Page 29 of Mountain Bean Dream
“Not for the reasons you think. It wasn’t just the eyes.” He pulled into a parking stall near the far end and turned off the engine. The rumble died down and a strong silence wrapped around us. “I was in an academic school, that groomed you for a post-secondary career in sciences, engineering, or law. Things I was never interested in. I wanted to build things and enjoyed taking things apart to see how they work, and then put them back together.”
It sounded like a branch of engineering to me, but then again, I didn’t know everything.
“I didn’t want to know trig, nor physics, and every time I protested to my teachers, I always got a ‘Mr. Wentworth, it doesn’t matter if you’ll need it or not, you’re here to learn it’.After a semester of that, I dropped out.”
Whoa. I hadn’t pegged Jeremy for a high school drop-out.
He’d turned to face me. “Everyone was beyond angry and couldn’t understand my reasons, so they kicked me out. I quit my part-time job at Dairy Queen and, as they say, I headedwest.”
I swallowed and rolled my lip between my teeth. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
My eyes widened. Thanks to on-set tutors, I was essentially home-schooled, aside from a torture-filled year trying out a real high school. By sixteen, I was two courses away from completing the requirements to graduate high school early. As often as I had thought about living on my own, it wasn’t a possibility.
“Wow. That’s incredible.”
“Incredible as in good? Or incredible as in bad?”
“Mind-blowingly impressive. I don’t know how you did it.” As someone in her mid-twenties, who wasn’t touching her sizable bank account for fear some family member would discover where I lived, I struggled a lot to make ends meet on a barista’s salary. How on earth did a sixteen-year-old do it?
“Looking back, I don’t know either. Pig-headedness I presume.” He laughed and rubbed his bearded jawline. “But whatever. It was over half a lifetime ago.”
I did the math in my head, although it took me longer than it should’ve. “You’re thirty-two?”
“Thirty-six.” There was a quizzical frown forming. “Is that an issue?”
Not at all, since we weren’t dating. He was eleven years older, one more than Derek. “You just seem younger.”
“Why, thank you,” he said with a smirk and a slight sparkle danced in his eyes.
“Don’t you want to know how old I am?” I tried my best to be alluring, but it sounded childish.
“I’m not even going to touch that with a ten-foot pole.” He shook his head as he spoke. “It’s bad manners to ask, and even worse to guess. Women are so great at doing makeup anddressing the way they do; an eighteen-year-old can look like she’s pushing thirty.”
He was hard to read, but the sound of his tone suggested there was a reason he knew that; however, I wasn’t going to push.
“I suppose that’s true, but I’m not wearing makeup. It’s easy to tell because these things,” I pointed to the freckles smattered across my cheeks, “are more prominent.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Still not going to guess my age?”
“Nope.” He shook his head.
“Does an age gap bother you?”
His eyes widened and a sudden slack in his jaw appeared. “Are you legal?”
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, of course.”
A quick breathy, borderline relieved sigh blew out. “Then why would it?”
“For our fake-dating reasons.”
“I can’t see why that would matter.” It was said so matter-of-factly, I was a little put-off.
“Oh, okay.”