Overlooked(1)(37)

“Do you do much baking in your apartment anymore?”

I shrug, smiling slightly to myself. When I first moved into my little Brooklyn loft apartment, I had been so thrilled to have an oven of my own that I’d made cakes, cookies, brownies, anything I could think of.

“Not that much, just for special occasions, like if the office has a potluck, or it’s someone’s birthday,” I say. We keep talking about the job, about my mediocre social life in New York. In the back of my mind I keep thinking about how Zane and I can manage to maybe meet up and talk about what’s going on between us, come to some kind of conclusion.

I know I have to do something.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN





ZANE LEWIS



I leave my room feeling a little bit worried still. I can’t quite believe that the week is almost over. That things are still so messed up between me and Harper, and there’s not really much I can do about it.

Mom’s in the kitchen, working on lunch. While I don’t think she knows about the situation with Harper and me, I also don’t know what to talk about with nothing more than Harper and my reenlistment on my mind.

“Hey, are you hungry, sweetie?”

I sit down at the table and think about the question. “I could eat,” I tell her.

Really my stomach’s in knots, but eating at least will give me something to do. Mom brings over what she’s been working on, pasta salad, with leftover roast chicken, tomatoes and little cubes of cheese mixed in. I serve Mom and then myself, and try to think of something to say. How many hours is it until we have to go next door for dinner?

“So you’re leaving in the morning, right?”

I nod. “I’ve got a late-morning flight, so I should have just enough time to get some breakfast with you and Dad and then drop the car at the airport, and I’m off.”

“I have to say, I’m glad that you and Harper could both make it this week,” Mom says.

“You are?”

“Well of course, sweetie,” Mom tells me. “I love you both.”

I’m right there on the point of telling her that I think I might have feelings for Harper, but I don’t even know what those feelings actually are, or whether there’s anything either of us can do about them. So I let the comment stand, and try to think of something to talk about while I eat a few more bites.

“I went out to the lake yesterday,” I say.

“Oh, your father and I used to go out there all the time,” Mom says.

“He told me that.”

“I know you and your friends used to go skinny dipping down there when you were teenagers. Though you all thought you were so clever you couldn’t get caught,” Mom says with a little grin.

I laugh. “I think we’re all just glad the cops never showed up,” I say.

“I think there was probably a little conspiracy to prevent that. None of us wanted you kids to get in trouble for the kinds of things kids do.”

I have to laugh again, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking of the fact that Harper and I only just went skinny dipping a few days before, and Mom apparently has no idea. It’s probably for the best that she doesn’t know.

I finish off one bowl of pasta salad and consider having another one. I know we’ve got a big dinner at the Polsens’ place, but I don’t know if I’ll even be able to eat. Everything I try to think about circles right back around to Harper. This isn’t good. It isn’t like I’ve never been into a girl before. I had a couple of girlfriends in high school, and I dated Cheryl Sheppard more than half the year between high school and basic.

But there’s something different about the way I feel towards Harper.

It isn’t that she’s been my next-door neighbor for as long as I can remember, or even that she’s suddenly gone from being the nerdy girl who’s practically my sister to this hot city-living woman. It’s something that goes in another direction that I don’t even really know how to name.

“Do you think you’re going to end up deciding to reenlist? I know you said you didn’t really want to talk about it, but you’re going to leave in the morning and I figured I’d pick your brain a bit before the only way I can talk to you is on the phone,” Mom says.

I try to pull my head out of the clouds to think of a way to answer her.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“You should talk to your dad about it,” Mom suggests, and I grin.

“We talked about it yesterday, and I’ve got a lot on my mind about it, it is really complicated,” I tell her. “Right now, I don’t really know which direction I’m leaning more towards. It’s weird.”