Rachel Gibson: Not Another Bad Date

Zach had been blessed with looks and talent. He’d been treated like a rock star, yet everyone on campus genuinely seemed to like him. While Adele could appreciate his hard body and gorgeous face, she’d always figured there had to be something wrong with his brains. He had to have a mental defect, perhaps the result of too many hits to the helmet that made all that physical perfection a total waste and a damn shame. Why else would a guy like Zach date a heinous bitch like Devon Hamilton? Sure, Devon was gorgeous, but there were a lot of gorgeous girls at UT. Obviously, he was retarded or just superficial. Maybe both.

Then one day he plopped down in front of her and turned in his chair. If suddenly looking into Zach’s dark brown eyes surrounded by long thick lashes hadn’t been shocking enough, he’d said in an easy drawl, “I’ve been wonderin’ how you get your hair to do that.”

“What?” She’d been so stunned, she’d actually looked behind her to see whom he was talking to. There hadn’t been anyone but her, and she’d turned back, and asked, “Are you talking to me?” Because jocks like Zach, with beautiful cheerleader girlfriends, didn’t talk to girls like Adele. She was into theater and hung out with people who debated interplanetary teleportation.

Not that she thought she wasn’t good enough or pretty enough, she just didn’t live in the same privileged sphere, where everyone kissed your ass because you could throw a football or execute a perfect back handspring into an equally perfect Herkey jump.

His soft laughter had filled the silence between them. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you. Do you get it permed?”

Was he making fun of her? Before the days of Carrie Bradshaw and Shakira, she’d always hated her hair and had never understood why anyone would get a perm when they could have straight hair. “I don’t do anything to it,” she’d answered, waiting for the punch line. Back in junior high, she’d been called pube head. Usually by his cheerleader girlfriend.

“It’s just naturally like that?” His gaze moved across her face and touched her hair.

“Yes.” He had the longest lashes of any guy she’d ever seen, and yet he was the most masculine guy she’d ever seen.

“Hmm. It’s really pretty. I like it.” He looked back into her eyes, and said through a flash of white teeth and perfect smile, “I’m Zach.”

Had he just said her hair was pretty? Shocking. “Adele.”

“I know.”

Shock number two. “You do?”

“Sure.”

Then he’d turned back toward the front of the class, tossed a notebook and pencil on the desk in front of him, and she’d been left staring at the back of his football player’s neck and wondering what the hell had just happened.

The next scheduled class day, he’d sat in front of her again. And once again, he’d turned around. This time he asked about her silver cuff bracelet engraved with three Celtic knots.

“This symbolizes the interdependency of nature,” she’d explained, while wondering why he was talking to her again. She didn’t even go to football games. “This, the relationship of man and Earth. This, the unity knot of lovers.”

He looked up from her wrist and grinned. “Unity of lovers, huh?”

She pulled her hand back and shrugged. “That’s what some archaeologists believe. The Celts left very few records, so no one really knows for sure.”

He reached across the desk, grasped her fingers in his warm palm, and lightly tugged her hand toward him. “I’ve never seen a knot of lovers that looked quite like this.”

She tried to pull her hand free, but he’d tightened his grip. “You won’t find it in Penthouse or Hustler. ”

He chuckled deep in his chest and let go. “I guess that explains it.” He looked into her eyes for several long seconds, then turned around as class had begun.

Her fingers still warm from his touch, she’d grabbed her pen and pretended an interest in the professor at the front of room. But in order to see the teacher, she had to look past Zach’s wide shoulders in the T-shirt that hugged his muscles and fit tight around the bulge of his biceps. She gave up and studied the back of his head and his golden hair.

Zach didn’t seem slow, like he’d taken too many hits to the head. He seemed kind of nice, but there had to be something wrong with him. Some thing. Some reason why a nice guy would date Devon Hamilton.

She was still wondering about it five hours later when Zach walked into the restaurant where she worked five nights a week serving pizza. He came in with three of his football friends, but he’d hung around until she got off work.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she’d asked, as he opened the door for her.

“What girlfriend?”

Adele walked out into the crisp night air and shoved an arm into her sweater. “You know what girlfriend.”

He moved behind her and held her sweater while she threaded her other arm inside. “Describe her for me.”

“Blond. Skinny. Jumps around a lot in a cheerleader’s skirt.”

“Oh, that girlfriend.” He pulled her hair from the back of her sweater, and the tips of his warm fingers brushed her neck. “She isn’t my girlfriend.”

Adele looked up into the shadows of his face. “Since when?”

“You ask too many questions.”

It really wasn’t her business anyway. It wasn’t like he was asking her out. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m like a furnace. I don’t get cold.”

She supposed it had to do with all those muscles. He walked her back to her dorm room and left her at the door with no more than a handshake. But the next night when he walked her to her door, he backed her against the wall and kissed the air from her lungs. He’d told her he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and within two very short months, he’d made her love him so completely that she’d found it hard to breathe around him. Hard to do anything but think about him. She fell so fast and hard and completely, she hadn’t thought twice about giving herself to him, body and soul.

Adele had never planned to save herself for marriage, but she had wanted her first sexual experience to be with someone she loved. She’d thought that person was Zach, but once she’d given him everything she’d had to give, he’d crushed her heart like a can of Lone Star. He’d dumped her flat and returned to Devon, and Adele had been so devastated that she’d left the University of Texas at midterm and moved more than a thousand miles away to live with her grandmother in Boise, Idaho. A few months after she’d moved in with her grandmother, she’d received an invitation in the mail. Cecilia Blackworth Hamilton Taylor-Marks and Charla May and James Zemaitis requested the honor of Adele’s presence at the wedding of their children, Devon Lynn Hamilton and Zachary James Zemaitis. There had been no return address, but Adele had known who’d sent it.

Adele had known that Zach would marry Devon, but apparently it hadn’t been enough for Devon to have Zach. She’d wanted to rub Adele’s face in it.

She’d never told anyone about her relationship with Zach. Not her friends and not her sister. Looking back on it, she wondered how she could have been so foolish. Not only had she given her heart away easily, she’d given it to a jock.

The last she’d heard, Zach was playing pro ball for Denver, not that she kept up on sports. But occasionally she had heard his name mentioned in the sports segment of the nightly news or seen his face selling Gatorade or Right Guard or jock itch cream on television. Okay, so she’d never seen him selling jock itch cream.

She didn’t know if he was still playing for Denver or had been traded. She didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, and she didn’t give a damn. Hopefully, he was still married to Devon, and his wife was making his life hell.