Love Match Page 9
Maya turned to leave. Either she’d hurt him so badly that he could barely look at her or he simply didn’t care about her anymore. How could that be true? You don’t just forget feelings that intense. But if Jake didn’t want to be friends, she was open to see what her friendship with Travis could become
Of course, there was another option. She was in a school with some of the finest specimens of physical perfection in the world. She didn’t need to contain her options to one family. Maybe she could have her friendship with Travis while she played the field. The Academy did have a lot of fields to play on. There were plenty of guys hanging around outside the weight room alone.
Someone grabbed Maya before she could fully explore that idea. She was face-to-frantic-face with Renee. “Maya! Quick, we’re in the middle of a conversation. Laugh.”
“What?”
“Laugh!”
They both laughed with the most fake-sounding giggles that Maya had ever heard. She was seriously afraid that someone would think they were on drugs.
“What’s so funny?” Diego asked.
Suddenly, the insane laughter made sense. At least, as much sense as anything in Renee’s boy-crazy world did.
“Oh, it would be too hard to explain,” Renee said.
She’s right about that, Maya thought.
“So … tonight … ?” Diego said.
Renee jumped right on it. “I was just talking to Maya about it! She loves the idea.”
That didn’t sound good.
“You sure?” he asked. “Because we could—”
“I’m sure!” Renee had an edge of panic in her voice. “It’s going to be great.”
“Okay, then,” Diego said. “I’ve got to get to practice, but I can’t wait!”
“Me neither!” Renee said.
The girls watched him run off.
“What’s going to be great?” Maya asked.
“You, me, Diego, and Travis,” Renee said. “A double date.”
“I’m not dating Travis.”
“It doesn’t have to be a real date,” Renee said. “Just a group of friends going out together. I mean, it would be a date for me and Diego, but you guys would just be pretending.”
“You really think it’s a good idea to begin a relationship with a lie?” Maya asked.
“We had such a great time the other night at 360,” Renee said. “Everything was so easy. But when it was just the two of us, it was … well, I told you how it was. I need you, Maya. Can’t you please do this for me?” Renee’s eyes pleaded with Maya.
“Okay,” Maya said. “But you owe me.”
“Oh, Maya!” Renee pulled her friend into a hug. “And I know just how to repay you. I have the most awesome outfit in the world for you to wear. You are going to look hot tonight!”
That wasn’t the kind of repayment Maya had in mind. Then again, she liked the idea of looking hot for Travis. Even though they were just friends.
But were they really? Part of her was looking forward to the fake date.
So much for Maya’s plan to play the field.
“I felt like a taste of home,” Diego said as they stood in front of the Brazilian buffet. Maya had always wanted to try Brazilian food. Her family didn’t go out to eat much. When they did, it was usually to a chain restaurant that offered coupons.
“This time, it’s on me.” Diego turned to Maya and Travis as he opened the door. “I mean, Renee’s on me. You two are on your own.”
“No problem,” Maya said as the scents of the food pleasantly assaulted her senses. “Now that I’ve got a job, I can afford to eat out once in a while.” She didn’t actually have the money yet, but that would come soon enough. Her pay for the ad campaign would be more than enough to cover dinners for the month, buy a new wardrobe, and leave her enough extra cash to send some back home. Even after the Academy took its contractually obligated percentage.
The hostess showed them to a table and started handing out menus, but Diego stopped her. “Nope. We’re not ordering off the menu. We’re doing the buffet. Start bringing out the courses.”
The restaurant wasn’t like buffets Maya was used to where she and her parents waited in line at serving stations ladling out lukewarm, undercooked food. Diego warned them that this was going to be a different experience entirely.
It started with a gigantic platter with a colorful assortment of veggies covering some lettuce. They called it a salad, but it was so much more.
Maya allowed for a couple of tongs full of vegetables before cutting off the waiter. It looked so delicious, but she wanted to save room for later.
“Don’t fill yourselves up too much on the salad,” Diego said. “There’s plenty more food in the back.”
Renee quickly stopped the server after one small serving reached her plate. “Thanks.”
“This is delicious,” Maya said after her first bite. “It’s like an explosion of flavor.” She quickly scooped up another, glad that she’d worn her own outfit instead of the one Renee had offered. There was no room for a big meal in anything her friend owned.
“Wait till you get to the meats,” Diego said. “The spices they use … I hope no one here is a vegetarian.”
“If I were, I’d quit for the night,” Travis said. “That kitchen smells delicious.”
Renee smiled as she took a small bite of her salad. Her face scrunched up noticeably.
“You don’t like it?” Diego asked.
Her eyes went wide. “Oh, no. It’s delicious! But you said you didn’t want us to fill up. It’s going to be hard to stop.”
But Renee did stop. Maya noticed that she didn’t take another bite of the salad. It wasn’t unusual. In the time that they’d been friends, Maya never saw Renee once clean her plate.
When the salads were cleared, new plates came out and the fun really began. Waiters carried out more platters with a variety of dishes. They didn’t even bother to ask if anyone wanted the food first. They started putting things on the plates until someone stopped them.
Maya didn’t want to say no to any of it, which was good because they moved much faster than she did. Renee was the only one who could still see her plate by the time the first wave of waitstaff had passed their table.
Maya caught Diego eyeing Renee’s small portions. He was probably spending more on this dinner than any other meal he’d had in his life. Maya wanted to pull Diego aside and explain that Renee simply didn’t eat a lot, but there was really no way to do that without making it into something it wasn’t.
Renee probably didn’t have a full-blown eating disorder, but she did have some messed-up views about food and her body. Of course, if Maya spent all her time in a sport that required her to wear a tight bathing suit in front of hundreds of people, she might have the same issues.
“Isn’t this better than that stuffy place we went to the other night?” Diego asked Renee.
She smiled brightly, turning on the charm. “So much better!” Renee punctuated her statement with a small bite of chicken. Diego smiled back at her, but it faltered just a bit when he looked down at her plate again.
“It couldn’t have been any stuffier than the place Travis took me to on our first date,” Maya said, hoping to direct Diego’s attention away from the food.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Travis said.
Maya just looked at him.
“Okay, it was awful,” he agreed. “I was trying too hard.”
“Just a bit,” Maya said. “He took me to a private drive-in theater with a movie projected up against a wall and a flood of concession snacks falling out of the glove compartment.” Maya recalled the night a bit more fondly than she made it sound. It was actually one of the best dates ever. No one had ever tried that hard for her, misguided as some of it may have been.
“That was after the ritzy restaurant I brought her to where she couldn’t identify a single thing on the menu,” Travis added.
“That’s not true!” Maya said. “I recognized the garden salad.”
“Sounds like that place we went to the other night,” Diego said lightly. “I didn’t even know what to order.”
“I would have helped you,” Renee said shyly. The only other time Maya had seen her so soft-spoken was when she once walked in on a phone call between Renee and her parents.
“What are you talking about?” Diego said, laughing. “You didn’t eat anything then either.”
Three people around the table now got very silent. Diego was the only one who was still smiling. Renee’s largely untouched plate suddenly took up a lot of attention.
Slowly, a realization washed over Diego. “Is there something … Do you eat?”
“Of course I eat,” Renee said. “I just prefer smaller portions. It takes some work to maintain this girlish figure.”
“Where I’m from, girls come in all different figures,” Diego said. It was a light comment, but Renee clearly took it harder than he’d meant it.
“Some of us have to work to look good,” Renee said softly.
“Renee, you’re beautiful,” Travis said. “Diego, tell her she’s beautiful.”
“No.”
Now everyone at the table was silent.
Maya was the first to speak. “Excuse me?”
“She doesn’t need me to tell her that,” Diego said. “She needs to believe it for herself.”
“So … you don’t think I’m beautiful?” Renee asked.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I just don’t think your beauty has anything to do with the amount of food on your plate.” He cut into his steak.
Maya looked to Travis and shrugged. There was something so final about Diego’s last comment that she started eating as well. Travis soon followed and even Renee started picking at her food once again. She didn’t come close to clearing her plate, but she did eat more than Maya recalled ever seeing her eat before. That was a start.
“Where to now?” Travis asked as the valet brought Renee’s car around. Of the two people in the group with cars, hers was the only one with a backseat.
“It’s your town,” Diego said. “You tell me.”
“I don’t know. I’m kind of tired.” Renee grabbed Maya, pulling her over to the driver’s side of the car, whispering, “All is good. I’m ready to go solo with Diego.”
“Gotcha,” Maya said. She got into the backseat with Travis. “I’m kind of tired, too. Would you all mind if we called it an early evening? I’ve got a tough practice in the morning.”
Maya used the one phrase every Academy student immediately understood. It ended all discussion without the usual prodding to change her mind.
Renee put the top down on the convertible as they rode back to campus. The noise from the wind gave sufficient privacy to the two couples since their voices barely traveled to the person beside them.
Travis leaned toward Maya so he didn’t have to yell. And maybe so he could just be closer. “This was nice,” Travis said. “I’m glad we’re friends.”
Maya rested her hand on top of his on the seat. “I am, too.”
Renee dropped Maya off at the dorm with Travis, who had offered to be a gentleman and walk Maya inside. It made no sense whatsoever since Travis had left his car at Renee’s villa and Diego lived in the dorm next door. And yet it made complete sense as Renee drove off with Diego.
Since it was after eight, Travis wouldn’t be allowed past the lobby. It was clear from the way both of them dragged their feet that they didn’t want the night to end. Travis was the first one to acknowledge it.
“You look like you got your second wind,” he said as they reached the door.
Maya nodded. There wasn’t more to say since she’d been lying about being tired to give Renee some cover. “I’m much more awake than I was leaving the restaurant.”
“Great! I want to show you something. It’s my favorite part of the campus.” Travis took her hand, pulling her around to the side of the dorm.
Maya couldn’t imagine what Travis liked about this side of the campus. The villas and the sports complexes were far better. The scholarship dorms weren’t exactly slums, but they were the oldest and least interesting buildings on campus
“Right around here,” Travis said as they came to the well.
“Oh,” Maya crinkled her nose. Most students in the dorms hated the well because it looked so out of place. The battered old stone well sat under a large concrete archway in the middle of nowhere. Both the well and the archway were gray and crumbling, serving as a stark contrast to the modern Spanish-style villas on the other side of campus.
Travis must have caught her look of confusion. “You know the story about the well, don’t you?”
“There’s a story?”
“Oh, yeah,” Travis said. “Over a hundred years ago the land here was all wilderness. The woods ran up to the property of a railroad magnate, some rich guy who owned pretty much half the state. His daughter fell in love with one of the railroad workers.”
“Travis, if this ends with one or both of them dying tragically …”
“Just hear me out.” Travis sat her down on the edge of the well. “As you already guessed, her father was not happy with the pairing, so he transferred the worker to a whole other part of the country to keep him away from his daughter. And before you say anything, no, he didn’t refuse to go. This was a different time. He couldn’t afford to find other work. He had to do what his boss told him.”
“That part, I get,” she said.
“Before he left, the workman built this well and the archway for the girl, as a symbol of his love. He told her to come here to think of him and it would be like they were together.
“At first, the girl couldn’t bring herself to visit the well. It hurt too much. But after some time the pain of missing him was worse than the sadness of this reminder. So, she came out here. She sat where you are and sighed his name. A moment later, she was shocked to hear his voice saying hers back.
“The girl looked around, expecting her love to come out from the trees. But he wasn’t there. She called out to him, telling him to show himself. This time when he answered, she realized his voice was coming from down in the well. He told her that he’d built an exact replica of the well and the archway where he lived and tied the two together through magic. That way, they could always be together even though they were hundreds of miles apart.”
Maya looked down into the well. “You’re making that up.”
Travis smiled. “I can’t take credit for the story. Part of the deal when Dad bought this place was that the well could never be demolished. No one knew why, so people have made up stories over the years to explain it. That one’s my favorite.”
“So you brought me here to lie to me.”
Travis laughed. “No. I brought you here to show you this.”
He took her by the hand and moved her over to the archway. The stone arch was concave in the middle. Travis placed a hand gently on her cheek, turning her head so it rested beside the concave part in the center of the stone.
“Stay like that,” he said before jogging over to the other side of the well where the arch came down.
“What are you—?”
Travis put a finger up to his lips, shushing her. Then he pointed to the arch, signaling that she should get back into the position he’d left her in. She did as she was told, leaning her ear toward the cold concrete.
“Maya?” Travis’s voice whispered from the stone. It sounded like he was leaning right up to her ear.
“Travis!” She looked back. He was all the way on the other side of the arch, a good twenty-five feet away.
“Shhh,” his voice whispered. “I can hear you.”
“That’s incredible,” she whispered into the stone. “How did you find this place?”
“My mom showed it to us when we were kids,” he said. “Jake and I used to come here to tell each oth
er our secrets. Back before …”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. She knew the rest of it: back before they stopped being close. Travis and Jake were still friendly, but they weren’t close. And that had nothing to do with Maya.
“So, what secret did you bring me here to tell me?” she whispered.
“That I want to be more than friends.”
Chapter 11
“Come to the football field.” Maya read the text aloud again. “Important.”
“It’s so vague, yet exciting,” Cleo said as they walked down the palm tree–lined pathway.
“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?” Maya asked.
“I’m making fun of teenage intrigue,” Cleo clarified. “I can’t help it if you’re the star of that intrigue.”
Maya had to laugh. Cleo was right. Things had been pretty intriguing lately.
Days had passed since Travis declared that he wanted more than friendship with Maya. Standing in that archway, she’d wanted to say yes right away, but she told him she wasn’t ready to make that commitment. She needed time to think about it. Thankfully both their busy schedules soon got in the way of a follow-up conversation.
Maya’s postponed schoolwork started to catch up with her and practices pulled them away from each other. They spent time at the Academy Exposition meetings together, but coaches, teachers, and the school’s publicity team surrounded them from the moment they walked in the door to the time they left. It wasn’t the best setting for a private conversation.
Maya still didn’t know if she wanted more than friendship with Travis. Part of her did, but not when she thought of Jake. She couldn’t imagine telling him she was dating Travis less than a week after she told him that nothing was going on. Then again, considering how indifferent Jake had been about it, that conversation might be a lot easier than she imagined. That bothered her, too. She didn’t want Jake to be jealous, but a small part of her wouldn’t mind if he was.