Authors: Lauren Gilley
“Injured?” he feigned insult.
“Is it?”
“No.”
They picked up the pace again, Jordan taking long, but slow strides to keep even with her. She wasn’t a slouch, but she was a head shorter than him and there was no making up for length of leg.
The campus was relatively quiet. Students were enjoying the early evening sun on benches and sprawled across the grass, but it wasn’t a bustling time of day and the only traffic here off the streets was of the golf cart variety.
“What made you late for class?” Jordan asked thinking that, if nothing else, he ought to have an explanation for his inappropriate afternoon stroll with a student.
There was a fine mist of excitement lacing the air she sucked in before she launched into an explanation. “One of my English profs asked me if I could log some time in the writing center. I was a little afraid he’d change his mind, so I went upstairs to talk to the head of the department about it. I know I should have come straight to class,” she said like she thought she was in trouble, “but I was hoping that since you and I, well…” She trailed off and the color came back into her cheeks.
“Oh,” he said, a touch surprised. “I thought you were gonna say since HPS is such a gimme class, you didn’t think it would matter. But apparently there’s a ‘we’ I need to know about.”
“I only meant,” she said, “that since we have a bit of a rapport, you might cut me some slack.”
“We have a rapport?” He was enjoying this waaaay too much.
“Do you have dinner with all your students?” she countered, one dark brow arched knowingly.
He was doing it again: watching her and not paying attention to his own feet, but it was worth it to see her go crimson when he delivered his next line. “Only the hot ones.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, and rolled her eyes in a way that was reminiscent of Jessica. For some reason, the similarity didn’t bother Jordan like he thought it might have. “Your professionalism is astounding.”
So is your ass
. “Thanks,” he said instead, “I work hard at it.”
“Uh-huh.”
A tight knot of girls was walking toward them and this time, Jordan had the grace to walk around them rather than through them. “Since we have this rapport,” he said once he was alongside Ellie again, “I wanna know why you’re so allergic to the gym.”
She reached up and raked her fingers through her bangs, exhaling in a rush that he figured had nothing to do with exertion. “I’d rather not say. You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“I just ran into a guy for you. It can’t be more stupid than that.”
She cut him a glance from the corner of her eye.
“It’s not that I’m lazy.”
“’Kay.”
“The treadmill would do me some good.”
He didn’t see how, but whatever.
“But there’s - ” Her hands clasped together, black nails digging into her palms. “There’s someone who spends a lot of time there who I really want to avoid.”
Jordan knew, with a pang of disappointment, that she was talking about a male someone. He didn’t know her, not truly, but he hadn’t figured her for the kind who hid from old boyfriends. He also hadn’t figured her for the type who dated gym rats, but clearly she had. “Old boyfriend?” he asked, and heard the flatness in his voice.
“Old asshole who made my life miserable, more like. I – okay,” she sighed, “I know it sounds pathetic, but I really can’t stand listening to that dumbbell-for-brains trying to make snide comments.”
“So give it back to him.”
“I try, but he doesn’t understand my insults.”
Jordan chuckled. “How’s an English major end up with a meatneck anyway?”
The smile she tossed him was almost wistful, touched with regret and memory. “We’re all allowed to be sixteen and stupid, right?”
Jordan had been. He’d been sixteen and invincible, high off the rush of calling someone “his,” drunk on the taste of her skin. Yeah, he could relate, all the way down to the retrospective shame and self-loathing.
“Right.”
Ellie’s face was stamped with regret and embarrassment, and Jordan was almost glad she looked away because he couldn’t seem to turn his own head and spare them both the awkwardness of remembered mistakes.
A breeze ruffled through the crepe myrtles along the sidewalk and it carried with it the first breath of cooler air, the hint of a fall to come. Jordan watched it play with all of Ellie’s dark, gleaming hair and knew his motives were selfish and not charitable. Helping her would just be a bonus – an excuse to give the other coaches.
“What time is your first class of the day?” he asked her, already mentally kicking himself.
“Nine-thirty.”
“I work my guys at eight-thirty on Wednesdays. If you come walk laps around the track, I’ll sign your chart for you.”
Her gray eyes went saucer wide.
“Does that work?”
“Yeah.” A disbelieving smile began to creep across her face. “Are you allowed to do that?”
“You gonna rat me out?” He felt his own smile tugging.
“Absolutely not.”
**
Darkfall was at least three hours away, but their shadows were growing longer across the concrete, the black stripes of their legs looking entangled as they walked side-by-side.
Ellie knew exactly what the effervescent bubbling of excitement in her belly was, but she was in full-on denial mode. Just because she hadn’t felt it in a while didn’t mean she’d become incapable, and rather than fill her with hope, it made her nervous. So she was going to pretend she felt perfectly normal, that her eyes weren’t scanning every detail of his face and picking out all the parts of it she liked. She was going to act as if his eyes weren’t making her heart beat faster.
“What are you planning on doing with your degree?” he asked as they began their fifth lap. “I only ask because I’m not thrilled with mine.”
It was an innocent question on his part, but Ellie couldn’t squelch the frown that it elicited. “It’s okay,” she said. “My family’s been asking me that on a routine basis. Saying they’re ‘not thrilled’ would be a major understatement.”
“Gotcha.”
“I want to be a writer,” she said, and just saying the words aloud eased some of the tension thinking of her parents had created. “Correction: I’m
going to be
a writer.”
He was quiet a moment, their shoes sounding loud on the concrete, and Ellie wondered which reaction he’d have. Everyone – save Paige – who she’d ever shared her dream with had responded one of two ways: confusion over her choice, or an insistence that he or she was also a great writer. No one could ever just be happy for her – again, save Page.
“Newspaper, magazine, or book?” he asked and surprised her.
“Books. Novels.”
“Ambitious.”
“Dedicated,” she countered.
“There’s a difference I take it.” He was wearing a barely perceptible smile that just touched the corners of his mouth.
“I don’t wanna be famous,” she said, “I just love writing. And if I can make some money doing what I love, well…that’s a no brainer.”
There was a glint in his eyes that gave away his trap before he laid it out all nice and flat, smooth and cool. “What do you write about?”
Ellie bit back a grin. “About people. Relationships. Drama. Universal understandings.”
His smile stretched, just a fraction, as he stared ahead of them down the sidewalk. “So no cheap porn?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Good answer.” He nodded to himself and reached up in what looked like an unconscious gesture to push his wanting-to-curl hair off his forehead. Still watching the sidewalk, he asked, “You’re not anything like other girls your age, are you?”
“My mom tells me ‘no.’”
“Good. That’s a good thing.”
Ellie could pretend all she wanted, but the sad truth was that she was rapidly developing a crush on her PE coach.
8
A
visit to her gynecologist on Monday had not smoothed Jo’s tattered nerves. She was, yes, officially pregnant, but her husband was still being an official ass.
Tuesday night, Beth sat her down after dinner and shared wisdom that Jo wanted to doubt, but knew she couldn’t. “Tam has a very damaged little soul,” she said, and patted Jo’s hand on the table. “Even though we know him and love him, we can’t always know how he’s going to handle certain things.”
Jo had hated the sound of the words: like Tam was some animal whose behavior patterns they were trying to predict. But she was tired of sleeping back-to-back with him and could no longer pretend that his glacial cold-shoulder routine wasn’t torturing her.
“He expects you to either fight with him, or drop it,” Beth said. “His father beat him and his mother never cared enough to stand up for anything. Kill him with kindness. Love him enough not to let him get away with this.”
And so Wednesday, not at all sure if it was the right approach, she set out to do just that.
Tam was upstairs in the guest bedroom that had once been shared by Mike and Walt, studying. The desk was a hulking metal contraption Randy had found at a yard sale eons ago, its heavy legs full of drawers where the boys had housed paper, pencils, and little tokens of childhood: a love letter from Jenny Bryant in the third grade for Walt, a record breaking spitball for Mike. Beth had covered the coffee-stained and cigarette-burned top with contact paper patterned like the surface of a globe and it was yellow and flaking now, curling up at the corners. It faced the window and late evening sun fell in golden panels through the glass and across Tam as he took notes from a textbook.
Jo had showered and no longer smelled like vet clinic. She was in old yoga pants and one of his t-shirts. She lingered in the doorway a long moment, knowing that, whatever the subject, no textbook should have carved such grooves between his brows. He looked like a little boy and like an old man at the same time. With the late summer sun pouring over him, she could envision the way those fleeting lines on his face would deepen with time, the way his thick, glossy dark hair would silver.
Damaged
, her mother had called him, and he was. Jo forgot sometimes, when things were good, when he was his laughing, sweet self; it was easy to pretend there weren’t demons there.
“How was school?” she asked softly as she crossed the old, mashed carpet.
A flicker of his dark lashes told her he’d heard, but he didn’t turn to face her. “It was fine.”
Undeterred, she walked up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. When she traced her fingers along the cords at the base of his neck, he tensed. “You know, I heard that non-traditional students always have the best grades. Job, stable home life, direction…it’s good for the As and Bs, ya know.”