AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said.
“What about you? City planner? I never thought of that as a little girl’s dream job.”
“Hey, Barbie can be an astronaut. Girls can be anything,” she said wryly.
“I know, I know,” I protested. “I just didn’t grow up around a lot of city planners, you know?”
“Well, yeah, around here it’s nurse or teacher or waitress mostly.”
“Yeah.”
“I always liked Legos, you know, design something and build it. I did some of those STEM contests growing up, but I was really good at, like, critiquing other people’s work, telling them how to fix their designs and make them work better. It was at one of those competitions that I heard a group of engineers speak and they talked about infrastructure and civil engineering and city planning, all ways to apply the skills we were using in our projects. I was hooked.”
“That’s really cool. I didn’t even know stuff like that exists. We had a science fair in middle school I guess.”
“It was a bunch of rich kids. So we had the materials and resources. We could travel to the contest without having a bake sale to raise money, that kind of thing. I think we could do stuff like that here, that I can find grants for some of the students to go to STEM camps or robotics competitions and stuff. A friend of mine from college is going to do remote coding classes twice a week via Zoom if I can get enough kids signed up. At the community center, of course.”
“That’s amazing,” I said sincerely. “You’re really full of ideas to use this building to help everybody out, aren’t you?”
“I am. And it’s nice to hear you say I’m full of ideas instead of just full of shit.”
“If I ever said you were full of shit, I was obviously talking out my ass trying to impress you.”
“Did insulting girls work for you?”
“I played basketball and ran cross-country, I didn’t need lines. Then I was working construction 24/7 to make the business turn a profit and that—well, working shirtless in the summer, I had all the free lemonade I wanted, you know?” I smirked. “Iced tea, ice cream… all the time I had women asking if I wanted to take a break, come inside and cool off.”
“So women were just—construction site groupies trying to lure you in their houses with ice cream?” she laughed. I grinned, loving her laugh.
“A lot of the time, yeah. I mean, when it was grandma type ladies, they mostly wanted to give me some iced tea, maybe show me pictures of their unmarried daughters.”
“What? No cougars?”
“There were cougars. I was in my twenties, so pretty much everybody was a cougar when I started.”
“Please tell me that you don’t have porno stories about bored housewives seducing you.”
“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,” I said archly.
“Oh Lord. You do have those stories.”
“If I had them, I wouldn’t repeat them,” I said. “Discretion is one thing my mom taught me. We didn’t air our dirty laundry in public. If she had to go get my dad because he was acting a fool at some bar, she didn’t tell her friends and complain, didn’t act sorry for herself. We just kept it quiet.”
“But that had to be hard on her and on you. I mean, she didn’t have any support system? I understand discretion, but everyone needs somebody to talk to. Otherwise, you bottle it up. And you and she had nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not saying I’m ashamed of the women I hooked up with when I was starting out. I just think there’s things you don’t discuss out of respect for people’s privacy. And maybe my dad didn’t deserve privacy, but my mom does. She went through enough with him that she didn’t need all the people in town gossiping about her, too.”
“You think they didn’t know? Small towns, man,” she shook her head ruefully. “I think no matter how you try and keep a secret in a place like this, you can’t do it.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe there’s people who have. If they did, I wouldn’t know about it obviously. But you said you like small towns.”
“I do. That’s the only thing I don’t like about them. The gossip. Knowing everyone’s business. Like you said, privacy can be important.”
“You sound worried. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“No, I mean really. Tell me the truth,” I said, wanting her to trust me with whatever was bothering her.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said, but I noticed she still wasn’t looking me in the face.
26
Nicole
My resolution to stay away from Noah didn’t last very long. Ever since he brought me soup and hung out for a while, I just couldn’t pretend I wasn’t thinking about him. He’d been so nice, and we’d talked, really talked. I liked him, and he was open with me and impressed with my plans for the center and the town. It made me greedy for more. More of his time and his attention.
