How Do You Say Goodbye

Chapter Two

The  entire Stanford family must have working night and day on the house because it looked as if it had been lived in for years, not for only two months. I followed Xander straight to the kitchen, but what a kitchen! The cakes I could bake in the kitchen!

Gleaming copper pots hung from a round rack over big, round wooden work island. I know it's called a work island because sometimes I read home decorating magazines, and that's what they call a work surface like that in the center of the kitchen. While Claire pores over the latest fashion and beauty magazines every month, I look through decorating magazines, putting together in my mind my "dream" professional kitchen. The Stanford kitchen was about as close to my dream as I'd ever seen.

"This is---beautiful, unbelievable!" I gasped as I circled the kitchen, my fingers trailing over crocks filled with wooden spoons and wire whisks, my eyes taking it all in---every counter, every cabinet, every corner.

Xander shrugged, or at least I think he shrugged, but I wasn't really looking at him. "It's okay," he said.

Suddenly I realized that for five minutes I had actually forgotten all about Xander. From the first trance I had fallen into upon seeing his kitchen.

Later, when I told my sister Abby all about this strange and wonderful encounter, she had analyzed my second trance as "flight" or escape from the intensity of the first one.

"You were so overwhelmed, you had to focus or concentrate on something else---the kitchen---to ease your self-consciousness."

Crazy as it may sound, I think she was right. I was overwhelmed. And I was self-conscious. And I did love that kitchen. But when I at last looked at Xander again, and our eyes met, I grew jumpy. I felt as if I had to keep moving, keep talking. If I stood still or sat down, I might blurt out my innermost thoughts and feelings, I might tell him that he was the boy I had been waiting for.

"Could I have the grand tour?" I asked. "I'd really like to see the rest of the house."

"Sure," Xander agreed. "Only I'm afraid it'll have to be a mini-tour. We've finished the downstairs, but the upstairs is still a wreck ."

As I followed Xander, I wished we could walk for miles that way, me in back of him, looking at his back, wavy hair curling over his shirt collar and at his wide, wonderful shoulders.

His head turned in profile as he pointed out the living room to me, but I was more interested in looking at his fine, classic nose and thick, black lashes than in seeing the best living room.

"Nice," I said, forcing myself to glance at the room. I think there were green velvet sofas and a green-and-gray-striped chair. Or, maybe the sofas were striped. The walls were gray--- that I'm sure of because I leaned against one when Xander turned to me and said, "Life is crazy, isn't it? Ten minutes ago, I didn't even know you existed."

He stood before me, his arms folded across his chest, his head shaking in disbelief, his lips curled into an amused smile.

I couldn't speak. There wasn't a word in the entire English language I couldn't think of that moment, much less to speak. All I could do was mimic him in agreement, shaking my own head in disbelief and smiling my own amused smile. Just then the spell was broken by the ring of the phone.

Xander didn't run, but in what seemed like three huge glides with his long legs, he was in the kitchen, answering it.
"Yeah, this is Xander Stanford," I heard him say.

Immediately my heart began to race. Suppose it was a girl calling him up? What if he was going steady? Or what if it was my mother on the phone, demanding to know what was taking me so long?