“How high?”
He chuckled. “Higher than yours.”
“Now, wait a minute.” I didn’t want to insult him, but he had to be kidding, because I’d knocked my entrance exams out of the park. “How do you know what I got?”
“I don’t,” he said, “but Ms. Malone told me my scores are the second highest in the school, right behind Tia’s. I actually got higher than Tia on the verbal.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“What?” he asked again.
I tried to make his crazy face with one eyebrow up and the other down. I couldn’t do it, so I lifted and lowered my brows with my fingertips.
“Don’t do that to your face,” he said.
“Sawyer,” I said, exasperated, “you have grades and scores that high and you want to go to culinary school ? And you don’t see anything wrong with this picture?”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s never wrong to pursue something you love.” He twisted one of my curls around his finger.
“But you don’t love cooking,” I pointed out. “You don’t bum around the Crab Lab kitchen after hours, inventing new recipes, do you? You happen to be a vegan, but just because you have special dietary preferences doesn’t obligate you to open that kind of restaurant. There may not be a huge population of vegans in the Tampa Bay area, but there are plenty in the world, and they’re not all going to culinary school and opening vegan restaurants. I think you’ve only come up with this idea because you work as a waiter, you know restaurants, and you’re scared you’ll fail at something else.”
“Like what?”
“College. Just apply for college. Apply to Columbia.”
He laughed. For once it was an ugly sound. “I would never get in to Columbia.”
“How do you know if you don’t try? It sounds to me like you’d have a good chance. You might get a need-based scholarship. On the essay part of the application, tell them a sob story about your dad and your situation.”
“My situation?” He gave me the raised-eyebrow look.
“Yes. And by ‘sob story,’ I guess I mean you should tell them the truth.”
He shook his head. His hair made the softest sound against the pillow. “I don’t have the money for college applications.”
“If your scores are that high, Ms. Malone will find you some money.”
He stared thoughtfully at my face. His eyes traveled down to my breast. He touched me softly.
I shuddered.
He slid his phone from the table on his side of the bed and peered at it, probably checking the time. “We’d better go before we are discovered,” he said in a voice from a cheesy movie. Then he laid his phone aside and rolled so that I was underneath him again.
“Katherine.” He kissed my lips. “Beale Gordon.”
“Yes?”
“This has been the best night of my life.”
“Mine too,” I said. “Sawyer . . .”
“Salvatore De Luca,” he prompted me.
“Salvatore?”
“No,” he laughed. “I’m kidding. My middle name is Charles.”
“Charles?”
“Yeah. That’s why I don’t tell people my middle name.”
“It’s not as bad as Salvatore. Anyway, this has been—”
His phone vibrated on the table. “Hold on.” He slid over and glanced at it.
The next second he leaped up to standing and was fumbling on the floor for his clothes.
“What’s the matter?” I exclaimed.
“Harper texted me.” His voice bounced as he jerked his shorts on. “Somebody at the party heard where we’d gone and told Angelica. Angelica told Aidan. Aidan called your parents. He’s drunk and he just admitted it to everybody.”
“No, no, no,” I chanted, like that was going to help. “Where are you going?”
“Stay here. I don’t want you to see your dad beat the fuck out of me.”
“Sawyer, wait!” But he was already gone, not bothering to keep his shoes off to avoid waking the rest of the B and B. His flip-flops clattered down the stairs, and the front door slammed.
As I pulled my own clothes on, I tried to picture what was happening, and feared the worst. Dad was mild mannered, but he was huge. Sawyer was not huge, but he had a temper. There was no best-case scenario to this.
It wasn’t either of their voices I heard yelling as I ran out the back door of the B and B to the parking lot, though. It was my mother’s. She was yelling at Sawyer.
A cloud of white dust was still settling over the gravel-and-shell driveway. As it cleared, I saw why. Both my mother’s Mercedes and Dad’s BMW were parked in the lot. Dad leaned against his car with his arms folded. Sawyer leaned against the Mercedes with his arms folded. They were like two captains of pirate ships in Tampa Bay, deciding whether to fire that first shot across the other’s bow.
My mother was the one shooting from the hip, reciting to Sawyer a lot of his poor qualities that she’d listed for me in the past couple of weeks. “Hey,” I said, which only drew some of the fire from him to me. I could see there was no way out of this now, though. I would never be able to go out with him again, if he even wanted to.
Help came from an unexpected place. Harper appeared from a trail through the trees, the same one Sawyer and I had followed to get here from Tia’s house. “Hi, there!” she called as if my mother didn’t sound murderous. “I beg your pardon. I’m so sorry. My mom’s not here right now, but we have a rule at the B and B that we don’t raise our voices because it might disturb the guests if they’re sleeping.” She nodded toward the second story of the Victorian towering over us. “Come on inside.” She stepped away to unlock the front door of her own tiny house.