Dream of You (36 page)

             
Jordan managed to turn his snarl into a false smile. “Yeah.”

             
She shifted in her chair. “Can I go?”

             
“Please do.”

             
“You won’t say anything…since I told the truth…right?”

             
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

             
When she was gone, the door latching shut with a quiet click, he kicked the desk she’d been sitting in. Hard enough to send a jolt radiating up his ankle that made him wish he hadn’t.

             
Tam let out a low whistle as he got to his feet. “What the hell was that?”

             
Jordan wiped his hands down his face. “Ellie’s ex is trying to get my ass canned.”

             
“Why?”

             
“’Cause he’s a sick little bastard? How the hell should I know?”

             
“Well it’s not about you,” Tam stated the obvious. “He’s gotta, I dunno, still have a hard-on for Ellie or something.”

             
Of course he did, because of course it had been about Ellie; when had Jordan ever hung tags on a relationship, set up perimeters and made himself comfy, without the whole thing crashing around his ears? He wanted to hit something. He wanted to pull up his grade book on the computer and fail the shit out of Shanae. He wanted to go over to the gym, cut off all Kyle Whatshisname’s feathered hair and shove it down his throat.

             
He wanted, just once in his life, to want something that had a chance of making him happy.

             
“How’d this happen?”

             
In a tired, flat voice he told Tam about meeting Kyle at the gym and the resulting visit from Vaughn the week before.

             
“Shit. Your runner’s best pals with her ex? Small world.”

             
“I dunno about ‘best,’ but yeah, they’re friends. And clearly me screwing a student is big news to the KSU track team.”

             
Tam frowned and tidied the spikes of his hair in a gesture that seemed unconscious. “Screwing? You took her to meet Randy and Beth – that’s way past screwing.”

             
“I know.”

             
“What are you gonna do?”

             
“I don’t know.”

**

              Tam wasn’t surprised to find Ellie propped against the brick front of the business building, but he wasn’t glad. She was in jeans and brown leather boots, a wool coat with the collar flipped up around her ears, the wind pulling her bangs across her forehead. Her brows were pulled together, little tension creases marring her pale skin, and Tam sighed with dread as he approached her. The brick building fronts of this school had never worked in his favor.

             
“Is everything okay?” She straightened away from the wall once he was in earshot.

             
Tam’s leather jacket wasn’t really warm enough for the day around them, and he hunched his shoulders against the wind, dug his hands in his pockets as he came to a halt in front of her. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class all the way over there?” He nodded in the general direction of the English building.

             
Her frown was made of stubborn stuff, accompanied by the same kind of amusingly cute chin thrust Jo liked to use on him. “It can wait. What’s going on with Jordan?”

             
Back in the day, Tam had met the infamous Kelsey only a handful of times. She’d been “intimidated” by the family, Jordan had explained, but really, she just hadn’t been serious enough to want to trouble herself with mothers and fathers and siblings. She’d been pretty in a generic sort of way. Disinterested in everything around her.

             
Ellie was nothing like her; she reminded him of a character from an old book: the picture of elegant sweetness and concern, her emotions embroidered in golden thread up and down her sleeves. Tam very much approved of the way she felt about Jordie, even if the idea of being a gossip made his skin itch.

             
He found a quarter in one pocket and rubbed the pad of his thumb against it. “I think you should probably talk to him about that.”

             
She sighed. “Shanae stopped me in the hall last week and was trying to get me to fess up to being with Jordan. She ratted us out, didn’t she?” She bit her lower lip. “Is he in danger of losing his job?”

             
So much for appeasing her with a pat on the head. He made a face. “Just call him, okay? I don’t wanna say the wrong thing and get you upset.”

             
A thick lock of hair tugged loose from behind her ear and whipped across her face; she tucked it back into place. She blinked hard. “Oh, God, he is, isn’t he?”

             
“If he is, then it’s not your fault, okay? Jordie’s a big boy; he decided you were worth the risk, so it’s his problem, not yours.”

             
But she didn’t look convinced, still blinking. She glanced away from him toward the green.

             
Shit, why weren’t all women as easy to talk to as Jo? “Ellie,
call him
. He-said-she-said and keeping secrets doesn’t work. Trust me, I know.”

             
“Yeah.” She pulled a hand through her hair again, eyes faraway. “I will.”

**

              She didn’t call after class, or on the way home. As she helped Paige bake, she kept wondering, hoping almost, that Jordan might be the one to call her. The more time she allowed to build, the more bleak her internal monologue of questions became:

             
Did Shanae really even know anything? So what if she did? She couldn’t have any evidence, could she? But why would Jordan want to talk to her if her threats had been empty? What if it wasn’t even about his job at all? What if he had some kind of hot affair going on with Shanae too? What if he hadn’t called because he didn’t care if she was at home fretting? What if admitting her feelings had been the beginning of the end? What if…

             
She dialed him halfway through a
Hamlet
scene she’d read twice already because she couldn’t focus. And then she bit her lip and held her breath until he picked up.

             
“Hey.”

             
Try as she might, there was nothing to interpret from “hey,” so she took a deep breath and said, “How are you?”

             
The half a beat of silence that passed was telling. “I’m fine.”

             
She wanted to play the coy mistress, but she realized, as her throat tightened, that she couldn’t tell him she loved him and do that. “Oh, Jordie, I’m sorry,” came tumbling out before she could catch herself. “Shanae jumped me outside class one day but I didn’t tell her anything. I don’t know how she found out, but, oh, God, I never meant for any of this to happen.”

             
Another pause, shorter this time. She thought she heard him swallow. “I know you didn’t.”

             
“How can I help?” she asked as she tucked her legs up beneath her and curled back against the headboard. “I’ll pull out of your class if you need me to. I know it’s too late for that, but I could take an incomplete credit. I could - ”

             
“Ellie.”

             
“What?”

             
“I gotta go.”

             
When the line went dead she stared at her cell phone, refusing to comprehend, trying to convince herself some technical difficulty was to blame. There were fat tears coursing down her cheeks by the time Paige yelled up the stairs: “El! Lover Boy’s here!”

             
The sudden kick of unexpected joy left her breath lodged in her throat. She swiped at her face, but there was no way to erase that she’d been crying, and when Jordan appeared in the open doorway of her room, the worry etched across his features told her how red and raw she looked.

             
She met him halfway across the floor, thankful for his chest to press her face against, his arms solid around her.

             
“We’ll figure it out,” he said against the top of her head. “I promise.”

30

             
I
t all began unraveling two weeks before Thanksgiving. The first thread had caught the day Vaughn came to visit him – the same day Ellie said, “Yes.” As if he were walking through the wilderness in a hand-spun sweater, he felt little ragged, vulnerable places catch against the undergrowth; sharp little thorns like Beth’s photo albums and Ellie’s smile as she’d looked through them, like
yes
and
girlfriend
, like Shanae’s guilty glances and Ellie taking an incomplete credit for his class, her desk empty in front of Tam, reached out and snagged at loops. Each step he took ripped at the delicate fabric of what he’d allowed Ellie to stitch around him, and by the time he went around the end of an aisle in Walgreens and stumbled into his ex-girlfriend, the whole thing was already in tattered ribbons.

             
He should have been expecting something like this, he supposed, because when life started to suck, it sucked hard. But still, when he pulled up just an inch short of colliding with Kelsey and she jumped back with a startled, “Oh, shit!” he wasn’t ready for the encounter.

             
Jordan came to a grinding halt. She looked so different than she had back when he’d thought he would give her a ring and his last name and his children, but there was still no mistaking her; a person didn’t just claw your beating heart out of your chest without leaving a lasting impression. “Kels,” he said before he could stop himself, and her head tipped back, eyes finally coming up to his face.

             
She was blonde now, a brassy, unnatural shade that left dark roots exposed. Her orthodontist husband clearly spared no expense when it came to her nails, her fake tan, her makeup and new boobs. She was still into girl colors – her sweater done in bold, bubblegum shades of pink, teal and orange – and stacked stilettos. Somewhere, under the thousands of dollars of exterior shellac, was the girl who’d ended his running career.

             
It was a full second before her dark eyes widened in recognition. “Oh my God! Hey, Jor!” She’d always hated his family nickname. “What are you doing here?”

             
He thought his basket of toothpaste, shampoo and razor blades was self-explanatory, as was the fact that everyone went into a Walgreens somewhere at some point, but all his snark and indifference abandoned him. “Shopping,” he said stupidly. And then, to add insult to injury: “You look good.”

             
“Oh.” She fluffed her yellow hair, propped a hip in a calculated way. “Thanks.” Her eyes went up and down him and her voice became the stiff, over bright tone of accomplished liars. “So do you.”

             
Walk away
, he told himself.
Just walk the hell away
. But he didn’t, and Kelsey gave him another of those big, cheerleader smiles.

             
“So what’ve you been up to?”

             
On some level, he acknowledged how unfair it was of her to ask him that. But he shrugged and said, “I’m coaching at the college.”
And living at home and dating a freshman
.

             
“Oh cool,” she said without sincerity. “That’s great.”

             
He shifted his feet on the tile, suddenly feeling eighteen and unaccomplished again. And really, was he accomplished? No. “How ‘bout you?”

             
“Oh, I’m so, so busy, you know?” She lifted her hand as if it were a given: of course she was busy. She had a rich husband and kids and a totally fabulous life to live. Why wouldn’t she be busy? It wasn’t like she’d, you know, turned her whole life upside down for a high school sweetheart who dumped her on her ass or anything. “Brady’s in kindergarten this year,” she said of one of her snot-nosed, non-Walker brats, “and I’m like,
the
room mom, you know? So I’m at the school like,
all
the time. And we’ve been renovating the master bathroom, so the house is, like, a
crazy
mess…”

             
Standing under the harsh fluorescent bulbs in the middle of the drug store, next to an end cap full of nail polish and press-on eyelashes, he didn’t want Kelsey; he wanted what she’d taken from him. He wanted to have a laundry list of goodness to read off every time someone asked him what he was “up to.” He wanted his dreams back.

**

              He only saw Ellie at night, now that she was no longer in his class, and then their time was devoted to a desperate, struggling sort of sex that only satisfied for a few minutes’ time. Every time she propped up on an elbow and traced her fingernails across his chest, a question poised on her lips, he feigned sleep rather than tell her how disgusting he found it that she’d jeopardized her three year college plan for him. Only idiots like him did idiotic things like that, and he could feel a frustration building in him that was no longer contained. It was beginning to leach out into the air between them. It tainted every kiss and every uncertain smile she sent his way. The fabric was coming apart too fast for either of them to stop, and that was before she asked him, over dinner one night, if he’d like to come to meet her family on Thanksgiving.

             
The day that was the last, ultimate ruin of them dawned gray and leaden, the sky stacked with clouds that looked like dirty mattresses, the trees bowing and turning loose of their last, clinging brown leaf scraps. Jordan woke up in his own bed, alone, a headache already throbbing behind his eyes. After his run and his shower, as he combed his hair and stole some of Tam’s hair paste so he could tame it into some trendy resemblance of straightness, Thanksgiving dinner smells were already bounding up the stairs and wiggling their way under the bathroom door. He dressed in a white oxford and the good gray sweater that was only for special occasions, jeans and clean black Chuck Taylors. Both his sisters were in the kitchen with Mom, Jess chopping and Jo steeping tea bags for a great vat of sweet tea because no one trusted her with food that wasn’t prepackaged. Thanksgiving was an unending day of food, football, small talk and napping, and even if it usually left him restless and coming out of his skin, today, he thought he might miss the tradition, because dread was like a cold stone in his belly. He nodded along to Beth’s wishes, that he come back home and bring Ellie once they were through with her family, and slipped out the door.

             
Ellie looked nothing less than stunning, which took a cheese grater to the already rough edges of his calm. Her dress was black zebra stripes over smoke gray, body-hugging cotton, long-sleeved and embellished with black knee-high boots and her double-take worthy figure. Her perfume shot straight up his nose as she slid into his Jeep, and the careful way her eyes said
please talk to me
as she leaned in and pressed a pink lipstick kiss to his cheek left him twitchy. It was the perfect sort of dreary day that led to perfect indoor Thanksgivings, and he had this perfect-looking girl next to him as they headed for a perfect meeting of the parents…and somehow everything felt skewed in Jordan’s mind. Something was
wrong
, and if that was just his imagination, then his brain was intent on sabotaging him.

             
The Graysons lived country club adjacent in a stone and cedar shingle custom home in one of those exorbitantly expensive planned communities where people just a notch less affluent than Delta’s family flocked in droves. It was a hulking structure with two chimneys and a three car garage, a professionally landscaped yard that looked just like all the other lawns on the street, sapling trees held up with stakes and cables. Jordan threw his Jeep in park along the curb and stared up at all the watching windows, trying to rectify the Ellie he thought he knew with what he was looking at.

             
“Yeah, I know,” she sighed beside him. “They’re
those
people.”

             
They…or her too?

             
Something turned over in his stomach and left a bad taste against the back of his tongue as he went through the motions of walking around to open her door for her. He floated his hand at the small of her back as they went up the gray brick drive and sidewalk, between the little pom-pom shrubs and tidy waves of yellow pansies. Ellie’s heels were too loud against the bricks. His sweater was suddenly too warm and making him itch even through his oxford. The smell of leaves burning was sharp as a knife.

             
He felt Ellie’s fingers against his as they drew up to the door – she was reaching around, searching for contact – but he kept his palm against her spine, frozen and immobile.

             
He shouldn’t have been this nervous. Maybe it wasn’t nerves at all: some sort of prophetic sense that doom lay on the other side of the red door and its tasteful fall wreath.

             
Ellie’s profile was drawn and tight as she turned to him, bangs slanting across her forehead. “Jordie - ” she started, and then the door opened and the last pure, untainted memory he had of her was the way she called him
Jordie
.

**

              Anyone who’d met Beth’s sister Julia realized that no, Jordan and Jo were in fact not the mailman’s babies. She was genetic proof of the big, blue-green eyes and all the dark mahogany streaks in their honey hair. She was slender and sweet, and without children of her own was all about living vicariously through her nieces and nephews.

             
“Oh, proud papa,” she said, laying a hand against Tam’s cheek. She had to stand up on her tiptoes to do it. “Aren’t you so excited?”

             
Terrified, fretful, anxious, sleepless, continually amazed that Jo was handling it so well…yes. “Sure, we’ll go with that,” he told her and was rewarded with a quick pat before her hand withdrew.

             
Julia cast a beaming smile across the room to where Jo stood with her cousins Alyssa and Kyra; Jo had decided that showing her baby bump was better than making a poor attempt at hiding it, and wore low-slung jeans and a tight sweater. She’d been under siege by curious relatives all afternoon, she and Delta the ladies of the hour. “She’s just glowing, don’t you think?” Julia said. “She’s got that expectant mother glow.”

             
Tam thought it was probably just a light mist of grease the gravy pot had spit on her, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t willing to lick it off her face either way. “I guess so.”

             
“Have you started thinking about names yet?”

             
“Um…” Jo slipped away from her cousins and headed in his direction, her tired half smile indicating she knew he’d been cornered. “Not really, no.”

             
“Oh, well.” Julia flashed a very serious glance up to him. “If you need any ideas, I have a whole list I never got to use myself. Boy and girl names, and they’re alphabetized, too –“

             
“That’s so sweet, Aunt Jules,” Jo said as she joined them, and Tam heaved an internal sigh of relief. “We’d love to see them.”

             
“Oh, wonderful.” Julia clasped her hands together, smiling so hard her face was in danger of cracking. “I’ll email them to your mother. Oh, that reminds me; where is she? I think my soufflé is ready to come out of the oven. I’ll be right back, dears.”

             
Jo smiled right up until her aunt was out of sight, then she slumped against the wall beside him.

             
“We’d love to see them?” he asked, brows lifted.

             
She rolled her eyes. “Humoring never killed anyone.” He watched a thought spark behind her expression, her words triggering something. “Speaking of which - ” She stole a glance across the thick stew of bodies in the living room and then lowered her voice, leaning into him. “Walt’s actually been
pleasant
to me,” she said like she didn’t believe it. Her little non-smile was knowing. “That wouldn’t happen to be your doing, would it?”

             
He shrugged. “Maybe he just finally pulled his head outta his ass.”

             
She snorted. “You said something to him that night you walked the boys out, didn’t you?”

             
Tam dropped an arm across her shoulders, found a shiny, curling lock of her hair and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He could see the most subtle of shifts in her face, the way the stress in her eased as a result of the contact. He liked that: thinking that every once in a while he got to be the one to comfort her instead of the other way around. “I get to defend my girl, don’t I?”

             
Her smile was fleeting. “You shouldn’t have to, though.”

             
He gave her a little squeeze. “That’s my job.”

             
She glanced away. He saw the muscles in her throat work as she swallowed. “Still…”

             
Still, her brother shouldn’t be such an asshole, he thought.