A Longtime (and at one point Illegal) Crush by Janette Rallison

he hadn’t needed to do it so heartlessly—accusing her of trying to get him fired and emphasizing it had always been one-sided between them. Hadn’t he ever heard of the phrase “I’m flattered, but I just want to be friends”?
    Mrs. McBride spooned a second helping of potato salad on her plate. “I’d say you’ve treated some of your students a fair sight better than they’ve treated you.” She offered the bowl to Elsie. “The shenanigans those kids come up with.”
    Elsie felt her chee ks warm. Shenanigans like throwing yourself at your teacher? Was Mrs. McBride about to make the connection? Well, it served Elsie right. She should have kept her mouth shut. She should have said nothing during the meal except, “My, this food is good. Thank you.”
    Elsie shook her head at the bowl of potato salad. She wasn’t hungry, and the sooner dinner ended, the better.
    “Skipping school,” Mrs. McBride went on, “cheating, trying to forge parent’s notes—it’s amazing the school can get anybody to teach these days.”
    Mr. McBride leaned forward to take the potato salad from his wife. “Kye won’t have to put up with it much longer. Every year I get more useless. Soon Kye will have to run the entire ranch.” He put a couple of dollops of the salad on his plate. “I suppose dealing with all those kids is good practice for herding ornery cattle.”
    “Not all the kids are bad,” Kye said, probably for her benefit. “Some are great. And some . . .” his gaze was back on hers, “some stay with you.”
    Why did he say things l ike that? Was he teasing her? Pitying her? Or was she reading things into his words that weren’t there? Maybe he was talking about all of his students who hadn’t kissed him.
    The conversation moved on. Eventually Kye’s cell phone rang, and he told Elsie that Frank had cleaned the corrosion off the posts and her battery should work fine now.
    After they finished eating, Elsie thanked the McBrides for dinner and followed Kye to the garage. Kye led her to a new dark-blue pickup truck, not the old white Ford he’d driven to school his first year as a teacher. He opened the door for her and helped her step up into the cab.
    Well, that was another moment to cross off her prayer list—three years too late.
    She sat down, pulled on her seatbelt, and couldn’t think of anything to say. She wanted to ask who Lisa was and if he remembered how they’d met, but asking either question would make her sound like she hadn’t moved beyond him. And she had. Or at least she was going to. So Elsie sat in the cab, her arms wrapped around her middle to keep warm.
    Kye silently drove toward Windham road. She’d forgotten how bright the stars were out here away from the city lights. They hung in the sky above them, sparkling like frozen chips of ice.
    Kye asked a few questions to fill the silence , mostly things about the wedding. “It’s funny that Carson is marrying a girl from Lark Field,” he said. “I always figured he wouldn’t stick around.” Kye shot her a glance. “I guess not everyone wants to get as far away from here as possible.”
    That, she supposed, was a reference to what she’d said to him at graduation. “People change,” she said.
    “Yes, thankfully they do.” Another glance. “You’ve grown up quite a bit.”
    What did he mean b y that? Did he see her as a peer now, or did he just think she was more mature because she was no longer throwing herself at him? Elsie inwardly groaned. This was the problem with being around Kye. She would forever analyze everything he said. He probably meant the statement in the same way his parents had meant it when they’d said nearly the same thing. Kye hadn’t seen her in three years. She looked three years older, that was all.
    Time to say something else so there wasn’t an awkward , long pause. “I was surprised Carson and Olivia hit it off,” Elsie said. Carson and Olivia had gone to school together but hadn’t dated. He’d