“No, Paul.”
“Would you tell him it’s okay to do so now? I’d like to take the rest of the night to die of embarrassment and look up recipes for the Taiwanese restaurant. I’m thinking something with cayenne pepper. I feel it would complement the taste of mutt on the palate.”
I didn’t even hear Vince approach, didn’t even notice him until he was right up on me, pressing up against my back, putting his arms around my waist, holding me close. “You okay?” Vince murmured in my ear.
“Sure,” I said. “I just wanted to teach this wall a lesson by headbutting it. It’s always giving me dirty looks and I just got sick of it. Thought it was time to man up, you know?”
He chuckled near my ear, his lips almost on my skin. “Anything broken?”
“Aside from my pride? Nope. Nope. Everything else seems to be just peachy.”
“Why don’t you turn around and let me make sure?”
“I’d really rather not do that. I think it may be better if you leave and go to the U of A.”
“The college?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to see if you can find a physicist there and ask him how long it will be before time travel is invented. Because I really would like to travel back in time to when this house was being built so I could have stopped the builders from putting up a wall here, and then I would travel back to right now and instead of being face-planted against the wall, it would have looked like I was showing off some really sweet dance moves in a long hallway.”
Vince snorted in my ear, which I found to be rather gross, and yet was okay with him doing it anyway. He turned me around in his arms, and even though I tried to avoid looking at him, he wasn’t having any of it. He gripped my chin and forced me to look up, inspecting my nose and cheek. They throbbed a bit, and I felt my face heat up under his careful gaze. I was proud of the fact there were no tears in my eyes, even though such a facial smash deserved them. I was manly, after all, I reminded myself; manly men didn’t cry after getting tripped by their two-legged dog and running into a wall with their face.
Vince poked my cheek. “Ow!” I snapped at him.
He shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it’s broken. Nose, either. Probably will get a black eye, though.”
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Taylor,” I said, rolling my eyes.
He grinned at me, dimples exploding like fireworks. “Did you notice how I didn’t laugh, even though it was pretty funny?”
I glared at him and then heard a choking sound. I looked over to where Sandy stood in the middle of the living room. He had his hand over his mouth, squeezing tightly, tears streaming down his face as his body shook.
I stepped away from Vince and his hands fell to his sides. I pointed at Sandy, who I was pretty sure was going to burst at any moment. “You can go home now,” I scolded.
He nodded once and grabbed his keys off the coffee table. He almost made it completely out my door before he couldn’t hold it in anymore and starting howling with laughter, the sound ringing back to us as he closed the door.
“This can’t possibly be a good way to start things,” I muttered.
Chapter 10
I Hate Waiters Named Santiago and I Really Hate YouTube
VINCE tried to say we could just stay in, but I told him that it was probably a good idea if we went out, given that I wanted to pretend Wheels was a soccer ball and I needed to score a basket. Vince then told me that it was a soccer goal and not a basket and that’s why those announcers always screamed, “Goooooooaaaaaalllllll!” I cocked an eyebrow at him and he just rolled his eyes at me.
There was silence in the car that was almost uncomfortable, but I was distracted by the fact that my face was slightly throbbing. I wondered if I would actually get a black eye or not and if it would be believable if I told people in the office on Monday that it was from the fight I’d gotten in over the weekend, where I took on a gang on the south side with nothing but my fists.
“Don’t keep touching it,” Vince told me as he drove. “You’re going to make it worse if you keep poking your face.”
“I’m making sure I don’t have nerve damage,” I said, poking myself again, feeling the burn. “I may have smashed all my nerves to death, and I want to make sure I don’t get droopy-eye.”
“It’s going to bruise,” he warned.
“Maybe it’s my penance for hurting you. Like some kind of divine retribution for causing pain and misery and giving you two days off from work in a row where you did nothing but text me the whole time.”
“You liked it when I texted you,” he said, sure of himself.