Valentine's Date Disaster Read online

  “Nothing, sheesh.” Rhea crosses her legs on the couch. “It’s just… different, that’s all. I mean, I’ve never dated a guy who couldn’t walk. Have you?”

  “No,” I admit.

  And the truth is, I’m a little scared. Of all the things I could mess up on a date with a guy I really like, it seems like the list is multiplied with him. I’m freaked out that I’m going to do or say the wrong thing and offend him. Or worse, spend the whole night trying not to say the wrong thing and not have a good time.

  But if I start worrying, I’m going to psych myself out. I need to just keep telling myself everything is going to go great.

  My phone buzzes within my purse—it’s Dean, telling me he’s arrived. I leap off the couch, not noticing I never put my compact back until it clatters loudly to the floor.

  “Shit!” I say, as I snatch it from the ground. I pop open the square container and see the mirror inside has fractured into three pieces. “Rhea!”

  Her eyes widen. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I broke a mirror!”

  “Oh.” She shrugs. “You can borrow one of my compacts. I’ve got like ten of them in the bathroom.”

  “But it’s a mirror!” I’m really freaking out now. “I broke it—that’s bad luck! For seven years!”

  She laughs this time. “Seriously, Callie? Lucky bras and broken mirrors—this guy is making you nuts!”

  I wring my hands together. “I just want tonight to be perfect.”

  “It will be,” she promises. “Now stop being ridiculous and go on your date, okay?”

  My shoulders sag. She’s right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me—I’m usually not a superstitious person. This broken mirror means nothing. This date with Dean is going to go great.

  Chapter 4: Dean

  The last time I was out on a date was approximately a year and a half ago, but I swear, you’d think I’d never been on a date before in my whole goddamn life the way I’m stressing over this. I spent an hour looking at clothes, trying to figure out what to wear. The last time I went out with a girl, I think I just threw on a T-shirt and jeans. Now I’m wearing nice tan dress pants, a blue button-up long-sleeved shirt, and a tie.

  Yes, I’m wearing a fucking tie.

  This is the first time I’ve dressed up since my mother dragged me to church about six months ago (never again), and it’s depressing how different the clothes fit me from when I first bought them two or three years ago. I lost about thirty pounds in the last year (and I wasn’t somebody who needed to lose thirty pounds), so the pants and shirt are loose where they shouldn’t be loose. But the only place where I didn’t slim down is my waist. None of it is fat—the muscles that used to hold my abdomen taut don’t exist anymore. But the effect is the same: I’ve got a gut. These stupid pants that are baggy on my legs just barely button closed.

  I’m glad there’s no mirror on the first floor of the house. It would kill my self-confidence.

  I’m in the middle of doing a pre-date tooth-brushing when I hear my mother calling my name. I freeze, the toothbrush hovering over my molars.

  “Dean?” she calls. “I’m starting dinner!”

  I didn’t tell my mother about my date with Callie. Partially because I was scared she’d cancel again. But partially because I was certain Mom would make much too big a deal out of it. I mean, I’m going out on a freaking date. No need for a ticker tape parade, Mom.

  But I owe her some sort of explanation for not showing up at dinner. And when she sees how I’m dressed, she’ll probably guess I’m not just hitting up a bar again with Rich.

  I spit toothpaste into the sink and wheel myself out of the bathroom. Mom is in the kitchen, wearing the pink apron Dad bought her for Christmas, her sweater rolled up to her elbows as she fills a pot with water from the sink. I calculate the odds she won’t cross-examine me when I tell her I’m going out to dinner. The odds are not in my favor.

  “Dean!” Her eyes widen as she takes in my appearance. She nearly drops the pot of water. “My… you’re all… dressed up!”

  I tug at my tie, which feels a bit tight. “A little.”

  Her eyebrows knit together. My mother looks about ten years older than she did a year ago. Her hair has gone from “a bit gray” to mostly all-gray. My fault. “You look very nice, sweetheart. Are you… going somewhere?”

  My tie feels like it’s choking me. I loosen it with my thumb, then decide to hell with it and pull it off completely. The tie was a dumb idea. “I’m going out to dinner.”

  “With Rich?”

  I can’t believe that was a serious question. Why the hell would I put on a tie for dinner with my loser brother? I chew on my lip, trying to decide if I should tell her.

  “No,” I finally say. “It’s with a girl.”

  Mom’s eyes light up the way I knew they would. I was prepared for that. I wasn’t as prepared for her to wipe her hands on her jeans and throw her arms around me in a hug. Even worse, when she pulls away, she’s got tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, Dean.” She dabs at her eyes while I groan internally. “That’s so great!”

  You’d think I just won a Nobel Prize.

  “What’s her name?” she asks me.

  “Uh, Callie.”

  “And how did you meet?”

  “At the mall,” I mumble, not wanting to tell her the whole sordid story.

  Mom beams at me. “No wonder you wanted to buy a car!”

  “Yeah.” I avert my eyes. “Look, I better go. I just wanted to tell you I wouldn’t be home for dinner.”

  She nods. “And when will you be back?”

  And that’s yet another fantastic thing about living with my parents, aside from the obvious social benefits. When I go out, my mother expects me to tell her where I’m going and when I’ll be back. Not that I go out much—for a while, I was attempting to set some sort of record for number of days in a row of not leaving the house—but I’m twenty-seven years old. I’m not thirteen. Hell, even when I was in high school, she didn’t grill me this way when I went out. She worries about me an unhealthy amount these days.

  “Before midnight,” I say, knowing that the chances of this date with Callie stretching much beyond ten o’clock are remote.

  “Will you call if you think you’ll be late?”

  I nod, even though it’s ridiculous. Mom showed me an article two weeks ago about some guy in a wheelchair who got mugged two towns over, so now she thinks I’m going to be a target. As if there’s some criminal specifically going after guys in chairs. Although the truth is, I do get a little more nervous being out late by myself than I used to.

  My dented, gray Nissan Versa is parked out in the driveway. I scraped up the money to buy a used car in early January and got it modified with hand controls. Then I had to learn how to drive it. It was like being sixteen again, but at least now I feel somewhat comfortable getting behind the wheel. But I have to be really focused on driving. It’s still not second-nature to me the way the gas pedals used to be. When I need to stop suddenly, sometimes I can almost feel my foot going for the brake, but of course, it isn’t actually moving and I’m just gliding to my death.

  Callie’s apartment is the longest drive I’ve taken since I got the car. I use the GPS to find it, worrying the whole way that I’m going to get into an accident because I’m so goddamn nervous. My hands are shaking.

  My first date in a year and a half. My first date in a wheelchair. I’m ready to have a heart attack.

  I text Callie to let her know I’ve arrived. For a moment, I’m scared she’s going to write back that she needed to cancel, but instead, she texts: Be right down!

  My palms are sweaty by the time I see the girl in the brown coat emerge from the entrance to the building. A green scarf conceals the lower half of her face, but that shiny brown hair is familiar. And she’s got on these sexy black leather boots that get me to smile in spite of my pounding heart.

  She hurries through the snow drift in front of her build
ing, hugging her arms to her chest. When she gets to my car, she taps on the window and peers through to look at me before opening the passenger side door. She’s just as cute as I remember. No, cuter.

  Way out of my league, really.

  Calm the fuck down, Palmer. It’ll be fine.

  “Hey.” Callie grins at me, rubbing her hands together to get them warm. Her upturned nose is pink. “It’s cold out there.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say. “I heard it’s going to snow again tomorrow.”

  Great. We’re talking about the weather.

  “Oh no,” Callie groans. “I hate it when it snows. That means I’ll have to dig out my car.”

  I’m itching to offer to dig her car out for her, but I can’t. Snow is a bitch in this chair. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my own car, much less Callie’s.

  Callie blows into her palms, which is my cue to crank up the heat. This car is a piece of shit, but at least it has a functional heater. We’ll see about the A/C when the summer comes.

  I turn on the radio as I pull away from Callie’s building. A Taylor Swift song comes on, and she groans when she hears it. I glance at her, nervous to take my eyes off the road for more than a second. “You can switch stations if you want.”

  She smiles gratefully, quickly reaching out for the dial to change the station. She passes a country station, a sports station, a hard rock station, and finally settles on an oldies station. The song playing sounds vaguely familiar, like something I’ve heard many times before, but I can’t place it.

  “Is this okay?” she asks me.

  I brake as a light switches to red. It’s hard to talk to her while I’m driving, but I don’t want to admit how uncomfortable I still feel with the hand controls. If she realized this was the most driving I’ve done in a year, she might leap out of the car and hail a taxi.

  “Whatever you want to listen to is fine,” I tell her.

  “Do you like oldies?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me,” she says. “What are your top five favorite songs? Go!”

  The light switches to green. My left hand grips the steering wheel and my right is on the gas. I’d love to play the “what do we have in common” game with Callie, but right now, I need to concentrate on Not Crashing.

  Christ, these roads are icy.

  “Dean?” Callie says when I haven’t answered after a respectable amount of time.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I just… can we talk when I’m not driving?”

  I feel my ears growing hot. I don’t know how I should have handled this situation, but I suspect I did it wrong. Callie mumbles her own apology and we sit in silence the whole rest of the way to the movie theater.

  It’s been less than ten minutes, and I’ve already fucked up this date. New world’s record!

  Because Callie and I are a couple of geniuses who decided to have our date on the biggest romantic holiday of the year, the parking lot for the movie theater is packed. My knuckles are white from my iron grip on the controls as I navigate the lot. Lucky for me, I’ve got handicapped plates—it was one thing I made certain I’d have because I can’t even get out of the car if I don’t have the extra room on the driver’s side. So we snag a spot right by the entrance.

  Callie’s never seen me do a transfer before. I’m sure there’s a point where it will seem like a normal thing for me to do this, but right now, I don’t love the idea of people watching me. We never talked about exactly why I need a chair, but when she sees the way I’m transferring and how I have to pull my legs out of the car with my hands, I have a feeling she’ll get a pretty good idea about it. Not that I could keep that information from her, but it’s not exactly a sexy side of me I want to show her on a first date.

  But what can I do? I have to get out of the car.

  I let Callie get out first, then I push the backrest of her seat forward and mine backwards so I can retrieve my chair from the back seat. I have to take the wheels off to fit it in the car, so I need to reassemble it before climbing in. I want to tell her to go away, but instead, she’s standing a few feet away from me as I shift myself into the seat, keeping my head low during the transfer like they taught me in rehab. She’s watching when I adjust my legs to make them straight and smooth out the wrinkles in my pants.

  Oh well.

  It turns out the transfer was the least of my problems. I can make it out of the car okay, but it turns out the snow from a few days ago has not been cleared away. There’s a relatively large pile of snow between me and the rest of the parking lot (i.e. the path to the theater). Apparently, nobody thought to clear away the handicapped spot.

  I stare at the snow, growing dread in the pit of my stomach. I don’t think I can wheel over it. If I try, I’m almost certain my wheels will get stuck. If I were alone, my only option would be to get back in the car and find another spot. But with Callie standing here, there’s one other option. One I really hate to consider.

  “Dean?” Callie says. “Do you need help?”

  I heave a sigh. Someday in my future, when this wheelchair wears out and my insurance is willing to spring for a new one, I’m getting a chair without visible handles in the back (and a much lower backrest). At the time I was selecting the design for this one, my mother convinced me I should have them “just in case.” Admittedly, there are times they come in handy (like now), but at the same time, I really, really hate being pushed.

  Over Christmas, my grandparents were visiting from Florida. Grandma has been falling a lot lately and everyone was trying to convince her she needed a walker. I tried to stay out of the conversation, especially because it was a slap in the face when my grandmother was right next to me and insisting she didn’t want to be “an invalid.” Christ, I wish I could walk with a walker. Anyway, Mom came up with the brilliant idea that when we were outside, Grandma should push my chair. I was her walker. And actually, she loved it—after a few days, she would happily announce she was “taking Dean to the corner store” even before she asked me if it was okay.

  I hated it, obviously. I don’t like it when other people push my chair. And I don’t like the fact that the two handles (albeit small ones) sticking out of the back makes people think they should try to push me without asking first.

  But right now, I don’t have much of a choice.

  I look up at Callie, but it’s hard to meet her eyes. “Yeah, if you could just push me past that snow over there, I should be good.”

  Like a trouper, Callie nods. She steps over the snow with those sexy boots—too sexy for a girl who’s going out with a guy who needs to be pushed from his car to the movie theater. I take my gloved hands off my wheels, putting one on my cushion and the other on my legs to keep them from shifting too much as she pushes me through all this goddamn snow.

  I feel myself moving, and it’s rough. The snow is hard for her to even push me through. I hear her grunting behind me as one of my casters gets jammed in snow. I reach down, trying to clear the snow away.

  “You need any help over there?”

  I look up and see a couple standing in front of my car, watching us. They’re obviously on a date too. The girl is a cute brunette like Callie, but the guy is tall and muscular, in a way I never used to be. He is looking at us with a friendly smile on his face. I cringe—it’s bad enough Callie has to help me. I don’t want to involve more people.

  “It’s okay,” Callie says, obviously sensing my reluctance. “I just—”

  But the guy isn’t listening. He comes over and starts shifting snow away with his bare hands, then he practically shoves Callie out of the way to push me over the snow. On the one hand, he makes it a lot easier. On the other hand, I didn’t want some other guy helping me push my chair on my date. Also, even when we get past the snow, he keeps pushing me.

  “I’m okay now,” I try to tell him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the guy says. “It’s Valentine’s Day. Least I can do.”

  I don’t understand that lo
gic at all, and I really want him to get his hands the fuck off my chair. But I let him push me the rest of the short distance to the theater, where he finally lets go.

  I let out a sigh of relief when the guy and his date bound up the steps to the theater, leaving me to take the ramp myself. Yes, that was a disaster. But it’s done. We made it to the theater. Everything will be fine now.

  Chapter 5: Callie

  Dean looks so sexy tonight.

  When I first slid into the car and saw him sitting in the driver’s seat, wearing that blue shirt under his coat that made his eyes look oh so blue, I swooned. I wanted to lean forward and kiss him right then and there, but he seemed so edgy. He looked like he needed a big hug more than a kiss, but in the end, I did neither. I just let him focus on driving, all the while cursing myself for missing the chance.

  It doesn’t make things better when that Boy Scout at the movie theater insists on pushing his chair. I can tell how uncomfortable it makes him, but the guy insists on doing his good deed. By the time we get inside the theater, Dean looks thoroughly frazzled. He rips the black hat he’d been wearing off his head, and runs a hand through his short brown hair to comb it out.

  I reach out and squeeze his shoulder. He looks up at me and smiles. “Do you want to get in line to pick up our tickets?”

  I nod. Thank God Dean got tickets in advance, because the theater is packed. Even just the line to pick up preordered tickets is substantial. There are at least a dozen couples in front of us, waiting—there’s even a man from the theater with a bouquet of roses who is trying to sell them to unwitting boyfriends. Rose for your lady friend? I stand next to Dean, wondering if I should suggest sitting in his lap. I probably shouldn’t. I mean, this is a first date. That’s more of a third or fourth date move.

  And anyway, I don’t want to call more attention to us than we’re already getting. I can’t imagine what’s so interesting about Dean and I being on a date, but everyone walking by does a double-take when they see us. So he’s a guy in a wheelchair on a date. So what? I look at him, wondering if he’s noticing the way I am.