Ryan glanced at me, and for a second his eyes met mine.
“I may have led them on…” he said. He was silent for a few moments.
I began to wonder why he would keep something like this from his friends.
“So you deliberately lied to them?” I glanced at him as I asked.
He winced at the word “lied”.
“It’s not that I lied about it…It’s more like how I felt, you know?”
It was my turn to wince.
He was silent again, but this time the silence went on and on. We didn’t talk again until we got downtown.
Ryan found a place that served coffee and espressos and we sat at a table outside. It was sunny, with only a few clouds in the sky, and a soft cool breeze blowing in from the bay. I’d gotten a mocha.
We started talking again, but just about me this time. I did share one bit of gossip: I’d found out recently that our neighbor, Mrs. Martin, had had an affair with the local deputy.
Ryan didn’t seem to find this information even half as shocking as I did. He just smiled in a knowing kind of a sly way and said, “She’s hot, I remember having a thing for her myself.”
I rolled my eyes to show him how crazy I thought the whole thing was.
“Speaking of totally hot women,” Ryan said, then deliberately looked me over. His eyes seemed to touch every single part of my body before settling, for a moment, on my boobs. By the time he’d brought them back up to meet mine I was not only blushing but telling myself I should have left my bra at home.
“I’m not totally hot,” I said. “I’m not even lukewarm. I’m an old woman.”
Ryan laughed, reached across the table, and took my mocha, which I’d nearly finished. He drank the last of it, then set my cup on the table and looked at me with the same kind of cocky egotistical grin I had imagined in my earlier daydream.
“That was my mocha,” I said. I tried to sound hurt, but I sounded more like I was horny.
“Come on,” Ryan said, suddenly standing up. “Let’s go down to the waterfront.”
He turned and started walking away, obviously expecting me to just follow him like a spineless nobody. Which I did. I hadn’t been to the waterfront in four years, and a lot of it had changed since then. There were a lot of new shops and restaurants, and a long wide cement walkway had been built right along the shore. It was called a “promenade,” and Ryan and I walked along it hand in hand.
“I’m glad I finally got to be alone with you,” he told me as the cool breeze washed over us.
“Really?” I said. “Why?” I remembered the fantasy I’d had in the car and what “alone with me” meant meant to me.
Ryan gave me his typical and meaningless shrug and said, “I dunno. You know how it is. Especially around Dad. You can’t say everything you wanna say in front of him.”
“Like what?” I asked, although I thought I knew exactly what he meant.
“Like how much I love you and missed you. How important you are to me.” Ryan looked at me, and his eyes went up and down my body. “How sexy you look in that tank-top.” Another knowing smile.
I smiled too, and looked out at the bay. “Thank you,” I said, then added, “But you said all those things before…”