How Sweet It Is - Alice J. Wisler [91]
“What do you want, Deena?” His smile has faded from his lips.
More time with just you. Would that be too forward of me to say? Mom would turn up her nose. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to be in a relationship… with you.” He speaks slowly, like each word is coming from someplace deep.
I’ve heard of being honest, but this takes the cake. I swallow and mumble, “You would?”
“How about you?”
I don’t know what to say. I look down at his shoes, then at my shoes. All I can see is Rhonda and him standing in the kitchen together. As though reading my mind—and I guess he can do this because he went to grad school for social work—he says, “Rhonda and I aren’t together. We never were.”
Jonas has let me know this, and so has Robert. Once again, Zack is assuring me that he and Rhonda are not, as the kids say, going out. Yet, there is so much more than just knowing where another woman stands in his life. There are many other components… time, truth, trust. These are small words, but each holds great significance for me.
When I look up, his face is right in front of me. I feel unsure, and yet sweet anticipation floods over me at the same time.
“I know it hasn’t been long.” His fingers encircle my arm just above my wrist; I feel warmth touch my scars.
“I want the three Ts,” I tell him.
He gives me a pensive look. “The three Ts?”
“Yeah.”
“What are they?”
His face is so close to mine.
“Something to do with cooking?”
I am glad for the opportunity to laugh. “Yeah, they stand for Teflon, tablespoon, and tarragon.”
“Tarragon?”
“It’s an herb.” There’s a French-grown variety and a Russian-grown one, and French is usually thought to be best in the kitchen. It’s funny how studies at the culinary school can filter through my mind at the most unexpected times.
“I just wondered why there would be an herb when the other two are objects.”
I note the tongs hanging by the stove and say, “Okay, Teflon, tablespoon, and tongs. Does that sound better?”
He looks into my eyes.
I’m not able to catch the harsh pain I once felt his eyes encompassed. All I see now is tenderness.
His hands move to my shoulder. His touch is so light, yet strong enough to make me take one step closer to him. As I put my head against his chest, his arms slip around me.
I let him finger my hair, slowly, caressing away pain, distrust, loneliness. Even the scars on my arms, legs, and stomach seem not to matter right now.
I could stay like this all night.
We hear Jonas over the music. He enters the living room and then the kitchen. I expect Zack to pull away from me like he did when Rhonda was clutching him.
“Well, it’s about time!” Jonas’s voice booms with excitement. He smiles at us, and then leaves the room again, his boots pounding over the hardwoods. “Who made the fire?” he calls as he enters the living room.
“No comments,” Zack says over my head.
“Needs work,” his brother shouts back. “Needs work!”
“Needs work,” I repeat.
“Okay, okay. I heard him.”
I step back a bit and look into Zack’s eyes. To be truthful, to be trustworthy, to know that over time, with God’s help, I have come from wanting to die in Georgia to embracing the sweetness of life in the mountains of North Carolina—those are the valuable things to know. I risk exposing my thoughts, something that I’ve found near impossible to do these past months in Bryson City. “I think we need work, too.”
He looks as though my words have slapped him.
Immediately I want to retract what I said, but it’s Jonas’s fault, he gave me the idea.
“Work?” Zack clears his throat. “We need work?”
Goodness, surely he, of all the intelligent people I know, understands this. “Needing work isn’t a bad thing,” I explain. There are times even the best-looking cake could use a little more icing or a few more buttercream roses.
His eyes are hopeful. “But you do think there’s po–tential?”
That’s when I tell him what the three Ts really stand for. “Trust, time, and truth.”
“You’re right. I