His Frozen Heart (29 page)

As my eyes took in the tattoo on his
chest, my mouth gaped. Even after he had prepared me, I wasn’t
prepared. My breathing sped up and tingles spread from my head to
my toes. It wasn’t creepy. It wasn’t even remotely offensive. It
was the most unexpected cartoon tattoo I had ever seen. On top of
his beautifully sculpted chest, directly above his heart was a
tattoo of a bright red heart. The heart had big brown cherub eyes,
white gloves and sneakers, with oversized cartoon lips. It looked a
lot like one of the M&M guys from the commercials. The heart’s
two little gloved hands were holding a red and white striped candy
cane.

I was speechless. His eyes desperately
searched mine. He made no excuse and didn’t try to play it off like
it was a joke or anything; instead he quietly offered, “I told you
I’ve had a crush on you forever.”

I sat motionless, my eyes darting
between his chest and his eyes. “You have a tattoo of a candy cane
on your chest?”

“
Yeah. Still want to wake
up early and cover it up with a Sharpie in the morning?”

My hand was drawn to the happy cartoon
figure smiling back at me from his muscular chest. My finger traced
the outline as the implication of the happy message crashed on
me.

“
You were on a date with a
girl and got this? What did she say?”

“
I think she assumed I had
a strange fascination with Christmas or something. She didn’t try
to talk me out of it. She sort of egged me on when I said I wanted
a candy cane over my heart. She’s the one who told me to get a
cartoon heart holding the candy cane. People get dumb tattoos all
the time.” His eyes bore straight into mine, “This one means
something to me. I was letting the world know that my heart wanted
to hold you.”

Frozen in place, my memory raced to
yesterday morning after finding him in his garage. He had confessed
he had always had a crush on me – I had dismissed it. The proof of
his feelings were staring at me. I wanted to gather him in my arms
and get lost in his embrace. I wanted all the fear and craziness in
my life to evaporate so I could truly enjoy this moment. I
stammered, “I don’t know what to say.”

Dave’s lips were at my ear when he
answered, “You don’t have to say anything.” His hands slid under my
shirt and glided across my skin. The goose bumps returned at his
touch. He whispered, “Just promise me you’ll be here when I wake up
tomorrow.”

“
I promise.”

Dave kissed my neck, gently nuzzled
the sensitive skin by my ear lobe then slid under the covers. He
held the comforter up for me to slide in beside him. Before
accepting his invitation, I walked over to each of the candles
still dancing in the darkness and blew each one out. When I
returned to the bed, I slid my sweater off and climbed in beside
him. Dave’s massive body spooned against me.

My head rested on his bicep, as his
other arm draped over me, gently motioning circles on my front. His
whisper so low, I barely heard his words, “I love that you are
here.”

Gripping his arm draped over me, I
answered, “Me, too.”

Chapter 21

Friday morning I again awoke to an
empty bed. . . a little disappointed. I had hoped to see his happy
heart tattoo first thing this morning. Dave continued to surprise
me. How could I have ever believed I knew him? I hadn’t known him
at all.

Dave was confident, attractive, he
finally had conversational skills, and judging from this place, he
must be a savvy businessman. What had happened? The Dave I thought
I knew didn’t make eye contact, wouldn’t speak unless he was
answering someone’s question, and had never been the poster child
for Tide.

Had he watched one of those, “You can
do it” infomercials on television? Taken a Dale Carnegie seminar?
People change. Everyone matures, but nothing like the change I had
witnessed in Dave. It was almost as if he had gone through a
finishing school or was abducted by aliens. I liked him before, but
I liked him because he had done me a favor by restoring my car. The
more I learned about him while I was in high school, the more I
felt sorry for him. The truth was, the feelings I had for Dave
right now were nothing like how I felt before. I no longer thought
of him as a wounded puppy I could try to save.

Dave was a catch – a real catch. Lots
of guys I had met in college had been okay, but the few I had dated
were so consumed with their own lives, I felt as if I had been
intruding. Time with me had been squeezed in between football games
or road trips with their friends. I had gotten semi-serious with a
couple of them, well, maybe not serious, but exclusive. None ever
broke my heart because I didn’t care about any of them enough for
their departure from my life to be more than a blip on a screen.
There was one other major difference between Dave and everybody
else, too – my eyes couldn’t get enough of him.

I snuggled back into the sheets that
still retained his scent. My eyes closed as I escaped into a
fantasy where it wasn’t just his bare chest I was snuggled up
against. The candles had been a nice touch last night. The way the
flickering light danced across his skin and accentuated the crevice
of each ridge on his muscular arms and chest, it was beyond a
turn-on – nothing short of erotic.

Breaking myself out of my own little
world, I sat up in bed and stretched my arms, letting an enormous
yawn free. It was just after 7 AM on a Friday. Regardless of Tony’s
warning yesterday, I didn’t have any classes today, so there was no
need to rush across town or to worry about dodging any stalker who
could be lurking outside one of my classes.

Gazing around the apartment,
everything still looked as it had the first time I laid eyes on it:
nothing out of place. I thought people only lived like this on
television shows. My house as a whole, and my room specifically,
always had that “lived in” feel. I thought of the last guy I had
dated, Calvin. He was nice enough, but every time we went to his
place, it smelled like a locker room. I could go for obsessively
organized and clean as opposed to grimy and gross any day. Dave was
a huge step up from Calvin.

I plodded to the bathroom, checked
myself in the mirror, grabbed some clothes, and decided I was
presentable enough to score a cup of coffee downstairs. It was
still early, so I thought Dave must be getting in some work before
he opened the place. I wouldn’t pass for a supermodel, but
sweatpants and a t-shirt had to be acceptable this early in the
morning.

Halfway down the steps, I saw a figure
wearing a pair of blue coveralls bent over the engine of a green
Chrysler. A quick glance told me it wasn’t Dave: the body was too
thin. I froze in place and considered returning back to the
apartment when Mr. Kravitz looked over his shoulder and caught me
watching him from the stairs. Instant relief flooded me. Although
never one of my teachers, he was always great to me, with his easy
smile and welcoming demeanor. His skin was weathered, and although
it had only been a couple years, gray hairs had begun to take over
the hair on his head and face. Mr. Kravitz wore the same scraggly
beard and mustache he had the last time I had seen him; his hair
was cut short and from what I could see, he was still sporting the
same grease under his fingernails as he had in high
school.

He called a happy greeting, “I
wondered when you were going to come down. Dave told me to keep a
lookout for you.”

My eyes darted around the garage.
Dave’s truck had been parked inside last night, and it was nowhere
inside now. How hard was I sleeping? I should have heard him leave.
Where would he have gone? “Hi, Mr. Kravitz. What are you doing
here?”

“
What? You think only kids
cut school?” He grinned mischievously, then added, “Around here,
I’m just Ryan.”

Something felt insanely wrong calling
him by his first name. Still not sure what to think about Dave’s
absence, I asked, “Where’s Dave?”

Flashing me a smile, he answered,
“He’s sort of an early riser. Dave needed to find a part at a
salvage yard. He left a little earlier than normal to catch some
gym time first. He didn’t want to leave you here alone, so he asked
if I’d come try to work a miracle on this car until he gets
back.”

“
Oh.” I looked at the
coffee pot in the lobby, “I was just going to grab a cup of coffee,
and I’ll get out of your way.”

Mr. Kravitz put down the wrench he was
holding onto the Chrysler’s radiator. “I’ll join you.”

I went to the little cup tree and took
two cups, filling them both and passing one to him. I wondered what
he thought about me spending the night. Did he know why I wasn’t at
my house? My teeth sunk into my lower lip, the way they did every
time I got nervous about something. How much had Dave told
him?

He interrupted my errant thoughts when
he asked, “Dave tells me you met Mark?”

“
Yeah, well, at the time I
didn’t know it was Mark. The two of them look a lot alike.” After
the tattoo revelation last night, I had completely ignored the fact
that I had seen Mark a second time. It didn’t feel like I was
keeping it from Dave last night because my thoughts were occupied
elsewhere, but in the light of day, I regretted not telling him
about the encounter as soon as I got here, candles or
not.

“
You know, Dave has been
searching for his brother nonstop for years. Funny how fate
works.”

His statement took me off guard just
as I was bringing the steamy cup to my lips. “He never mentioned to
me that he even had a brother until two days ago.”

“
Dave’s a pretty
complicated kid.” That was the understatement of the year. Mr.
Kravitz paused for a minute before he added, “He’s come a long way
in the last couple years. I hope he’s not disappointed when he
finally meets Mark.”

Did Kravitz know Mark? I swallowed the
steamy coffee slowly, worried that I wasn’t the only one keeping a
secret from Dave. “Disappointed?”

His smile was warm, “No one is able to
live up to a memory. Dave’s been holding on to the memory of his
big brother for fifteen years. It would be great if people were as
perfect as we remember them to be, but no one is without
flaws.”

That was sort of profound. I felt a
little more comfortable; he didn’t seem to be hiding anything about
Mark from Dave. Rather than speculating on Mark, or worse yet,
letting it slip that he’d choked me last night, I was much more
interested in learning what had happened to Dave in the last couple
years. “Dave’s a lot different than I remember him being in high
school.”

A thoughtful smile crept across his
face. “Different? You mean he’s taller?”

“
No!” I answered with a
laugh. “I mean, he was sort of a loner before. He seems, I don’t
know, energized or something.”

“
I wish I could take the
credit for the changes I’ve seen, but most of the big improvements
were Emily’s doing.”

My heart sank. Dave hadn’t even hinted
that he had a girlfriend, or an ex-girlfriend. I was naïve to think
just because he had a heart hugging a candy cane on his chest that
he had been pining away for me for the last couple
years.

“
Oh.” I felt my face blush.
What would Kravitz think of me staying here if Dave had someone
else in his life? Especially someone who had done for him what I
hadn’t been able to do. My eyes rested on the floor as I confessed,
“He didn’t mention her.”

His voice was rich as he warned,
“You’d better keep that tidbit of information to yourself. She is
pretty possessive of him, and I doubt she’d forgive him anytime
soon if she found out he was having sleep-overs and wasn’t telling
you about the other woman in his life.”

Did he think this was a joke? The
light pink on my cheeks morphed into a deep red as I felt the blush
stretched all the way to my ears. My teeth gnawed on my lower lip
again, and I wanted to escape, not hide, but melt into the
wall.

“
Now, don’t get like that.
Here. . .” Kravitz whipped a cell phone out of his pocket and
flashed his screen at me. A child with light blonde curls, pouty
lips, and bright blue eyes scowled at me from his phone. She looked
like a cherub, with chubby cheeks and a look that said, “I will
have my way whether you like it or not.”

Aside from her demanding look, she was
an angel. “Ah, if that’s my competition, I forfeit.”

“
You’re a smart girl.” He
tucked his phone back into the side pocket of his coveralls. “When
he came to stay with us, he tried to stay locked up inside himself.
She wasn’t having it.”

“
When he came to stay with
you?”

“
You met the hideous beast
the state placed him with while he was in school? He turned
eighteen and aged out of the foster care system. His guardian
didn’t want anything to do with him when the checks stopped coming
in.”

A wave of sorrow spread over me, “He
never told me.”

Kravitz nodded. “That was my doing. I
told him he was welcome to stay with me and my family as long as he
wanted. But there are lots of sad stories out there: I couldn’t
take in any other students. I didn’t want any of the faculty or
students to find out he stayed with me because I didn’t have room
for anyone else in my home.”