Waking Olivia(38)

She's holding up two different dresses. "I got you one for today and one for the fall athletic banquet."

I laugh uneasily. "I guess the one that looks like lingerie is for today?"

"It's a slip dress," she scolds, "and no, that's for the banquet."

Both of the dresses are beautiful, but the idea of wearing either of  them makes me feel squirmy and self-conscious. She has me take the dress  that doesn't look like lingerie and try it on. It's a fitted beige  sheath in matte jersey, pouring over my body like it was made for me.  Dorothy sighs happily when I emerge. "I knew it would be perfect on you.  Do you like it?"

I nod. "I do. I'm just not used to wearing dresses I guess."

She smiles. "Maybe that's for the best. You're dangerous enough in  running clothes. Now run and put on a little makeup and I'll see you in  the kitchen."

I go to my room and put on mascara and lip gloss, hating myself a little  for how much I care. How badly I want Will to like it, for blindly  hoping it will somehow change things for us when he's made it so clear  that nothing's going to happen. It's a course of action destined to fail  but here I stand, undertaking it anyway.

I brought heels, thinking we might go out with Brendan one night, so I  slip them on and look in the mirror one last time. I look good, and it  won't be enough. He made that clear last weekend, didn't he?

I see Will before he sees me. He's at the dining room table carving the  turkey, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, which isn't all that  dressed up, I suppose, but far more than I've ever seen from him. He's  gorgeous. Even in that shirt you can see the raw strength of him, the  breadth of his shoulders, the taut forearms. He looks hot and grown up  and just  …  I can't put my finger on it but it's something that makes my  breath come a little short.

"Hey, Mom!" he shouts. "Do you want-"

His voice trails off as I come into his line of sight. He doesn't smile. He doesn't move. He just stares.

"You're looking at me like I walked in here carrying a decapitated head," I tell him.

"That'd be less surprising than you in a dress," he mutters, turning back to the turkey.





55





Will



Holy shit.

Olivia stands before me in a dress that flows over every curve. Curves  even I didn't realize she had, and I've done more than my fair share of  looking. I am temporarily struck mute. I want to tell her that she is  gorgeous, breath-taking, astonishing. That the second I saw her my  stomach dropped with something that goes so far beyond lust that I can't  even name it. I can't tell her any of this though, so I do what I've  always done.

I try to pretend she's no longer there.



There is nothing about this day that isn't hard. It's hard to be this  close to Olivia, looking like that, and not touch her. It was hard  seeing her with my mom in the kitchen, seeing the way she seemed to cure  a certain loneliness in my mom that me and Brendan and my dad never  did. It was hard seeing how much she belongs here, and knowing it's  never going to happen. It's hard looking at my brother's smug smile. I  don't know where they went yesterday, but I know they didn't climb for  eight hours.

It doesn't help that my mom invited Peter either. I struggle enough to  conceal the way I feel about Olivia as it is without having my boss here  as an audience. And it could easily come up that Olivia is staying  here, and that I am too. I don't think he'd fire me, but I know for a  fact he'll tell me I can't stay here tonight and there's no way in hell  that's happening.

Although, with the way Olivia looks right now, that might be the safest course of action.



Peter doesn't take my father's seat at the end of the table. Instead, he  sits next to my mom and leaves the seat for me. I guess he's just  trying to be respectful, but I wish he hadn't. I'd kind of banked on  talking to him about sports and ignoring Olivia entirely, but now he's  talking to my mom and Olivia's beside me, so pretty that my eyes trip  over her, stutter, stall, every time I look up.                       
       
           


///
       

Peter and my mom have an endless stream of things to talk about, things I  didn't even know they had in common. He's in her book club, which I'd  always thought was some female thing, and their mutual friend Tina,  apparently, drinks too much wine and thinks her husband is having an  affair. I guess I should have realized my mom had a life outside of us  and the farm, but it's weird to realize that her outside life overlaps  to the extent it does with my boss's.

I don't like it.

"How's school, Brendan?" Peter asks. "You gonna graduate on time?"

Brendan shrugs as if doesn't matter when most of my salary is what's  paying his goddamn tuition. "I don't know. Don't see myself using that  degree anyway."

"Oh?" says Peter. "Why's that?"

"I got a buddy who's trying to line us up jobs with a bike tour company  next summer. I'd rather do that than anything I could do with my  degree."

"Bike tours?" I ask. "If you're going to piss away your time, why don't  you piss it away by helping around here?" Jesus I sound exactly like my  father, bitter and demanding and unfair. I hate it and yet I'm still  angry.

Brendan laughs. Laughs. "Right, because working on a farm is just as rewarding as biking through Europe."

Even before Olivia, I'd have been angered by his response. But now I'm  enraged, and it has far less to do with the farm than it does the fact  that he has choices. If he wanted to, he could take Olivia out tonight.  He could sit across from her in a restaurant and feast on the sight of  her in that dress and wonder how the hell he got so lucky. He could be  the one who takes that dress off of her when they get home. And most  importantly, he could be the one to follow her when she leaves here next  year.

I want those things. I want them so badly that when I imagine them, the  way I am now, I feel a little unhinged. I lower my head, thinking about  the busted engine I still need to fix and the climbs I'll never climb  and the girl across from me that I'll never have, and it feels entirely  possible that I may explode in a fit of rage, right here, at the  unfairness of it all.

Brendan says something I don't catch and he and Olivia exchange a look.  He looks at her like he knows things, as if he's privy to her secrets.  If he ends up with her, I won't be able to fucking stand it. I won't.

I hear my text tone chime across the room and practically leap from the  table. I just need to get away from all of them for two seconds, away  from the idea of Brendan with Olivia, or anyone with Olivia, before I  lose it.

I walk slowly to the other room with my phone, checking the text mostly  for show. It's from Jessica, her tone breezy as if Tuesday night never  happened. She wrote several times yesterday, asking if we could talk,  which I ignored. I assumed she'd gone to Denver, but nope. Her text now  says she's on her way here. I have a little gift for your mom, she says,  and then maybe the two of us can have a chat.

And here I thought my evening couldn't get any worse.





56





Olivia



Will's been weird all through dinner. He seems angry, though at whom I'm  not sure. And I'm a little angry at him too. Or actually, I'm just  hurt. I knew me getting dressed up would change nothing, but I thought  maybe  …  I don't know what I thought. Will is as blind to me in a dress  as he is to me in anything else, and it shouldn't come as a surprise.

"Jessica's coming over," he sighs as he comes back to the table. "Apparently she got you a gift, Mom." He looks at me warily.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"When I broke up with her, she made some accusations involving you."

"Then I'll just go home."

"No," says Dorothy hastily, "absolutely not. You're not running off just because Jessica got the wrong idea."

"There's not time anyway," Will says. "She'll be here any minute now."

"Let's just tell Jessica she's dating me," Brendan says with a grin.

A flicker of anger crosses Will's face. "No," he says, his voice hard.

"I'll go to the stables," I suggest. I jump to my feet. "I can groom the horses a bit."

"You're in a dress," Will objects, but I'm already on my way out the door.

What a disaster.

I was so happy that he'd broken up with her, but here I am looking as  good I'm ever going to look and he still doesn't care. And now his hot  girlfriend is going to come over and he's either going to regret what he  did and get back with her, or he's not and she's going to flip out if  she finds me here. She will definitely know I'm here-my stuff is all  over the room and my plate is still sitting on the table.