Breakable (22 page)

I knew her well enough to know that
placating
wouldn’t be welcome.

Two words I did hear her say, clearly: ‘It’s.
Jacqueline
.’ With this, she uncrossed her arms, her hands curling into fists at her sides.

He stepped closer and she didn’t move, but when he raised a hand to her face and she stepped back, I propelled off the bike and up the walk. She swiped her card and slung the door open, and he followed. I grabbed the door just before it closed, as Jacqueline whirled on him, her mouth open. She stopped when she saw me.

‘You okay, Jacqueline?’ I asked, stepping next to her as I examined him for signs of aggression. He oozed condescension above everything else – increasing when he recognized me as the guy who’d repaired the AC at his frat house. ‘What would administration think about you sniffing around the students?’ he sneered, and it took every ounce of self-discipline I had to keep from reacting.

I turned to Jacqueline, dismissing him – the one thing guys like him can’t easily swallow, and the one response to which I could give free rein.

She told me she was fine, her eyes sliding to the gathering audience I was just beginning to notice. Something about this girl made everything else disappear for me. At times that was ideal, while others it could be hazardous.

Then Kennedy Moore gestured to me and said exactly the wrong thing. ‘Are you hooking up with
this guy
, too?’

‘Too?’ she asked, her voice so vulnerable, and I wanted to punch him in the mouth to stop the ugly words before he said them.

‘In addition to Buck,’ he said.

Her mouth fell open, whatever she’d meant to say emerging with no sound.

Moore grabbed her arm and started to steer her away, and without a second thought, I wrenched his wrist and removed his hand from her. I wanted to snap it.

‘What the fuck?’ He puffed up, and I knew in that moment that he wasn’t done with her. He thought he could win her back – or maybe he knew he could.

But Jacqueline steeled her jaw, laid her hand on his arm, and told him to leave. He argued – stressing his belief that I was a
maintenance man
– which I couldn’t refute without placing Joseph in danger of losing his job.

‘He’s a
student
, Kennedy,’ she snapped. He said something about speaking with her next week, when they were home. She didn’t reply, her expression unreadable.

I knew the comment about Buck had unnerved her, but not for the reasons he intended. He spoke as if she should worry about a bad reputation, which was bullshit. The idea that people might be gossiping about her
hooking up
with the asshole who’d assaulted her made me want to find and beat the utter shit out of him all over again.

Moore glared as if he could intimidate me. I hoped he
wouldn’t be stupid, because he’d be much less trouble to put down than his rapist cohort. He seemed to think his resentment was threatening, but his stance was completely untrained and left him wide open. Two hits and he’d be on the ground. He’d probably never even been in a real fight. I held his stare until he turned and went through the door.

Jacqueline touched me then, and my body unwound. She teased me about my multiple jobs, and I told her the maintenance thing was rare, and the self-defence gig was a volunteer position.

‘I guess we should add one more, huh?’ she said, and I stiffened, thinking
economics tutor
while fighting to keep my expression vacant. ‘Personal defender of Jacqueline Wallace?’ she said. I swung between relief and disappointment. I didn’t want to tell her, but I wanted her to know. ‘Another volunteer position, Lucas?’ She leaned closer, playful, hypnotizing me with those eyes. ‘How will you have time for studying? Or anything fun?’

I reached out and tugged her to me.
Goddamn
, this girl made me
want
. ‘There are some things I will make time for, Jacqueline,’ I whispered, kissing her neck – the sensitive space near her ear that made her go weak when I barely touched my lips to it. She hummed softly when I licked and sucked the delicate skin, careful not to mar it with a bruise. She was a sensual but private girl. Marks would only be welcome where they’d be hidden to anyone but her.

For now, I kissed and released her.

I emailed Jacqueline my notes on her research paper, noting the fact that she was caught up, though I’d continue to send her worksheets the last two weeks of class. I also let her know I’d be going home Wednesday – where there was no Wi-Fi, so I’d be virtually unreachable.
As Landon
.

If Grandpa could see me now, he’d shake his head and sigh heavily. And if he could reach me, he’d cuff my ear and call me ten kinds of idiot.

She replied to the email to tell me her parents were going skiing, but she was going home anyway and would be there alone. In all the scenarios I’d ever imagined, this girl having parents who’d do something so oblivious wasn’t in them.

I’d be hitching a ride in the Hellers’ SUV for the four-hour trek to the coast. They’d rented a beach house and planned to make Thanksgiving dinner there. I would stay with Dad and have a few days of silence, except for the dinner we would share with Charles and Cindy, Carlie and Caleb.

Cole had snagged himself a girlfriend at Duke and had decided to go home to Florida with her for his first break, instead of coming home. His father ragged the hell out of him for a week about mothers-in-law and being whipped and texted questions like, ‘Where are you registered?’ Cole vehemently denied impending marriage or in-laws while Heller laughed his ass off at every infuriated text from his oldest son.

I wished I could tell Jacqueline.

Predictably, the altercation with Kennedy Moore renewed my antagonism and tapped it a notch higher. Monday’s class was torture, between failed attempts to either ignore him or at least resist firing telepathic insults at the back of his head. When he turned and smiled at Jacqueline at the end of class, I left the classroom before I walked down the steps and put a dent in his toothpaste-ad-worthy smile.

Leaning on the wall by Jacqueline’s usual escape door, I watched her emerge with the guy who sat next to her in class. He’d attended one or two of my sessions at the beginning of the semester, three months ago. They both seemed to notice me at the same time, and I could have sworn they were discussing me as they approached. After wishing her a good break, he headed towards the opposite exit, and I examined Jacqueline’s face for signs that he’d told her I was the class tutor. Her expression was jumbled as she stared up at me, her forehead holding the slightest crease. Unable to read her, I fell into step as she passed, pushing the door open as we exited together. Her elbow brushed against me and her now-recognizable scent revived my memories of Saturday night.

‘Can I see you tonight?’ I asked.

‘I have a test tomorrow in astronomy,’ she said. She would be studying with classmates all evening. Nothing strange about that, except for the brief pause that made it seem more pretext than reason.

Dogged by a nagging sense of exposure, I scanned the mass of people, looking for the source. Intuition told me
that source was right next to me – but that had to be wrong. ‘Tomorrow night?’

‘I have an ensemble rehearsal tomorrow,’ she said, and the buzzing in my ears increased. She talked about missing practice Sunday morning and packing her bass for the break – familiar ground – but my brain faltered, comprehending that it was familiar for
Landon
– not
Lucas
.

I was sprinting headlong into a concrete wall, and I had hit that wall before, hard. I didn’t have to feel the wretched crunch of everything shattering to know how it would feel. I needed this break. I needed the waves on the shore, and my dad’s silent presence. I needed to see if I could break this obsession.

Staring into her eyes, I asked her to text me if her plans changed. With every speck of willpower I possessed, I said, ‘Later, Jacqueline,’ and walked away without touching her or kissing her goodbye.

I thought hitting Clark Richards would make me feel better – and it did. It felt too good, if there’s such a thing as too good. Every blow I landed, and even the hits I took, numbed and transformed the pathetic freak I’d been, bringing to life an unfeeling motherfucker in his place.

My fight with Boyce last year rattled that cage, but hammering the shit out of Richards’s face was the watershed moment. I’d found something better than combining molly and weed, better than alcohol, better than sex for smothering the voices in my head – because even when those things worked, and they sometimes did, the voice I still heard was my own, and it would never let me completely forget. Ever.

‘I’ll only be gone three days,’ Dad had said, his hands cradling her face. ‘We see Charles and Cindy this weekend, right? We’ll plan that Christmas in Rio trip you and she have been harping about for years.’

She pouted at him with a fake scowl. ‘Oh,
harping
, eh? Maybe you can just stay home, Mr Grinch.’

He slid his hands down her shoulders to her elbows, loosening her crossed arms and pulling her hands to his chest before towing her close and tipping her chin. ‘You can’t leave me behind, Rosie,’ he murmured. ‘Not after last night.’ He leaned down to kiss her like I wasn’t sitting twenty feet away.

‘God, you guys,
get a room
.’ I clutched the controller in my hand, eyes resolutely staring at the screen and my skateboarder guy doing ollies over spaces between buildings, aerials off walls and slides down escalators – stuff that would kill me in real life. I tried closing my left eye so I couldn’t see my parents, who were standing by the door, saying their long, mouth-sucking goodbyes.

‘This is why we bought you a television and game console for your room, son. So your mother and I can enjoy …’ He smiled down at her. ‘… the rest of the house.’

I hit
pause
and lay back into the sofa cushions, both hands over my eyes. ‘Oh, man.
Seriously?
’

Mom laughed. ‘Stop teasing him.’

‘I can’t. It’s too easy,’ Dad said.

Sighing, she straightened his perfectly straight tie. ‘I was actually thinking that we should visit your dad this Christmas. He’s always alone, Ray …’

My dad’s relationship with his father was the definition of complicated. ‘He chooses to be alone. He likes it.’

‘But, honey, he’s so happy when we visit. He adores Landon, and he won’t be around forever.’

My mom’s parents had been in their early forties when she came along – a surprise baby long after they’d accepted the idea of being childless. Prominent professors in analytical fields, they’d spoiled their curiously artistic daughter rotten – her words. They were both gone by the time I was five or six. Mom missed them a lot, but I barely remembered my grandmother, and couldn’t remember my grandfather at all.

Grandpa – Dad’s dad – was the only grandparent I had left.

‘He just thinks he’s finally got a sucker to take over the Maxfield
family business
,’ he air-quoted, ‘because Landon likes to go out on the boat with him. Plus, we just saw him a couple of months ago, in July.’ In spite of these claims, I heard the surrender in his voice, caving to whatever Mom wanted. He pretty much always did. ‘When I escaped that town, I never intended to go back at all. And here you are making me go every summer. And now Christmas?’

‘Because it’s the right thing to do. And because you aren’t a sulky eighteen-year-old boy any more – you’re a grown man.’

He kissed her again, wrapping his arms round her and growling, ‘Damned right I am.’

‘Minor in the room. Right here. On the sofa. Having his innocence corrupted.
By his own parents
.’

‘Go get ready for school, baby boy,’ Mom said, calling me the thing she only said in front of Dad or when we were alone. Thirteen-year-olds couldn’t have their moms saying crap like that in front of friends or the general public.

I shut down the game and my parents were
still kissing
.

‘
Gladly
.’ I made blinders with my hands as I passed them.

‘Hug your father goodbye first.’

I did a one-eighty at the base of the staircase and leaned into him for a quick hug. He patted my shoulder and looked down at me, still inches taller, though I was gaining on him.

I’d picked Mom up the other day just to prove I could and she squealed and laughed. ‘I used to change your diaper!’

I grimaced. ‘Mom, really –
that’s
the memory of my infancy you want to evoke?’

She poked me in the chest and slanted a brow. ‘Unless you want me to bring up how I fed you?’

I put her down. ‘Eww,
no
. Ugh.’

‘Do well at school and practise hard for that game this Sunday against those asshats from Annandale,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll be back Thursday.’ He ruffled my hair, which he knew I sorta hated – and that’s why he did it.

I twisted out from under his hand. ‘Good use of asshat, old man. Your vocab is improving.’

He smirked. ‘All right, big guy.’ He took my shoulders and looked me in the eye. ‘You’re the man of the house while I’m gone. Take care of your mother.’

‘Okay, Dad. Will do.’ I saluted and ran up the stairs, thinking about the game this weekend, and Yesenia, who I planned to ask out before the end of the day, if I could man up enough to do it.

The temperature at the beach was in the seventies, the average for this time of year. The Hellers dropped me off at Dad’s before heading to their vacation rental with a thawing turkey and a box full of yams, green beans, bread crumbs and cranberries. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow,’ Cindy told us. ‘We’ll eat around one o’clock. And if the turkey isn’t done yet, we’ll be
drinking
by one o’clock.’

Boyce:
You here?

Me:
Yeah. Give me a couple hours.

I dropped my duffle bag on the bed. The room had never seemed smaller. It was like a cocoon. I’d emerged from it and flown away over three years ago, and now it was just a tight, outgrown place, both familiar and odd.

The blank wall was full of thumbtack holes, and the shelves opposite were mostly empty. Dad hadn’t moved the light fixture back to the kitchen – it still hung near the ceiling, casting its indirect illumination over the space. A few old textbooks were stacked on one shelf, along with Grandpa’s Bible and a high-school directory. There was also an envelope that hadn’t been there when I visited last. It contained a dozen or so snapshots I’d never seen before.

One had been taken on my first day of eighth grade, after I got out of the car in my new uniform. I’d outgrown
every item of clothing that fitted me three months before. I smirked at the camera – at my mom – as a guy on the sidewalk behind me photobombed, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Tyrell. Hated or loved by every teacher, he was one of the funniest guys I’d ever known. In the background, nearer the school building, a trio of girls stood talking. One of them faced the camera, dark hair in a ponytail, dark eyes on the back of my head. Yesenia. She was probably about to enter law school now, or begin an internship in accounting or apply for master’s degree programmes in film or sociology. I hadn’t known her well enough to know her interests or ambitions, beyond her interest in me. At thirteen, that was all that mattered.

I sifted through the other photos, pausing at one of Mom painting, and another of the two of us clowning in the backyard. I pressed the ache in the centre of my chest and put them all away to study later, musing that Dad must have left them in here for me. Maybe these images had been on a memory card in an old camera he’d finally checked before throwing it away.

In the kitchen, there was a bag of spinach in the fridge and a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. I wasn’t sure if Dad had turned over a healthier leaf, or he was deferring to what I’d want to eat while I was home.

‘How’s school?’ he asked, pulling a beer from the fridge, his hair wet from a shower. He’d been out on the boat before we arrived today, of course. I assumed he would take tomorrow off completely, but was afraid to ask. It would hurt Cindy’s feelings if he didn’t.

‘Good. I netted a spot on a research team next semester. A project with one of my professors from last year. There’s a stipend.’

He sat at the small, ancient table – the varnish long since worn away, the wood scratched to hell. ‘Congratulations. So – engineering research? Race-car design?’

My mouth twisted. My interests had morphed beyond race cars since high school – not that he knew that. This exchange had to be the longest conversation about my academic goals we’d had since Mom died. ‘No – durable soft materials. Medical, sort of. Stuff to be used in tissue engineering.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘Ah. Interesting.’ He stared out the window over the table, which had the best view of the gulf, except for the view from Grandpa’s room – where no one lived. I was about to leave the room to shower and unpack the few things I’d brought when he asked, ‘Dinner plans?’

‘I’m, uh, going out with Boyce in a bit.’ I took a beer from the fridge and popped the cap off with the edge of my unopened pocketknife.

‘Got your key, still?’

‘Yeah.’

He nodded, eyes never leaving the window, and we lapsed into our customary silence.

Boyce and I chose a booth near a window. There was one halfway decent bar in this town, and we were in it. It was too loud and too smoky, and I missed the beach hangouts he said were overrun with high-school punks now. We had
to laugh, because we
were
the high-school punks not that long ago.

‘Still got the Sportster?’ he asked. In the last few months before I left town, the two of us had rebuilt the badly maintained Harley his father had accepted as payment for repairs from one of his drinking buddies. When I needed to sell the truck to pay my first semester of college tuition, Boyce had somehow talked him into selling the bike to me cheap.

‘Yep. It’ll do a few more months, until I graduate.’ I thought about Jacqueline’s arms, locked round me, her hands clasped low over my abdomen. Her chest pressed to my back. Her thighs braced round my hips. ‘I’ll probably keep it, though, after I buy a car.’

The waitress brought our drinks and a basket of assorted fried stuff. Boyce picked out a beer-battered avocado slice and dipped it into the salsa. ‘Seen Pearl lately?’

I shook my head. ‘Not in a few months. She was doing well, I think – probably applying to med schools now. You’re more likely to run into her than I am, though. There’s, like, fourteen times as many students there as there are residents here, and I know she visits her parents often.’

‘True.’ He sipped his tequila.

‘So – you’ve seen her?’

His mouth kicked up on one side. ‘A few times.’

I shook my head, smirking. ‘You two have a strange relationship, Wynn. One of these days, you’re gonna have to tell me about it.’

‘Whatever, man,’ he said, dismissing the subject of Pearl
Frank. ‘Any new adventures for you? Threesomes? Orgy parties? Cougar professors sexually harassing you?’ He waggled his brows, hopeful.

I ran my teeth over the ring in my lip and shook my head, laughing. ‘You know I’m studying or working all the time.’

‘Yeah, man – your hundred and one jobs. You can’t tell me you don’t take T-and-A timeouts, just to break the monotony.’ He glanced behind us at the growing crowd. ‘You’re too damned picky or I’d suggest one or two of the girls in this bar. What about that tutor job? Any hot chicks needing supply and demand demonstrated at close range?’ I stared into my beer for one second too long, and he slapped his hand on the table and leaned closer. ‘Maxfield, you son of a –’

I put my head in my hands. ‘I’m kinda getting over something. Or trying to.’

He was quiet for about five seconds. ‘One of those students you tutor?’

Fuck me
– how did he know that? But Boyce always knew. I nodded.

‘Hmm. Knowing you – and I do – that sucks ass. If it was me? I’d be all over that shit. Just as well I’ll never be anyone’s tutor. Or boss.’ He tossed back the last of his tequila and signalled the waitress for another round. ‘See,
me
– I need to get hired by some hot chick so
I
can be the one being harassed.’

In one flash, I imagined Jacqueline and me swapping positions – if she were the tutor and I were the student. If
I’d been a high-school-senior bass player to her college-girl bass tutor … Every muscle in my body contracted and hardened.
Goddamn
, I would seduce her so fast her head would spin.

The waitress thumped our second round down and Boyce laughed and clinked his shot glass to my frosted pint glass. ‘To whatever you’re thinking, dude. That’s the look of a guy who’s gonna get him some. Anything I can do to help?’

I shook my head, startled at the intensity of that one-minute fantasy.

That’s what it was, of course. A fantasy.

Two more weeks of economics classes. Two more self-defence modules. Over.

When Boyce was driving me back last night, I caught the altered sign of the Bait & Tackle, which had added ‘Coffee & Wi-Fi’ to its name. I could imagine old Joe painting the sign extension himself – which is exactly how it looked. I thought about stopping by, signing into my campus email to see if Jacqueline had written to me. To
Landon
.

Once I thought about her – home alone, parents skiing, dog boarded, I couldn’t stop worrying. I reminded myself that we’d travelled in opposite directions for this break. She went four hours north while I’d meandered four hours south. If she was in trouble, there was nothing I could do about it.

If she was fine, I could relax. All I had to do was check.

But I’d left her standing in front of the language arts building three days ago, when I’d made the decision to
suspend this craving, at least for the break. If I texted her now, everything would start all over. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.

Then Caleb fell asleep on my bed after eating at least two pounds of turkey and double helpings of everything else. Dad, Charles and Cindy were all glued to a closely contended football game I couldn’t focus on at all, and Carlie whined, twice, ‘
I’m so boooorrrred
.’