Текст книги "Quarterback Bait "
Автор книги: Celia Loren
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Chapter Fifteen
Landon
September 1st
It took me to the second frickin’ week of school to wise up. I'd followed Clay Hoskins to a big Alpha Phi party on Frat Row, and there the pair of them were. Lip locked on the grass, in plain sight, for everybody to see. I was shocked that The Daily Texan hadn't been invited to this oh-so-public photo-op.
When we saw them, Clay put a steadying hand on my shoulder like he was afraid I'd pull out a glock or something. But what shocked me most was how vacant I felt, watching them gnawing away at one another's faces. I thought for a second about how we'd probably looked, the few times I'd ever gotten Zora to make out with me in public. (“What am I, a Kardashian?” she liked to say, whenever I so much as tried to nuzzle her on the shoulder in public. Which I never actually got, because as far as I could tell she aspired to be a Kardashian.) I didn't think she'd ever looked so focused while kissing me. Regardless—what they were doing didn't look too fun. Denny was pawing at her like a virgin on death row, his hands squeezing and pinching her flesh. And though Z looked 'into it,' I detected no joy in her body. She kissed like she was out to prove someone wrong.
“That's some shit, man,” Clay offered, shaking his heavy dreads back and forth. “Can't believe your girl would dog you like that.”
“I'm a little more surprised at my best friend,” I said. And as if on cue, there the bastard went again—swooping in for a hickey. A few freshmen girls in teetering party heels paused on the sidewalk to point and laugh at Mr. and Mrs. Billy Bob Thornton, who were now just about fucking in plain sight.
“I hate to say it, but I'm not,” Clay murmured. I smiled wryly at my buddy. He'd never made a secret of the fact that he wasn't Denny's biggest fan, but it was nice to hear some solidarity. I wondered why it'd taken three years of college for me to start hanging out with Hoskins. I mean, of all the jags I spent my time with, he was definitely one of the better dudes.
Denny, at long last, caught on to his audience. He pulled himself away from Zora with the suctioning sound of a plunger, and when he met my eyes I watched his face blanche with fear. Z took another second to realize what was happening, but when she saw me and Clay across the grass her eyes narrowed. She pulled a compact from the back of her jeans and started to primp.
“Landy,” Denny said, his voice coming out strangled-sounding. “I can explain, man. Z and I were just...”
“Save it, man.” I looked from best friend to girlfriend, then back again. It was strange, feeling nothing. I knew what I was supposed to feel—betrayal, fury, even sadness—but none of these would come. Seeing them together just struck me as...empty.
“He doesn't even care, Denny,” Zora piped up. I was surprised to hear a harsh edge to her voice—here when I'd been thinking she was as jagged-sounding as it was possible to get. “He hasn't paid any attention to me since we got back together. I could be fucking his step-sister, and he wouldn't care.” She sounded more bitter than any twenty-two year old had a right to be. But I felt something then—a slight little twinge of pity for Zora. She wasn't entirely wrong, after all. We'd never been a good match for each other, but I sure hadn't been holding up my end of the boyfriend deal.
Still, I remained silent, feeling braced by Clay's hand on my shoulder. After a few more seconds I turned to my buddy and flicked my head in the direction of Frat Row. As we turned, I could see them gaping, turning to each other all outraged. I don't know what they expected of me. But I do know that as I left those two in the dust, I felt the weirdest lift in my shoulders. Relief.
Chapter Sixteen
Ash
September 1st
“You're settling in okay?” Anya asked for what felt like the three-hundredth time. Mom had made it her prerogative to visit my closet of a dorm room four times already, though I'd only been at college for two weeks. I'd never seen her so hands-on about anything. My new roommate, Lotte, was demonstrably un-amused about this third addition to room 6E.
“Yes, Anya,” I repeated, as my mother fussed with a mini-fridge magnet. “Is everything okay? You really didn't need to come celebrate my first quiz in Organic Chemistry.” Especially as you didn't know until today I was taking that class, I added silently. Our relationship was one built on my independence. It felt strange to fuck with the formula.
“I know, baby, I know,” Anya said, running her fingers down the silk curtains Carson had made for me. “I'm just happy to visit, you know. It can get a little lonely in the house without you.”
Lotte sighed dramatically from her desk corner, and I took a dainty step towards my mother. We could at least talk in lower tones, if she had to talk so much.
“What do you mean, lonely? Didn't you get married a few weeks ago? How's the Pastor?”
Anya's smile was delayed on its way to her face. She'd never been an excellent liar, but I was surprised to see how much effort it seemed to take for her to approximate newlywed bliss. I set down my orgo book, sighed, and really looked at my mother.
“Everything's going okay with you two, right?” I said slowly. But mom had made a decision to play her cards close to the chest. She nodded furiously at me before getting up to hunt around the room for her purse.
“Mom? Did I say something off? You know you can always talk to me, right?” But Anya had already reached the door, and seemed married to her ruse.
She nodded tightly again, eyes wide, smile manic. “Just don't be a stranger, sugar,” she said, blowing me a kiss. “And hey, I like that. Mom.”
Unexpected Anya visits aside, college was a mixed bag so far. Lotte didn't seem too interested in exploring UT's vivacious social life, which made studying in the dorm easy, but friend-making less so. Melanie, my old pre-college study buddy, had reappeared to drag me out to a few mixers. Together, we'd made it to a few floor shin-digs, in the name of being social. I'd let a tall, Korean basketball player give me a hickey at a kegger. I'd played a game of Truth or Dare with my suitemates that resulted in my making out with Lotte's favorite teddy bear. Classes were actually challenging, more so than at any point in high school. But despite all this, I did feel like something was missing.
“It takes a while for a new place to feel like home,” Nate had told me not two nights before, over Portobello burgers at Kerbey Lane. Oh—and I'd also been spending some time with Nate. “I remember my freshman year. It took a month for me to find my people.”
“Oh, the Star Trek Fan Club was that hard to track down?” I'd grinned. He'd rolled his eyes. It was easy to talk to Nate. He and I were so similar. Ever since the wedding reception (where Dempsey had offered to foot half the dinner bill, attempted to dance with me, and ended the night with a sweet, chaste kiss), we'd been casually kicking it. I got to hear all about his incoming crop of freshman hell-raisers, and he got to give me sage advice about the “formative years.” Everything was peachy-keen.
In fact, there was a lot to like about Nate Dempsey. He was only twenty-three (“completely respectable,” in Carson's estimate), he was soft-spoken and sarcastic, and we could talk easily about books and music. On our third date, he'd introduced me to Nirvana, and I hadn't been able to take In Utero off shuffle since that day. He was as kind and considerate as step-brother Landon was cagey and erratic.
And last night, we'd finally had The Conversation. Nate had walked me up to my dorm room doors and taken off his glasses, so I could catch streaks of moonlight bouncing around his blue eyes.
“I had a really nice time tonight,” he'd murmured, bending low. I'd smiled and presented my face for our usual good-night kiss, with minimal tongue action. I’d thought we'd both been in the business of taking things slow. But then, he'd leaned just the slightest bit further, breaking some invisible barrier we'd spent the past two weeks ignoring. I'd felt something thick and hard and insistent through his jeans.
“I would really like to come up,” Mr. Dempsey had whispered, so close to my ear that his stubble scraped my cheek. His hands, meanwhile, had found purchase on my bare arms. He'd begun stroking me, in the slow, soothing way one strokes a pet. I'd waited to feel the pull. But it hadn't come.
“Lotte's cramming for her first Econ test tonight,” I'd said, instead of something sexy and invitational. I don't know why I made the decision so fast, nor why I was so...un-turned on. Dempsey was cute, he was smart, he was older. Easily the best guy who'd ever wanted to date me, in any city, at any school. I'd kicked myself as he walked off towards his bus stop. Luckily, he hadn't seemed too disappointed when I ended the evening with a few vague bumps against his nether regions and a soft, long make-out sesh. At the end, he'd wiggled his eyebrows in a way that telegraphed: next time, you're not getting out of it.
Now, I regarded my mother from the dorm window. She meandered in the direction of the parking lot, seeming to take her sweet time. It occurred to me that as Anya had never attended college, maybe the place itself contained mystery and excitement for her. Maybe that was why she visiting so often. Or maybe she was finally trying to repair our fraught relationship, and play the part of the mother who'd always been around to give a damn. But something else told me that she'd been lying before, by the curtains. Maybe her and the Pastor's honeymoon phase had reached its inevitable conclusion.
The idea of a 'honeymoon phase' prompted a freaky flash of an image in my mind's eye—there was me and Mr. Dempsey as doddering old folks, sharing the newspaper over a breakfast table. I tried to imagine kicking it with the AV teacher for any kind of long haul. Didn't they say half the world found their soul mates in college? Was this all how love worked, perhaps? A kind-enough guy met a kind-enough woman and they began a good-enough life together?
“You're not going to pass any test if you keep staring off into space like that,” Lotte said, rattling her water glass to secure my attention. I listened to the cubes clinking against the glass, and thought about the man who hadn't kissed me two nights ago.
It had been so many days since I'd seen my step-brother.
There'd been a moment.
At the wedding reception, as the bride and groom slurped spiced shrimp from the tines of one another's forks. Landon had clinked his own utensil against his girlfriend's wineglass, because he himself was drinking Johnnie Walker in a low tumbler. Everyone at the table had stopped their chewing and guffawing, like it was some insane surprise that the Best Man would make a speech.
His face was red from the whiskey, and the first two buttons of his dress shirt had popped open. He swayed when he stood. But the words that tumbled out of his mouth surprised me in their eloquence.
“I think we all know love is rare,” Landon started. “It's a scary thing, to even ask someone you like those first questions: do you want to see me? Do you want to see me for a few more hours? Do you want to put your mouth on my mouth? Do you want to wake up next to me?” The small crowd tittered, but I felt my cheeks start glowing red again. I suddenly couldn't look at him. I looked at my napkin, instead.
“Pop, I remember how you called me at football camp—just a few short weeks ago—to sing Anya's praises, 'I've found the one son!' you told me.” Landon had started gesturing with his tumbler. Its contents seemed perilously close to sloshing over the sides. I watched Zora's grin tighten. “And here's the thing—it's magic, isn't it? There is an element of the divine to this thing called love, and it's that urgency, that total inability to explain yourself, that makes it right.”
Anya was crying gently into her napkin, and Carson, beside me, was rolling her eyes. I should have figured she wouldn't buy into any of this lovey-dovey hooey. My sis was too cool.
“Sometimes, it's this simple: you meet a girl, and you know. It's right. And you think to yourself: hey. We fit, me and her. There's a feeling, a magical, freaky feeling that you share before you even exchange names.” I knew his eyes were on me before I looked up. Shockingly, awfully, it was then that Mr. Dempsey chose to slide his palm across my back. His gesture felt somehow protective.
People were still applauding when our eyes finally connected. Landon looked like he was trying to smile for a second, but couldn't muster.
Chapter Seventeen
Ash
September 13th
One lazy Friday, after a botched orgo pop quiz, I rode out to visit Anya. I figured she'd been putting in more than enough time at the dorm.
I knew something was wrong before my cab-driver had given me the change. Though I didn't subscribe to a lot of the superstitious astrology BS that, say, Carson liked to blab about, I was shocked when conviction tiptoed over my skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. I knew something was wrong, I just knew it. At that point, my imagination shut down. I shut out the specific possibilities, and felt my body go on autopilot as I made my way up to the house.
The driver was still trying to give me my change when I found my feet had carried me to the open doorway of Anya's condo. The house was silent. I couldn't even hear the dull murmur of the TV, or the rasping of the wall clock. Walking slowly into the kitchen, I found my first explanation—the kitchen clock had been prodded off the wall with some blunt instrument, and lay in punctured, shiny ruins on the floor. Broken glass covered the linoleum, so it almost looked like rushing water. My breath caught in my chest.
“Mom?” I asked the silent house. Then I made my body rigid, just in case her reply was small and faint. No dice. I left the kitchen and turned down our long hallway, which seemed unbearably long today. “Mom?” I repeated. My footsteps fell lightly on the carpet. In retrospect, it might've occurred to me that we'd been robbed, that the first sensible thing to do might be “call the police”—but I didn't hear reason. I was just about to call her name again when the house made its first gesture toward me. When I reached the bathroom door, I heard the unmistakable sound of water running from a slow tap.
“Mom!” I cried again, hearing the panic in my own voice.
I'd gotten good at blocking out some of Anya's and my worst memories, but here they came again, like a parade: all the wretched possibilities. Like how once, in a small town in Nebraska, my mother had found her way to the roof of a barn while tripping balls on LSD. I'd gotten the call in the middle school nurse's office, under the pitying gaze of a Ratched disciple. A robotic-sounding orderly had informed me that my mother had leapt from the rooftop into a field, and “thank God, only broke her sternum.” I'd spent two days at her hospital bedside, answering the requisite, terrible questions from nurses who were deciding whether or not to call CPS.
She had always been reckless. She had always been accident-prone. She was happy to be addicted, to this day, and even from the wagon could make the occasional spiel for drugs and alcohol that the whole program thing was effectively designed to halt. Once, my mother had told me—on the downswing from a night on E—that she believed people were meant to exist under the influence. “I pray to God that someday you feel this alive, baby,” she'd said, her pupils big as the moon. I'd been fourteen, and getting ready for school.
Mom was a mess, a mistake, unfit—and yet, she was all I had. I'd pulled her out of the ruins many a time, sure, but even so—it was impossible to imagine my life without her. She was my best friend. She was my worst enemy. I loved her more than anything, despite our whole miserable history. And I knew, with a shaking but deep conviction, that if anything happened to her that we couldn't bounce back from...I'd crumble.
I gripped the rickety brass knob of the bathroom door and twisted. It wasn't locked, but the light was off. With quivering hands, I reached for the switch. “Mom,” I whispered.
She was buck naked, sitting in the bath-tub. The tap wasn't opened all the way, and the drain was only half-in, so just as the tub was filling up, the water was slipping away. She sat in a pool that just barely grazed the tips of her hips. The wasted stream reminded me of something we'd been studying in my Intro to Classics course—that figure Sisyphus, from Greek mythology, who was always pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom again. But I shook off this nonsense. Now was so not the time to be thinking about school.
It was a relief, for a moment, to see her sitting upright—that is, until I saw her face. When she tilted her head up toward the light, I realized that half of my mother's face was tomato red, like skin that's just been burnt. When she tried to smile at me, everything got worse.
The skin around her left eye was swollen, even broken in some places. The wound was wet-looking; it looked like she'd tried to dress the slices on her skin with nothing more than a few handfuls of bathwater. I went to kneel on the grubby bathmat, deciding not to be fazed about seeing the naked body of the woman who'd given birth to me. Up close, the eye was even grislier. Somebody had clocked Anya good. Though it didn't look like she could open wide, what little I could see of the whites of her eyes were shot through with broken blood vessels.
“It's not so bad,” she croaked, cautiously. He'd gotten the corner of her mouth, too—I could tell from the way her lips moved as she spoke. The whole left side seemed...inflated. “Really, baby. It looks way worse than it feels.” But no sooner was the lie out than the rest of my mother's face seemed to collapse in on itself, making the most terrible picture. I leaned forward and pressed my mom's wet head against the front of my shirt.
“Where is he now?” I asked, after her sobbing had subsided. We both kept our faces pinned in the direction of the dripping faucet, as if it would be too hard to look at one another square-on while having this conversation. Anya sniffled, but didn't say anything. I repeated the question.
“Mom, you need to tell me.”
“But there's an explanation,” she whined. For a second, a white flash of fury wracked my bones. The very idea that she could protect any man who was capable of this…monstrosity, made me unbearably sick. If I were a praying lady, I'd have pulled a Scarlet O'Hara right there by the bathtub: “as God is my witness, I will never let a man lay a hand on me in anger. Not unless he happens to be tired of having testicles.”
But I remembered my mother's fragile body in my arms. Her life had been hard. She deserved to be happy. She had tried her best. I leaned across the tub and gently twisted the faucet, so the water stopped running. My fingers brushed against the dwindling stream. The water, I discovered, was ice cold.
“It doesn't matter,” Anya sighed. “He's not coming back.” With a slight inclination of her head, she indicated a corner of the sink. In a little pool of moisture, a perfect circle against the pink enamel—there was her wedding ring.
Chapter Eighteen
Landon
September 13th
I'd never been angry like this before, not that I could remember. I'd been mad when we'd lost the championship to the Baylor friggin Bears in the fourth quarter last fall. I'd been mad the first time Zora cheated on me, and mad at myself for taking her back. I got mad thinking about a dozen tiny slights, a dozen skirmishes in games—but not like this. My whole body felt amped up, just the way juicers described life after taking a steroid cocktail. But I didn't feel capable and strong, like those dudes. I just felt helpless.
I'd heard in the locker room.
I'd started at the familiar pain, then remembered to roll my eyes as a wet towel slapped against my bare ass. A post-game snap was SOP for a Longhorn who'd made a winning play, so I knew not to get too twisted—but to this day, I have to confess that I hate that tradition. It was always the dirtiest dirt bags who could be counted on to target another man's junk when we should have been celebrating.
“That was a bitching last play, your majesty,” crowed Dixon, one of our fullest fullbacks. “I thought for sure that 22 was ‘bouta kill you dead. You're a fucking snake in the grass, Landy. Faster than fucking Forrest Gump.” Dix hooted and hollered at his own joke, and I took the opportunity to angle myself away from his towel. I slid the jeans up over my hips, already feeling the spots along my body that'd be sore by sun-up.
The team was prattling on at full-steam about the after party when I heard my phone go, which was already weird. Since the break with Denny and Z, I'd been getting way fewer calls than before. The Pastor had even lapsed a little from his weekly check-in (Sundays, at 3pm). I hadn't spoken to Pop man to man hardly at all since his wedding day. Half of me figured he was tripping on marital bliss, so had less need for his collegiate son—and the other half was content without an explanation. I felt bad about this, but there was also something nice about feeling like he and I were headed off to lead our separate lives in peace.
The number on the screen, so grudgingly entered at my step-mother's request (step-mother; still sounded weird...) was Ash's. In fact, Ashleigh Bennett. She wasn't Doll anymore. I'd finally gotten it through my thick skull at the wedding reception, watching her go all doe-eyed and cutesy with her ancient date. Ash was a pretty young thing with a bright future, and whatever thing it was that moved between us was impossible to act on. Had always been impossible to act on.
And I couldn't continue to put her on a pedestal in my mind and hate her in close proximity, because it: A) just plain wasn't fair and, B) was fucking with my mind. Besides, Clay had promised to introduce me to the Alpha Kappa crowd at the next mixer, and I had high hopes for some new pootie tang. There were lots of pretty faces at UT, and I was the fuckin’ Longhorns quarterback. Not that I could get too serious about anyone, as I was fixing to make a scout connect any day now. Anyways.
“Hey,” I said into the phone, trying—no, not even trying—to sound breezy and cool. It occurred to me that she might've just watched the game in a bar, and could be calling to congratulate me. But then, that was ridiculous. Ash was under twenty-one in a college town, and had also never demonstrated an interest in football. Plus, she'd never called me before—it was then that I realized something might be wrong.
“Landon,” she rasped, and her voice proved my second theory. I held up a hand to the noisy locker room crew and made my way out into the cement-lined hallway, head ducked in the direction away from the press.
“What? What is it?” I strained to hear the sounds in her background, but all I got was silence. She was speaking softly. “Where are you? Is everything okay?”
“No. No, everything is not okay. Where the fuck is the Pastor?” She seemed to spit out the name. I'd never heard Ash talk like this, with this callow edge in her voice. It rankled me.
“I don't know,” I started, trying to put on my most soothing voice. “I haven't heard from him in a week or more. Will you tell me what's wrong? You sound upset.”
There was silence on the line for a second, in which I thought I could hear her thinking. Deciding whether or not to believe me. Deciding whether or not to clue me in. Some belligerent ESPN reporter took the opportunity to ping a paper football in my direction, grinning like a maniac when I turned around. I frowned. The press could wait.
“He hit my mom,” she said, finally. “I came home today and the house was trashed, and half of her face was knocked in. Four stitches. We just left the ER.” She sounded so tired. So sad. The anger started there, as I felt my jaw set. And the worst thing? It didn't take me more than a second to believe her.
“I need to know if he's ever done something like this before,” she continued. Some of my teammates were emerging from the locker room now, gussied up like show ponies. The press queue seemed to rev at each entrance. I wandered further down the hallway. “Landon? Please.”
“A long time ago,” I heard myself say, without having planned or prepared to speak. The anger began to mingle with worry, and doubt, and an alien feeling: guilt. And I was guilty. I was a participant. I had known, all this time, that he was capable of cruelty. For he'd been cruel to my mother. He'd been cruel to me.
“When my mother was alive, they had fights sometimes.” I felt my fists clench and unclench. I was going to lose her forever. This was how it was going to happen. “Well, we all had fights. He got back from his tour and was just so different. When he got mad, he'd slap her sometimes. If I got in the way, he'd get me.” I tried not to imagine Ashleigh's face as she processed this. I'd never told anyone any of this before. Not Zora, not Denny, not Clay.
“Oh, Jesus,” she breathed. I took the non-screaming as an invitation to continue.
“When she died, that was when he got really religious. Leased the property in the city. Started drumming up 'religious support.' He told me that he was a changed man. He asked me to forgive him for all of his bullshit. And Ash, I really did believe he'd changed. Nothing's happened in years.” I wanted to pull her into me, across the telephone line. I wished I could rest my fingers in her hair. “I truly, truly did believe it. I figured he deserved a second chance, you know? He is my Dad.”
The line fell silent. Behind me, the locker room procession had basically ended. The stadium would be half-near empty by now, the boys well on their way to getting wrecked at any of a dozen post-game parties. None of that sounded appealing to me, now.
“I'm so sorry.” And thank God the press had retreated, 'cause for just the third time in a decade I felt tears bubbling up in my throat. But it was too hard to think about our whole miserable family history without remembering...her. “I'm so sorry,” I repeated again, desperation and anger and grief all souping together, drowning out what remained of my post-game adrenaline. “I'm so sorry,” I chanted a final time.
“Landon,” my step-sister said, her own voice strangely bereft of hatred and fury. If I were in her place, I think I might've wanted to throw lightning bolts. “I'm gonna give you the address to my sister's place, okay? It's near Kerbey Lane. I want you to pick me up.”
“Why?” I blubbered. In the olden days, dudes had carried around hankies to prevent just this kind of gross-face situation. Scanning the area for any unexpected street traffic, I ducked my head below my collar, tried to sop up some of the nonsense.
“You're going to buy me a thousand drinks, is why,” she said.
The anger changed form—and became fear.
