Authors: Joyce Scarbrough
Mr. Christopher put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Did you see the new arrivals, Hazel? There’s one by Barbara Kingsolver I think you’ll really like.”
Her whole attitude changed, as if she had morphed into another person before our eyes. She smiled at Mr. Christopher and took his arm. “Oh, I love the way she writes, and I always learn something new from her books.” She paused to giggle. “And her sex scenes are smoking hot.”
Mr. Christopher threw us an uncomfortable look as they walked away.
“I hope he’s safe with her,” I said. “You think I need to follow them in case he needs Zombie Girl’s protection?”
Annalee laughed. “She’s harmless as long as she doesn’t think you’re in the MCP. Get her talking about books and she forgets her paranoia for a little while. Did you find Lew?”
“Stalking me again, huh?” His voice made Annalee and me both turn around a little too quickly.
“Conceited much, Triple C?” I tried to sound scornful. “We’re just hungry. And broke.”
He laughed, then his eyebrows went up in surprise. “Wow, Annalee. If you do your hair like that for the next chess tournament, you’re gonna wreak havoc on your opponent’s concentration.”
She blushed—no surprise there—but when she looked up at Lew through the long eyelashes I had so recently enhanced for her, I almost gasped.
Annalee didn’t just have a crush on Lew. She loved
him.
Chapter Twenty-two
J
avier said he had somewhere to be and left the library in a hurry. Good thing, because there was no way the four of us could’ve fit into Lew’s Corvette. Annalee and I barely squeezed into the passenger side together on the ride to the Medianoche Mezzanine. Since she was shorter than me, she was the logical choice to sit on the console next to Lew—
right
next to Lew. Yeah, I’m talking squeezed up against him. But I guess it was actually for the best, seeing as how he spent the entire drive talking to her about chess. They definitely shouldn’t have had a problem hearing each other.
I kept hoping the intricacies of chess strategy would miraculously become clear to me, but no such luck. Maybe Flo and her crew considered it an exercise for me in learning to deal with jealousy and inferiority because I definitely felt like a clueless third wheel. So much for granting my wish as a reward for my good deeds.
By the time we arrived at the restaurant, I was practically sulking. But the funny thing was, I wasn’t mad at Annalee at all. In fact, mixed in with my jealousy and hurt feelings, I actually felt proud of her for the way she was coming out of her shell because of Lew’s attention.
After we got our sandwiches and snagged one of the tables outside the restaurant, Lew and Annalee finally noticed that I wasn’t saying much.
“Sorry, Gwen,” he said as he sat on one side of the table. Beside Annalee, of course. “All this chess talk must be boring you to death.”
Annalee flushed. “I’m sorry too. We’ll shut up now and talk about whatever you want to talk about.”
Great, now they pitied me. A little sprinkle of humiliation added to my emotional gumbo.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m more interested in talking to this sandwich right now anyway.” I pretended to savor a bite. “God, it’s
so
good.”
Lew smiled. “I knew you’d like it. Not too spicy?”
“No, just right,” I said.
Maybe a touch too much wood pulp and a little heavy on the corrugation.
Annalee took a bite of her own sandwich and rolled her eyes with ecstasy. “That’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I can’t believe I’ve lived in Miami all my life and never had one of these.”
“Javi used to beg his mom to make them for us when we were kids,” Lew said.
“You think he’ll pass his test tomorrow?” Annalee asked.
Lew shrugged. “He should be okay if he can get through the math part. We’ve been working on that the most.”
“He sure took off in a hurry from the library,” I said. “Hot date?”
“More than one probably.” He laughed as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I gave him a midnight curfew so he wouldn’t fall asleep during the exam, but he’ll be doing good if he makes it home before three.”
I’d actually felt a little slighted when Javier left us at the library without so much as a glance in my direction, especially after the way Lew had made such a big deal over Annalee’s appearance. I probably should’ve taken it as an omen to my night of invisibility.
For the next hour, I tried not to let them see me pout while they made token attempts every now and then to include me in their conversation, which only made me feel more pathetic. When Lew finally said we needed to leave, I couldn’t wait to get away.
“Why don’t you take me home first?” I suggested as we walked to the car.
“Annalee’s house is closer,” he said. “We’ll drop her off and then head to the Grove.”
She did a fair job of hiding her disappointment. “Oh, do you live in Coconut Grove too?”
He nodded as he opened the passenger door for us. “My dad wanted to stay on the water when we moved from Fisher Island last year.”
From the look on Annalee’s face, I could tell Fisher Island must be a pretty big deal around there. I was more interested in why they had moved and would’ve asked him about it if I hadn’t been stuck in my sinkhole of self pity. At least he hadn’t jumped at the chance to get rid of me so he could be alone with Annalee the way I’d expected. That small consolation allowed me to peek over the edge of my hole as we drove to Annalee’s apartment, but I slid back into the muck when he parked and got out with her.
“Be right back, Gwen,” he said, taking Annalee’s backpack from her when I let her out.
I turned to get back in the car, but I made the mistake of glancing at Annalee first. The look of happiness mixed with guilt on her face reminded me of how much this had to mean to her.
“Hey, tonight was fun,” I said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Her relieved smile made me glad I’d hidden my feelings, especially when she hugged me.
“Thanks for everything, Gwen.”
I watched them walk to the front of the apartment, Lew’s hand casually on her back as they disappeared into the shadows of the porch. At least there was no porch light so I couldn’t torture myself further by watching him kiss her goodnight. I thought about getting out of the car and running away before he came back, but I didn’t want to have to explain it to him later.
At least this made me want to get back to my search for BOSSMAN so I could leave as soon as possible. In fact, I intended to spend all night online looking for him as soon as I got home. Maybe this date was a message from Flo that I needed to focus on my assignment and stop playing stupid romance games.
When Lew got back in the car, I discovered that my lack of anger at Annalee didn’t extend to him as well, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t as if he’d led me on or done anything to suggest we were anything more than friends. But that didn’t keep me from wanting to zomjitsu chop him upside his neatly-groomed head.
“I wanted to make sure she got inside safely,” he said as he started the car. “She said her mom should be home from work soon.”
I stared straight ahead. “Great.”
He didn’t seem to notice my snippiness. “Mind if we make a little detour before I take you home?”
“Detour to where?” I said, still not looking at him.
“You’ll see when we get there. Don’t worry, it’s not far from your house.”
I turned to see if his face gave any hint as to what he had in mind, but he only looked back at me expectantly.
“Fine. Whatever.” My gaze returned to the street in front of us. “But I can’t be out too late.”
He kept asking me trivial questions about school as we drove, but all he got were one-word replies. By the time we reached Coconut Grove, he had to have noticed that I was pissed about something. When he didn’t ask me what was wrong, I figured it meant he didn’t care. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t either. No such luck.
“Okay, where are we going?” I said when he turned east on Grand Avenue.
“To my house.” He gave me a smile as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
The momentary hope that flooded my zombie heart disappeared just as quickly when something horrible occurred to me: what if he was taking me there because he thought I was easy? Gwen was supposed to have been a hooker, after all. Maybe he’d only been nice to me because he wanted to—
“You promised me a book discussion, remember?” he said, yanking me back to reality.
“Oh, right.” I was relieved but still confused. “We could’ve talked about it earlier though. I’m sure Annalee’s read Gatsby too.”
“I know, but you were a good sport all night about all the chess talk, so I wanted to save this for you and me.” He looked at me and smiled again. “And there’s somewhere special I want to show you too.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage while I flailed helplessly in the emotional tide that washed over me—excitement that he wanted to be alone with me, guilt over the way I’d doubted him earlier, and nervous speculation about how the night would end.
He turned down a driveway leading to the gated entrance of an estate on Bayshore Drive that made Scott’s place look like low-income housing. My home with Vanessa and David had been nothing to sneeze at, but we’d been living in squalor compared to the Stanton estate. The stories about Lew’s family hadn’t been exaggerated. He was straight-up loaded.
He opened the gate with a remote mounted above the car’s rearview mirror, then he drove down a circular driveway with a lighted fountain in the middle. We parked on the far side next to a brick walkway lined with palm trees.
“Let’s go,” he said with a wink that made me ridiculously happy.
Despite my wobbly legs, I managed to get out of the car and go around to where he was waiting for me at the top of the walkway, which I could now see led down to a private beach.
“This way.” He inclined his head toward the opening. “Careful on the steps at the end. The sand makes them slippery sometimes.”
I didn’t trust my voice any more than I did my legs, so I nodded and followed him silently down the path. When we reached the steps, he led the way to a wooden boardwalk that curved around the beach toward a boathouse. He stopped just past it where the boardwalk branched off into a pier stretching out onto Biscayne Bay.
“I know it looks narrow,” he said, “but there’s plenty of room for two people to walk on it. I can hold your hand if it’ll make you feel safer.”
Safer
was definitely not what it would make me feel, but I nodded. “Okay, thanks.”
Because I spent the next few minutes marveling over the electric current passing from his hand to mine, I didn’t notice until we were halfway down the pier that there was a covered deck at the end. When we reached it, he stopped and let go of my hand to flip a switch mounted on one of the roof supports. A light came on at the corner of the deck and revealed a wooden swing swaying gently in the breeze blowing in off the bay.
“This is where I come when I want to be by myself and get away from my family’s craziness,” he said. “Sometimes I stay out here all night.”
I was once again speechless. Not only was I afraid I might squeal like a fangirl because he’d brought me to his sanctuary, the main reason I couldn’t speak was because I recognized Peacock Park off to my right about a quarter mile away. The light Lew had just turned on was the one I’d seen the night before. The one that had reminded me of Gatsby and Daisy.
Maybe Flo had granted my wish after all.
Chapter Twenty-three
W
e sat beside each other in the swing with our shoulders touching. I considered telling him that swings made me even more nervous than narrow piers so he would hold my hand again, but I didn’t think he’d fall for it.
“So tell me what you thought of Gatsby.” He turned toward me slightly, his elbow resting on the back of the swing. “And I want you to be honest.”
I wasn’t sure I remembered how to do that anymore. Fortunately, I really liked the book.
“Okay, I honestly wanted to slap all the characters except Nick,” I said. “I ended up feeling sorry for Gatsby, but he was really just as stupid as everybody else. I suppose Fitzgerald wrote them like that on purpose to prove his point about rich people being clueless.”
Lew nodded. “Exactly, and I agree. I love the way he exposes the shallowness of wealth, their prevailing moral deficit and how quickly they can be knocked off their self-made pedestals.”
Okay, wow. That was some deep stuff, but I actually understood exactly what he meant and agreed with all of it because of personal experience. Of course, I couldn’t tell him that.
“Yeah, what you said. And I did feel a little sorry for Gatsby when Daisy broke his heart after everything he did to get her back, but since she was basically a whore, he kinda deserved it. I guess the thing I liked the most was Nick and the way he saw through all of it and had sense enough to get the hell away from them.”
A smile spread slowly across his face. “Do you really mean that?”
“Sure. Why would I lie to you?”
About this anyway.
“Nick is the main reason I love that book,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m cast as him in the whacked-out version of the plot that masquerades as my life.”
Yeah, this was way more than just a book discussion. I knew that if I was ever gonna get him to open up, now was my chance. As casually as I could manage, I put my hand on his forearm.
“Tell me about your family, Triple C. What is it about them that drives you crazy?”
He stared out at the water. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear about it.”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t. And you must need to talk about it or you wouldn’t have brought me out here.”
I could tell he was fighting with himself over it, so I scrabbled around in my head for something to convince him he could trust me.
“What if we make a deal?” I said. “I’ll answer a question for you, then I get to ask you one. Ask me anything you want to know.”
He looked at me intently a second then sighed. “Okay. What made you decide to get off the streets?”
Oh, crap. Maybe I should’ve thought this through a little more. I tried to stall by staring up at the night sky, as if I was pondering how to phrase such a deeply emotional revelation. Within seconds, I was rewarded with a flash of deceptive brilliance so perfect that I had to wonder if Flo was my wingman.
I turned to look at him with all the fake earnestness I could manage. “My life’s never been perfect, but it didn’t suck quite as bad until my mom decided to run off with a piece-of-shit meth head and I got sent to a state group home where I met my friend Jada. She came from a rich family like yours, but she kept running away because her dad was a drunk and her mother was a selfish bitch. For some reason, we hit it off from the start and were like sisters in no time. Things were actually pretty good until she got murdered by a pervert who worked at the home as a chaperone.”
“Oh my God,” he said. “Was he arrested for it?”
I put a hand over my eyes, shamelessly playing on his sympathy.
“They never found her body. I knew he did it, but nobody listened to me. They said she just ran away again. I decided I’d better take off before he made me disappear too, and I ended up turning tricks on the street so I wouldn’t starve.”
I looked up at him and almost managed to squeeze out a tear.
“I know it’s gotta be hard for you to understand how I could do something like that. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.”
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You did what you had to do to survive. It just makes me admire you more.”
I gave him a brave smile. Nope, not a shred of decency left.
“Anyway,” I said, “after a year of that, I woke up one morning in the filthy warehouse I’d been living in and found a rat gnawing on my finger, and I realized I didn’t have any more of a life than if he’d killed me. So I turned myself into the cops and decided that if I got sent back to the home, I’d fight instead of running. I knew it’s what Jada would want me to do.”
He took my hand. “I’m glad you got a good family this time.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “And I feel like I owe it to them to do good in school and stay out of trouble. That’s why I tried to pick a better crowd to hang out with from the start. But when I hear about stuff like what happened to that Caitlin girl, I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut and playing nice. I guess it reminds me too much of how I lost Jada.”
“I understand how you feel,” he said. “I know what it’s like to lose the person you’re closest to in the world.”
Okay, this was it. My fingers tightened around his. “Who did you lose?”
He looked at our hands and hesitated, but only for a second.
“My twin brother committed suicide last year—eleven months, twenty-four days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes ago. I come out here every night at the exact time I found him hanging from the tree in our back yard where we built a tree house with Javi when we were ten.”
He looked up at me, and I recognized the same anguish I’d felt when I lost Cassie reflected in his eyes. I forgot all about my petty jealousy, my lame attempts at flirting, and the deceitfulness I’d just used to play on his sympathies. His pain was
real
, and it was the only thing that mattered to me at that moment. My arms went around him before I had time to think about it or worry about what he would think it meant.
“I’m so sorry, Lew. I know how bad it hurts, and I’d do anything if I could make it stop for both of us.”
I could tell the embrace had surprised him, but he must’ve heard the sincerity and grief in my voice, because he returned the hug and said, “Thank you, Gwen. It feels good to have somebody who understands.”
I pulled away to look at his face. “Why did he do it, Lew? Can you talk about it?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. But maybe soon.”
“It’s okay.” I put my hand on his cheek. “I’ll listen whenever you’re ready.”
I honestly hadn’t meant the gesture to be anything but comforting, but I sensed the change in him immediately. Even in the darkness on the deck, I could see the pain in his eyes replaced with softness as they looked into mine, and I felt his breathing double in speed.
“I can’t believe how wrong I was about you when we first met,” he said. “It’s always been hard for me to trust anybody, and it got worse after Drew died. I didn’t think I’d ever find anyone I could talk to like this.” He took my hand from his face and held it in both of his. “It’s almost like we were destined to meet.”
“Maybe we were,” I said. “They say everything happens for a reason.”
Maybe I had to die so I could come into your life.
“Whatever the reason,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
His hands encircled my waist, but he made no move to pull me closer. I could tell it wasn’t because he was nervous or anything like that, it was because he was leaving the choice up to me. I didn’t make him wait long for my decision.
My arms went around his neck, and I could tell he knew it wasn’t for comfort this time. When he pulled me to him, I felt his heart beating hard enough to cover the stillness of the dead one in my chest. I forgot to close my eyes because I couldn’t stop watching the way his lids descended slowly over the blue of his eyes as he bent to kiss me.
I’d never had any feelings for the guys I’d dated when I was Jada, but I still had kissed more than my share of them. Nobody had impressed me much, but a couple had been respectable. Lew put them all to shame.
And although the rest of the world disappeared while I was lost in the wonder of his lips against mine, I didn’t miss the strength I felt in the arms holding me so tightly that I would’ve had trouble breathing if I’d still needed to do it. The long-sleeved Oxfords he always wore buttoned up to the neck were more than just a personal fashion statement. They were hiding muscles he clearly didn’t want anybody to know he had.
When the kiss ended, I pulled away to look at his face. “You sure kiss great for a nerd, Triple C. Care to explain that?”
He threw back his head and laughed for a good ten seconds, then he turned to face the water with his arm behind me on the swing. “I didn’t realize intelligence was an impediment to knowing how to kiss, but I guess I should be flattered by the praise.”
“You’ve been holding out on me in more ways than one.” I put a hand on one of his biceps. “Am I supposed to believe you got these guns from lifting all those heavy chess pieces?”
“Hey, those pewter sets can be pretty hefty.”
“You’re not gonna tell me the truth, are you?”
He shook his head. “Can’t talk about that right now either, but your inquiry is duly noted.” He turned toward me again and touched my chin. “Besides, if I’m using my mouth for talking, I can’t use it for the other activity I had in mind.”
Forget it. I’d grill him later.
“Shut up, Triple C. You talk too much.”