Icing on the Lake

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Текст книги "Icing on the Lake"

Автор книги: Catherine Clark

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Chapter 21

When I got up Thursday morning and looked outside to check the weather for our trip up north, I saw Sean sitting on the front steps. Maybe it was a mirage, I told myself as I looked again. I hadn’t slept much the night before, because I was so excited about the trip.

What was he doing here? This was awkward. Was his shovel broken or something? Or was he here to tell me that Conor couldn’t go away with me—that he and I were back on instead?

I opened the front door a crack. “So, did it snow?” I asked him.

“Oh, hey, Kirsten.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. He had dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept all that well either. “Good morning.”

“What’s up?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

He got to his feet. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Well, do you need something?” He wasn’t here to try and win me back or something romantic like that, was he? He had this serious, distressed look on his face, his forehead semi-creased with worry.

“I just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” he said. “Do you have time?”

“Clearly,” I said. I was standing there in my sweats, having decided to sleep in clothes that might not always look like pajamas from now on. “Do you want to come in?”

“Could we sit out here?” Sean asked. “I don’t really want to see Gretchen or Brett, if that’s okay.”

“That’s cool. I’ll be right out,” I said. I grabbed my jacket from the hook on the closet door and put on my boots. Looking at them reminded me of the Snow White costume. Hopefully Sean wouldn’t have the same memory.

I grabbed my mittens and went outside. Sean was sitting on the porch swing, so I went over to sit beside him.

“First of all, I want to apologize,” Sean said.

“No! I should be the one apologizing,” I said. “I know I should have been honest with you, when I felt like I was kind of, I don’t know. Like maybe Conor and I had more in common and…I just really liked you and I’d already said I’d go to the dance and the cabin with you, so…”

Ugh, listen to me, I thought. I was sounding a lot like Emma Dilemma. I love the girl, but I didn’t want to emulate her dating style. “Anyway. I’m sorry if I was rude at the party, or worried you that night, or any of that,” I said.

“I’m sorry, too,” Sean said. “I was just…I liked you and everything. I mean, you showed up here in town and you’re funny and cute, I thought, well, I just wanted to hang out with you. And then I saw that Conor liked you, and when I realized there were like a hundred reasons to like you…I felt like I had to go out with you, instead of him.”

We sat there, swinging back and forth for a minute. I wondered if he felt as stupid about this as I did. There was no reason we couldn’t go out with each other, but there was no reason we should, either. We just didn’t have that intense connection, the way you should if you’re going to spend that much time with someone and, like, make out with him.

“I guess what I want to say is that, despite everything that’s happened, I really like you,” Sean said.

I stopped swinging. What?

“That’s why I have to tell you something. It’s really, really important.”

“Okay…” I said slowly.

“As much as we argue, and fight, and criticize each other? Conor’s a really good guy. You can trust him.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah. For sure.” He nodded. “But if it turns out you can’t? And he’s awful to you? You know where I live.”

I laughed. “Are you seriously going to be that nice to me?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“I think you’re too nice,” I said. “That’s why you have all those girls around you all the time. You have to be a little, you know, discriminating or something. Be mean to a few of ’em. Thin the pack.”

“Thin the pack? What am I, a wolf now?” Sean slid off the swing and caught the chain to keep it from whacking me. “I know we act like jerks to each other, but he’s still my brother. I’d stick up for him over anybody. Even when he does stupid things like walking out on a team.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I thought about Gretchen and our argument the night before. Maybe we’d never be that much alike, but I’d knock down any guy—anyone, period—who tried to hurt her.

“Aunt Kirsten likes boys, Aunt Kirsten likes Sean…”

“Conor,” I tried to correct Brett for the umpteenth time.

The four—make that five, counting Bear—of us were standing outside by Conor’s pickup. A light snow was falling, and we’d just spent the required five minutes discussing the weather as we prepared to take off for the Groundhog weekend.

Gretchen had tried to give me some advice over breakfast, in terms of how far to go with Conor on our first weekend away together. I told her that one, I didn’t plan on sleeping with him or any guy until I was older, and two, we’d be sleeping in a cabin with a bunch of other people, so not to worry. That seemed to put her mind at ease.

“Don’t break your leg,” she said to me.

“I won’t!” I said. “Will you quit saying that already?”

All of a sudden, Brett stopped chanting my name, and got this big lower lip as I opened the passenger door to the rusty pickup truck. His eyes filled with tears and he started to cry.

I crouched down, wrapped my arms around him and gave him a big hug. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

“You’d better be,” Gretchen said. “I need a driver.” Then she smiled. “And a friend.”

We gave each other a quick hug, and then I climbed into the pickup beside Conor.

Gretchen leaned into his window. “Take care of her.”

“Got it,” he said.

“And drive really carefully.”

“No problem. It’s a light snow. I think it’ll taper off soon.”

“Okay, bye!” I called out as we pulled away from the curb. “Man,” I sighed. “I thought we’d never get out of there. Could you and Gretchen talk about cold fronts any longer?”

“Well, what else are we supposed to talk about?” Conor said. “Uh oh. I think we’ve got a problem.” He kept glancing in the rearview mirror. “Look behind us.”

I was afraid to look. I figured it must be Gretchen waving her arms, yelling “Stop! Stop!”

But when I finally turned around, I saw Bear. He was running at top speed, like an Iditarod sled dog competitor, bounding along the middle of the street after us.

“Loyal, isn’t he?” Conor remarked as we slowed to a stop.

By the time we got Bear back home and got on the highway, the snow had started coming down harder. Then it fell even more heavily. After a while, we were going so slowly due to ice buildup, and lack of visibility, that we had only made it about ten miles in an hour.

“This has kind of turned into a blizzard,” I commented. “Did we even hit St. Paul yet?”

Conor laughed. “Yeah. We’re about fifty miles out of town.”

“We’re actually not going to make it to the cabin. Are we?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

I started laughing. After all that. After everything I’d gone through to get a date for this silly weekend, after all the money I’d spent, the risky deposit for two. Now we weren’t even going to get there.

“I think we should pull over here,” Conor said as he peered at the exit sign in the distance. “It’s only getting worse. We can sit for a while and see if the storm’s going to stop.”

We made it to a SuperAmerica gas station, where several other cars had pulled in to assess the situation. I went inside to buy us a few sodas and asked the clerk what the roads looked like, going north. “They’ve got a foot already in Duluth,” she said. “Lots of cars are stuck, and there’s this real icy section where people are going off the road, near Hinckley.”

That did not sound good. I pulled out my cell phone and called Jones, but she didn’t answer. I hoped she’d made it okay. I left her a message, then called Emma. She was already at the cabin with Donny, her latest, and Crystal and Eric were there with them. They had had a much shorter drive to the cabin, and they’d left home before the storm, so they were already settled in, sitting by the fire and watching the snow come down.

“Kirsten, it’s okay, you can admit it,” Emma said. “You didn’t find a date for the weekend. Come on up anyway.”

“I’m serious!” I said. “We’re stranded.” I looked out at Conor, who was scraping the ice off the windshield because the truck’s aging defroster was overwhelmed.

“Wait—here’s Jones! Hey, you made it!” I heard everyone laughing and talking, and then Jones picked up the phone.

“Where are you, Kirst?”

“We’re trying to get there, but the roads are awful,” I said.

“You are cursed, Kirst. You realize that.”

“I know. We’re going to stay here for a while until it stops snowing and sleeting and whatever else. Hopefully we’ll make it later tonight, or else tomorrow.”

“You and…?”

Just then, Conor walked into the store, shaking the snow off his jacket.

I’d kept the secret this long. Why not a few more hours? “See you tomorrow, for sure. Okay?” I said to Jones. “Bye!”

Conor and I left the gas station shop and ran to the pickup truck. Just before we got in, I made a snowball and quickly tossed it at him. It was the perfect snow for making snowballs—wet, heavy and easy to clump together. We circled the truck, and the gas pumps, hiding out, tossing them at each other. Soon other people got out of their cars and joined in—soon the entire gas station was filled with people hiding behind their cars and pelting whoever dared come out from behind their car to walk into the shop.

We were laughing so hard when we finally got back into the truck to warm up. “Well. Should we settle in for the night, or what?” Conor asked.

“I guess so,” I said with a shrug.

We had our sleeping bags in the back, under the truck cap, and Conor made a little nest with blankets and some of our clothes.

We climbed in together, and snuggled up close. As I was lying there, trying to fall asleep, I scraped a little part of frost off the window. K + C, I traced with my fingernail. Then I drew a heart around it.

“Are you seeing things again? Hearts in the ice? Like you saw hearts in your lattes?” Conor teased me.

“Did you, or did you not, intentionally make a pattern in my coffee that morning?”

“I did not,” Conor said. “But I take full credit for it anyway.”

“That is so like you!” I giggled as Conor pulled me over toward him, taking a chunk of snow out of my hair.

“I can’t believe we’re spending the night in the truck,” Conor said. “I’ve never done something like this before. Well, except for the time I ran away from home.”

“When was that?”

“When I was sixteen. I got so mad at everyone that I just left, you know? The problem was, I forgot the sleeping bag and blankets part.” He snuggled closer. “It was February.”

“You went home. End of story,” I said.

“No, I made a snow mattress,” Conor said. “You know, the way animals do? If you lie on the snow it’s really warm.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “I think I’m just going to take your word on that. For a change.” I turned slightly so that I was lying on my back. “Though it would be cool to lie outside and look at the stars right now.”

“Yeah, but it’s still snowing,” Conor said. He turned over, too, and we laid side by side, holding hands. “So…what’s it going to be like tomorrow?”

“We’ll have to see, I guess,” I said.

And then I fell asleep, cuddled next to Conor, completely toasty warm in the cold truck in the middle of a snowstorm.

Chapter 22

“You made it!”

“Kirst!”

“She’s here!”

Everyone screamed as Emma opened the door and Conor and I walked into the log cabin—which was actually more like a big lodge—the next morning.

Well, maybe not everyone, maybe just the girls shrieked. In any case, I felt like a celebrity.

Emma, Jones, Keira and Crystal all gathered around me in a hug. “That’s not Sean,” Jones whispered in my right ear, as Emma said, “Isn’t that goalie guy?” in my left.

I cleared my throat as we separated and said, “Conor, this is everyone. Everyone, this is Conor.”

Fortunately, nobody gasped. At least not that I heard.

Tyler and I exchanged polite nods in greeting, and I said hi to Emma and Crystal’s boyfriends, Donny and Eric. It looked like Jones had come by herself. I admired her for that. Not that I wanted to trade places with her right now, because I was very happy I’d brought Conor along. Maybe I’d started off with the wrong intentions—finding a guy just to bring here—but I’d ended up with something—someone—great.

“Oh, no!” Crystal suddenly cried, and she rushed back to the large, open kitchen. I thought I saw a little smoke coming from the stove, but I ignored it as we sat down on the rustic furniture by the fireplace.

Keira brought each of us a mug of coffee, and everyone gathered around to hear about our trip.

“It’s so great you could finally make it,” Emma said. “Were you scared?”

“Us? No.” Conor shook his head. “Kirsten might have scared some people at the gas station when she started whipping snowballs at them, but—”

“You did what?” Tyler asked.

“It was boring. It’s called letting off tension,” I said.

Crystal came over with a big plate, stacked high with pancakes. “Help yourselves, okay? A couple of these are sort of burned, sorry,” she said. “That stove is weird. All of a sudden it gets really hot.”

We all loaded up some breakfast onto paper plates and sat back down to eat.

“Yum. We’re going to need this energy for when we go skiing—”

“And snowshoeing—”

“And hiking—”

“I don’t know if I should have maple syrup, or jam,” Emma said, tapping her knife against the table. “What do you guys think? I love syrup, but that raspberry jam looks really good.”

Jones looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Emma Dilemma. Have both. Okay? Just have both.”

We both cracked up laughing, and I saw Conor giving me a confused look out of the corner of my eye. Then I turned to him and saw that he wasn’t confused; he was trying to choke down one of the burned pancakes, and he seemed to be struggling.

“Fear factor: pancake edition,” he mumbled to me after he’d managed to swallow the bite.

Together we managed through our laughter to hide his plate under mine, and we shared the less-done pancake. Which, when you got to the center of it, turned out to be a little raw.

Luckily, we’d bought some donuts at the gas station—they were selling them for a quarter to everyone who’d camped out for the night, and we had sort of a party with coffee in the parking lot as everyone got ready to move on.

“No matter what? We’ll always have SuperAmerica,” Conor had said as we pulled out onto the highway.

“Oh, yes,” I said, laughing as I checked out the photos on my cell phone. “Isn’t that romantic?”

“I guess I picked up a few things from the pigeon scout,” Jones said that night. She’d just managed to start a fire outside, on the snowy beach at the edge of the large lake where the cabin was located. We were right in the middle of the woods—it was completely deserted, except for a few other big log cabins nearby. No one else was having a bonfire that night.

“Did you guys hear? The groundhog saw its shadow this morning. You know what that means,” Crystal said.

“Six more weeks of winter,” I said. We’d spent the day cross-country skiing, snow shoeing and hanging out. Everyone seemed to approve of Conor—though they were still confused about what had happened with Sean. I’d fill them in later, when we had a chance to talk, just the four of us.

“We live in Minnesota. Like we didn’t know that we had six more weeks of winter already,” Jones said. “More like a hundred, probably.”

Crystal groaned. “Don’t remind me, okay?”

“You need a spring break trip,” I said. “In fact, maybe we all do…right?”

“You think maybe you could spend six more weeks in Minneapolis?” Conor asked me.

“Well, Gretchen is really not all better,” I said. “I mean, clearly. Plus, I told her I’d help her get started in her new job.”

I thought of how worried she was when I got home, and how we’d had that big fight and made up and felt tears welling in my eyes. I’d called her several times already since we’d been gone, just to let her know I was okay.

“You know that movie, Groundhog Day? Maybe we could live through this day over and over,” Conor said as I leaned against him.

“Yeah, but then we’d have to eat Crystal’s pancakes of lead again,” I whispered to him.

He rubbed his stomach and said softly, “I think I’ll take over the baking tomorrow.” I nodded.

I looked around the fire at everyone, taking stock of my friends and their significant others.

Crystal and Eric were solid—they’d been together for a year plus. On the other side of the fire, I knew Emma wouldn’t stay with Donny. And I knew Keira and Tyler would barely make it through the weekend, because Tyler was still staring at Emma. He clearly only kept dating her friends so he could be around her.

For some reason, I had a feeling Conor and I would be together next Groundhog Day.

“Come on,” I said. I stood up and held out my hand to him. “Let’s go to the middle of the lake.”

“Right now?” he asked. “But the fire—”

“Just for a sec,” I said.

“This isn’t some trick where you’re going to pelt me with snowballs again, is it?” he asked. “Or shove me on the ice?”

“Come on!” I cried.

We ran to the middle of the lake, laid down in the snow, and made snow angels looking up at the starry sky. When you’re so far out in the country, it feels like you can see a million stars.

“You know how you accused me of seeing stuff, at the bakery. Like, hearts, and smiles? I…well, I made a pattern of my own for you.” I got to my feet and fished a flashlight out of my pocket. “It got dark before I was done, so I couldn’t show you before, and if it snows tonight, it might cover it up, so…”

Conor stood up and held out his hand for the flashlight. “Give.”

I slapped it into his palm and waited while he switched it on. The stars were so bright, I could almost read the giant letters I’d tracked into the snow without the flashlight.

I U CONOR.

“All those instant messages you’ve been writing are really paying off. You’ve been working on your abbreviations,” Conor teased me. “What school do you go to again?”

I started chasing him across the lake. “It’s a very good school. Very!”

About the Author

CATHERINE CLARK is the author of TRUTH OR DAIRY, FROZEN RODEO, THE ALISON RULES, and MAINE SQUEEZE. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she loves to ice skate outdoors, providing she has the right hat. And coat. And awaiting fireplace.

You can visit her online at www.catherineclark.com.

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Credits

Cover design by Karin Paprocki

Copyright

ICING ON THE LAKE. Copyright © 2006 by Catherine Clark. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195733-8

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