploded.
I turned my face toward her, keeping my head on the dashboard. I’d retreated back into my turtleneck, but my eyes were still peeping out, watching Roxie for any sign that I might still be bordering on charming and not psychotic. “To be fair, I didn’t run very far,” I pointed out. “I turned around.”
“Because a cow was chasing you.”
I went ahead and pulled the turtleneck up and over my entire head. It was true, it was all true. When he’d realized it was me, and we’d completed our Three-Word Waltz, I hadn’t waited around to see what he would say. Because like a flash, I jumped my size-eighteen ass up and over the side of the Jeep, and took off in a shuffle-hop-step across the field, one of Leo’s galoshes hanging halfway off my foot.
Turns out gentle sweet dairy cows get startled when someone comes running, and they don’t always take too kindly to a shuffle-hop-step. One of them came after me, and although it was likely at a pace of about a mile per hour, it looked very fast in my head. I panicked, turned back around, and headed for the Jeep again, while Leo, Roxie, and a beautiful but semifuming Oscar tried to call out alternate directions to me.
“Stop!”
“Keep going!”
“Turn around!”
“Over here!”
“Over there!”
“What the hell are you doing to my cows?”
Luckily, by the time I’d made it back to the Jeep, the men were in the herd, calming down the Bessies, while Roxie was left to calm down this Bessie. And this Bessie directed her to get us the fuck out of there right the fuck fucking now.
And so here we sat, a half mile away from the cow pasture, and I was wondering if there was a one o’clock train back to the city.
“What in the world, Natalie? Really, what’s going on?” Roxie asked, and I groaned inside my turtleneck.
“If I knew, I’d tell you. I just go to pieces around this guy.” I pulled down my turtleneck to just above my nose. “When I see him, I literally lose my mind. I can’t talk to him when I see that face, and those eyes, and those lips, and all that gorgeous ink, and those hands—did you see those hands? And—”
“Okay, I got it. So, what if you couldn’t see him?”
“How can you not see him? How can you not see that face, and those eyes, and those—”
She held up her hand. “I’m not going to sit here while you go through another round of Sexual Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.”
“Knees and Toes,” I sang back. Which made her smile, which made me smile. A little.
She sighed. “I need to get back to the barn to make lunch.”
“Great! I’m starved!” I announced, tugging down my turtleneck, anxious to sweep this whole thing under the Jeep.
“A lunch that Oscar is attending.”
“I’m actually still full from breakfast.” Up went the turtleneck.
Roxie’s hands tugged it from my face. “You’re going. This ends today, one way or another.” She started the Jeep and pointed it toward the farm.
I sat on my hands the entire way back to the barn to stop myself going full turtle. And as I sat on my hands, I thought about every time I’d seen Oscar, and how I’d reacted. I was fine when I was in the market, I was fine when I was in line, I was even fine when I was paying for my Brie. It was when we were full frontal, his eyes all over me and the force of him turned up to eleven, that reduced me to mush.
And an idea began to take shape . . .