Breakable (Contours of the Heart #2)

11

Landon

When I started racking up detentions for tardies from sleeping in and my grades began slipping, the consequences I’d expected didn’t happen. I thought Dad would try to ground me or yell at me. I thought he’d set up a parent conference with Ingram or take away my allowance. But nothing changed.

Sometimes Grandpa grumbled at me, but most of his griping happened when I didn’t pick up after myself or pitch in on chores, so I figured out how to run the washer and help cook, and I kept most of my crap stuffed into my room.

Over dinner one night, Grandpa said, ‘You need to learn a vocation, son. Might as well be fishin’, what with the gulf so handy and all.’

As he plopped a spoonful of potatoes on to his plate, Dad scowled, but didn’t contradict him – which was weird. So when summer came around, I was conscripted into working on the Ramona – named for my grandmother. Getting up early sucked, because most nights I partied on the beach with the guys and staggered home late, no longer bothering to sneak out or in. I only got three or four hours of sleep before Grandpa woke me up, which he’d taken to doing with a pan and serving spoon when my alarm didn’t do the trick. Nothing echoes like a metal pan in a tiny room with no windows.

Dad never took a day off. He was gradually transforming Grandpa’s commercial fishing business into chartered fishing and sightseeing tours only, setting up a lame website with pics of rich tourists in front of the Ramona, showing off their catches – guys willing to pay a thousand bucks to spend a day drinking and being pointed to a boat-attached pole whenever it jerked from some poor fish taking the bait. All summer long and into the fall we transported skilled and wannabe fishermen to the best sites to throw down lines for redfish in the bay or kingfish offshore – fathers and sons or couples who bonded or spent the day trapped and pissed off at each other, elite executives who came alone or brought VIP clients, frat guys who did more drinking, cussing and sunburning than fishing.

I baited hooks, filled the tanks and supplies, cleaned and gutted fish, hosed down the deck, and took photos. By the end of the summer, I was darker, harder and at least an inch taller than my grandfather, unless the wispy white hair drifting above his head like fog counted as height. (Grandpa claimed it did.)

Grandpa nearly came unhinged when Dad added sunset cruises for couples, dolphin-sighting tours for families and whooping-crane excursions for groups of little old ladies. But the money increased, and the workload was easier – especially with me for free labour, so there was only so much he could protest.

‘I was thinking.’

I feared Boyce was about to turn philosophical, and I was way too tired for that shit. I’d only had one beer before nearly falling asleep while making out with a hot chick who’d be gone tomorrow, so I decided to quit drinking before I ended up face-first in the sand. Boyce stopped in solidarity of the fact that we were the only two in our pack who worked our asses off during the day. Me on the boat, him at his father’s garage. We carried threadbare beach chairs down into the surf to escape the others, who could be annoying shitheads, especially when they were high and we weren’t.

‘Dangerous, Wynn.’

‘Ha. Ha.’

I focused on the cool waves lapping over my feet and the ceaseless, lulling hum and crash of the rolling water. The tide was still coming in. If we remained in this spot, we’d be waist deep by midnight.

‘I was thinking that I’ve never seen you without your wrists covered.’

I tried not to react, but my hands clenched the aluminium arms of the chair. As tanned as I was, my wrists were as white as my ass – they never saw the sun. Ever. I wrapped them in bandanas and wristbands or the watch I seldom wore any more. No one here had ever noticed the fact that all that stuff was masking something else. At least, I’d assumed they hadn’t.

I turned my head to look at him. ‘And?’

He chewed a bit of dry skin on his lip. ‘I was thinking you could probably get tattoos to cover – y’know – whatever you’re … hidin’.’ He shrugged, closing his eyes.

I stared out at the moon’s reflection rippling across the water and felt my insignificance to my core. Nothing was important enough to strive for – nothing but the need to keep my past pushed too far down to feel. There was nothing else to be done with it. No other way to avoid it.

I’d never considered his idea, which seemed abnormally genius for Boyce. ‘Don’t I have to be eighteen?’

He laughed, low. ‘Nah, man – don’t you know me at all? I know a girl who’ll do it.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

He shrugged. ‘Let me know. I’ll hook you up.’

Her name was Arianna, and she was in her mid-twenties. One arm was sleeved in colourful ink, and the other had only two scripted lines on her inner forearm that read: New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings ~ Lao Tzu. We’d come an hour after the studio closed, since I wasn’t old enough to get a tattoo without parental approval.

‘If you want the tattoo to sort of cover the scars, like a smokescreen, then the scar tissue is inked. But you could also incorporate the scars into the design – leave them inside the negative spaces. They’d be hiding in plain sight – like camo.’ She examined my wrists, turning them to and fro and brushing her fingers across the disfigured pink tissue. I felt nauseated and exposed, but I couldn’t move. Boyce was uncharacteristically silent. ‘We could also tat all the way around. Make it look like wristbands.’

I nodded, liking that idea. We looked over a few designs from a scrapbook before I pulled a sheet of paper from my back pocket. ‘Um. I sketched a couple of ideas … I don’t know if you can use them.’

She unfolded the sketch and smiled. ‘I can absolutely do this, if it’s what you want.’

I nodded.

She sketched and transferred the two designs on to my wrists – one for the right, one for the left, and then readied the equipment and snapped on latex gloves. It hurt like hell, but it was a bearable pain. Boyce was so skeeved out – I assumed from the blood, though my blood all over his fists a few months ago hadn’t bothered him – that she ordered him to go sit in the waiting area until we were done.

‘So why are you doing this?’ I gritted my teeth as she worked over the bone at the side of my wrist, and tried not to think about the needle stabbing me over and over. ‘For me, I mean.’ I knew Boyce had filled her in. She hadn’t batted an eye when I removed the bandanas.

Her eyes didn’t waver from her work. ‘Because having the ability to make my skin my own again saved my life.’ She wiped the blood away and examined the link she’d just filled in. Her eyes met mine. ‘Some of us can begin to heal the damage people have done to us by escaping the situation, but some of us need more than that. Tattoos make statements that need to be made. Or hide things that are no one’s business. Your scars are battle wounds, but you don’t see them that way. Yet.’ She pumped the machine back to life with her foot.

I felt the burning prick of the needle as she began another link. ‘This ink will make your skin yours again. Maybe some day, you’ll see that your skin isn’t you. It’s just what houses you while you’re here.’ She paused as a roll of chills ran over me. ‘You’re an old soul, Landon. Old enough to make this decision. Just like I was.’

I went home with bandages round both wrists and strict care instructions. ‘This is like a wound of its own,’ she warned me. ‘Do not get a sunburn on top of it.’

For the rest of the month, I kept them hidden, same as always. When the sun touched the bare skin of my wrists for the first time in almost two years, I felt naked. The reactions of most of the people I knew was some variation of Cool tats, man. Some people assumed I’d been hiding them under the bandanas all along, which made me laugh. Yeah. The tattoos are what I’ve been hiding.

Girls thought they were sexy. Sometimes they asked, ‘Did it hurt?’

I’d shrug. ‘A little.’

Dad and Grandpa had similar reactions – a quick flash of the eyes to the ink when it was noticed. A grunt of disapproval. No words spoken.

My next tat didn’t cover a scar – not a visible one. Arianna put a rose directly over my heart. I didn’t need to add her name, Rosemary Lucas Maxfield, to say who it memorialized. Dad didn’t need her name, either. His face mottled purple the first time he walked into the kitchen and saw me in my board shorts and no shirt. He stared at the tattoo, still new and shiny with medication, and his fists clenched. Slamming through the back door, he hadn’t said another word about it until a couple of weeks later, when we were out on the boat.

I’d just baited a kid’s hook. He was ten or so and looked like he would pass out if he had to do it himself. Poor kid. He’d probably rather be building sand castles or slurping a snow cone on the beach than fishing with his dad and uncle. Instead, he would be stuck on this boat all day. I knew how he felt.

As I turned to open another bucket of bait, Dad said, voice low, ‘It’s illegal for you to get those without parental consent. I checked.’ He stared where a dark red petal peeked out from the neckline of my white tank.

I waited, silent, until his eyes, ghostly silver in the bright sunlight, met mine. ‘It’s my skin, Dad. Are you going to tell me I’m too young to mark it on purpose?’

He flinched and turned away. ‘Dammit, Landon,’ he muttered, but didn’t say anything else. Every few months, I added something new. Black flames licking over my delts, following the sharp lines of my biceps. A gothic cross between my shoulder blades for my maternal Catholic ancestry, with Psalm 23 scripted round it. Mom hadn’t been full of religious devotion, but she’d possessed an innate spirituality I envied now, and we’d attended mass often enough for me to have an idea of what it was about. I wondered if it would bring me peace to think of her in heaven, instead of in the ground.

Probably not.

On the second anniversary of the day we buried her, I got my eyebrow pierced. Dad railed satisfactorily while my grandfather seemed baffled that anyone would pierce a body part deliberately. ‘I’ve gotten enough hooks through various parts of my anatomy to not wanna put a hole through m’self on purpose!’ He had a scar near his eye where a hook at the end of an inexperienced fisherman’s pole had almost rendered him half blind. ‘Half an inch more and he’d have yanked my eyeball plum out!’ He was fond of telling the story, and I’d heard it enough times to almost keep from pulling a squeamish face at the imagery.

Come fall, the Hellers were suddenly much closer, because Charles accepted a tenure-track position at the top state university – two hundred fifty miles inland. While their new place wasn’t the twenty minutes we’d been accustomed to when we all lived in Virginia, it wasn’t an impossible distance for a weekend trip. Except to Dad, who refused to make a four-hour drive to see his best friends in the world. His excuse was work, same as always.

I figured then that people never change. Dad might have quit his high-powered banking job, but he brought his workaholic personality with him when he left Washington.

Even though the teaching position was a step up for Heller’s career, Cindy had to look for a new job, and Cole and Carlie had to make new school and neighbourhood friends. I knew they’d done it with us in mind, but Dad closed his eyes to the sacrifice they’d all made. For him. For me.

His silence seemed to blame them for what had happened, though maybe just being around them reminded him. Maybe my presence – which he couldn’t ditch as easily – reminded him, too.

I didn’t need a reminder. I knew who to blame for us losing Mom. Myself, and no one else.

Dad dropped out of Thanksgiving at the Hellers’ place – big surprise. Since I was fifteen and carless, he drove me to the bus station pre-asscrack of dawn. I could have refused to go by bus, alone, just to be an a*shole, but that would have been a pointless rebellion. I wanted to go, even if I had to board a bus with a collection of broke degenerates who took one look at me and concluded that I was the most menacing guy on board. Silver lining: no one sat next to me.

The bus stopped in four piece-of-shit towns to pick up more transportation-challenged losers before arriving in San Antonio, where I transferred to an identical crap bus with a matching set of losers. The total trip would have been less than four hours by car – straight shot, no stops. Instead, after six hours, I arrived at a station that smelled like the combination of a poorly run rest home and areas of Washington, DC, that my friends and I had been forbidden to venture into on our own. Charles was waiting to pick me up.

‘Happy Turkey Day, son,’ Charles said, wrapping me in an easy hug that pinched my heart with a single, abrupt awareness – my father hadn’t touched me since the funeral. Even then, I remember clinging to him, unleashing my grief into his solid chest, but I don’t recall him reaching for me on purpose.

He’d never uttered a word of blame, but there were no words of pardon either.

Remaining within Charles’s embrace a beat longer than comfortable to clear the moisture from my eyes, I shoved at the never-ending guilt in my mind and wished it would fall silent, just for today. For an hour, even. For a few minutes.

‘You’re gonna be Ray’s height, I think,’ Charles said then, drawing back to take my shoulders in his hands and inspect me. I’d grown since I’d seen him last; we stood eye to eye. ‘You favour him quite a bit, too – but you got Rose’s dark hair.’ He crooked an eyebrow. ‘And lots of it.’

Charles had been a military guy before he went to college. I’d never seen a hair on his head longer than an inch. If it even got close to that, he joked that he looked like a damned hippie and went to get a haircut. It amused the shit out of him to harass Cole and me about our hair length whenever he got the chance.

‘You’re just jealous that we have hair,’ Cole smarted off the last time his dad had grumbled that he couldn’t tell him apart from Carlie. I’d spat milk through my nose.

My parents met the Hellers at Duke. Dad and Charles were PhD track in economics – worlds apart from Cindy and my mother, who were undergrads and best friends. None of them would’ve ever met their future spouses if not for my mother’s decision to stroll through a doctoral student get-together held by her father – a distinguished economics professor and a member of Charles’s and Dad’s dissertation committees.

I was eight or nine the first time I heard the story, but the telling I remember was when I had my first real crush – Yesenia, in eighth grade. Love and destiny had suddenly become essential things to comprehend.

‘I saw your dad from my bedroom window and thought he was so cute.’ Mom laughed at my eye roll. I couldn’t imagine my father ever having been cute.

‘I was sick of the pretentious artist boys I usually dated, and I thought someone like my father might suit me better. He always listened to my opinions and spoke to me like I had a brain of my own, and he spoiled me rotten, too. But his students were all so nerdy and awkward – until your dad. I thought if I could get his attention, I could get him to talk to me. Of course then he’d fall in love with me and ask me out.’ Her eyes crinkled at the corners, remembering.

‘I must have tried on a dozen outfits before settling on one. Then I waltzed down the stairs and nonchalantly cut through the living room on my way to the kitchen. My clever little plan worked, of course, because I was pretty cute myself back then.’

This time, I was the one who laughed, because my mother was beautiful. There were times I caught my father staring at her like he couldn’t believe she was standing in his kitchen or living in his house. Like she shouldn’t be real, but was, and somehow belonged to him.

‘He followed me into the kitchen to refill his iced-tea glass.’ She nodded at my confused expression. You couldn’t pay Dad to drink iced tea. ‘I didn’t find out until later that he hated iced tea. He leaned against the counter, watching me make a sandwich. “So are you Dr Lucas’s daughter?” he asked, and with a perfectly straight face, I said, “No. I just wandered in off the street to make a sandwich.” I turned and looked him in the eye to give him a smirk, and I almost stopped breathing, because he had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.’

I had my father’s eyes – clear and grey as rain, so this compliment was for me. I hadn’t known yet that I’d also inherit his height, his analytical abilities and the watertight way he could disappear into himself.

‘Then, Charles strolled into the kitchen. Your dad glared at him, but he grinned and said, “You must be Dr Lucas’s daughter! I’m Charles Heller – one of his many acolytes.” One of them asked me what I did, and I said I was an undergrad at Duke. “What major?” your dad asked, and I told him, “Art.” And then, Landon, he almost kept you from ever being born.’

I waited, stunned. I hadn’t heard that part of the story before.

‘He sputtered, “Art?” and asked me what I was going to do with such a worthless degree.’

My mouth fell open.

‘Right? I wanted to punch him right in his handsome, arrogant face. Instead, I told him I was going to make the world more beautiful – duh! I let him know how unimpressed I was that all he was going to do was ‘make money’. I stomped back upstairs, spitting nails and determined to never look at one of my father’s students again, no matter how cute he was. I even forgot to take my sandwich with me.’

The rest of the story was familiar: an impulsive invitation – passed through Charles in a chance meeting – to her very first gallery showing. Her best friend, Cindy, was there for support, in case Raymond Maxfield was insufferable. But my father was the opposite of insufferable. Appraising her work, he was awed. My mother always pouted that it was actually her paintings and not her charm, her beauty or her sass that made him fall in love with her.

He’d always insisted that it was definitely her sass.

I knew the truth. He fell for all those things, and when she died, it was like someone had extinguished the sun, and he had nothing left to orbit.

LUCAS

Hours after I came home from the club Saturday night, I still couldn’t stop thinking about holding Jacqueline – how she’d fitted against me, bracketed by my arms. Her eyes, dusk blue in the smoke-thick club. Her nervous swallows. Her stuttered questions. As if everyone else had disappeared the moment I pulled her close, I didn’t smell the mixture of sweat and cologne from the crush of bodies around us – just her sweet scent. I could no longer hear the music, shouts or laughter. I was only aware of the beat, pounding vigorously, like the blood tearing an endless loop through my body.

Once home, I lay in bed and stared unseeingly towards the ceiling as my imagination ran rampant. I pictured her stretched out on top of me, knees astride, her body meeting my measured thrusts, her mouth open to the stroke of my tongue. My hands kneaded my thighs and every nerve in my body blazed. I felt her soft, bare skin. Her silky hair brushing the sides of my face. Her complete trust.

I pulled a pillow over my face and groaned, knowing anything I did now to relieve the building pressure would be a goddamned inferior rendering of what I really wanted. I could not have her, for so many reasons. She was off-limits, as a student in my class – which she didn’t know. She was emerging from a breakup after a three-year-long relationship. I was the witness to a humiliation no one should have to bear, and she was afraid of me.

But maybe a little less so, now, my mind murmured.

I couldn’t contain the thrill that shot through me, so I let it run its course.

Then I stamped it out and gave myself that second-rate release so I could get some sleep.

Sunday night, Joseph and I met up at a bar in the warehouse district to see a fledging alternative band from Dallas that we both liked. Though I’d barely slept the night before and had put in two hours of training at the dojang that afternoon, I was both wired and weirdly contemplative – two things I can usually dispense with in one good sparring session.

Master Leu had agreed to spar with me, since no one else was there, which had kicked my ass. For a smallish guy, he was the biggest badass I’d ever met. At a training expo, I’d watched him – in two moves – put a larger but equivalently trained opponent in a chokehold that could cause a real-life adversary to pass out. Or could crush his trachea.

Jacqueline’s attacker had no idea how lucky he was that I was still a few levels away from being allowed to learn that move.

‘Dude, you are not in Kansas any more.’ Joseph’s voice broke through my reverie.

I smirked. ‘I’ve never been to Kansas, actually.’

He shook his head. ‘What – or who – are you thinking about? Never seen you so distracted. I’ve asked you three times if you’re going home for Thanksgiving and you haven’t so much as purposefully ignored me. You just aren’t hearing anything.’

Shaking my head, I sighed. ‘Sorry, man. Yeah, I’m going home. You?’

He shook his head and tossed back the rest of the tequila shot he’d been sipping. ‘Going home with Elliott. His mom loves me.’ His lips twisted as he leaned an elbow on the bar and looked at me. ‘Mine – does not.’

Joseph had dropped hints about his family’s rejection before, but he’d never stated it outright. I didn’t know what to say.

‘So … you’re not welcome to bring Elliott home with you?’

‘No, man. I’m not welcome home, period. It’s a no fags allowed zone.’

‘Jesus. That sucks.’

He shrugged. ‘Is what it is. Elliott’s family is more than fine with us being a couple – his mom makes up a guest room for us that would rival any bed-and-breakfast, but they’ve had to deal with him bringing home a blue-collar guy. They’re all educated and shit – whole family. His little sister is in f*cking med school. The first time I met them, all he’d told them was where I worked. Imagine their surprise when they found out I keep the campus plumbing in order instead of teaching history or math or, you know, women’s studies.’ He laughed. ‘I can’t catch a break, man. I’m too gay to be redneck and too redneck to be gay.’

Whatever my dad thought about me, whatever I did to piss him off – even purposefully, he’d never told me I was unwelcome to come home. I knew without thinking about it that I could move home right now if I wanted to. I wouldn’t. But I could.

The band took the stage, and Joseph and I enjoyed sound that was neither pop or musical theatre, a few drinks, and more than a few attentive glances from girls.

‘Yep,’ he said, angling a brow at a boisterous trio of coeds who kept looking our way. Hands behind his neck, he popped his guns from the sleeves of his white T-shirt. ‘I still got it, even if I don’t want it.’

Chuckling, I shook my head and signalled the bartender for one more round. I never picked up a girl when I was with Joseph, but I knew the ground had shifted beneath my feet when I found myself not even the slightest bit curious whether any of those girls were cute. There was only one possible reason for that disinterest.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how to get Jacqueline Wallace back into the circle of my arms, come hell or high water. I was all too familiar with both.

Monday morning, I was nursing a slight hangover and a dampened outlook. Every time I saw Charles, I felt guilty. Every time I thought of Jacqueline, I felt more so. She hadn’t emailed me over the weekend. I had what felt like a premonition about her figuring out that I was Landon, and told myself, again, that I had to put a stop to this. Now.

She dropped on to the edge of the seat next to me.

I was so thrown that I didn’t say anything. Just stared.

‘Hey,’ she said, knocking me from my stupor. Fearing my earlier gut feeling was about to go down, I focused on the subtle smile teasing the edge of her mouth.

‘Hey,’ I returned, opening my textbook to shield the sketch I was working on.

‘So, it just occurred to me that I don’t remember your name from the other night.’ She was nervous. Not angry. Nervous. ‘Too many margaritas, I guess.’

Here’s your chance. Sitting in economics class – what better place to clear up the … mix-up about your name.

I stared into her big blue eyes and said, ‘It’s Lucas. And I don’t think I gave it.’

Dammit.

Heller came slamming and cursing through the door down by the podium, and Jacqueline’s smile grew a little wider. ‘So … you, um, called me Jackie, before?’ she said. ‘I actually go by Jacqueline. Now.’

I called her Jackie? When … Oh. That night. ‘Okay,’ I answered.

‘Nice to meet you, Lucas.’ She smiled again before hurrying to her seat while Heller was arranging his notes.

She didn’t turn to look at me the entire lecture, though she seemed distracted – given the way she squirmed in her seat, unless she was talking to the guy next to her. They both laughed softly a couple of times, and I couldn’t help smiling in response. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her laugh – but I was wired to her now. I felt the sound of her laughter all the way to my boots and back. I wanted to make her laugh – something Landon had undoubtedly done.

As absurd as it was to be envious of myself, I was. She responded to Landon’s teasing emails with teasing of her own. When he told her he was an engineering student, she’d replied, No wonder you seem so brainy. Flirtatious words to direct at a tutor. Careful, possibly innocuous words … but flirtatious in context.

Dammit. I was jealous of Landon. Of all the stupid-ass reactions I could have right now, that was the most ludicrous.

At the end of class, she shot from her seat and rushed out the door before I could even get my backpack loaded. Some primitive, predatory impulse urged me to leap up and chase her out the door, as if that would be the most sensible reflex to her cut-and-run exit. I consciously slowed the process of sliding my texts and notebooks into the pack, stunned.

She was driving me crazy. And I was loving it. Goddamn, I was in trouble.

I’d agreed to take a couple of hours of Ron’s shift so he could meet with an architecture professor who only had office hours once a week. I also had a parking-enforcement shift this afternoon – after the group tutoring session and after my two-hour team project course. I wouldn’t have time to study until after ten p.m. This day, with the singular exception of Jacqueline initiating that one-minute conversation this morning, was going to suck.

I glanced at my phone in between orders. Half an hour to go, and we were busy. Both canisters were running low. As soon as there was a break in the line, I closed my register. Just in time, too – because a group of students materialized and joined Eve’s line.

‘Eve – I’m going to the back to get coffee. It’s low.’

‘Grab me a bottle of vodka while you’re at it,’ she replied. Eve was grouchier when we were busy. Which was about ninety per cent of the time.

‘Grab one for me, too, Lucas!’ The mechanical-engineering admin was next in line. Dark-skinned and white-haired, Vickie Payton was an organizational wizard for professors, a valuable source of campus information for students, and a shoulder to cry on for everyone.

‘Little early in the day, isn’t it, Mrs Payton?’ I chuckled, backing through the door.

‘Spring registration,’ she answered with a smirk. ‘Oy vey.’

‘Ah.’ I winked at her. ‘Two vodkas and one bag of Kenyan, coming right up.’

‘I wish,’ Eve mumbled, taking Mrs Payton’s order.

I brought the bag out and sliced it open. The line had grown, but Eve – whose apathy towards people in general didn’t hinder her proficiency, luckily – had everything under control. Unthinkingly, I scanned the line, searching for Jacqueline. During the two weeks she’d missed class, looking for her on campus had become ingrained – something I did whenever I entered a room where she might have the smallest possibility of being.

The likelihood of her showing up here was better than most. Despite that fact, I was still mystified at the sight of her. My eyes swept over her, slowly, devouring every detail as if she were a last meal that I wanted to simultaneously consume wholly and savour.

She was with her friend, again, and that friend was watching me. Jacqueline was decisively not watching me. But they were talking, animatedly, and Jacqueline was blushing so hard I could see the blotchy pink of her cheeks from a dozen feet away. With effort, I turned to make the coffee, but the hairs on my arms stood up. My entire body was aware of her eyes on me.

My forearms were fully visible, and she hadn’t seen my tattoos before. That night, in her truck, she’d stared at my lip ring and I’d known that she was one of those girls who shied away from guys like me on principle. I looked like a poster boy for a bad life choice. From her mode of dress, I knew she was a preppy sort of girl, as were her friends. And her ex. Hell, if someone stood me next to that asswipe who’d attacked her and asked the general populace which one the rapist was, I’d get a helluva lot more votes.

Even so, she was watching me now. On the dance floor Saturday night, she’d come into my arms as though she felt safe, against all better judgement. She was confused, but curious. Interested. I felt that one truth in the pit of my stomach, and it was gripping and unnerving. I wanted her attention. Her full attention. And I meant to get it.

I popped start on the coffee and turned to the register next to Eve without looking up. As soon as Eve took the guy in front of Jacqueline, I shifted my eyes up to meet hers. ‘Next?’ She blinked as though I’d caught her misbehaving, but came closer. ‘Jacqueline,’ I said, as though I’d just noticed her. ‘Americano today, or something else?’

She was surprised I’d remembered what she’d ordered a week ago. I would happily catalogue her likes and dislikes. Every one of them. From how she took her coffee, to how she liked to be kissed, to what stroke to use where to make her shiver from head to toe.

She nodded. I grabbed a cup and a Sharpie, but I pulled the espresso and made her drink myself.

Eve cocked a double-pierced brow at me, because she knew what I’d just done. ‘In the habit of handing out your digits to sorority chicks?’ she murmured. ‘Lame.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

Shaking her head, she wiped the espresso valves and dumped two shots into a grande cup. ‘No, actually, there’s not.’

I shrugged. ‘True enough. Is it acceptable if she’s not a sorority chick?’

Her lips twisted, and I got the feeling she was making a concerted effort not to smile. ‘No. But less unacceptable.’

As Eve and I took orders and began to whittle the line down, I didn’t allow myself to watch Jacqueline cross to the condiment stand to get her three sugars and splash of milk. I knew exactly where she was, every second, but I ignored her until she walked through the door, at which point I couldn’t watch anything else.

‘Oh, dear God. Someone’s got it bad.’ Eve laughed, which made the guy across the counter smile at her.

He was wearing a Pike T-shirt.

‘What?’ she barked, glaring at him.

His smile disappeared and he threw up his hands. ‘Nothin’ – just … nice laugh. That’s all.’

She rolled her eyes and spun to grab a new carton of soy milk, ignoring him.

When he looked at me, blond brows arched, I shrugged. I didn’t know the girl’s history, but there was no crossing that explosives-laden barrier. She was barely civil to me half the time, and she liked me.

Tammara Webber's books