Meg Cabot - Missing You

Sure, it’s an age-old technique, used by mothers worldwide to control fractious offspring.

But did you know the U.S. Marines use it occasionally as well, to quell a recalcitrant suspect? They do, actually.

Because it not only works, but it doesn’t leave a mark. On the victim, I mean.

Oh, yeah. I learned a lot of useful stuff like that while I was overseas.

Hannah balked at first over being dragged by her ear from her boyfriend’s cushy apartment to my motorcycle. But, as I explained to her, it was either that or I called the cops, and Randy got an extra-nice surprise when he got home from work that night, in the form of an arrest for statutory rape.

She finally gave in, but not exactly what you’d call graciously. I was strapping my helmet on her—I didn’t have a spare, so I was going to have to risk my precious cranium to transport the little brat home—when she stiffened.

I knew without even glancing over my shoulder what she was looking at.

“Where is he?” I asked evenly. “And don’t get any ideas about calling him over here. I can dial nine-one-one faster than anybody you’ve ever seen.”

“He’s getting out of his car,” Hannah said, her gaze devouring the object of her affections the way Ruth devours éclairs—or would if she went off her no-flour-or-sugar diet. “He’s going to be really upset when he sees I’m gone.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “I bet five dollars you never hear from him again.”

“Are you kidding?” Hannah shook her head. “He’ll go to the ends of the earth looking for me if he has to. He told me. We’re soul mates.”

Straddling the bike, I glanced in the direction she was staring, and saw a tall, skinny guy getting out of a Trans Am.

Seriously. Why do they always drive a Trans Am?

But instead of heading for Apartment 2T, old Randy headed straight for Apartment 1S. Hannah and I watched in silence as he thumped once on the door. It opened and a dark-haired girl, who looked even younger than Hannah, peered up at him. He leaned down and pressed a kiss on her that appeared to make her knees melt, since he had to drag her back into the apartment, as her legs apparently failed to work properly anymore.

Behind me, Hannah made a faint noise, like a kitten who has only just woken from a long, deep sleep.

“Huh,” I said, gunning the engine. “Looks like Randy’s got more than one soul mate, doesn’t it?”

Then I got us out of there just as fast as I could. Without going over the speed limit, of course.

Eight

Rob was on the phone when I tugged open the screen door and then pulled a very humbled Hannah into his living room.

His jaw dropped when he saw us. Then, remembering himself, he said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She just walked in. I don’t know. No, she looks fine. Yeah.” He held the phone out towards Hannah. “Your mother wants to talk to you, Han.”

Hannah’s face crumpled. Then she turned and ran dramatically up the stairs, weeping the whole way. A second later, we heard a bedroom door slam.

Rob looked at me. I rolled my eyes. He said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She’s a little…upset. Let me go talk to her. Then I’ll call you back. Yeah. Bye.”

Then he hung up and stared at me some more.

“She’s in love,” I said, nodding my head in the direction Hannah’s sobs were floating from.

“But she’s all right?” he asked in a tight voice.

“Physically,” I said. “I think a little visit to the ob-gyn might be in order.”

His legs seemed to give out from beneath him. He sagged onto a chair at the dining room table.

“Thank you, Jess,” he said faintly, speaking not to me, but to the carved wooden fruit bowl in the center of the table.

I shrugged. Gratitude makes me uneasy.

Particularly when it comes from someone who looks as fine as Rob does in a pair of jeans. It was so unfair that he should be so hot and at the same time so unattainable.

Unless any of that stuff Hannah had told me back at the apartment complex was true.

But how could it possibly—

To keep my mind from straying into this dangerous territory, I looked around Rob’s place. It had been totally redone since I’d last been there. The chintz his mom had loved so much was long gone and replaced with masculine-looking—but still nice—olive-greens and browns. The flowered couch was nowhere to be seen, replaced by a brown suede one. The old nineteen-inch Sony was now a sleek plasma screen, mounted to the wall above a dark wood bookcase filled with CDs and DVDs.

Whatever else Rob might have been through since I last saw him, he wasn’t hurting for cash. He’d converted his mother’s place into a bona fide bachelor pad.

“You got any soda or something?” I asked. Because thinking about all the girls he might have been entertaining in said bachelor pad had left me feeling a little weak.

“In the fridge,” he said. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the fruit bowl. There were three red apples and a banana ripening in it. If I wasn’t mistaken, Rob Wilkins appeared to be in shock.

I went into the kitchen. It, too, had been totally remodeled, the old white farmhouse cupboards replaced by sleek unpainted cherry wood. The lucite counter was gone and a black granite one gleamed in its place. The appliances were all new, too, and were stainless steel instead of white.

I found two Cokes in the fridge and brought one out to him before taking a seat in a chair across the table from his. I figured, judging from the way he couldn’t stop staring at that fruit bowl, his electrolytes had sunk as low as mine. Or something.

“Where’d you get the money for all this?” I asked, popping open my Coke can and nodding towards the plasma screen. My mom would have killed me if she’d heard me—it’s totally impolite to ask someone how they got the money to pay for something. But I figured Rob wouldn’t care.

He didn’t.

“Dentists,” he said. And looked away from the fruit bowl long enough to open his own soda can.

“Dentists?”

He took a long slug from the Coke, then sat the can down again on an expensive woven place mat.

“Sorry,” he said. “Yeah, dentists. They’re about the only people who can afford Harleys anymore. Well, and retired doctors. And lawyers.”

I remembered the bike he’d been fixing up in his barn two Thanksgivings before. The bike he’d been fixing up when I’d told him I loved him. The time he hadn’t said he loved me back.

“I get it,” I said. “You’ve been buying old bikes, fixing them up, and selling them?”

“Right,” he said. “The market for antique bikes is incredibly hot right now.”

I thought about my bike, parked out in his gravel driveway. I wondered where my dad had gotten it. I can’t believe I had never thought to ask. Had Rob—

But no. No, that would just be too weird.

“That’s great,” I said instead. “The place looks…” Move-in ready. God, what is WRONG with me? “The place looks really nice.”

“Not nice enough, apparently,” Rob said with a grimace and a glance up the stairs.

“Yeah,” I said. “About that. She lied to you, you know.”

“About what was going on with her mom?” Rob nodded. “I know. Now. Gwen—that’s her mom—and I have been talking. Hannah snowed us both pretty good, it looks like. She told Gwen I was suicidal over a girl and that I’d begged her to come stay with me a few weeks to help give me a reason for living.”

I thought back to what Hannah had said, about my breaking Rob’s heart. So I guess it hadn’t been true after all. It had all just been to get back at me.

But what about the scrapbook? And making her watch the TV show?

“She met him on the Internet,” I said, and filled Rob in on the details about “Randy.”