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Oh, shit. I hadn’t even thought of that. I was such a bad Jew.
“Ham and cheese isn’t kosher,” Abe explained when Keith kept staring at him blankly. “And Rachael’s Jewish.”
“Is that right?” Ryan looked directly at me for the first time in ages.
“Yeah.” Abe leaned back into the couch. His tall, heavily muscled frame took up half the space. “She’s adopting me. We’re going to have Rosh Hashanah with her family.”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed, and his head tilted very slowly. “I want to talk to you for a minute.” He rose to his feet and heading toward the back of the apartment.
When I didn’t follow, the other guys looked my way. “What?” He couldn’t just drag me around like a rag-doll.
Mike shrugged philosophically. “Just good manners to hear a guy out.”
With a scowl, I got up. Ryan had left the door to the side room open, and when I stepped in, he slammed it behind him.
“Seriously?” His calmness vanished, leaving the fury I’d seen when he’d first entered the apartment. “What are you doing? You’re inviting Abe for your holidays? What do you want?”
My pulse jumped. “I don’t want anything!”
“He’s twenty-one years old. You’re not going to take advantage of him. Is that your game? Is that why you were really in Malcolm’s bedroom the other day?” With each question, he hemmed me in against the wall. Anger sharpened the planes of his face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I backed up until I stood flush against the wall. I was acutely aware of how his T-shirt stretched taunt over his broad shoulders, and of the restrained tension in his powerful arms.
“Right. You’re not trying to catch a rich boyfriend.” Disbelief colored his voice. “Why the hell would a girl who doesn’t like ball spend an afternoon watching a game if she doesn’t want something out of it?”
For God’s sake. “You’re disgusting. And give me some credit. If I was trying to catch a football player, I wouldn’t exactly admit that I thought you were a total cretin, would I?”
He cocked his head. “You’re just digging yourself in deeper. So then what are you doing here?”
“I forgot my scarf. What part of that is too complicated for your thick skull? Or do you have so little experience with women that you just assume we’re all incapable of anything but panting over you?”
His unkind laugh matched the gleam in his eyes. “Oh, trust me, sweetheart. You don’t want to go there.”
He was too tall, too broad, and I kept taking quick gasps and still not managing to catch enough oxygen. I breathed in the heady combination of cedar and soap and masculinity, and it unnerved me as much as my erratically beating heart. “Get away from me.”
When he only smiled, I shoved him as hard as I could. His chest felt like marble. He caught my wrists, holding them high until I stood on my tiptoes, teetering toward him. I felt overheated and dazed, and his eyes lidded halfway. The air between us shimmered.
He only had to tilt his head down and he could kiss me. I caught my breath.
And he let his out in a long, deflated sigh, thrusting my arms away. I rocked back on my heels, shoulders banging against the wall. He shook his head. “You’re pathetic. Get your scarf and go.”
“The game’s not over yet.”
He cocked his head, and I got the feeling I was being weighed and judged. “Fine. Tell me the score and you can stay.”
I bit my lip, and he walked out of the room.
The rest of the guys didn’t seem to notice anything odd at my conveniently recalled “meeting.” Ryan held the door open, insultingly attentive, as though I might try to stay if he didn’t usher me out. Chin high, I stepped over the threshold. I turned back, struggling for something to say, unable to find words under the weight of that blue stare. Then, eyes still locked with mine, Ryan closed the door in my face.
As I walked down the stairs, I wrapped my arms around my stomach. My face fell and my guts were knotted and tight. Ryan had been right. I was pathetic. I’d wanted him to kiss me.
* * *
On Monday morning, I hopped on the R train into Manhattan. I’d applied for dozens of jobs after college, but when I didn’t even receive a cursory “Sorry, no thanks” from any of them, I’d ended up applying to dozens of internships, and finally landing one at Penelope Books. An imprint of Maples&Co, one of the Big Seven publishing houses, Penelope put out a lot of light-hearted women’s fiction and YA, with a dose of memoir added to the mix. Gretchen Sterowski started the imprint back in ’95, when she’d been hired away from another of the publishing houses. Penelope, like all of Maple&Co’s imprints, was housed in a twenty-story neo-Gothic building Midtown.
I spent three days a week at my unpaid internship, while I temped on Tuesday and Thursday. That money paid my rent, but not my MetroCard and groceries, and my scanty savings dwindled at an alarming pace. If I couldn’t turn this internship into a job or snag a real one, I’d be back home in three months.
Well, my parents would be pleased. They kept sending me articles about law school even as they paid lip service to my pursuit of the arts. And my best friend Kate had half-begged me to come home, but that was because she wanted entertainment. Working as a middle-school teacher apparently wasn’t the social contact she craved.
