Snow Days (The Hope Falls Series) Page 8

  “Amy?” Eric’s expression hardened immediately and Matt noticed his entire body tense.

  Jake either didn’t notice or didn’t care and continued happily. “Yeah, Mom told me that she’s meeting these guys on some website. Can you believe that? Amy?!”

  “No, I can’t.” Eric’s tone sounded calm. Deadly calm.

  “Our little girl’s growing up.” Jake’s voice wavered as he pretended to be choked up, wiping a nonexistent tear from his eye. He reached out and patted his brother’s shoulder.

  “Why the hell is she doing that?” Eric didn’t seem to appreciate his brother’s antics.

  Jake tightened his grip on his brother’s shoulder, asking solemnly, “Eric, do we need to have a talk about the birds and the bees?”

  Matt couldn’t help but laugh a little. He felt good about the fact that Justin did as well.

  Eric, however, didn’t. He pulled away from Jake’s hold. “What site is she going to?”

  “No idea,” Jake answered, reaching down and picking up the basketball.

  “How does she know these guys aren’t crazy?” Eric asked.

  “No clue,” Jake said dryly as he dribbled the ball.

  Eric shot another rapid-fire question at Jake. “Where is she going on these dates?”

  “Don’t know.” Jake threw up a three pointer and it swooshed through the net.

  Matt was feeling a little uncomfortable just standing here, listening to Amy’s brothers talk about her when she wasn’t there. Also, he really didn’t like the way the subject of her online dating was making him feel. So he decided it was time to go. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out his sweats to put over his shorts and shirt.

  “When is she going on them?” Eric hissed.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” Perhaps taking a cue from Matt, Jake pulled his sweats out of his bag as well.

  “Does Mom know where she goes or who she’s meeting?” Eric’s voice was controlled, but anger radiated off of him.

  “Don’t think so. She asked me if I knew.” Jake pulled his hoodie over his head.

  “So she goes out with these guys that she doesn’t know from Adam and doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going.”

  Jake’s head tilted as a worried expression fell over his face, “Well, shit. When you put it like that, it sounds bad.”

  “It is bad.” Eric’s jaw tensed.

  Justin stood from the bench he’d been seated on while watching the two brothers go back and forth like a tennis match. “Look. I know she’s not my sister, but Amy’s always had her head on straight. She’s a smart girl. I’m sure she’s being safe.”

  Both Eric and Jake just stared at Justin, who turned to Matt.

  “You work over at the high school, right?”

  Thanks a lot, Justin.

  Matt tried to keep his expression completely blank. “Yep.”

  “Have you met Amy?” Eric asked in what Matt could only assume was the same tone he used to interrogate people.

  “Yeah. We share a prep period.” Matt had no idea why he was offering that information up. But it wasn’t like he had anything to hide, and they did share a prep period.

  “Have you heard anything about her dating?” Jake asked. “You know, around the water cooler or whatever.”

  Okay, so maybe full disclosure was not the way to go.

  Matt gave a non-answer. “I just started.” Shrugging, he picked up his bag.

  “Do you have any sisters?” Eric turned to Matt as they all made their way out of the gym.

  “Two,” Matt nodded.

  “Would you want them to be dating online?” Eric asked pointedly.

  Hell no.

  “No,” Matt answered honestly.

  Eric searched his eyes for a moment. Just as Matt was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable, Eric nodded once decisively. “Keep an eye on her.”

  Well, that certainly wouldn’t be a hardship.

  Chapter Ten

  Excitement bubbled up inside of Amy as she leaned back in her chair and looked at the round clock hanging in the back of the room. Ten more minutes and it would be her prep period. Taking in a shaky breath, she tried desperately to suppress a smile.

  She didn’t know what it said about her that she was so much more excited about the hour she would get to spend seated beside Matt than the date she was going on tomorrow night, but she was. Even on the days when they barely spoke and just worked silently next to each other, the entire hour was a-ma-zing.

  She knew it was because she had a little crush on him. Okay, a big crush.

  Whenever she thought about Matt, she felt butterflies in her stomach. Amy didn’t think, even as a teenager, she’d ever had a real-deal-Holyfield-bona-fide crush. She’d certainly never thought about someone as much as she thought about Matt. These past couple of weeks she couldn’t go an hour without him popping up in her head like a jack-in-the-box. She could be reading, working, playing with Scooby, or even having a conversation with someone and out of nowhere the thought of his smile, his eyes, his forearms, his scent would pop into her mind like they were spring-loaded.

  Since embarking on her self-discovery journey, she’d been having a hard time focusing. Now with Matt in the mix, her focus issues hadn’t just doubled or multiplied, it was like they had been squared.

  The alarm she’d set on her phone beeped. “All right, students. Pencils down. Please pass your tests up to the front.”

  She heard several sighs and other frustrated sounds coming from her class. She knew that her honors students took their scores to heart. As much as she loved teaching, she wished her job didn’t require her to do so much standardized testing. Preparing her students for those tests took up so much of her class time, and she didn’t really feel that they were an accurate representation of what they were in reality learning and retaining.

  The bell rang loudly and the class all began gathering their things and filing out. “Have a good weekend. For those of you volunteering for Student Service Day, I will see you tomorrow. The rest of you I will see on Monday.”

  Returning to her desk, she heard several students greet Matt as he came into the classroom.

  “Hey, Mr. Kellan.”

  “Mr. K., what up?”

  “Hi, Mr. Kellawwwn.”

  “Mr. K. How goes it?”

  He’d only been at the school a few weeks, but students already had nicknames for him. And from everything Amy had heard and seen, all of the kids loved him. She could add that to the ever growing list of amazing things about Matt she had running in her head.

  He held the door open until the last student had exited and then smiled as he strode toward the front of the classroom. Oh, that smile. She could look at that smile all day every day for the rest of her life and never get tired of seeing it.

  “Hi,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady and normal and not sound like one of her students when they had a crush on a cute boy in class.

  “Hi.” Matt smiled even bigger just as the sun peeked out of the cloud cover and bright rays shone through the window and onto his face like a spotlight.

  Amy sucked in a breath. Matt always looked incredible, even in florescent lights, but rays of sunshine streaming down on him took him to an entirely new level of hotness.

  “How’s Scooby and Scrappy? Have they been on any adventures?” he asked as he pulled out his laptop.

  He’d asked every day since last week when Amy had gotten a call from Sue Ann of Sue Ann’s Café downtown that not only was Scooby strolling along Main Street, he’d also brought Scrappy along with him. Scooby was a very smart dog, and it seemed that no matter where she left him—in the house, in the backyard, in the garage—he always found a way to escape.

  Amy knew it was probably misplaced, but she blamed Marlene at Two Scoops, who had given him an ice cream cone after the first escape he’d made the previous summer, when he’d walked up to the to-go window. Marlene claimed at the time that she’d thought he was hot. But now it was the
middle of winter and Amy had asked her not to continue giving him “treats,” but had she stopped? No.

  “They’re good, and no, there haven’t been any more escapes.” Amy made a fist and knocked on her wooden desktop.

  Matt let out a little laugh. “I keep trying to picture what it must have looked like to see a huge Great Dane and a little Chihuahua walking down Main Street.”

  Amy quickly grabbed her phone from her purse and pulled up the picture Sue Ann had taken of that very thing. “Here, this is what it looked like,” she said, handing him her phone.

  Matt’s eyes widened as he took in the comical picture. “The fact that it’s snowing around them somehow makes it even funnier.”

  “She sent a few different ones. There are a couple closer up. You can scroll through them if you want.”

  Amy knew that most people in town thought her dog’s shenanigans were really funny, her family included. Amy did not share their opinion. She’d been called out of meetings, in the middle of the night, and—her personal favorite—smack dab in the middle of a checkup with her lady doctor, feet in stirrups and all. The nurse had rushed in with an emergency call to go and pick him up ASAP because so many looky-loos were slowing down in their cars as he made his way down Main Street that he was going to cause an accident.

  Her phone dinged with a text alert and Matt immediately handed her iPhone back to her. She looked down and read it.

  See you Saturday @ 8. Can’t wait to meet you.

  Amy didn’t know why she hoped Matt hadn’t seen it, but she did. They were just colleagues. Amy did consider him a friend, but it’s not like they’d ever hung out outside of work, so even that might be overstating their relationship. There was no reason she should feel weird about the fact that she had a date.

  She looked up to see if Matt had, in fact, read the text. He was facing his computer and had already begun working. It looked like he was inputting students’ grades into their school-wide database. He either hadn’t read it or had read it and didn’t care. She hoped for the first.

  Quickly, she responded.

  See you at eight.

  Then, returning her phone to her purse, she pulled out the papers she needed to grade.

  “So, you got a hot date?” His voice sounded more strained than she’d ever heard it before.

  Okay, so he’d read it—and it sounded like he cared.

  --- ~ ---

  Matt knew damn well that it was none of his business whether or not Amy was going out. And the fact that her brother had asked him to keep an eye on her had nothing to do with him asking her about it. In fact, if anything, it made him feel uncomfortable, like he was spying on her or something.

  Nope. The only reason that question had left his mouth was because he wanted to know. Which was totally ridiculous. He didn’t know why he was torturing himself. It’s not like having any information about her dating life was going to make him happy—it would be the exact opposite. Just the fact that he had inadvertently learned the time she was meeting her date meant that at eight o’clock Saturday night he would be thinking of nothing else.

  “Um, well, it’s a date.” Amy cleared her throat, “I don’t think I can qualify it as ‘hot’ just yet.”

  “You going to dinner?” He must be a masochist. That was the only explanation for him to be continuing this line of inquiry.

  “Yep.” She looked back down at her paperwork.

  Even though her body language could not have been clearer that she did not want to discuss the subject further, Matt turned in his chair so he was facing her and not his computer. Glutton for punishment. That’s what he was. “Is this the same guy you went out with the other week?”

  “No.” She shook her head while still looking down at her paperwork.

  “Poor guy didn’t make it to round two, huh?” Matt tried to ask casually.

  Her head flew up and her skin paled. “How did you know? Did you read…?” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait. What do you mean?”

  Matt had no idea why his statement had flustered her. “I just meant he didn’t get a second date. Why? What did you think I meant?”

  “Nothing.” A blush quickly spread up her cheeks and she pursed her lips before looking down at her papers.

  “Wow, if you were Pinocchio, your nose would be growing.” He hoped that teasing might get her to tell him what she’d meant because to say he was intrigued was barely scratching the surface of what he felt.

  He noticed that she bit her bottom lip as she continued scanning the papers on her desk. He really didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. He just wanted to know why she’d reacted like that when he’d mentioned round two.

  “Sorry,” he said, turning his chair back to his computer. “It’s none of my business. I was just curious.”

  She sighed and set her papers down. “No, it’s fine. It’s just, I’ve never really dated this much. Or, I guess, at all. And I’m not used to talking about it.”

  Well, he wasn’t sure if that meant she actually wanted to talk about it, but he was going to take the opening. “What made you start dating more now?”

  “I’m almost thirty,” she said simply, as if that explained everything.

  He waited to see if she was going to follow up the statement of her age with anything. When she didn’t say more, he prompted, “And…?”

  “And I figured it was time.” Once again, her tone and cadence led him to believe that she felt her statement was self-explanatory.

  “For?” He had the feeling this conversation was like a puzzle, and he was fairly certain he didn’t have enough pieces to complete the picture.

  “Me.”

  Matt wasn’t sure if she was being purposely vague or if she was being totally forthcoming and he was just not getting it, but he decided to drop it. He didn’t want to pressure her into talking about her personal life. Maybe he would ask his sister later if it was some kind of girl code and she could help him decipher it. “Oh, okay.” He turned back to his computer.

  He had just begun typing when she said, “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  He laughed, admitting, “Not even a little bit.” As he turned back to her, his eyes met hers and it felt as if a surge of electricity shot through him.

  “Do you really want to hear this?” she asked, tilting her head. The open smile she wore on her face caused an ache deep in his chest.

  “Yes,” he answered, attempting not to be distracted by his reactions to her.

  She leaned up and over her desk, making sure that the door to the classroom was shut. Matt’s eyes were automatically drawn to her perfect ass as she stretched across the desk. The sight caused a lightning bolt of desire to hit him right in his gut.

  Far too soon she sat back down. She turned to him and smoothed her hands down her gray slacks. The motion drew his attention to her delicate hands. Her fingernails were painted the same color of pink that her cheeks had a habit of turning. He thought it was adorably sexy.

  “Well,” she began. Her voice was shaking a little, and she brought her right hand up, touching the bridge of her nose before quickly lowering it once again to her lap. Entwining her fingers, she took a deep breath.

  “You really don’t owe me any explanation.” He didn’t want her to tell him if it was going to make her this uncomfortable.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s not a big deal. We’re friends.” She folded her hands primly and sat up a little straighter.

  Friends.

  He hadn’t ever been put in the “friends” box before. In one sense, he was happy that Amy considered him a friend and not just a colleague. But for some reason, hearing himself qualified like that…he just didn’t like it. He knew that’s all they ever could be, but he still didn’t like it.

  “Do you remember the data you saw the first day we met?” she asked.

  Yeah, like he could forget.

  “Yes.” He’d only replayed that night in his head about, oh, a hundred times or so.

  �
��Well, my dating is part of that same project. It’s a self-improvement project. I woke up one day and realized that I hadn’t really ever experienced—her hands came up off of her lap and she moved them around as if she was searching for the right words—“certain things. So I began this journey of discovery.”

  “How’s it going so far?”He nodded, hoping to encourage her to continue.

  “Well, the interviews have been very successful. Eye-opening and educational.” She let out a forced laugh. “I guess I could use those same adjectives to describe the dates, but they have certainly not been successful.”

  He forced himself to smile. “Well, maybe your luck will change tomorrow night.” He’d almost choked on the words as they came out of his mouth, but the truth was that she was a sweet, beautiful girl and she deserved to find what she was looking for.

  He saw a brief look of disappointment cross her face before she quickly masked it and held up her hand with her index finger wrapped around her middle finger. “Fingers crossed,” she said with a small smile before turning back to her paperwork.

  Matt had a really hard time concentrating on his work the rest of the prep period. Amy’s answers had only caused more questions to fill his head. Self-improvement? Certain things? Journey of discovery? Those all sounded like sexual references to him. Especially when he factored in the subject matter of the interviews and also the fact that she’d said that dating was a part of the project.

  The bell sounded, pulling him out of his inner ponderings.

  “See you tomorrow,” Amy smiled sweetly as she gathered her things.

  Matt stood as she moved to leave. He was probably much happier than he should have been that they were doing community cleanup tomorrow. “See ya.”

  Just before she turned the corner to pull open the door, he remembered something he’d wanted to tell her. “Oh, I met your brothers last night.”