Cream of the Crop
Page 68

This, this right here, what I was feeling—confused, unsettled, unsure—was why I never got in this deep this fast. And I was in very deep. I had it bad for this guy, and I didn’t see that going away anytime soon.
Ugh. I flopped over onto my stomach. The biggest T-shirt Roxie had was snug across my hips, and most certainly my breasts.
I flopped back over onto my back. I sat up, punched my pillow repeatedly, lay back down, sat back up, then flipped once more onto my stomach and starfished. Just as I was finally getting settled, there was a knock at my door.
“Nat?” a quiet voice called.
“Yeah?”
“There’s a good-looking dairy farmer at the front door. Go see what he wants.” Then Roxie’s footsteps went back down the hallway toward her room.
It was after 2 a.m., for pity’s sake. Curious to know what he had to say, I threw off the covers, slipped into a robe, and padded down the dark back steps to the kitchen, then let myself out onto the porch. Shivering in the cold night air, I was grateful for the thick woolen socks I’d pulled on before going to bed.
Standing in a puddle of moonlight, rocking back and forth on his heels, Oscar was watching the front door. Nervous? Still disappointed? The moonlight wasn’t bright enough to tell, but something was clearly on his mind.
A board in the porch creaked, and he whirled in surprise.
“Hi,” I said.
He looked at me, taking in my robe and socks. And said nothing.
“You woke me up out of a sound sleep, Caveman. What’s going on?” I didn’t want to let on that I was losing sleep over what had happened.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he finally started, taking a step toward me on the porch.
“Talk to me about what?” I asked.
“About what happened tonight.” Step. “With Missy.” Another step.
“Oh. That.” I made myself sound like it hadn’t affected me in the slightest that he’d left me to go chase his ex-wife to wipe her oh-so-convenient tears. “Yeah, let’s talk about that.” So much for unaffected.
“What Missy said, about the way I like my hot dogs, was . . .”
Rude. Assuming. Territorial.
“. . . true.”
I blinked at him. “True?”
He nodded. “She’s right. I don’t like relish. And I don’t like onions.”
My hands were suddenly on my hips, and my right foot was tapping furiously. “Fine, Oscar. You don’t want my relish and my onions, then just say so.”
“I just did, actually,” he said, his eyes watching my foot tap.
“So Missy knows everything there is to know about you, and I know nothing.”
“She was my wife, Natalie,” he said softly, and something very small and almost foreign to me, way down deep inside, twisted over at hearing those words. “She knows I sometimes like chocolate chips in my pancakes. She knows I’m terrible at folding laundry but that I love to iron my sheets. She knows that when I’m sick, I like to have the ginger ale swished up to get rid of all the bubbles.”
“If you woke me up in the middle of the night just to list all the wonderful things Missy does, this really could have waited until the morning.”
“And she makes great muffins,” he continued as if I hadn’t said a word, looking at me with the faintest hint of amusement.
“Tell me again why you divorced her?” I asked sweetly. “She sounds like the one who got away.”
“What’s wrong with two people staying friends after they divorce?”
“It’s weird,” I answered promptly.
“It’s weird?”
“Yeah, it’s weird. You’re supposed to, I don’t know, hate each other, and be bitter and angry, and fight over things like coffee tables and salad spinners.”
“What’s a salad spinner?”
“It’s a bowl that you put washed greens in and— Oh stop it, that’s not what this is about!”
“You brought up the salad spinner, it must be something pretty amazing if I’m supposed to be . . . what did you say? Fighting over it? Along with a coffee table?”
“You. Are. Infuriating.” I spat each word out slowly and clearly, not wanting him to miss them.
“Missy used to tell me the same thing.”
I launched myself at him, threw myself on this giant man with his giant shoulders, and literally tried to take him to the ground, my sock-clad feet sliding on the cold wooden planks. My hands struggled to land a blow, to do anything other than hang pitifully from his enormous shoulders, while he simply braced himself and let me tantrum in midair.
When he began to chuckle, I really lost my cool. “Don’t you dare laugh at me, you motherfucker! I can’t believe that you’d laugh at me, after what you did to me tonight at that stupid hoedown!” I swung wildly at him, missing by a mile.
“Okay, that’s it,” he grumbled, grabbing me across my middle, throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and starting across the lawn. “’Night, Roxie, sorry about the noise,” he called out.
I looked up to see her hanging out of her bedroom window and waving merrily at the two of us.
“Thank goodness, now I can go back to sleep,” she said good-naturedly, starting to close the window. “It used to be so quiet out here in the country.”
He carried me over to his truck, kicking and screaming obscenities. Opening the passenger side, he dumped me inside, then closed the door. As I continued to yell at him, he stood outside the door until I’d exhausted every insult I could think of, which was a lot.