Dream of You (32 page)

             
“It’s fine. I’m on the pill,” she murmured. It wasn’t like this would be the first time they tested its effectiveness.

             
“Not that. It’s just…” There was a note of tension in his voice suddenly. Worry, almost.

             
“What?”

             
“My, um…” Twice tonight he’d used “um” and that wasn’t something that pervaded his vocabulary. The
girlfriend
bomb was getting to him, she thought. “My mom wants to meet you.”

             
She wriggled loose enough so she could roll over onto her back. His face hanging above hers was a crazy collage of expressions: part hopeful, part embarrassed, part nervous, part something she couldn’t name. The thought that went cartwheeling through her mind was that in order for Mother Walker to want to meet her, she must know of her existence: Jordan had talked about her. She played calm and said, “She does?”

             
“Yeah.” His smile pulled hard to the side until it wasn’t a smile at all. The lamplight over his bronzed shoulder was picking up all the gold flecks in his blue-green eyes, betraying the tiniest stressed twitch of his eyebrow. “If you don’t want to, though - ”

             
“Oh, I want to.” Her smile was so sudden it surprised even her. “I’d really like to, actually.”

             
“You say that now…”

             
“She can’t be any scarier than my mom.”

             
“’Scary’ isn’t what I was thinking. She’s just very…mother-ish.”

             
Ellie laughed. “And that’s a bad thing?”

             
“Guess we’ll find out,” he said with a deep sigh through his nostrils that ruffled her bangs. A true grin crept into existence. “But we were about to do something a lot more fun than talk about moms.”

             
“Yes we were.”

27

             
H
alloween was not a family holiday, and for that reason, it was one of Ellie’s favorites. Sure, Christmas was Jesus and joy, cookies and Christ – the culmination of every happy thought or wish – but it was also silent, stilted dinners eaten to the soundtrack of Nikki’s endless accomplishments. It was disgruntled throat clearing from her father and only the most helpful of gifts from her mother: sparkly pink nail polish, a gym membership, an offer to help her setup an online dating profile…

             
But Halloween was none of those things. It was too many Tootsie Rolls and neighborhood children dressed as goblins and princesses. It was Paige’s pointed witch hat and Johnny Depp’s Ichabod on TV. It was ninety-nine cent spiderweb that stuck to nothing but her fingers, the crunch of fallen leaves, the sinister orange flare of the sun as it winked out over the horizon. The dancing bright faces of Jack-o-lanterns and the sharp smell of singed pumpkin where a candle flame had licked just a little too high. Vampires and werewolves. “Thriller” and the throaty, timeless sound of Vincent Price’s laugh. Black cats and urban legends, sharp gusts of wind; and the sense that somewhere out there in the night, something worth lifting the fine hairs on the back of her neck was happening.

             
And this year, Halloween was meeting Jordan’s parents.

             
“One cappuccino, one small black coffee, please,” Ellie slid a ten and a five to the girl across the bagel counter in the business building and caught Tam’s grin from the corner of her eye. They’d bumped into each other in line and she’d ducked back a space so they could wait together. “What?”

             
He was in a white AC/DC t-shirt, black leather jacket – the kind that had gone soft and worn, like he’d had it for a lifetime – tight jeans and black Converse sneaks. He was so perfectly comfortable in his own skin, with that dark spiked hair, that looking at him always made her want to smile. Plenty of guys went through phases, but Tam, she suspected, had always been just a little too punk for the mainstream crowd.

             
“Taking your man coffee in the middle of the day,” he said, grin getting wider. “He’s so spoiled.”

             
“I can spoil him if I want,” she said as she took her change back. “He’s good to me.”

             
Tam looked almost pleased, she thought, nodding to himself. He fished out his wallet – it was skinny – and began thumbing through bills, blue eyes still on her. “I hear you get to meet the parents tonight.”

             
Another nervous tremor went rippling down her spine at the mention, but she couldn’t keep back a smile. “Yeah.” She’d never pressed Jordan about spending the night at his place – he’d dropped enough hints and made enough awkward faces that she’d arrived at the conclusion that he’d moved back in with his folks, and that Tam and Jo lived there with them – and she’d been too busy holding her breath and basking in the glow of what they had to push for anything more serious. When he’d brought up his mom two weeks before, she’d not expected to be introduced so quickly. “How nervous should I be?”

             
“You shouldn’t be – small black,” he told the bagel girl as Ellie stacked her cups one on top of the other. “I’m a little biased, but they’re kind of, well, the best parents
ever
.”

             
Sons-in-law didn’t say that sort of thing, and for a moment, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the counter where his coffee was being prepped, Tam looked like a man with a story – the kind of history that Ellie loved in a novel, but didn’t wish on anyone in real life. He wasn’t a college freshman at twenty-seven because life had gone as planned. He didn’t live with his wife’s parents because he wanted to, but he loved them for letting him stay. When he wasn’t trying to be charming, like now, he looked tired and weighted down and stressed. But then he picked up his coffee, fired her another smile, and looked every bit the throwback charmer again.

             
“Be prepared for pictures,” he warned. “And cookies. And Beth’s a hugger, so watch for that.”

             
She chewed her lip as they started across the atrium. “Are they hard to please?” she asked, thinking of her own mother. “Are they - ”

             
“They’ll like you. I swear.”

             
And for some reason, she believed him.

**

              “Coach Walker.” The unexpected sound of Coach Vaughn’s voice in the middle of the afternoon was never a welcome surprise. Jordan glanced up from the quizzes he’d been hand grading with a red pen and saw his boss filling up the open doorway to his office. It was sixty-five degrees outside, but Vaughn was in a white Nike t-shirt with big half-moons of sweat under his arms. His ID was on a lanyard around his neck, a bag of Funyuns trying to work its way out of his sweatpants pocket. “Can I steal a second?”

             
Like he could refuse. “Sure.” As he started to duck his head, pen poised over the last incorrect answer on the quiz under his nose, he saw Vaughn close the door, and Jordan’s sleeping pulse shook itself off and sat up. Closed doors were never good; congenial, harmless conversations about practice never took place behind closed doors. “What’s up?”

             
There were two gray and green office chairs up against the front wall and Vaughn towed one over to the desk that he took his time settling into – sighing and groaning and adjusting his fleshy ass until he wasn’t wincing. He straightened his lanyard, ID facing out, and drummed his fingers across the round hump his belly became when he was sitting. When he pressed his lips together and cleared his throat, hummed and played awkward with his eyes going up and down Jordan, he looked just like someone who had a juicy piece of gossip…and who was enjoying it.

             
If not for the bowling night gone bad – gone good again – Jordan would have been able to say it had been something like seven years since he’d worked up any sort of emotional reaction. Ellie’s nerves manifested themselves physically – he could always feel the tremors running under her skin; he thought it was cute, honestly – but his nerves never got the best of him, not in a way that anyone had ever been able to detect anyway. Now, he made a steeple of his fingers on top of the desk, pen falling down onto the stack of quizzes and rolling till it hit his stapler. His sudden, perfect stillness forced Vaughn to do the same, even if he couldn’t maintain eye contact.

             
“Is there a problem?”

             
Vaughn’s mouth pulled hard to the side, his teeth a row of bath tile with moldy grout. “Not a
problem
I don’t guess you could say. Not
really
.”

             
“Okay.”

             
“It’s only that, well…there’s been talk.”

             
Jordan knew; he saw Ellie’s face, chewing at her lip:
you’d be taking a risk
. But he blinked and said, “Talk about what?”

             
The head track coach was a piss poor actor; this sent a cold thrill through him, this kernel of drama he’d dug up, and no amount of
so sorry
facial shrugs could mask that. He chewed on what he wanted to say a long moment, the second hand on the cheap clock hanging above him
tick
-
tick
-
tick
ing along. “Well, it’s never easy to hear things about any of my guys, so I didn’t want to believe this straight away, you understand.” The set up before the knock down.
I tried to think the best of you, but you’re just hopeless
. “But” -  deep, sad breath - “word’s going around that you’ve been a little too friendly with one of your students, if you get my drift.”

             
Asshole
, he thought. He’d expected this, if he was honest, but that didn’t make hearing it easier. Not now that it was more complicated than telling some unauthorized plaything to find another older man to meet her scandal quota. Now this ugly bastard was here to tell him that his
girlfriend
was a problem. The girl he was taking home to meet his mother tonight. “If we both know what you mean” -  he felt his self-control slipping, heard the note of anger in his voice - “then why don’t you come right out and accuse me already?”

             
Vaughn hadn’t expected that. He sat back, chair protesting. “Hey, I didn’t come here to accuse anyone of anything.”

             
“That’s what it sounds like. You’ve got unsubstantiated ‘talk’ and I’m supposed to, what, feel warm and fuzzy about that?”

             
“Now, calm down, son.”

             
“I am calm. And I’m not your son.”

             
Vaughn’s brows scaled up his forehead to the hairline he didn’t have. “I didn’t say I believed what I’ve heard, but you jumping me like this doesn’t look innocent.”

             
No, it didn’t. Jordan took a deep breath. “Then what is this, then?”

             
Vaughn drummed his fingers on his belly again, made Jordan wait.
I’m the one in the driver’s seat here
, he reminded.
I have the power
. “I don’t like ugly rumors any better than you do,” he said at last. “But” - his head tilted, non-smile full of impending regret - “I don’t like to be made to look bad either.”

             
No shit
.

             
“If someone I brought onboard to the team goes…against policy…then that reflects back on me. Understand?”

             
“Perfectly.”

             
“Now.” And here came the faux friendship. “You’re doing a good job considering this is your first semester. I like you.” Oh, lucky him. “And I think you could really go far here at KSU. So.” His hands linked together, ugly smile stretching. “Here’s what I’m gonna do.”

             
Do tell
. Jordan chewed at the inside of his cheek to keep silent.

             
“I’m gonna pretend that I never heard what I heard about you. I’m puttin’ it outta my head. Right now.” He mimed pulling something out of his ear and throwing it aside. “And then I’m gonna remind you that it would not be a good thing if I ever heard anything like that again.” Eyebrow lift. “Understand?”