For the next week, I pretended that the kiss hadn't happened. Jenna called me forty-three times to remind me that it most certainly had, always demanding to know what I was going to do about it.
"Do about what?" I rubbed my aching temples, wishing I had never told her.
"Are you going to call him?"
"Whatever for?"
"Maybe you guys could go out or something," she said very slowly, as if I were some kind of simpleton, in need of guidance.
I hated to point out the obvious--hated worse how the truth made me feel, like I was putting all my hopeful eggs into one poorly crafted basket. "Do you think if he wanted to see me again, that if that kiss had meant anything to him, that he might have called me by now?"
This answer apparently did not satisfy my sister, who then took matters into her own impatient hands. The very next day, a Saturday, I found Jason Taylor standing at my front door, his old toolbox in hand.
"Hi," he said, looking absolutely gorgeous while I, no doubt, looked like I had just been scrubbing the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, which I had. I hid the brush behind my back.
"Hi, Jason." I smiled but surely he discerned the question in my eyes.
"Jenna called my house, looking for my dad's number. She said your faucet was leaking." He seemed not at all suspicious of Jenna's transparent tactics. "When I told her Dad and Mom were down in Philly for the weekend, she asked if I could fix it."
I was going to kill my sister. I thought I'd made it perfectly clear after her last pitiful attempt at matchmaking that I would shoot her on sight if she ever tried it again.
Too embarrassed to do otherwise, I played along and showed him the kitchen, and the sink, and the leak which was barely worthy of the name. Jason was a veterinarian, but his father was a plumber and in no time he was on his back inside the lower cupboard while I nervously chatted away and kept a close eye on a pair of impossibly long legs. My eyes strayed happily and unnoticed over hard thighs covered in loose jeans while pretending to devote myself entirely to our perfunctory conversation.
"Where are your girls today?"
"Gone to their father's for the weekend," I told him. "What's Brian doing today?"
A small chuckle sounded from under the sink. "He's seventeen, Maddy. As you might imagine, I don't see too much of him on the weekends, though he did ask me to meet him at the courts later for a pick-up game of hoops."
I made no reply. My mind had jumped with lightning speed to wonder, My God! What would our children--all teenagers--say if they knew exactly what I was thinking about this man right now? That I was thinking I liked the way he looked in my house, in my kitchen. That his form, spread so gloriously before me, tempted me nearly beyond reason. That I truly had put entirely too much stock in just one kiss.
)
