Inside Out (3 page)

“Another shot of Jäger, my friend?” Clay asked as the bartender set another glass of the stuff in front of Rett.

“You just keep 'em comin', boy. I'm gon' show you how to take 'em down like a champ,” Rett answered with a grin. He drummed the bar top momentously, then swept up the drink and let it slip quickly down his throat. He held back his grimace like a man.

“Where we goin' next?” Clay asked, knocking back his own.

“Aww, man.” Rett slapped him on the back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He hated the taste of Jäger. “I'm going to Kim's. I'll see you back at the apartment later.”

“Aw-right,” Clay acknowledged, then waggled his eyebrows at a pretty redhead at the end of the bar… at least until a very pretty blonde with pretty hazel eyes eclipsed his view and winked at him.

When his expression changed, Rett tracked his gaze to the blonde at whom he scowled. “Don't make me kick your ass, Clay.”

Clay licked his lips and turned to order another drink.

Rett left after greeting the blonde with a half-hug and a kiss just to annoy her. In his car, he looked over at the books on his passenger seat and took a deep, fortifying breath. Then, he punched directions into the nav system.

* * *

Late Friday night, Tracey was up and home, as she usually was, drinking spiked coffee and listening to jazz. Maybe it sounded pretentious, but it's what she liked to do. Listening to jazz had been Tracey's favorite pastime ever since her father brought home a reel-to-reel when she was about seven. The coffee came later when he bought her a coffee maker and, when her mother wasn't looking, gave her a bottle of coffee liqueur he'd brought from the islands.

Just when Charlie Parker was about to get into his “Mood,” Tracey heard a knock at her door and got up to answer it. She moved slowly, wondering who would come this late. She peeked through the peephole in the door and her immediate reaction was,
There's a white boy at my door
. She rubbed her eyes, but there he stood: Garrett Atkins. She opened the door.

“Hey,” he piped, wearing a little boy grin.

“Oh, no, not you!” It was out before she could stop it.

“What do you mean,
not me
?” He chuckled. His voice was slower and deeper than usual. More accented than usual. It put a tickle on the back of her neck. She tried to think about all those movies with the dirty old white man trying to get at some fresh-out-of-church naïve, nubile, young black girl walking down the side of a rural road. It had been done in so many ways in so many movies. Sometimes they got them, sometimes they didn't. But the scenes she could remember weren't working. He wasn't leering at her. He was, however, giving her a tickle.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, agitated.

“Well, it's actually a two-part mission,” he started, knocking another smile her way. Another tickle.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest, refusing to fall for it. Those smiles were his weapon.

“Listen, I'm sorry I'm here so late,” he said in a rush. “God, I'm sorry. But I couldn't stop thinking you were mad about what happened that first day at the law school. I mean, I see you around every day and every day I think you think I'm a… I'm a—”

“Racist?” Tracey questioned with a quirk of her eyebrow. It was the first time she had heard or seen the slightest hint of vulnerability in this man. She decided to take advantage of it. “It's good that you're worried about that. You should worry. You should feel guilty, too. But it's still no reason for you to come here at this time of night to make reparations. You can leave my forty acres and my mule at the door. I'll get them in the morning.” She didn't know if it meant she was somehow getting comfortable with him or not, but Tracey was getting good with the zingers.

She went on. “And may I ask you a question? Do you normally track people down like some sort of stalker just to apologize? I mean, that's just not normal. And you could be in some serious danger coming into this neighborhood at night.” Tracey looked beyond him out into the darkness and could see that he had pulled his shiny black SUV all the way up into her drive behind the trees. No one would see it from the street.

“I don't do this all the time.” There was the arrogance again. Still, he stood there. At that point, she noticed the books tucked under his arm. He untucked them so she could see them better. “The second part of this mission.” His gaze darted around her into her living room. “You mind if I come in?”

“Why?”

“I don't know.” He leaned his head against the doorframe and pawed at his eyes with broad hands. Then he pulled his head away from the frame and put his elbow where it had been. He laid his head in the palm of his hand. His elbows slipped on the wood and he teetered. She grabbed for her books before they plummeted to the floor.

Realizing why his accent was so much thicker than usual, Tracey asked, “Are you drunk?”

“Not half as much as I wanna be.”

“You're looking pretty drunk to me right now. You're smelling pretty drunk, too.” She stood there staring at him for a long while, wondering what to do.

“Listen, I'll get outta here. I probably shouldna come anyway.”

There was that sensitivity again. Tracey honestly didn't know what to make of it.

“No, no.” She didn't know him that well, but in his condition, he didn't evoke much fear. Besides, he shouldn't be out driving. All very rational. Uh-huh. “No, you shouldn't drive like that. Come in.” She moved back into the house and turned the music off. It didn't feel right with it on and him there.

“How'd you find me?”

He didn't sit, just stared at his surroundings.

Walking over to the sofa to look at the prints hanging above it, he replied, “Your address is in your books.”

Tracey accepted that answer for about three seconds. “It is not.”

“Damn, I should have checked before I said that, huh?” He chuckled. “And not even a thank you for bringing them back.”

“Thank you. Now tell me how you found me.”

“Easy. I knew your name already. I just had Marsha in the front office look you up for me this morning. I told her we'd gotten our notebooks mixed up and I had to find you 'cause there was a big test coming up. I've been ridin' around for about an hour trying to find your house. Even with the GPS, I passed it like three different times. You really ought to get someone to chop those trees down out there.”

“Listen, Detective CSI, I happen to like those trees. Why didn't you just get her to call me or call me yourself so we could arrange for me to pick them up?”

He shrugged.

“That's your answer?”

He shrugged again with another lopsided grin.

“It's late.” Her voice didn't hold half the resilience it had earlier. “It would be irresponsible for me to let you drive like that.” Tracey closed the door behind him and offered him something to drink. Reflex, pure reflex. That's what one did when one had a guest. Did she really have a guest?

He wanted something alcoholic. After explaining to him that that defeated the purpose of letting him in, she agreed. She gave in because he kept walking around her living room, picking up everything, looking at everything, touching everything. He picked up the heavy wooden fetish her father had brought back for her from the Ivory Coast. He ran his hands over the hips and lips of the roughly fashioned fertility talisman. He turned it in his palm, then set it down on its little pedestal once more, so softly that she never heard it touch. Tracey gave in to Garrett because whenever he spoke to her or she to him, he would watch her face and pay more attention than she was accustomed to. He studied her as he had that talisman. She gave in to him because she barely had a choice.

Out of milk for white Russians, Tracey started a pot of decaf for an Irish coffee. “Be happy I'm not a cheapskate; otherwise you'd be drinking water.”

He smiled. Another tickle. Dammit, she hated it when he did that. She got up and moved into the kitchen. When she came back, he was sitting where she had been sitting, in her favorite spot, her favorite chair, and didn't look as if he was going to move. She didn't say anything, needing a little more time to size up the situation. Plus, she didn't want to be rude.

Tracey handed him the glass, and he tasted cautiously. “This is good. Thanks.”

“So happy you like it.” They were quiet for a moment. “Okay, I don't mean to sound rude or anything, but why did you ask Marsha for my address and not my phone number?”

He responded—or didn't—by telling her he liked her furniture because it was weird. He seemed amazed when she told him she'd helped her mother make most of it. She pointed out the dark tan leather armchair he had usurped from her, one of her mother's signature designs.

“This is amazing.”

“My mother is trained in interior design, but for about the past ten, fifteen years, she's been involved with industrial design as well.”

“Awesome,” he said. Tracey hated that word. “How'd you get into law?”

“Well, I'm not ‘into law' exactly. I'm in the MBA program. I'm hoping to specialize in the legal aspects of operations management. You know, like labor unions, HR policy, etc. It's kind of dry, but I like it. Besides, my father is a corporate law consultant. I guess I took after him.”

Garrett was quiet.

Tracey tried to fill the silence. “You know, I hear that people struggling under the white man's burden sometimes feel the need to give confession.”

He looked rather perplexed, and Tracey started to laugh.

“That was a joke,” she said. He relaxed again and stared down into his mug. “What is it?” she implored. “You want to talk about it? And while you talk about it, would you also please explain why you stalked me. You still haven't.”

“Nah, I don't guess so.”

But he didn't say anything more. She sat on the couch contemplating how long he would be there and if he was ever going to talk about what was bothering him or tell her why he'd gotten her address. His appearance on her doorstep was probably the oddest thing that had happened to her in her entire college career.

Something occurred to her, and she looked him full in the face. As was becoming usual, his yellow and brown and green eyes met hers dead on. Tracey could feel hers widen, then narrow. “Where'd you find my books, Garrett?”

“Huh?” His surprise and guilt were as evident as Santa Claus's appetite for frequent dining.

“You stole my books, Garrett?” It was barely a question.

“I gave 'em back, didn't I?” he returned with a wolfish grin.

“And that makes it okay?”

He shrugged.

“And you're number three—”

“Soon to be number one,” he interrupted.

“Good lord! Why did you do this?”

“You remember that day about two weeks ago in the student lounge? You know, when my ingenious friends and I decided to vandalize the Quiki Snack Machine?” His gaze moved from hers briefly, a glance at his mug and back. She nodded. “Well, you may not believe this, but I heard you laugh—”

“Of course I believe it. Everyone heard me laugh. And here's a shocker: I wasn't the only one laughing, either.”

“Aw-right, aw-right. But that's not what you won't believe. You won't believe that I never heard a laugh like that before.”

“There is not a single thing peculiar about my laugh,” Tracey said, not at all pleased.

“Oh, but there is,” he insisted cryptically. Then he winked at her.

“Anyway,” she demurred, “I still don't understand what you're doing here, what you're doing with me.” That was a funny choice of words, and they both knew it. Tracey rushed ahead. “Isn't it homecoming weekend or something? Shouldn't you be doing something to show your school spirit?”

“Shouldn't you?”

“It's not my style,” Tracey answered, shrugging her shoulders.

“But you figure it's mine?”

She didn't answer that.

“Well, yesss,” he drawled. “I was out with some friends on the strip tonight. I was doin' the same old thing I always do on the weekend—homecomin's not for two more weeks, by the way. Anyhow, sometime tonight, I got bored and left.”

Tracey pinned him with a stare. “And came here.”

He licked his lips. “And came here.”

“Why?”

“It bothers me, the way you look at me. It bothers the hell outta me. And I don't know why, but I like you.”

“You don't know me.”

He dipped his head in the most awkward and entrancing way, almost like a bird running its wing over its head. “You're right. So let me fix that. Where you from?”

“Huh?”

“Where are you from?” He cocked his head to the side.

“Here, why?”

“The accent or the no-accent. You don't talk like you're from down here.”

“If you mean I don't talk like you, that's true. I've never had that strong of a Southern accent, and neither do my parents.” No need to tell him about Mama's family and how status-conscious they'd been for more than a century. Speech lessons had come so early Tracey didn't remember a time before she had them.

He hesitated. “I like the way you talk.”

“Thank you. I like the way you talk.”

He studied the wall. Tracey thought maybe she'd embarrassed him. “I been drivin' around since I left the bar, bored out of my mind.”

“You shouldn't drink and drive.”

“I know, but… I know.”

What she felt looking at him, all good looks and charm, and also conflict and sadness, was an instant, deep, and undeniable connection to him. Tracey needed a diversion. “I should tell you I've had extensive contact with alcoholics, and I know that sometimes when one has had too much to drink, it leads to a kind of philosophical degeneration. What I mean is, being drunk leads one to believe he or she is being deeply philosophical sometimes, whereas one is really only being drunk.”