Authors: Lauren Gilley
At the free weights, there were five where there should have been three. Jordan counted his guys, plus Shanae who’d just left his class, and some surfer-looking blonde dude admiring himself in the mirror while he did bicep curls.
“Coach!” Shanae was the one who noticed him first, a big suckup smile on her face, ten pound dumbbells dragging her arms down to her sides as her concentration broke.
Jonathan and Anton tossed him a more subdued, “Coach,” and Lane continued looking chummy with Surfer Dude.
“Guys.” Jordan kept his tone neutral and flat. He didn’t like to play the overbearing adult – technically couldn’t because this gym was open to the campus at large – and hoped he could bore the other two away. Or that they’d take the subtle hint that this was a team workout. But he ditched his bag and sweatshirt, got comfy on a bench, and Shanae and Surfer Dude were still there.
“Lane.” He put a layer of coach on his voice. “Swap the thirties for twenties. Come on.”
“It’s cool.” Lane shot him a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. “I can handle the weight. ’Sides, Kyle’s got the twenties.” A jerk of his head indicated Surfer Dude.
“Yeah, well, ‘handle’ isn’t the problem. I want you doing three sets of thirty with the twenties.”
“But Kyle - ”
“I’m sure Kyle’s a reasonable guy.” Jordan twitched a humorless smile at Surfer Dude. “Am I right? You can let your buddy use the twenties for team training, can’t you?”
His hair was the kind of messy that took hours of practice and gallons of paste to perfect. Jordan used gel to take the curl out of his, and God knew Tam spent enough time getting his spikes just right, but this dyed and highlighted, feathered, layered, sculpted and tossed mess of blonde on top of Kyle’s head was ridiculous. He turned away from the mirror, and whatever solace he found in his own reflection, glancing over at Jordan through a carefully constructed fringe of bangs, a puckered up, pretty boy frown on his overly tan face.
“What?”
Oh, fun. He had one of those
totally, dude, like, no way
voices. Worse than nails on a chalkboard.
“You’re friends with Lane? Can you let him use the twenties?”
His eyes were red-rimmed and glassy – he was into pot at the very least – and they weren’t synchronized when he blinked. His lip curled up. “He can wait. I’m usin’ ‘em.”
“Kyle,” Shanae said. “Dude.”
“What?”
“It’s cool.” Lane’s smile was almost nervous. “I can wait.”
Something was off. Like the fast pluck of a taut violin string, Jordan felt a high, humming note of unpleasantness strike up in the back of his head. A warning. He glanced around at his other two runners; Anton was looking at Kyle like he was something he’d scraped off his shoe.
“Hey,” Jordan said quietly, just to Anton, “what’s going on here that I’m not getting?”
“Dunno why Lane’s friends with this asshole.”
“No accounting for taste.”
“You don’t know?”
He snuck a glance at the other three – Lane was avoiding eye contact, Kyle was staring at him stupidly, and Shanae’s eyes skittered away when he looked at her – and the violin sounded in his head again. “Know what?”
It didn’t matter if his voice was low, there were too many people in too small a space and there was no way Anton’s response wasn’t heard by all. “Guy used to go out with Ellie,” he said, and Jordan felt like he’d been kicked.
His attention was drawn unwillingly to Kyle again – to his feathered blonde hair, his doobie-red eyes and Affliction t-shirt – and he searched for something, anything, that might have attracted Ellie. He was good-looking, he guessed – for girls who were into that super tan, California thing (and who was he kidding? Every girl was into that). But Ellie was a book girl, a writer, who baked cakes and blushed at the drop of a hat and who was in love with a creaky old house; who wrote love letters and who’d been in tears because she didn’t want to be the one who cared so much that she got hurt.
A stupid mistake
, she’d called the guy. Jordan had concocted a mental picture of a much older, more sophisticated kind of manipulator…but this guy…
“Huh,” he said to no one in particular, face stiff with the effort of remaining expressionless. “Okay, so,
anyway
- ”
“You know Ellie?” Kyle interrupted, and Jordan hated the sound of his voice. Just like he hated the little half smirk that lifted up his tan face. Everyone had history – and he should have been grateful that Ellie’s history had led her to him – but there was nothing grateful about the toxic bundle of overly macho jealousy that was building inside him.
Lane stared at the toes of his sneakers, a blush rising along his high cheekbones.
“Yeah,” Jordan said. Casual. Unworried. He bit down hard on all his brand spanking new
boyfriend
outrage and shrugged. “Now, where are we on that whole getting out of my team workout thing?”
Shanae set the weights she was using back on the rack against the window and backed away slowly as if she was hoping to escape unscathed. Kyle, though, wouldn’t have been worth avoiding if he wasn’t a giant pain in the ass. He grinned. “You bonin’ her?”
How was this even happening? “That’d be none of your damn business.”
“Ha!” Kyle’s laugh was a hard blast of sound that drew eyes from across the gym. “That totally means ‘yes.’”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Anton suggested in a low hiss.
Kyle ignored him, still smiling. “Dude,” he said too loudly, “if you’re gonna bang a student, at least make sure she’s
fun
.”
There were girls who would have written Kyle off as a loser and moved on. Ellie knew he was a loser, but she’d internalized his insults, obviously; her trembling doubt and caution were unshakeable, and here was the source material.
“If you like ‘em young,” Kyle said, sneering and delighted with himself, “I got girls you could call. They, ya know, actually know what they’re doing.”
There were a dozen things Jordan could say, wanted to say, but defending her would only hurt the both of them. He wasn’t so far past logic that he couldn’t avoid such an amateur snare as this.
“Lane,” he said, the picture of neutrality, “would you please explain to your friend Kyle that his suggesting that I might be having an affair with a student is not only offensive, but going to get his gym privileges revoked? Could you do that for me?”
Hint taken: Kyle opened his hands and the dumbbells crashed down to the mat, somehow missing his feet. As he left, smirking, Lane was crimson all the way up his neck and to his hairline.
“Guys.” Jordan got to his feet and motioned for Jonathan and Anton to fall in place at the mirror. He went to Lane, close enough that the stink of the kid’s Axe body spray threatened to gag him. “You’re gonna pay for this,” he said so low it picked Lane’s head up, his blue eyes miserable with guilt. “I don’t know how yet, but you will.”
“Yes, Coach.”
**
As the dark rushed up to meet the day just a little sooner every night, as time compressed, as warmth and color left the earth, Jo felt each and every minute down deep in her bones, pulling at her, slowing her, keeping her pale and baggy-eyed. Her mother and sister had told her a “little fatigue” was common, but – maybe it was the restless days at work on her feet, maybe it was the worry over money, maybe it was the thing Delta had suggested at the bowling alley: that she felt this need to take on the roles of all the women Tam had never had in his life – there was nothing “little” about the exhaustion that had its claws sunk in her. She was irritable, hungry and then nauseas, falling asleep on her feet and restless at night, horny all the time and poised at the edge of tears for no reason. She was a bundle of emotions and impulses that had never before occupied her all at once like this.
“Maybe because you’re kind of, well, small,”
Tam had suggested.
“Maybe it’s hitting you harder.”
She didn’t know or care; she just wanted some caffeine and a backrub. And perhaps a chauffeur because the thought of driving home instead of taking a nap behind the wheel was one of those ridiculous things that brought tears to her eyes. She could only hope, as she started across the parking lot of Honeygood toward her car, that Tam had actually listened when she’d begged off on her birthday.
October always heralded an unseasonable cold snap, the kind that came on so sudden and with such fierceness it took her breath. Today was a part of that snap, the wind the stuff of teen horror flicks as it sent leaves and candy bar wrappers rattling down the gutter, plastered her light fleece around her hips. A low bank of clouds scudded across the tree tops, sunlight a thin, blush line flirting along the horizon. It smelled like wood smoke, the late afternoon crouched down beneath the first sinister caress of fall, and it sent a collage of indoor, warm and cozy aesthetic images waltzing through her mind
An uncelebrated birthday wouldn’t be so bad
. Sweats and a bowl full of noodles wrapped up in front of a movie. Maybe she could talk Tam into that backrub –
“You’re Jo Wales, right?”
A man’s voice hit her, struck her hard in the back of her head as she reached the door of her Mustang and sent a sudden, inexplicable fear shooting along her nerves. The sensation was so alien it snatched her breath. Jo had grown up fearless: sheltered by her parents and a pack of brothers, spoiled on the knowledge that she lived in this protected bubble. She wasn’t quick to scare, didn’t jump out of her skin every time a tree branch scraped up against the side of the house.
But as she whirled to face the man who’d stepped up behind her, all her inner braveness fled and a primal, hot and che
mical terror flooded her system. It left her shaking, her pulse thundering in the tiny vessels that laced her ears. She swore she could smell it – the stink of flight – seeping through her pores and reeking of burned toast.
He was tall and broad-shouldered
, long arms and heavy hands down at his sides. Her eyes went darting across his thinning, flat brown hair and unremarkable face, the worn seams of his flannel shirt and jeans, the paint spattered work boots.
“Miss?”
she recalled with a sudden lurch of recognition. This was the guy from the grocery store who’d found her coupons. Who’d stirred the deeply sleeping unease inside her.
The wind pressed her up against her car with a sharp shove, its bite cutting straight through her fleece and making her shiver
. Alarms were going off in her head – car horns and air raid sirens and the whole bit – but she braced a hand against the Mustang’s roof and asked, “Can I help you?” because she didn’t want to think that pregnancy had turned her into a candyass.
He rubbed at the stubble along his jaw with one big hand, meeting her gaze in a way that felt too familiar. “Yeah. I been trying to reach you.”
The hangup calls.
Somehow she knew. Somewhere, deep down under layers of denial, she’d known it that night at Kroger, and she
knew it here now; but she kept leaning against her car, the wind snatching at her hair, and pretended the truth that was staring at her with piggish brown eyes would go away.
“You’re her, right?” He asked. “Jo? Jo
Wales
?”
She swallowed the tight knot that was forming in her throat. “Why were you trying to get ahold of me?” Her tone was polite, even if un
der the fear, a sharp, tangy rage was building to think that she’d been stalked.
His head turned, gaze sweeping out across the afternoon traffic crawling past out on the highway,
and he presented her with his profile; Jo couldn’t deny her suspicions any longer. It was his nose: nothing about the rest of his face resembled his son’s at all, but that nose, the little roman bend to it…
“Hank,” she said before she could stop herself.
Hank Wales: Tam’s father.
When his eyes came back to her, they brought with them myriad
mental snapshots. The bruises on Tam’s arms. The faraway, undeserved sympathy in Melinda’s dying soliloquies. All those teenage dinners punctuated by the Ziploc bags and casserole tins of food Beth sent home with Tam. Standing an arm’s reach away from her was the man who’d abused the two people he should have loved most in the world. Who was the source of all Tam’s doubt and worry, rooted deep in his skull, pushing at all of Tam’s logic and accomplishment.