Waking Olivia (13 page)

I
'm not
sure why I did it. I guess I just assumed she'd be eating with us. And when I saw her all dressed up and discovered she had other plans, I was weirdly – I don’t know exactly what it was. Angry? Disappointed?

Whatever it was, it was illogical and I should have gone about it another way. I could have insisted that she eat a decent breakfast, or even have a snack when she came back to the room, but instead I behaved like a controlling dick, which has led us to the present moment: a dinner where Peter and my mother chitchat away while Olivia and I scowl at each other across the table in silence.

I stop her before she goes into my mother's room when the meal is over. "I'm sorry," I tell her.

"For what?" she demands.

"Tonight. I was out of line and I should have handled it better."

Her eyes flutter open in surprise, and then her mouth turns down at the corners unhappily and she looks away. Her awkwardness is something I could easily have predicted. When she feels threatened or mistreated, no one is more sure on their feet than Olivia, but show her the smallest amount of kindness and it's as if she's on a foreign planet.

It’s still fairly early but my mom keeps farm hours – a prompt bedtime, up before the sun. She’ll want to sleep soon but Olivia is far too nervous about tomorrow to lie down just yet.

I go to our shared door. My mother isn’t there, so she must be in the bathroom. “My mom goes to bed pretty early, so I guess you can watch TV in here,” I sigh.

“Don’t do me any favors,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “You make it sound like I’m someone’s pet ferret you have to watch.”

“Olivia, it’s not that, it’s just …” I stop and pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t like breaking the rules.”

“There’s a rule against watching TV?”

“In my room?” I laugh. “Yeah, there’s a rule.”

She follows me and stretches out in the double bed beside mine. We end up watching the last 45 minutes of some movie I’m completely incapable of focusing on. There are a lot of explosions, which I’m a fan of, but every time she moves I grow aware of her to the exclusion of all else.

She changed into a T-shirt and shorts earlier, so I can’t get her endless legs out of my peripheral view, no matter which direction I shift. And then she moves, and her T-shirt rides up, revealing a swath of toned stomach and I have to stifle a groan.

I had it pretty easy in high school and college. If I wanted something from a girl, I almost always got it. This must be my karmic payback, because I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something quite this much, yet I’m
absolutely
not allowed to have it.

When the movie ends, some trivia show comes on and we watch that too. The guy walks away with over $500,000, even though Olivia and I answered the questions before he did.

“We totally could’ve taken him,” she says sleepily, rolling over on the pillow to face me. Her shirt rides up again and it takes almost superhuman restraint not to look.

“Maybe you should go on game shows if the running thing doesn’t work out.”

She smiles. “Maybe I will.”

“What would you do if you won that money?”

“Spend it all on hookers and blow.”

“No, seriously, what would you do? Would you stay in school? Would you keep running?”

She’s quiet for so long that I begin to think she won’t answer. “I’d find my brother,” she finally says.

Her words take my insides and twist them in a tight grip. I don’t want to know this. I don’t want to know anything more about the soft side of Olivia than I do at the moment. I already know far too much.

“You realize you could probably find him just by going online,” I tell her.

She shakes her head, a motion so small it’s as if it wasn’t meant for me. “He could’ve found me if he’d wanted to.”

“So why do you need the money?” I ask.

“I just want to make sure he has what he needs,” she says quietly.

The look on her face when she speaks hurts my chest. “Do you really believe he’s still alive, Olivia?” I ask.

She looks away from me, her voice growing hard and intent. “My brother is crazy smart. And he was fast. He could outrun anyone. That’s how I know he got away.”

“Got away from what?”

“Anything that tried to stop him.”

“Like the thing you have nightmares about? Is that the thing?” I ask.

“He got away,” she says with finality, jumping to her feet, and she leaves the room.

After she leaves, I struggle to fall asleep. The look on her face and her insistence that her brother is okay haunt me. The way she clings to the idea feels desperate, perhaps even childlike. If I were to guess, I’d say that the reason she hasn’t looked for him has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn’t want her.

I’m still awake hours later, thinking about it. I’ve had my share of hard knocks. Everyone has. But nothing compared to what she’s suffered. I wish I could fix it. I wish I could fix every single wrong that’s been done to her. Get her out of that God-awful neighborhood, make the nightmares end, protect her from all the bad things that might lie in wait for her.

I wander into the room she shares with my mother and sit quietly at the desk. She looks so innocent when she’s asleep with her long lashes fanning her cheeks, her mouth slightly open.

“Why are you still up?” my mother asks.

“Worried,” I reply.

“She’s a sweet girl,” my mother sighs. “And she’s the only one who doesn’t realize it.”

My mother is right. Olivia seems to see only the worst things in herself. She believes she deserves nothing from anyone, yet something about her makes me want to give her everything.

“I wish I could fix things for her,” I tell my mother.

“You’re doing your best,” she replies. “But for now you really need to get some sleep.”

“I can’t. I’m too worried I won’t catch her in time if I’m in the other room.”

My mother hesitates, and then climbs to her feet. “Take my bed,” she says. “And I’ll go sleep in your room.”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “I realize I’m already breaking rules, but that seems so …”

“You have her best interests at heart,” she says. “I wouldn’t suggest it if I thought for a moment it was truly wrong.”

I’m just dozing off when Olivia begins to talk. Unintelligible words that sound young and distraught. The minute she flings the covers off I'm out of bed and beside her, my arm anchoring her while I do my best to convince her she’s okay. I shush her again and again, promising her she’s safe.

"It's just a dream. You're okay."

And something miraculous happens. She doesn't fight me. She jolts for a moment as if she's been shocked, and then she curls into me, her head pressed to my chest, her hands fisted tightly in my shirt as she cries, still sound asleep.

I hold her until her tears slow and then cease, and then something slightly less miraculous but still surprising happens.

I fall asleep too.

H
oly shit
.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

Will Langstrom is standing in front of me, shirtless.

I'm gawking, and that probably needs to stop. It's not like I didn't
assume
he'd look fan-freaking-tastic without a shirt, but he exceeds anything I was previously capable of imagining. Yeah, fine, I admit it, I occasionally imagine things with him, and they’re usually R-rated. Except when I imagine him there isn’t an alarm going off in the background and he doesn’t have a pillow clutched to his stomach or a panicked look on his face like he has right now.

"Why are you in my room?" I ask.

His expression grows surly. "Waking your ass up," he growls.

"Good morning to you too," I snap, rolling over and putting the pillow over my head. "And I've seen you in shorts before, dummy. What's with the sudden modesty?"

He makes a testy noise that I ignore and heads toward his room.

“Did she run?” asks Dorothy, passing Will as she comes in.

"She never left the bed," he replies, hurrying away with that pillow still clutched against him. There's something about his phrasing that I find suspect, but I let it go. I didn't run. Before a big meet. Before a meet I was sick with nerves over.

“Wait. Why were you just coming in from Will’s room?” I ask Dorothy. “Did you sleep in there?”

Her eyes widen. “He was worried about you, so he took my bed and I took his.”

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I remember the feel of his arms around me, of curling into a warm chest in the middle of the night.

Maybe another dream …

Or maybe not.

W
hen we arrive
on the course, Will walks with me through the back field and gives me his standard pep talk, which, being tailored to me, is less “pep” and more “stop being insane.” He does this despite the fact that at this very moment he has a thousand other things to do and people to deal with, despite the fact that a young male coach wandering off with one particular female student is bound to draw suspicion.

I know it looks bad that he spends so much time with me. I know he’s put his job on the line again and again when I’ve done nothing but give him grief in return.

Today I want to give him the only thing I’m capable of giving. I’m going to win.

I take off too fast at the sound of the gun, feel that itching in my chest far too early, yet I keep going. I will win for him if it kills me. That voice in the back of my head tells me I’m going to lose if I keep going like this, that I’ll never make it, but I silently tell her to shut the fuck up.

I cross the finish line going so fast that I run an extra 20 feet trying to stop, like a car with bad brakes. This time it's him, not Peter, who catches me, holding me by the shoulders so I don't collapse. "Another record, Liv," he whispers, just as Peter runs over.

I'm happy, but this time my happiness is entirely for him.

A
team takes first
by weighting the scores of its runners. Today we manage to place, coming in second for the first time in a decade. Everyone is ecstatic. Brofton picks me up on his shoulder and spins me around and I actually laugh without threatening to hit him. He sets me down as we line up to climb on the bus, and I’m so dizzy I stumble into Erin.

“Watch it,” she says to Brofton. “She’s our ticket to regionals. I want you treating her like a delicate flower from now on.”

“Yeah,” I laugh, “that’s me. A fragile little flower.”

Betsy pushes forward, looking oddly annoyed given that we just placed. "If
someone
hadn't come in sixteenth,” she sneers at Erin, “we might have taken first today."

I hate the way her words have leached all the joy from Erin’s face. "We'd have won if you'd placed better too," I snap.

What happens next occurs so quickly that I have little memory of it. One minute I am speaking, and the next she’s pushed me so hard that when my face hits the side of the bus, I’m blinded momentarily by the pain. And then I’m on the ground, with Betsy pinned beneath me. There’s blood pouring from her nose and someone’s arms tight around me from behind, a straitjacket.

"Liv!" shouts Will. "Stop!"

It’s only then that I realize what I’ve done.

Somehow I’ve lost the moments that occurred between me standing beside the bus and now, but I’ve done something bad. Will’s arms are around me, holding me back as he pulls me off of Betsy. She gets off the ground while all of my teammates, and Peter, look at us in shock.

"What the hell just happened? We took second and you," Will says turning to me in amazement, "you
won
. So why the hell are you fighting?"

“She assaulted me!” screams Betsy. “You said she got one chance and she just blew it!”

“It was self-defense,” Brofton interrupts. “I saw the whole thing. Betsy slammed Finn’s head into the side of the bus.”

“Finn was just defending me,” Erin tells Will rapidly, “but she shouldn’t have bothered. Everyone knows you’re just jealous, Betsy.”

I can see the fear in all of their faces. I had my one shot, and now I’ve blown it. Hannah, Nicole, Erin – they look at me with some mixture of desperation and resignation, wanting to fix it and knowing it’s too late.

“You promised she wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Betsy argues, holding her shirt to her nose.

"Everyone on the bus," Will says. "We’ll discuss this when we get back."

It's a silent, painful ride home. Betsy sitting there with a smug smile I plan to beat off her face as soon as there is no staff around, Erin looking wan and worried. I’m going to lose my scholarship. It’s not like I don’t have a backup plan. I do, even if it’s a shitty one. I can sell enough of my stuff to get a bus ticket to Seattle, and I’ll train there. The idea once even appealed to me, but now it seems empty.

By the time we get back to campus, I’m as broken and weary as I've ever felt, while Betsy is jubilant and not even trying to hide it. The two of us follow Will to his office, and he takes Betsy in first. She leaves a minute later looking chastened but then shoots me a nastily triumphant look. No matter what they did to her, she knows I'll get worse.

I go in and Will's got his head in his hands. He looks as beaten as I feel. And for one of the first times in my life, I feel guilty.

“You're a smart girl,” he says. “Don't you see through her?”

“See through what?”

“She's
trying
to get you kicked out. She's been pissed off and jealous since you arrived. You took her spot on the team. She was the star, and now it's you by a mile, and she's pissed. You've got to be smarter.”

“Wait. Does that mean you’re not kicking me out?”

“No,” he sighs wearily. “I’m not kicking you out.”

"Why?" I breathe. "What happened to the 'one more violent outburst' thing?"

"Why the hell are you arguing with me about this?" he demands. "Did you
want
to be kicked out?"

“No, of course not. I just ... I just don't get it."

“But it can’t happen again. You can't let her bait you."

"She wasn't trying to bait me," I argue. "She was just being a bitch to Erin."

"Yes, because she knew she’d get a response from
you
by going after Erin. I can justify this one as self-defense, but it’s a stretch. Next time something happens, even if she hits you, you’ve got to hold back.”

I exhale. “I don’t think I can promise you that.”

“Why the hell not?” he demands. “How many chances do I have to give you?”

“Because I black out or something,” I tell him reluctantly. “Yes, I’m even weirder than you already thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I did today. I don't remember anything from the moment she pushed me until the moment you were pulling me off of her. None of it. I don't even know how I got her on the ground. I saw her bleeding and didn’t even realize I was the one who’d done it until you yelled at me."

"Jesus, Liv," he breathes. “So has this happened before?”

I nod. It’s happened plenty. It’s a wonder I haven’t killed anyone.

“Is that what happened with Mark Bell?” he asks.

I sigh. “Sort of.”

“‘Sort of’?”

“I mean I remember fighting him and I remember seeing the bat. I don’t remember the rest.”

“Wait. What do you mean by ‘fighting him’? I thought you just attacked him unprovoked.”

“Why would I attack him without a reason? Even
I’m
not that psychotic.”

Will’s face grows still, wary. “Did he do something to you?”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek. What happened with Mark Bell isn’t something I need to share. It’s not like anyone would believe me anyway. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” he says between clenched teeth. “I want to know exactly what he did.”

I roll my eyes as if it doesn’t matter. But the truth is that it does matter, to me, and he’ll be the only person alive to whom I’ve told the truth. “He found out about the nightmares. He offered to stay with me the night before a meet to keep me from running.”

Will’s face has fallen just a little. Anyone can see where this story is going. Anyone could have seen it then too, aside from me. It was so fucking stupid to trust Mark, and I’m not sure why I did. Maybe because I just wanted, so badly, to think there was a solution. “I’m sure you can figure out the rest,” I sigh.

His mouth opens and it takes a second for any words to emerge. “He
raped
you?”

“He
tried
,” I reply. “That’s where the bat came in.”

“Olivia,” he groans, putting his head in his hands. “Did you tell the school that?”

I laugh. “Right. I was sleeping in his apartment and I had the worst reputation in the history of the school’s track team. Who the hell would believe it was rape?”

“Even if you’d been
dating
him you’d still have been allowed to say no.”

“I could have had the whole thing on film and no one would’ve sided with me, Will. I had a bad reputation and was about to lose my scholarship anyway. Mark is the star of the team. It was pretty obvious how it would all go down.”

Mark even had the gall to press charges against me, which he only dropped when I told him I’d gone to the hospital that night and had everything documented. I didn’t really go, of course. A few bruises and some torn clothes weren’t proof of anything, but he didn’t know that.

He sits back in his seat, looking helpless and stunned. “This is insane. All of it. You should still be there, and that asshole should be in prison.”

“I wasn’t going to be there in any case. No way was I getting another year out of that scholarship.”

“But that’s not the point!” he cries. “You left there letting hundreds of people think you’re some sociopath who goes around swinging a bat!”

“I
am
a sociopath who goes around swinging a bat, Will,” I retort. “I don’t remember
anything
after I saw that bat in the corner, so why shouldn’t they think it?”

“That’s what this is really about then,” he says, looking grim. “You hate that you did it. You feel guilty it went as far as it did and this is how you’re trying to pay for it.”

There’s something in his words that stings, and I don’t like it. “If you’re done with the analysis, Dr. Langstrom, I think I’m gonna take off.”

"How's your cheek?" he asks.

I shrug. "Fine, I guess."

"You need to go get it checked out."

I shrug again. "I think it's okay."

"Right," he smirks. "I forgot about that medical degree of yours.” He gets up and kneels in front of me. "This might hurt a little," he warns. "Let me just make sure it's not broken."

I close my eyes because he’s too near. His warm mouth and the curves of his face and his ungiving jaw make me feel slightly unhinged, when he’s this close by. The pad of his thumb presses to my skin. He stops when I wince in pain, holding his hand there, waiting for me. He continues, and just the brush of his skin against mine awakens other things. Things I'm not supposed to feel. My eyes open of their own accord and lock with his. His hand holds my face, his mouth slightly ajar as he looks at mine, both of us breathing quickly. I want him to kiss me. I want him to kiss me so badly that my blood starts to sing, and all logic goes rushing from my brain. It sits between us, quicksand that drags us under so fast that fighting it seems impossible. He leans toward me, for just a second, before his hand falls away suddenly and he practically jumps backward.

"Nothing is broken," he says roughly. "Just ice it over the weekend, okay?"

I practically run from the office. The idea of losing my scholarship was scary, but whatever just transpired between Will and me is a thousand times worse.