Sway by Amy Matayo Page A

to do laundry, but I suppose it can wait until tomorrow.” Something tells me I didn’t quite pull off the aloofness I was going for.
    When Caleb grins at me, I’m certain of it. “If you’re sure the dirty t-shirts can handle lying there another day.” He fiddles with a knob on his stereo. “Pick you up at seven?”
    Flying. Soaring. So high in the air I feel lightheaded. I manage to shrug. “Seven sounds okay.” There. That sounded aloof. I open the door and climb out of his truck before a thought occurs to me. “What should I wear?”
    “Anything is fine. I’m pretty sure no matter what you wear, you’ll still look like a princess.” And with that, he drives away.
    Leaving me standing in the parking lot, wishing for a fairy godmother.

11
    Caleb
    “Learning To Breathe”
    —Switchfoot
    I never knew my father. Not even his name.
    The story goes that he spent every day in the hospital with me when I was born, checking my heart monitor, asking to hold me. I was premature by two months. Two months of medical bills added up to a whole lot of debt. I guess the money got to him. After a while, he stopped coming. Why should a man be expected to pay so much for a kid he doesn’t even know?
    By the time I was released, he’d made his decision to leave. No one knew, not even my mother. He picked us up, smiled for a couple of pictures, wheeled us out to the car, stuffed balloons and flowers in the trunk, and drove us home. After an hour, he left to pick up dinner. He never came back.
    When my mother checked his closet later that night, it was empty. All his clothes, gone. All his shoes, gone. All his money, gone. What was left of it, anyway. Most of it had been spent on me.
    Turns out the saying is true; history does sometimes repeat itself.
    The end of our relationship was premature, too.
    Dinner with Kate turned into lunch the next day, followed by a movie later that night. And even though I know I should’ve played it cool the way I’ve always done in the past, something hasn’t let me. Of course, it didn’t help when she emerged from her apartment that first night in a pair of tight jeans, brown leather riding boots, and an oversized cream-colored sweater looking more like a Greek goddess than a princess. With those golden locks and bright eyes, a crown of glory hovered over her the whole evening.
    I straighten in my leather seat, gripping one edge of the steering wheel. This girl has latched onto my mind, my soul, my body—and worst of all, a big part of my heart, too. I still haven’t kissed her, but not for lack of wanting to. It’s pretty much all I think about when I’m not wondering how these feelings could consume so much of me in three short days.
    Who falls this hard for a girl in three days?
    It’s precisely why I’m telling myself to back off now. It’s time for another reality check. A lowering of expectations. A big, fat dose of Kathryn withdrawal. My cell phone sits in the cup holder and screams at me to pick it up and dial her number like I did yesterday, but I won’t. I ignore the way it jumps up at me, practically convulses its way across the gearshift toward my lap, and so far I’m doing a pretty good job of snubbing it. After all, I’ve lived twenty-four years without letting a girl under my skin—the last five not even letting one into my bed. There’s no way I’m going to do an about-face on that now and give up everything I’ve worked for. I reach for the phone and toss it into the backseat. There. Done. It has no power over me.
    Easy to say. Easy to believe.
    Still, it’s what I tell myself as I drive to work Monday morning. It isn’t until I exit Interstate 35 onto highway 77 that I realize I’ve been humming “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” for the last five minutes, thinking of Cinderella and Snow White and a dozen other beautiful Disney characters I remember from my early childhood. In that moment, it hits me that I’ve officially morphed into the world’s biggest pansy.