Strangely, Wyatt seemed to take my weirdo-ness in stride. Jumping in to save me when I was at my worst and offering answers when I didn’t know what to say. Smushed next to him on the front seat of the golf cart, I still didn’t know what to say. In my head I tried to rile up the fervor Bev had imparted earlier. Get it together, Caroline, I scolded myself. You have a goal. Screw your courage to the sticking place. Harness and hump. Harness and hump? No. That’s not right. Picturing Wyatt on all fours wearing a dog harness, I controlled a little giggle from bubbling out. Oh my God. No. Not harness and hump. I mean, maybe. Am I a harness kind of a girl? No. Not really. Nothing against the harness kinds of girls but that’s not me.
I physically shook my head.
“Are you having a whole conversation in your head, Caroline?” Wyatt asked.
Oh shit. “What? No.” I tried to play it off like don’t be silly. “Why would you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he teased. Then he said, “You’ve always done that.”
“I’ve done what? Talk to myself?” I was sort of stunned that there was anything about me that Wyatt had noticed enough to say that ‘I’d always done it.’
“Yeah. When we were kids, you used to think out loud a lot. Like when we were eight and Cyan Ryan fell off the seesaw. You realized his arm was broken, and you walked through the actions you needed to take to get him to safety. You talked out loud to yourself, making a list. Tell him not to move. Tell no one to touch him. Call for Mrs. Rivers. Tell her to call the paramedics …” He stopped reciting my list and moved on with his point. “But then as we got older, I noticed that you started to have the conversations on the inside. And it seemed like the conversations you were having with yourself got more …” He paused, searching for what he wanted to say. “I don’t know, interesting?”
“You think my inner monologue is interesting?” I balked.
“First of all, I think it’s a dialogue. You’re clearly discussing things with yourself. And secondly, I honestly think one of you is a little judgy.”
“Oh, really?” I laughed. “Let me get this straight. You think I have multiple personalities?” He was smiling. He turned the wheel of the golf cart abruptly, heading for the stables, and my body shifted, responding to Newton’s first law, and the inch of space between us evaporated.
“Not clinically, Caroline. I think that while the rest of us need another person to process an idea, you bounce ideas off yourself.”
“Hmm,” I grumbled, looking away from him, out toward the empty fairground’s fields. I knew what that meant. Somehow, Wyatt attributed my inner chatter to his vision of me as Ms. Smarty McSmart Pants. Honestly, if anyone could hear my inner monologue, what they’d know about me was that being smart didn’t make me feel comfortable in my own skin. In fact, I tended to wish I wasn’t so smart. I’d rather just be normal. Well, not really. I loved learning, books, and the way things worked, but I hated that I couldn’t seem to understand how people managed to talk to each other without making a fool of themselves.
Wyatt seemed to read that I didn’t like his answer. “Okay, what’s the deal? Do you hate being smart? Or do you hate being known as the smart girl?”
How was he so intuitive? God, that was irritating. I sighed and then answered his question because that’s what you do when someone asks a question. “I hate that people assume things about me because I’m smart.”
“They just don’t know how to relate. It’s kindness more than anything else.”
“Doesn’t stop it from being annoying.”
“Am I that kind of annoying?” Wyatt asked.
I whipped my head back to him. “No. Never,” I said with too much fervor. Then I considered the last five minutes. “I mean, maybe a little, right now.”
“Because you think I think you work things out in your head on your own because you’re smart.”
I nodded, slowly.
“Caroline …” He said my name with intensity, forcing the word to be a beacon calling me to look him in the eyes.
“In high school, I once watched you stand outside the bathroom and talk yourself into going in to pee even though you knew those bitchy girls who called you the brainiac were inside. You weighed your options, struggled with the decision, grimaced at the idea, bounced a bit on the pads of your feet, and then in you went, clearly reasoning that peeing in your pants would be worse than any torture those girls had to offer you. That was not rocket science. It was logic.”
I laughed again.
“I wasn’t saying you were so smart that you could do it all on your own. I was saying you were alone so you figured it out for yourself.” He pulled the golf cart up next to the stables and put the brake on. “Conway is so different for you than it is for the rest of us. It’s bigger, maybe lonelier, I think.”
“I have Bev,” I said, but he was right. Conway was like that for me. Small towns aren’t perfect when you’re different. Conway was an amazing place. I loved it. And there were some people who looked past stereotypes and saw you for the person you were, like Hazel, who owned the Conway Cafe, and Eggy. Both of them always saw me as a person just like anyone else, but most Conwayans kept their distance.
“You do,” he said, but he wasn’t buying it.
Oh Jesus, when he saw me as a poor little lonely girl, how was I ever going to get back to operation lasso and mount? As I climbed out of the golf cart, I racked my brain, trying to think of something to say that would shift the conversation. And then, underscoring my utter failure at behaving in a normal human way, I said, “What about you? Do you hate that people think of you as a stud?”
Now it was his turn to laugh. It was a deep rumbly sound that seemed to bounce around that cavernous barrel chest of his like a hymn in a cathedral. “A stud, huh?”
“I think the horse breeding reference is appropriate, but you know what I mean, a playboy or a player, whatever the kids say these days.”
Still smiling, he shrugged. “I guess if the shoe fits.”
“Does it?” I asked. “Is that who you are?”
He got quieter, softer, clearly not being silly anymore. Then as we walked into the stables, he said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve never met the right girl, but maybe not. Maybe I am just a gigolo.”
“Everywhere you go, people know the part you’re playing?”
“Are you quoting David Lee Roth?”
I shrugged. “It’s Louis Prima, actually, but the point is he’s lonely too. He ain’t got nobody, Wyatt.”
We were both quiet for a second, and then he moved out in front of me and turned back, presenting the space like he was Vanna White. “These are the stables.” He was smiling and light again, like we hadn’t just had a layered and complicated conversation. Wyatt’s ability to bring levity back to a moment was either his superpower or his downfall.
I let him leave the heavy behind and responded in kind. Even though we were basically in a clean but run-down barn, I said, “Glamorous.”
“Right?” He smirked. “Aren’t you glad you wanted the tour?”
Notoriously unguarded, I said, “Actually, yes. I like talking to you.”