“I’m home,” I yelled, in case there was anybody around who’d care. Only Max came running to greet me, sniffing me all over in hopes I had food hidden in my pockets. Since I didn’t, he soon went away, leaving me to make my way up the stairs to my room.

I did it, step by agonizing step. It took me, I don’t know, like ten minutes or something. Normally I bound up and down two steps at a time. Not today.

I was, I knew, going to have a lot of explaining to do when I finally ran into someone besides Max. But the person I least wanted to have to face was going to be, I felt certain, the first person I’d see: Jesse. Jesse would be, more likely than not, in my room when I hobbled through the door. Jesse, who was not going to understand what I was doing at Paul Slater’s house in the first place. Jesse, from whom I thought it was going to be difficult to hide the fact that I had just been playing tonsil hockey with another guy.

And that I’d sort of liked it.

It was, I told myself as I stood with my hand on the doorknob, Jesse’s fault. That I’d gone off and made out with another guy. Because if Jesse had shown me the slightest shred of affection these past few weeks, I would never even have considered kissing Paul Slater back. Not in a million years.

Yeah, that was it. It was all Jesse’s fault.

Not that I was ever going to tell him that, of course. In fact, if I could possibly avoid it, I was going to keep from bringing up Paul’s name altogether. I needed to think up some story—any story, other than the truth—to explain my poor, abused feet…

…not to mention my bruised lips.

But to my relief, when I threw open the door to my room, Jesse wasn’t there. Spike was, sitting on the windowsill, washing himself. But not his master. Not this time.

Alleluia.

I threw down my book bag and shoes and headed to my bathroom. I had one thing, and one thing only on my mind, and that was to wash my feet. Maybe all they needed was a thorough cleaning. Maybe, if I soaked them long enough in warm, soapy water, some of the feeling in them would come back….

I opened the taps full blast, put the stopper in place, and sitting on the edge of the tub, swung my legs painfully over it and into the water.

It was all right for a second or two. In fact, it was a soothing relief.

Then the water hit my blisters, and I nearly keeled over with the pain. Never again, I vowed, clutching the side of the tub in an effort not to pass out. No more designer shoes. From now on, it was strictly Aerosoles for me. I don’t care how ugly they might look. Not even looking good was worth this.

The pain ebbed enough for me to make a tentative foray with a bar of Cetaphil and a sponge. It wasn’t until I had gently scrubbed for nearly five minutes before I got through the final layer of dirt and saw why the bottoms of my feet were so desensitized. Because they were covered—literally covered—with giant red burn blisters, some of them blood filled and all of them getting bigger by the minute. I realized, with horror, that it was going to be days—maybe even a week—before the swelling was going to go down enough for me to walk normally again, let alone put on shoes.

I was sitting there cursing Paul Slater—not to mention Jimmy Choo—for all I was worth when I heard Jesse utter a curse that, even though it was in Spanish, burned my ears.

chapter

eleven

“Querida, what have you done to yourself?”

Jesse stood at the side of the tub looking down at my feet. I had drained out all the dirty water and had run a new tubful to soak them in, so it was pretty easy to see through the clear water to the angry red blisters below it.

“New shoes,” I said. It was all the explanation I was capable of thinking up at the moment. The fact that I had had to flee in my bare feet from a sexual predator did not seem like the kind of thing that would sit too well with Jesse. I mean, I didn’t exactly want to be the cause of any duels or anything.

Yeah, yeah, I know: I wish.

Still, he’d called me querida again. That had to mean something, right?

Except that Jesse had probably called his sisters querida. Possibly even his mom.

“You did that to yourself on purpose?” Jesse was staring down at my feet in utter disbelief.

“Well,” I said. “Not exactly.” Only instead of telling him about Paul, and our clandestine kisses on his dark-gray bedspread, I said, talking about a hundred miles a minute, “It’s just that they were new shoes, and they gave me blisters and then…and then I missed my ride home, and I had to walk, and my shoes hurt so much I took them off, and I guess the pavement was hot from the sun, since I burned the bottoms of my feet—”

Jesse looked grim. He sat on the edge of the tub beside me and said, “Let me see.”

I didn’t want to show the guy with whom I have been madly in love since the very first day I met him my hideously disfigured feet. I especially didn’t want him to see them considering that he didn’t know that I had burned them in an effort to get away from a guy I shouldn’t have been with in the first place.

On the other hand, you should be able to go over to boys’ houses without them jumping on you and kissing you and making you want to kiss them back. It was all sort of complicated, even to me, and I am a modern young woman with twenty-first-century sensibilities. God only knew what a rancher from the 1850s would make of it all.

But I could see by Jesse’s expression that he was not going to leave me alone until I showed him my stupid feet. So I said, rolling my eyes, “You want to see them? Fine. Knock yourself out.”

And I pulled my right foot from the water and showed him.

I expected, at the very least, some revulsion. Chastisement for my stupidity, I felt quite sure, would soon follow—as if I didn’t feel stupid enough.

But to my surprise, Jesse neither chastised me nor looked revolted. He merely examined my foot with what I would have to describe as almost clinical detachment. When he was through looking at my right foot, he said, “Let me see the other one.”

So I put the right one back in the water and pulled out the left one.

Again, no revulsion and no cries of “Suze, how could you be so stupid?” Which wasn’t actually that surprising, since Jesse never calls me Suze. Instead, he examined my left foot as carefully as he had the other one. When he was through, he leaned back and said, “Well, I have seen worse…but barely.”