Dallas (Time for Tammy Book 1)

Prologue

I intended to avoid him. Walking in from the parking lot to the restaurant, I reminded myself that my objective was the same as it had been the past four months: to sit as far away from him as I could.

He was late, as usual. My anxiety grew as the chairs around me were filled one by one by my classmates. Finally, the only seat left was the one beside me. Apparently my Psycho Guardian Angel was up to his (her?) old tricks.

My face heated up when Dallas entered. He scanned the table from the hostess stand, his eyes settling on the lone empty chair and then on me. As his shoulders angled toward his ears, I could almost hear him let out a giant breath. He kept his eyes on the carpet while he walked over and sat down, all without a word or a glance in my direction.

Due to my self-imposed restraining order, I hadn't been that close to him in years. But I'm much more mature now, I told myself. I had a boyfriend of my very own, and didn't need to stalk boys anymore. Maybe I should tell him that. I surreptitiously glanced over at him. He sat stony-faced, his oversized J.crew button-down puffing out from his bony frame. Maybe not.

It was the end of the first term of my senior year of college. Despite ending up in the same class, Dallas and I had managed to spend an entire semester without actually acknowledging each other's existence. If he participated in a class discussion, I would stay silent, and vice-versa. I was extra conscientious of getting to class early, as Dallas was always late, and I would wait until after he'd left the room to pack up my stuff.

But now my former-crush-turned-archnemesis for the bulk of my college career was sitting beside me as we both ordered the orange chicken. Throughout lunch, as during class, Dallas and I sat in a mutual silence—at least toward each other. I made polite conversation with Helene, who sat across from me, and he exchanged monosyllabic comments with the girl on his other side.

And then came fortune cookie time: the time that had for thousands of years united ex-lovers and ex-friends in cracking open stale cookies and reading bits of nonsense. I looked down at his hands as he split his open, his giant knuckles and long fingers fumbling with the tiny slip of paper. He bumped my arm in the process and I gave that notorious button-down a shy smile, avoiding his eyes.

"Who do you think makes a living writing such trite?" he asked, turning toward me.

After three years of silence, that was his opening line? I was a block of ice, my arms frozen by my side as the waitress whisked away my abandoned plate.

"The sentence structure is all wrong," Dallas continued.

I unlocked my body to open my cookie, pretending that my fingers, despite his scrutiny of them, were defter than his. I crumbled the wafer on the tablecloth in front of me."You will have a successful career," I scoffed.

He reached over to pluck the fortune from between my fingers. I folded my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking. I hated that Dallas could still have that effect on me.

"You could have a successful career writing fortune cookies!" Dallas exclaimed.

I shook my head, still avoiding looking at him.

"Come on, Tammy, you have such an, er... creative mind."

I shrugged again. Why was Dallas acting so casual? As if nothing had ever happened.

"I read your columns, you know," he continued.

"Thanks," I replied, for lack of anything better to say. He reads them?

"They're really good. Sometimes I wonder how you come up with some of that stuff, but you know, you're...you." The way he said it, I think he might have been referencing the gift, the one I gave him three years ago. Not the crab. The one that caused the end of our friendship.

"I'm going to be a science writer," I told him, trying to divert the conversation from going down that road. "A successful one."

"Yeah. I'm going to write, too." He seemed grateful for the change in conversation. "I'm going to be a travel writer."

I couldn't resist looking up as he handed my fortune back to me. His cerulean eyes looked kind; I hadn't seen those eyes look anything but icy for years. He was smiling at me, actually smiling.

I gave him another shy half-smile in return. "Well...good luck." I wanted to tell him more, tell him I was sorry—again—but I didn't. I'd already said it enough. And, for the first time, I actually felt as though he had, maybe, forgiven me.

"You too, Tammy."

He got up to leave, nodding at our classmates as he sauntered out the door, his ill-fitting striped shirt fanning out behind him as he walked away.

My professor Helene stared at me as as I tucked the fortune into my purse. I met her eyes and shrugged. All around me, people were shaking hands and exchanging phone numbers. I quietly ducked out of the restaurant.

As I started my car and pulled out of the parking lot, a strange feeling took over me. It felt like Dallas and I had possibly achieved peace, but instead of being relieved, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. When I arrived at my dorm room, I did what any girl in the midst of her senior year in college would do if she felt uneasy at four o'clock in the afternoon: I cracked open a beer.

I was content to spurn Dallas forever. But, me being me, couldn't stand the thought that someone would have ill feelings regarding me. If I was having an optimistic day, I'd picture him thinking of me as a girl he used to be friends with. On a great day, a girl he had long ago defended when he helped put her main adversary's bike on the roof, but then sort of had a "falling out" with. And on a bad day, well, who ever knew what went through that boy's mind?

But I guess he tried to make things somewhat right. Forgive and forget perhaps. Maybe he was too dense to know something had gone so wrong between us that we were not supposed to speak to each other in the first place, let alone make casual conversation about fortune cookies and our future career choices. I gave up trying to figure him out a long time ago.

"So you actually spoke to him?" Jane barged into my room a few minutes later. If she was startled to see me sitting on the foam couch in my dorm room with three discarded beers on the floor at 5 PM, she didn't say anything.

"Yep," I said, stifling a burp.

"Did he say anything that made any sense?"

For quite possibly the hundredth time in two hours, I reflected on the lunch conversation between Dallas and I. "Not really. But at least he talked to me."

"I guess." Jane was never Dallas's biggest fan, which was, as I had eventually begun to suspect, in stark contrast to his feelings for her.

"What a Blockhead," she said, opening the mini-fridge and pulling out a beer.

An hour later Jane was as drunk as me, and we were laughing hysterically as we recalled all of the Blockheads of the past.

"Remember Sonofabitch and his cowboy boots?" she asked.

"And Jungle Funk and the prostitutes?"

She sat up. "I forgot about him. I still see him sometimes. My friend interviewed him for her film class. Do you know what he said his favorite movie was?"

"What?"

"Taxi Driver."

I gave her a blank look.

"The one with Jodie Foster as a child prostitute?"

"No. He didn't," I said as her meaning finally got through.

"He did," she exclaimed gleefully.

I shook my head again. Only I could have almost gone out on a date with a guy that hires 'girls-of-the-night,' in Cuba and then locks them in the trunk of a taxi. Only I could have found out about that an hour before our date. I cringed as I remembered him knocking at the door, expecting to find me dolled up and ready to go. Instead, I was hiding under the covers, willing him to go away. Just another tick on the Blockhead List.