AMANDA HAD STOPPED in the Sheetz convenience store meaning to grab a quick salad, but the fancy coffee drinks and a doughnut had worked their sweet, sugary seduction, and once that happened, she’d gone for the fried mozzarella sticks, too. She grabbed a carton of ice cream while she was at it, and a bag of chips. Might as well make it a total junk food orgy.
She’d almost made it out of the store with her bag of shame when she spotted a familiar figure in the parking lot. She paused at her car. “Ben?”
He turned, a bag in one hand. “Oh . . . hi, Amanda.”
“Are you walking?”
“Yeah,” he said, then added almost challengingly, “I don’t have a car.”
She gestured toward hers. “Want a ride?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s really cold out here,” Amanda said. “Don’t be a doofus.”
Ben paused, turning to face her. “A . . . what?”
“A doofus.” She grinned. “C’mon, it’s freezing out here. It’ll take you twenty minutes to walk home, and I can get you there in five.”
She thought he was still going to say no, but then with a sigh, his shoulders hunched, he nodded and went around to the passenger side of her car, waiting patiently for her to unlock it from inside. She watched him slide into the seat as she fiddled with the heat to get the car warmed up.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine. Hungry, that’s all. Thanks for the ride.” He put his seat belt on with a loud click and looked up at her.
When their eyes met, Amanda couldn’t stop herself from smiling again. Slow and crackling tension sizzled between them, hotter than the barely warm air puffing from the vents. Ben didn’t smile, not at first, but then his mouth quirked the smallest bit on one side. His gaze didn’t waver, not even to blink.
“You’re welcome.”
Ask him out, she thought, remembering what Norma had told her. But she couldn’t quite make herself do it. What, just blurt out a date request right there in the parking lot of the gas station, with their breath curling out between them in the cold air and the smell of fried food making her stomach rumble?
The ride home was only a few minutes, then a few more while she circled the block to find a parking spot, and they didn’t say much. They didn’t say anything, actually. Not even small talk.
Maybe she’d been wrong about that heated, lingering look.
“Thanks for the ride,” Ben said again as they stood in the Valencia lobby. “You’re right, I would’ve been an icicle by the time I got home. I appreciate it.”
Amanda lifted her coffee toward him. “No worries. Listen . . . anytime you need a ride, if I’m around . . .”
“Thanks. I couldn’t, though. Expect you to drive me around, I mean.” Ben patted his pockets and looked at his door, then gave a defeated sigh. “I forgot my keys.”
Amanda had done that a time or two. “You can call Mr. Schmidt. He has an extra set of keys.”
“No phone,” Ben said.
“You don’t have a cell phone?” Amanda’s brows rose before she composed herself.
Ben laughed self-consciously. “No. Weird, right? I keep meaning to get a new one, but I haven’t made it to the mall yet.”
“You can use mine.” She dug it out of her purse, pulled up the super’s number and handed the phone to Ben, who called but had to leave a message. She sipped her coffee, her empty stomach still growling. “You want to come upstairs to wait until he calls back?”
“Sure. Okay. I’m really taking advantage of your generosity.” He handed her the phone and followed her up the stairs.
Amanda laughed as she slid her key into the lock and opened her door. “It’s no big deal. Neighbors help neighbors, right? It’s a mitzvah.”
From behind her, Ben made a startled noise. “What?”
She glanced over her shoulder as she set her food and drink on the coffee table to shrug out of her coat. “Mitzvah. It means good deed—”
“I know what it means,” Ben said. “It just surprised me to hear it.”
Again, that look. Heat flared in Ben’s gaze. He took a step toward her. Then he looked away, and a surge of disappointment struck her hard enough to make her blink back a rush of unexpected emotion.
Silly, she told herself. It’s not like he was going to kiss her or something like that.
“We should eat before the food is stone cold,” she told him instead. “C’mon into the dining room.”
The kitchens in the Valencia weren’t big enough to fit a table, so she waved him toward the dining room table and grabbed some paper plates from the cabinet to set out for them. Settled into chairs on opposite sides of the table, each unwrapped what they’d bought at the convenience store and set it out. Amanda eyed the breakfast sandwich Ben had bought along with a hash brown. He was turning it around, rotating it on the greasy paper wrapping, but not picking it up to eat it.
“Is there something wrong with it?”
He looked up at her, then at the egg, sausage, and cheese biscuit. “Um . . . no.”
Amanda dipped a mozzarella stick into the small plastic cup of marinara sauce and bit into the fried cheese. She watched Ben lift the sandwich to his mouth and take a bite. He chewed fiercely and swallowed, then looked at her again with that odd mixture of challenge and defiance.
“It’s good,” he said. “Have you ever had one?”
Amanda hesitated a second before saying, “A few times, sure. Not for a long, long time.”
“But you’re Jewish,” Ben said. “Sausage is treif.”
His use of the term, uncommon among people who didn’t keep kosher or at least know what it was, surprised her. “Yeah, it is.”
“Do you keep kosher?” Again, his tone was sort of a challenge.
A little annoyed now, Amanda sat back and gestured at the food on the table. “Obviously, I eat from restaurants that aren’t kosher.”
Ben took another bite and chewed. Swallowed. He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Do you separate meat and dairy? Have separate dishes? If you don’t do that, you don’t keep kosher.”
“I’m a vegetarian,” she said, “so none of that is relevant for what I do in my house. I guess the answer is no, I don’t keep kosher. And honestly, Ben, it’s not really any of your business, is it? Unless there’s some reason it matters to you?”
A few years ago she’d made the mistake of going out with a guy she’d met on the Internet. He turned out to be some kind of Old Testament fetishist who was able to quote, chapter and verse, every single law. Conveniently, he’d made sure she knew how many of those laws had been invalidated by the New Testament, and exactly how steep would be her decline into the fires of hell should she not accept salvation.
Ben looked up at her then, eyes going wide as he swallowed the gigantic bite of sandwich he’d taken after finishing his diatribe. “I didn’t mean—”
“Do you have a problem with the fact that I’m Jewish? Because you keep bringing it up. And look, I’ve had some people be jerks about it in the past, so really, if you’ve got some kind of issue with it, how about you just man up and tell me that. What, you want to see the part in my hair that hides my horns?” Her voice had risen, shaky with anger and tears.
“Someone actually asked you that?” He sounded horrified. He put down the sandwich and wrapped it quickly in the paper.
Amanda had lost her own appetite. “Yes. Someone did. I’ve also been told that I’m going to burn in hell after I die, and I’ve been asked why I don’t have more money, since ‘my people’ are all rich.”
“I’m sorry.”
She wrapped up her own food and shoved it back in the bag, then stood to take it to the fridge. Her phone rang as she did. Mr. Schmidt. He’d be downstairs with Ben’s key in fifteen minutes.
“I’ll go now,” Ben said when she relayed the message. He hadn’t finished his food, but instead had shoved it all back in the paper bag, and now clutched it in one hand without asking her to put it in the garbage. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought this into your house. It was disrespectful of your beliefs.”
Amanda stood in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. “If I minded, I’d have asked you what you ordered before I invited you up. I live by my set of rules, Ben. That doesn’t mean I expect or demand other people do.”
“Too bad more people don’t feel that way.”
She crossed her arms and lifted her chin, still stung by his behavior. “Yeah. Too bad.”
Ben looked as though he were about to say something else, but when his gaze snagged on hers, he seemed to think better of it. Instead he nodded and backed away. He looked back once more before he closed the door, the click of the lock very loud behind him.
So much for that, Amanda thought. At least she hadn’t been an idiot and asked him out on a date.
“BEN. HEY. HELLO?” Tesla snapped her fingers in the air a few inches from his face. “You okay?”
He wasn’t, really. He was an idiot of the highest degree, and while feeling that way wasn’t exactly new, it was disheartening that he hadn’t managed to outgrow his propensity for acting stupid. “Sorry. Just preoccupied.”
His boss’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, I can see that. I asked you to refill the coffee thermoses twenty minutes ago. You made the coffee, but . . .”
“I didn’t do the refills. Yeah, sorry.” He shook his head, wishing he could shake off his bad mood as easily. “I’ll do it right now.”
“I had Marisol do it.” Tesla leaned against the counter, her arms crossed, and looked him over. “You want to talk about it? Something going on?”
“No. Well. Yeah. Maybe.” Ben had been slicing avocados, but now he set the knife aside to face her. “I met someone. And I like her. I think she’s smart and kind, and she’s been really nice to me.”
Tesla smiled. “And?”
“And, I insulted her. More than once. I didn’t mean to.”
“You don’t strike me as the sort of guy who goes around being randomly insulting,” Tesla said. “I mean, if anything, you’re about the politest, quietest dude I’ve met in a long time . . .”
Ben frowned. He stripped off his food prep gloves and tossed them in the trash, then moved to the sink to wash his hands. “Why does that sound like you’re going to add a ‘but’ in there?”
“But,” Tesla added with a laugh, “you do have a certain . . . umm . . . well it’s kind of a demeanor, I guess.”
Ben turned. She handed him a clean, dry towel for his hands. “What’s that mean?”
“Look . . . you haven’t talked much about where you grew up or anything like that, and it’s not really any of my business—”
“No,” he cut in. “It’s not.”
Tesla didn’t look offended, despite his sharp tone. “When I was a kid, I spent almost every summer on a commune.”
This gave Ben pause. “You did?”
“Yes.”
“Like . . . a religious commune?” He’d never heard Tesla talk anything about religion. The Morningstar Mocha was decorated with a tree and colored lights, but the signs all said Happy Holidays and there was an electric menorah in the window, waiting for its turn to be lit.
“Yes. Sort of. I mean, it was mostly an excuse for people to sleep with people who weren’t their spouses,” she said lightly, her gaze scanning his face as though to look for an obligatory show of shock. “And it was a front for a massive drug operation.”
Ben shook his head. “Wow.”
“Yeah. Anyway, it was definitely an experience that most people I run into haven’t had, and they can’t really understand. So, I don’t talk about it much, but there’s no question that it shaped me into who I am and how I view things.” She shrugged. “What I’m saying is, Ben, you strike me as a guy who’s trying really hard to forget where he came from.”
“So? Lots of people leave the place they grew up, their families. Their faith,” he added, without looking away from her gaze. “I’m not the first.”
“Not at all.”
He frowned. “Are you saying it’s so obvious that I’m some kind of what, a freak? An outsider? That I don’t know how to interact with people out here in the real world, or something? I didn’t grow up on a commune. Or in a cult!”
“I’m saying,” Tesla said gently, “that you have a way of speaking that sets you apart from the rest of the yahoos who pound their chests and make a show for the ladies, that’s all. That I’ve seen the women come in here and flirt with you, and you barely blink an eye, and I know you’re not trying to be insulting or anything, but you don’t realize that most women bending over to flash you some cleavage are not used to men not noticing.”
“I notice,” Ben said.
Tesla laughed, tossing back her head of crazy hair, then looked at him with a wide grin. “You don’t react.”
“I . . . they’re . . .” He was at a loss for words, uncomfortable. “I’m not used to it, I guess. And yes, it’s because of how I was raised. Women didn’t do that. Good women didn’t, anyway.”
Women in his community dressed modestly, to say the least. Married women wore wigs so that nobody but their husbands could even see their real hair. Long sleeves, long dresses, thick stockings. A wall between the men and women at the synagogue so nobody would be tempted to look at each other during services, instead of praying. As far as Ben was concerned, the barrier had only ever made it that much more tempting to try to get a glimpse.
Tesla’s laughter faded at his words. “Good women, huh? So a woman is bad if she shows off her body?”
“I didn’t say that. And I don’t think it, just like I don’t think women shouldn’t be allowed to lead a worship service or that somehow once a month what happens to their bodies makes them unclean.” Ben frowned again. “I don’t believe most of what I was taught was true, growing up. The stuff about. . . .” He stumbled on the word Ha-Shem, knowing Tesla probably wouldn’t know what that meant. “God. That stuff, I understand. But all the other rules, I just can’t get behind.”
She seemed mollified, though her eyes narrowed and she looked at him more carefully. “Ah . . . Amish?”
It was Ben’s turn to laugh. He knew very little about the Pennsylvania Amish, but he could see how she might’ve thought his description meant he’d grown up in that culture. “No. Orthodox Jewish.”
“Oh.” Tesla didn’t seem to know what to say for a second or so, then replied, “But not now?”
“No. Not anymore.” Saying it aloud tasted strange.
They stared at each other for a few seconds before Tesla reached out to squeeze his shoulder. “So, you like this woman. But you hurt her feelings. Apologize. Make it up to her? I bet whatever you did wasn’t as bad as you think it was, Ben.”
“I like her. Yes.”
Tesla grinned. “Like her, like her? Like you really, really like her?”
“Yes, I like her.” A laugh pushed its way up and out his throat, surprising him how good it felt. Watching Tesla waggle her eyebrows, he laughed harder, and that felt even better. “I like her a lot.”
“You gonna ask her out?”
His laughter eased into a sigh. “I don’t know.”
The idea was too vast to contemplate at the moment. Dating? In this world, where holding hands and kissing and making love were expected, not forbidden until after marriage. He’d spent his entire life expecting to marry Galya. Asking Amanda on a date seemed . . . disingenuous, at the least. Or somehow dishonest.
Tesla nodded. “Yeah. I get it. But listen. If you hurt someone’s feelings, isn’t it always better to at least try to make it up to them?”
“Yes,” Ben said. “Of course.”
“You’ll feel better about yourself, too,” Tesla offered. “And you know what would make you feel good, too?”
He gave her an expectant look that she returned with another wide grin.
“If you refilled all the coffee at the self-serve station.”
Ben burst into laughter again. “Yes. All right. I got it. Right away, boss.”
Tesla winked at him and gave his upper arm a small light punch. “Hey. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
And, when he walked out into the coffee shop’s main area, Ben saw he was going to have his chance.