Текст книги "Quarterback Bait "

Автор книги: Celia Loren

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Chapter Nine

Ash

The walls were too thin. The walls were disastrously thin, in fact. It took about ten seconds (and some of my newly minted woman's intuition) for me to jam my headphones into my ears and blast The Clash, so as to overwhelm any sounds of Anya and the Pastor...going at it. This wasn't exactly a new tactic—Lord knew I'd overheard my mother doing just about everything a person could do, despite even the biggest speakers—but The Clash was working better than most bands. Mr. Dempsey had suggested them to me. He'd brought me a mix CD on the last day of school.

I watched the light flickering under my closed door, indicating that he-who-must-not-be-named was watching TV in the living room. In spite of myself, I wondered what he could be watching. Probably sports. Meathead guys don't throw a lot of cultural curveballs.

Though it had been a relatively short evening, I was shocked by how quickly my tune had changed about Landon. For the past few weeks, I'd been bobbing around on a mysterious Cloud Nine. I'd been kinder to my mother than usual. I'd suffered my bullies with patience. I'd gotten a little distracted in my AP comp class at the community college, but had gleefully taken on extra work to ensure I'd graduate with an A. The day before, I'd received my early enrollment materials from UT, as well as a personal note of congratulations from my advisor. In the note, a one Mrs. Kepling had called my application materials “stunningly precocious” and “self-possessed.” I was looking forward to college, all while living out a daydream fantasy in my head. But in one pizza party, everything now seemed ruined.

I stared up at the Day-Glo stars smattered across my ceiling (left by a previous tenant) and tried to prioritize the problems at hand. So, okay—I'd very nearly got it on with my step-brother. That was maybe a 7 on the 1-10 disaster scale. More pressing was the fact that my crazy ma seems to have fallen head-over-heels for an old, crusty charlatan. As much as I wanted Anya to be happy and cared for after I flew the coop for school, wasn't leaving her in the clutches of Pastor Sterling a poor move on a daughter's part? The guy could barely walk, and the first words out of his mouth to me had been disciplinary. I didn't trust him. Their whole, whirlwind romance seemed...off.

And then there was the fact of the step-brother himself. It had been one thing to see him standing there, looking especially smug and tan in the kitchen doorway, and have to contend with the possibility that he was more of a jock dirt bag than I'd let myself believe on the roof. But the way he'd acted outside the bathroom? Trying to come onto me, and shit? I couldn't believe how quickly it was possible to go from lust to repulsion. I also couldn't believe how warped my own judgment of people could be, especially given all the lunatic step-fathers and druggies my mother had introduced me to. The whole thing was nauseating. As if to augment my fury, Joe Strummer now screeched into my ears about being lost in a supermarket.

The instant I threw my headphones aside in frustration, the overhead lights in my room snapped on. Blinking, I sat up to see jock boy—looking confused (and extremely naked, from the waist up). For a split-second, we just regarded one another.

Another source of extreme fury was the fact that—yeah, okay, sure, whatever, he was kind of good looking. I saw in the full light that his football camp tan ended at t-shirt level, while his pecs and chest remained a lighter color. There was something cute about the farmer look. There was something cuter about the coils of dark hair on his chest. The hair was darker than I would have imagined, and it grew thick at a spot just below his navel. When he inhaled, his core expanded in a way that suggested every fiber of his body was made of muscle. His form was tapered like a swimmer's. Either I'd forgotten the whole Adonis body thing while in the dark of his Saab, or he'd really outdone himself on the free weights in Galveston.

But it wasn't like any of this mattered, or made him less of a creep. It was like Carson said: “You can admire the house without signing the deed.”

“I got turned around. Thought this was the bathroom,” Landon grumbled, scratching at the side of his face. Even in the hours since dinner, it seemed as if stubble had begun to erupt on his jawline. Or maybe this was a trick of the light. Unbidden, I recalled his proclamation on the rooftop: I'm a man. I will fuck you senseless.

“It's not, genius,” I managed to huff, hopefully concealing some of my gawkery. But Landon didn't turn around right away. Instead, I got the sense that he was staring me down. Seconds too late, I remembered the loose-fitting nightshirt I'd elected to wear—the one I treated like a second skin. It was a gauzy, practically see-through t-shirt that just barely covered my ass—one of mom's old faves from the seventies. A lot of faux-Spanish embroidery framed the plummeting V-neck. I never had to think about how suggestive my sleeping clothes were when I lived in a house with no men. Blinking with fury, I shifted a pillow in front of my chest.

“Is that all?”

Landon nodded, but I watched his eyes pull themselves from my body and lurch around my room. I'd inherited a decorating gene from Carson. No matter how often Anya and I skipped town, making a space my own was always a first instinct. As his eyes peered around my room, I tried to see my little cubby space from Landon's POV. The long, glittery tapestries procured from Austin street fairs. An original sketch of Tex's, affixed to the far wall with multi-colored pushpins. A gumbo of band posters for Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, The Strokes and Metric. A tall vintage lamp, draped with scarves. Did all of my objects immediately betray the fact that I was a kid, and still “kind of an idiot”? In one way, this was my greatest fear. That people—even stupid jerk people, like my future step-brother—wouldn't take me seriously, for whatever reason.

Landon looked like he was about to say something, but at that moment some ambiguous groan moved through the wall. I watched him hear it, and frown. If things had been different, we might have made eye contact and grimaced together. That was the kind of thing siblings did, wasn't it? Laugh at the dumb (and disgusting) shit their parents did?

But we would never have that kind of relationship. I shifted my gaze to the braided rug on the floor, and pursed my lips. Landy took the cue, and pulled himself from the threshold of my door. I popped my earbuds back in, but snuck a peek at his lumbering frame as he moseyed off down the hallway. A few paces away, he returned and ran back.

“What?” I cried, pulling my earbuds out again. I half-hoped my voice was loud enough to let Pastor Sterling and Anya know that I was having none of their coitus. Landon just pulled a face at me, before snapping out the light and shutting the door. Which I guess was nice. Whatever.

When I blinked, I saw light again. You know how that happens sometimes? And for a long time after, though I stared at the ceiling and tried to pour my shifting feelings into the vessel of London Calling, I saw his torso in my doorway. His chiseled body, with its elegant, smooth-looking planes of tan and white.

Chapter Ten

Landon

July 28^th

Zora's hand reminded me of a hawk's talon, the way it clamped around my wrist. She was plowing toward the Hyatt like a steamship. She had no looks to spare me, so I tried to make eye contact with our chauffeur. But the poor guy—pretty righteously—didn't seem interested in exchanging a fraternal face with the dude whose girlfriend had been yelling at him for the past twenty minutes, as if he alone were responsible for Austin's gridlocked Friday night traffic.

“Smile for the cameras,” I heard my girlfriend murmur at me, from over her left shoulder. “And with your teeth.” As if taking her cue, bright lights started to wink at us from both sides.

“Did I miss something? Is your sister a celebrity?” The circle around my wrist tightened. I felt uncomfortable enough in the rented tux (cummerbund added at Z's “suggestion”), and this red carpet shit was just too much. I swallowed. Something about all those bright lights was making me thirsty, too.

“It's part of the theme.” Zora whispered back, smiling madly all the while. “You're the one who said it was a lame tradition. This is me, trying to spice things up.”

There was nothing I could say to that, so I tried to keep my eyes fixed on Z's tanned shoulder-blades as she maneuvered us toward the hotel entrance. She is very graceful, I’ll give her that. With seemingly no effort, she'd steered us to the front of a long line of other women in ball gowns, trailed by other bewildered-looking dudes in suits.

Only once we were inside the hotel lobby did Z release her skeleton grip. She looked me up and down, as she had several times that day already—eyes withering, hunting for a flaw. She looked fantastic in a peach-colored dress that complimented her honey skin. It was a light, gauzy fabric that drifted through the air behind her as she walked. And her dark hair was piled high on her head, sculpted into this fountain shape. She was beautiful.

“It's too bad your Dad can't swing the Hyatt for his wedding ceremony,” she was saying now, apparently satisfied with the picture I took. (Or not: she reached a manicured hand up and smoothed a lock of hair back from my scalp, not a second later.)

“His whole thing is pretty anti-flash, remember?” This change in conversation made me even grouchier. I would rather have talked about the long road to finding the perfect florist for Betsy's deb ball than spend a second admitting that Pop seemed about to go through with his hare-brained matrimony, despite my very logical protests.

“I know you think he's being crazy,” Z said, eyes roving the lobby. Periodically, she'd raise her hand and wave at some other couple or group. “But IMHO, it's romantic. He's a man of the cloth, he's getting up there...why shouldn't he have someone to spend the rest of his life with? I mean, when you get drafted next year it's not like you'll have a bunch of extra time to spend at home.”

I bit my tongue. Even during our best times, I'd never exactly felt the need to confide in Z about the real quality of my relationship with Pop. From the outside, I knew it looked like something out of a sad fairy tale or bad movie: Wounded Veteran Raises Only Son, Finds God On The Way...but the truth was, we were more complicated than that. Of course I wanted Pop to find someone to take care of him. Of course I did. But I'd never have gone so far as to call his storefront operation “of the cloth,” nor would I ever deign to call his shacking up with Anya “romantic.” I'd also never entertained any plans of coming back to live with the old coot, draft or no. Sticking around Pop for my last college summer was turning out to be a huge ordeal. If not for all the oddly scheduled football training, I would have been able to at least fly the coop every so often to a job—but alas. No dice.

And as much as I hated to admit it, there'd been a grain or two of truth in Ash's bitchy rant at our first dinner. I didn't think Pop was scamming Anya, exactly. Nor did I think she was scamming him. But I'd decided that there was something unseemly about their union, and could only hope it was mutually beneficial. After all, Pop had never exactly been a good husband to my Mom. I worried a little about his ability to be...decent. Or perhaps it was just that I didn't like to bandy the word 'love' around so lightly. My idea of love looked a whole lot different than what had become our tri-weekly pizza parties, those evenings spent in mostly silence.

But this wasn't the kind of thing you could say to girlfriends. Especially not family-oriented, marriage-crazy Christian ones, like Z.

“I want him to be happy,” I said curtly, hoping this would seal the matter. And Zora did seem temporarily satisfied. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I grinned at her impulsiveness, but in another second registered the camera waving in our face. Aha.

“I'm sorry you're getting a little twat of a stepsister in the deal, though,” Z murmured, as the camera-lady sauntered away. “That girl has the most sour face I've ever seen, except for maybe that Twilight chick. Like, what's her deal? And does she go outside? I haven't seen anyone that pale in Texas, ever.”

I didn't have the energy to rebut most of this, and luckily, I didn't need to. For there was Betsy, appearing at the top of the lobby staircase like Scarlet friggin O'Hara. Everyone in the vicinity clapped. Zora's little sister was first in a short line of trembling sixteen and seventeen year old girls, their faces spanning the spectrum of from giddy to nonplussed. But Betsy, in her short and comparably boring white dress, was definitely not feeling her big day.

“I am going to murder that girl,” Z said in the direction of the staircase, though she clapped and smiled as she whispered the threat. “She's going to regret that face in her pictures. She's not going to want to hang that puss on the dorm room walls.”

For something to say, I cast about the room of beaming faces.

“What's her date like?”

“Oh, don't even get me STARTED.” Zora barely gestured in the direction of a tall, sallow-looking redhead who immediately struck me as gay. But then again, what did I know?

Zora spent most of the rest of the ball hunting for people to yell at. During Betsy's short—but surprisingly funny—remarks about her future plans, Z was in the kitchen, harassing some caterer about a fruit plate that wasn't up to snuff. I couldn't help feeling bad for poor Betsy, who spent much of the evening looking miserable in her frilly gown. At one point, she and Sallow Red made a break for the lobby, looking like Bonnie and Clyde after a successful heist. Even though I knew Zora would pitch a fit when she realized her sister had escaped her own deb ball, I watched them go without raising my head. Kids were supposed to have fun, right?

Left to my lonesome, I spent a lot of the party looking at the array of high-school kids on display. Most of the guests, like Betsy, were fixing to finish high school in the fall—a few were headed to college. They all seemed bright-eyed and full of themselves. They had no idea about the future, the little posers. Most of the girls were like Zora minions—perfectly made up, flawless as Beyoncé. And I couldn't help thinking of what Ash might have made of this set-up. Try as I might, I couldn't picture her fitting in with these kinds of kids. These happy, breezy kids who seemed so certain about their place in the world.

Over the past two weeks, Pop had been spending almost every night at Anya's. I'd been finding elaborate reasons to keep guard at our house, or crash at Denny's, or sneak into Zora's room once her parents fell asleep. (Even though we were twenty-two and consenting, Mr. Hall was not a fan of mine when it came to his daughter.) I wasn't willing to risk another night of accidentally wandering into Doll's bedroom and finding her half-naked, like some kind of Lolita. I hadn't slept a wink that night, pinned as I was between fury (the little twerp...) and frustration (...her giant tits). It was like Denny said: you could crush a problem with your mind vice. And Doll was a problem.

Two more weeks, I told myself, letting the ice cubes clink in my tumbler. In Z's absence, I'd had to find comfort in Jim Beam. The Hyatt was beginning to blur around the edges, in echo of that rooftop night. Why was it that I couldn't stop thinking about her? I gripped my glass till it stopped feeling cold in my palm. Why?

“There you are,” Z murmured, the touch of her lips on my ear surprising me so much I dropped my whiskey. The cup shattered loudly along the parquet floor, causing the band's lead singer to stutter. I couldn't help but smile. Event bands were so cheesy anyways.

“Leave it,” Z was saying, her chest flush against my back. I could feel the round, warm bulges of her breasts as she breathed in and out. “The help will get it.” Then her hands appeared around my waist, revealing a crisp, laminated card in her outstretched palms.

“I got us a room,” she whispered, pressing her lips lightly against the divot where my shoulder and neck met. She breathed lightly on the place where I imagined she'd left a lipstick mark. I felt the slightest stiffening in my rented pants.

Crush it. Crush it with your mind vice, Landon.

Chapter Eleven

Ash

July 29^th

Carson took a drag of her cigarette, then blew smoke across the grey living room like a crop-duster. Though she'd allegedly (and very reluctantly) come to Pastor Sterling's house to help me and mom pack up the family's jewels, my sister had basically taken one look around the rambler and parked herself on the couch. While our mother's giggles could be heard somewhere in the back of the house (apparently in response to all the funny jokes I'd never heard the Pastor make), it was clear that I was the only one who'd be packing today. With a confusing mixture of rage and curiosity, I'd been shoving items from Landon's childhood home into cardboard boxes for more than an hour.

“I don't get it. Why isn't Wonder boy here? It's his house.” Carson stretched her long body across the couch, her damp skin creaking along the plastic. There was not a bit of AC at the Sterling's. I had to admit—I was surprised by the condition of their house, especially given how well Landon put himself together. His hair and clothes were forever on point, despite the grimness of this... shack. It seemed like companies and UT alums were always trying to ply him with commercial contracts and swag, local celeb that he was. But so far, I'd discovered ancient dust-bunnies in the living room, baked-on food stains in the kitchen, and a whole unexpected ecosystem on the front lawn. It was hard to imagine a Pastor living like this. It made even mom’s and my thin-walled rental look like a Bellagio penthouse.

“Have you seen his room yet?” my sister asked, her eyes suddenly narrowing. Though I'd been careful not to tell her much about Landon, I had a hunch that Carson knew more about my non-relationship with the stepbrother-to-be than I'd felt like letting on.

“No. And Carson, that's private—I'm not going in there.”

“Are you kidding? Whenever one has an opportunity to snoop as good as this one—why, it's a moral imperative.” Biting her lip with glee, she sprang from the couch. I heard the screen door clatter at the back of the house. Anya and her old man were tottering out into the garden. We had the place to ourselves.

“Carson! Carson, I mean it!” My voice caught in my throat as I trailed behind my sister's colorful caftan (the thrift shop purchase), watching her open doors and shut them with a cheesy smile on her face. There were only about three doors on the main floor, and two of them were closets. At the exact same time, our heads swiveled towards the stairs.

Carson went first. With all her yoga and Pilates BS, she was much springier than I was. I feebly continued protesting—“It's not even really his room, you know! He has an apartment on campus!”—but knew it was too late when I saw my sister, looking rapt in a doorway. We'd found his room. Landon Sterling's private, childhood room.

“Moral imperative,” Carson mouthed again, impatiently pushing a thatch of flyaways off her face. She took a theatrical Bugs Bunny tiptoe, and was over the threshold. I sucked in some air and followed suit.

I don't know what I expected, exactly. Maybe more of the same apparent absence of a mother figure—dirt in corners, piles of laundry. But what I noticed first was how clean Landon kept his room. There was a child's rug on the floor, white but printed with Thomas the Tank Engine and friends, and this had remained surprisingly pristine despite what I assumed were years of use. The little bedroom was also well-lit, being tucked away in the corner of the house. You could see both the street and a slice of the backyard via the high, clear windows.

Carson was fingering two football keepsakes, pinned to the wall with thumbtacks—one a signed Longhorns jersey, another something from PeeWee football. Along the same wall was a neat constellation of Polaroid photos. I drifted towards these, and immediately discovered young Landon, grinning up at a camera from behind a big cake. He looked about six in that photo. His dark hair fell in front of his face in a big, overgrown flop. His eyes contained the same child-like glee that they had on the night we'd been introduced—yet in the picture, he was missing two front teeth. Adorable.

And in every subsequent photo, Landon looked the same: thrillingly alive, glad to be there, honest, excited. There were a few professional shots of him in football gear, with one knee in the grass and a helmet in his hand. Another of him in his graduation cap revealed a boy who was flirting with the camera like there was a pretty girl behind it. My eyes moved down: there was Landon and some scowling senior boy I thought I recognized from that damn party Melanie had dragged me to. In this Polaroid, Landon and his pal held tallboys and wore glittery specs bearing the numbers “2011!” A New Year's party.

At the center of the makeshift collage were two photos of Landon with women. On the left was one of him and a statuesque date. She was beautiful and haughty looking, and despite my best intentions I immediately felt a pang of jealousy on seeing him with his arm around this unsmiling model type. Didn't help that Landon had his lips on the model's cheek, and his eyes were closed with bliss. I reached out and pressed my thumb lightly over the pretty girl's face, so it was just him, leaning down to kiss no one in particular. I smiled.

The next—and final—photo was an older one, a Polaroid going crispy yellow at the edges. I immediately realized that this was the first pic acknowledging the Pastor, who looked young and almost dapper in his uniform, with his crew cut, and square jawline. Landon was nowhere to be seen. I searched for evidence of a date in the corner. I decided the snapshot had to have been taken sometime in the late 80s, before the Pastor had fought in the Gulf. He was standing beside a woman, lightly touching her shoulder. She was smiling in the same way Landon did, in every other pic—with a pure kind of joy in her features. Her hair was dark like her son's, and her bone structure as defined. His mother.

“Like what you see?”

I jumped about a foot in the air. When I turned around, Carson was nowhere to be found—yet there was Landon, his jaw scrunched and brow furrowed in a way that made it hard to believe he could have ever been that grinning, silly boy from the photographs.

“Landon. I...”

“What the fuck are you doing in my room?”

“We're...I'm...” His eyes were narrowed with cruelty. He looked at me like he didn't recognize me. And then his gaze traveled from my face to my pointer finger, which was resting on the white rim of his mother's picture.

“You need to get out.” He took a menacing step towards me. I noticed for the first time that he was dressed to the nines—or at least he had been, the day before. He wore a crumpled dress shirt opened a few buttons at the neck and dark tuxedo pants. A suit jacket was slung over his shoulder. Seeing the fire in his eyes, I fought the urge to ask him where he'd been the night before—but no sooner had I decided to cower than my own temper rose up like a wave. This sack of shit couldn't intimidate me. We'd established that the night we met. I wouldn't be spoken to like that, by him or any other man. In a show of defiance, I stood up straight and puffed my chest out.

“You watch the way you talk to me, Landon,” I purred flatly. “I was just trying to help.” Then, for emphasis, I took one long look around the rest of his room. The tidily made up bed. The panel of trophies. The old clunker computer, taking up most of a desk. It meant nothing. None of this stuff meant anything. Let him pack it up.

I held my chin high as I sidled past his muscular body, though he didn't move an inch aside to let me pass. I inhaled a sweet breath of his cologne, and the slightly earthy smell of his skin. He'd been drinking the night before, I could tell. Once in the hallway, I heard the door slam shut behind me, so loud it sent a shock through my system. I could no longer hear my mother's giggling outside, but Carson was doubled up along the far wall, apparently tickled to completion about leaving me alone to face off with the thug. I smacked my sister on the exposed expanse of her thigh, rigid with rage.

“Nice playing look-out, jerk!” I hissed—but Carson seemed unfazed. Beyond the shut door, I could hear water stuttering on in some corner. I hadn't realized Landon had a bathroom to himself in his bedroom. I wished I could have gotten a glimpse at that, too.

“You just looked so doe-eyed, gazing at his pictures like that...” Carson wheezed, wiping tears from her eyes. After another half-minute, her storm finally seemed to be abating, while my own face remained red.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, fanning my hands through my hair out of habit. Today's white-blonde streaks were almost the color of my fingertips.

“Oh, baby—I think you do.” Together, we listened as the shower sounds amplified beyond the door. He was pulling back a curtain, in one violent, swift gesture. I imagined his tuxedo pants falling to a puddle around his ankles. I imagined his thick, hairy shins like tree trunks, stretching up to the muscly base of him. I imagined what was swinging between his legs, straight and thick as my wrist, slightly turgid with feeling. I imagined his narrow hips, the symmetrical scoops of his ass, then the hard cage of his chest, humming with fury, caged only by the second skin of dark down. His hair, wet in the shower. His liquid brown eyes, fierce with instinct.

“Oh, Lord,” Carson said. Without my realizing it, she'd come to place a warm, dry palm on my cheek. “Don't worry, kid. I won't tell anyone.” Her own eyes were heavy with sympathy—something I could never abide. Especially not from Carson, who was supposed to know better. The Bennett women didn't need sympathy. The very best—heck, perhaps the only good thing—we'd inherited from our mother was a stubborn sort of pride.

I shook myself free of her hand, then padded back down the rickety staircase to the many boxes in the living room. My mother and her husband-to-be kept a silent vigil there, holding hands on the couch in front of the TV. I expected a ribbing out for my abandoning the work, but they both looked preoccupied.

“We've set a date, darling,” my mother said in my direction, as I came in. I could hear another preacher, prattling from the television. Go figure. Pastor Sterling probably loved him some 700 Club.

“This Saturday. At the church.” When I looked at my mother next, she had little pearls of tears on her lower eyelids. The Pastor had turned to look at her, too. His eyes were kind. Even his withered turtle neck and his tiny head, topped by that outrageous baseball cap seemed...sweet, in that moment. He looked like an echo of his son in those photographs. Joyful.

Carson slid a hand around my waist from behind, managing in her expert way to avoid making eye contact with our mom. She whispered so only I could hear: “Don't forget. You've got two weeks until you're outta here. Two weeks. Anyone could do that.”