Breakable (19 page)

Then her hand slipped into my shorts, and I lifted just enough to give access, lost to the soft, warm grip of her palm and fingers. Going to one elbow, I pulled her with me and thrust my hand down the front of her shorts. ‘Jesus Christ, Melody,’ I gasped, fingers sliding into her so easily. She came seconds later, quaking against me, and I followed.

Drifting back to reality, we slowly pulled our hands from inside each other’s clothing. I grabbed my T-shirt and used it to clean her hand and then mine. I wanted to suck on the fingers I’d thrust inside her, wanted to know how she tasted, but I was oddly shy in that moment. Cocooning us inside my comforter, I drew her close and we lay staring at each other until we fell asleep.

When I woke, she was gone. She’d taken the drawing with her.

I didn’t email Jacqueline until Sunday evening – four short sentences, all instructional, no flirting. She responded in kind, but referred to my weekend. I couldn’t stop myself
from telling her that my weekend was good –
especially Friday
.
How was yours?
I asked.

Three words stuck out of her short reply –
good
,
lonely
and
productive
.

We all need our moments of solitude, but this girl should never be lonely.

I pulled out a heavy sheet of paper and my charcoal pencils, chose the fully reclining pose – on her back, arms above her head. As I re-sketched her lean limbs, each stroke across the paper evoked the kisses and caresses that left my body craving more of her. I smudged the shadows under her breasts with my finger, recalling her soft skin and the way she’d allowed me to touch her. Despite my need to keep a wall between myself and her, it was crumbling faster than I could rebuild it.

In my bedroom, I tacked the drawing to the wall, across from my pillow.

By the end of economics Wednesday, my desire to tell Jacqueline the truth about who I was warring heavily with my desire to continue the game we’d begun – the one where I was the sexual mercenary who helped her get her groove back. It seemed the ideal scenario – I got to be with the first girl to rivet my attention in years, and she got to spread her wings, forget her self-important ex and reclaim ownership of her own body.

I silenced the voice in my head telling me that none of this was enough.

Jacqueline appeared to be having second thoughts, too – she didn’t email Landon or text me all week. She didn’t
come into Starbucks, and she only looked back at me during class a couple of times. On Friday, her ex approached her at the end of class. He smiled down at her, one hand in his pocket, confident in his charm.

I couldn’t see her face as they spoke, though her posture seemed taut. Wanting to wipe that smug smile right off his face, I left the classroom before I did or said something stupid.

Friday afternoon, I got an email from Ralph Watts, the assistant chief of campus police. Watts was responsible for university-sponsored self-defence lessons the department offered a couple of times every semester. After I’d seen the flyer on our bulletin board last fall and asked him about it, he sent me to a training and certification programme. I’d volunteered to assist twice now – donning padding and consenting to be punched and kicked by female students, faculty and staff who sacrifice three Saturday mornings to learn basic self-protection.

Lucas,

Sgt. Netterson was supposed to assist the next self-defence class, but she snapped her collarbone in some wall-climbing mishap last night. I know it’s short notice, but if you can make it – I need you, starting tomorrow morning. Plus two more sessions after Thanksgiving break, if you can do those. If you can only do tomorrow, that’d still be a huge help. Let me know asap.

Thanks,

R. Watts

For once, I didn’t have a ten-to-three-o’clock Saturday shift scheduled at Starbucks. I wrote Watts back and told him yes, for all three Saturdays.

I also got an email from Jacqueline. Nothing flirtatious – just her research paper for Heller, which I’d promised to go over before she submitted it.

I couldn’t be displeased when I didn’t
want
her to flirt with
Landon
… Right? I emailed her back, telling her I’d look it over and have it to her by Sunday.

Minutes later,
Lucas
got a text from her:
Did I do something wrong?

I paced the apartment before replying that I’d just been busy and added a casual,
What’s up?
So indifferent, when I felt anything but indifference where this girl was concerned. Instead of seeming slighted, she replied with curiosity about the charcoals I’d said I was going to do of her sketches. I told her I’d done one and wanted her to see it. She replied that she’d like that.

So I told her I was out and would talk to her later.

‘Goddammit,’ I muttered, tossing my phone on the counter and pacing to the sofa. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes, but there was no blotting out the memory of her beautiful surrender in my arms a week ago.
She trusts me
. There was no triumph in that knowledge because I was giving her the embodiment of mixed signals – not to mention giving them as two different people.

‘I am a lying asshole,’ I told Francis, who yawned.

Standing in a chilly activities-building classroom at nine a.m. on a Saturday morning, the last thing I expected to see was Jacqueline Wallace. While Sergeant Don Ellsworth directed our twelve attendees to sign in and Watts handed out packets, I was lacing my low-rise taekwondo shoes and setting up the mats. I slowed when I recognized Jacqueline’s redheaded friend come through the door and went immobile when Jacqueline entered right behind her.

I’d considered suggesting the course to her, but didn’t think she was ready yet – especially if she hadn’t told anyone else what happened that night. If she attended too soon and felt intimidated or overwhelmed, she might not come back.

But she must have told her friend, who didn’t move further than a foot away from her, stroking a reassuring hand over her shoulder blade or guiding her firmly by the elbow when she looked ready to bolt out the door. Jacqueline was absolutely ready to run when she looked up and saw
me
flanking Lieutenant Watts. Her eyes tearing from me to the packet she gripped in her white-knuckled hands, she said something to her friend under her breath. One hand on her leg, her friend murmured something back.

Watts began his anxiety-dispelling opening speech, where he introduced himself, and then
I bench-press three hundred pounds
Ellsworth and me in his usual way: ‘This feeble-looking guy to my left is Sergeant Don, and the ugly
one is Lucas, one of our parking enforcement officers.’ As everyone snickered, he praised them for giving up a Saturday morning to attend the session and then gave an outline of the three-week programme.

After fundamental principles were discussed, we moved to choreographed demonstrations of attacks and blocks, so the women could get an idea of the moves we would be teaching them. In slow motion, Ellsworth performed the hits and I defended as Watts detailed weak spots of the attacker – some obvious, like the groin, some not, like the middle of the forearm. He stressed the goal of the attacked:
escape
.

Everyone broke into pairs to practise individual moves, while the three of us circulated to make sure they were executed correctly. Not wanting to stress her out further, I let Ellsworth take Jacqueline’s side of the room, but her navy yoga pants and white T-shirt were continually in my peripheral vision. I watched for signs of distress all too common in survivor attendees. I knew which scenario would trigger memories of her particular assault, and I dreaded its approach.

Thanks to her friend, whose name was Erin, she did well with the hand strikes, yelling,
No
! with each one, as instructed, and grinning when she nailed the hammer strike block.

We finally came to the last defence move of the day. I couldn’t assess her reaction while we demonstrated it, but once the group broke into pairs again, her stiff posture, wide eyes and the shallow rise and fall of her chest were
clear enough panic indicators. Erin held her hand as they spoke in low tones, heads together. Jacqueline shook her head but didn’t release her death grip on her friend’s hand. More murmuring ensued, and then they moved to the mat.

Erin lay on her stomach, and Jacqueline knelt over her. Her hands shook when performing the attack. Instead of trading places, they kept their positions and did the move twice more. Unable to take my eyes off them, I barely observed the pair I was supposed to be monitoring. When they switched places, I felt her panic from across the room and feared she might hyperventilate and pass out.

C’mon, Jacqueline
, my mind urged.
You can do this
.

A surge of pride flowed through me when she went through the motions, pushing herself to perform them accurately despite her distress. As they rose to their knees afterwards, Erin praised and embraced her, and I breathed a sigh of relief, even if Jacqueline didn’t look in my direction in the last minutes of class or when she went out the door.

I didn’t want her fear, or my presence, to keep her from returning. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.

That night, before I could talk myself out of it, I texted her, asking if she still wanted to see the charcoal. She answered
yes,
so I told her to pull her hair back and wear something warm, and then I hopped on my Harley and went to get her.

Outside her dorm, I leaned on the bike and watched the door. People were coming and going all around me, but I couldn’t pay attention to any of them. When she emerged, I was struck again at our differences. I made enough money
now to buy non-thrift-shop threads, but my style hadn’t changed much. This girl was a blend of classic and trendy but expensive clothes – they were a second skin she wore comfortably. She slowed, looking for me while buttoning a little black coat that could have come right out of a definitive 1960s film, the type my mother had loved.

It didn’t take her long to spot me.

Her step faltered and I wondered why. I wanted to sweep her up and kiss her as if there’d been no break since the last time I held her. I wanted to erase her friends’ designation for me – her
bad-boy phase
– an inconsequential segment of time between two sensible, valid stages: Kennedy Moore and whoever came next.

‘I guess this is the reason for the hair guidelines,’ she said, inspecting the helmet I handed her as if it was a complex, alien thing. She’d never been on a motorcycle before, a fact that sort of turned me on. Like I needed help with
that
.

She gazed up at me as I settled the helmet on her head, adjusting and fastening the straps. I lingered over the process, mentally devouring the sweet lips I could still taste and staring into her eyes, deep and blue as the open ocean.

The care I took on the drive over escaped her, I figured, since she buried her face in the middle of my back and held on to me round corners as if she’d be flung to Oklahoma otherwise – not that I’d ever complain.

By the time we arrived, her hands were freezing, so I took one and then the other between mine, gradually
rubbing warmth back into them. I wondered how she played an instrument the size of an upright bass with such small hands, but I bit my lip just before voicing this aloud.

She’d only told Landon about the instrument she played.

Prolonging my guilt trip, she asked if my parents lived in the house on the other side of the yard. ‘No. I rent the apartment,’ I told her as we climbed the steps and I unlocked the door.

Francis didn’t appear impressed or concerned that I’d brought someone home with me. He merely stalked from the sofa to the door and out, as if giving me a few moments of privacy. Jacqueline laughed at what I’d named him, musing that he looked more like a Max or a King. I explained that my cat had enough of a superiority complex without me giving him a macho name.

‘Names are important,’ she said, unbuttoning her coat slowly.

A chill ran down my spine at her words and the possible dual meaning behind them, but it disappeared with the hypnotic draw of her small fingers, slipping buttons through buttonholes at a pace that mercifully drove everything else from my mind and affected my heart rate directly. When she finally released the lowest button, my patience was going up in flames. I slid my thumbs inside and along her shoulders, tugging the jacket gently down her arms.

‘Soft,’ I whispered.

‘It’s cashmere,’ she whispered back, as though I’d asked.

I wanted to pull her close, run my hands over that
sweater and kiss her breathless. I wanted to stroke my tongue along the tapered arch of her ear, frame her pretty face with my hands and taste her plum-ripe mouth. Her eyes dilated slightly in the dimly lit room, and she stared up at me, waiting. Every muscle in my body strained towards her, wanting her. But I had something more important to tell her, and I blurted it out before I lost my nerve and reached for her instead, noble intentions be damned.

‘I had an ulterior motive for bringing you here.’