Love Edy (34 page)

“Hassan!” Edy screamed, fearful for the
other boy. She tumbled over as Lawrence and Will crashed into her
back and then flew in the other direction, bodies still locked. She
couldn’t even see Kyle and Jesus in the widening fray.

And then she saw,
really saw
, the
scope of what she’d caused.

The twins rushed in. More South End players
joined in, then Blue Hill Ave players, before Reggie caught Edy’s
attention again. Words froze on her tongue, warnings stalled, fears
ignited and took flight on wings of frigid foreboding.

Hassan had disappeared into the crowd to
help his teammates fight. He’d dismissed Reggie, leaving him to
writhe on the floor, bathing in beer and punch. He twisted and
maneuvered onto his battered back, where he his neck strained as he
struggled to reach into his pants.

No. Hell no. Beat up guys reached into their
pants for one reason: retribution with a gun. She knew that from
her mother’s court cases.

Terror set her charging with gritted teeth,
muscles screaming, brain retreating. Edy exploded with a football
kick to his face and it jarred her: toe to ankle to calf to knee to
hip, all in perfect alignment. Reggie’s face exploded with a shift,
nose
elsewhere,
before Edy had time to register a scream—her
scream. Blood sluiced thick and black from Reggie’s nose. People
rounded them or maybe backed from them, as he mucked her name and
what he would do to her. Oh, he would have her; he promised in
gelatinous words, right after he broke her goddamned neck.

No music
Edy realized belatedly. She
craned around to see why. Still, her boys committed full on to the
fight, and oh, Hassan rumbled like it gave him life. Red faced,
grinning, and tossing around two boys. He brawled with the best of
them.

“Edy!” Chloe shrieked.

The gun.

She turned to find it pointed at her
abdomen, Reggie’s arm less than steady, his head rested against the
wall. Edy swallowed. In fact, while his arm shook, her pulse
steadied. She felt . . . calm. Knowing she might die. Understanding
he had the upper hand and that this sequence of events had been
because of a choice she made. Choices were all she ever wanted.

“Go ahead,” Reggie said. “Scream. Beg.”

Nothing like that built in her now. For all
her indifference, for all the indecisiveness she’d faced in life
about Hassan, her future, what she couldn’t have and what
absolutely belonged to her, what Reggie promised with his gleaming
gun and globs of blood oozing from his nose was that nothing,
nothing
laid in her future after he pulled his trigger.

Only death.

And she had no remedy for that.

Reggie guffawed and swung the gun toward the
dance floor where the melee continued. His mouth went wide with
bloodied glee as he searched, fast, wild, desperate now for his
real prey.

Hassan.

A stiletto heel flung past Reggie’s face and
he canted in Chloe’s direction, pissed. Edy popped off the grand
battement from hell, kicking his gun arm toward the ceiling. He
misfired upstairs.
Bang.
Screaming. Shattering bone breaking
shrieking surrounded Edy on all four sides. It overlapped and
licked and threatened madness as it tore at the walls in a bid for
escape.

The stampede had begun.

A tangle of bodies fell into them, onto
them, and Edy plummeted, sandwiched between a cursing Reggie, and
another, bulkier than him.

She’d know that body anywhere.

From atop her, Hassan groped for the gun
still in Reggie’s possession. He closed his hand around Reggie’s
thumb back and snapped, earning a bubbling howl when it
cracked.

“Come on,” Chloe cried. “Now!”

She had an arm on Hassan and yanked. While
it didn’t pull him upright, it did get him moving. He got up,
claiming Edy as fast as he could.

Edy shot a questioning look at the front
door, still jammed with escapees.

“Back door! Now!” Chloe said and sprinted,
joining hands with Lawrence before weaving around a corner and out
of sight.

They collided with the twins outside and
fled.

~~~

Mirror. Road. Mirror. Road.
Swerve.
With Hassan’s eyes uncommitted, his Mustang jerked left into the
oncoming lane. No traffic this time, thank God.

“What is it?” Edy said. “Hassan, why do you
keep doing that?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. No reason.” He
exhaled. “Did he hurt you?” Hassan asked, voice delicate as a
melting snowflake.

Edy shook her head. “No.”

Images rushed her: the crack
back
of
a thumb, the
sluicing
of blood, the
skid
of a nose
off course. Nausea jolted Edy and she let down the window for
air.

“Cake?”

“I’m okay. I—”

She stared down a second bolt of sickness
and won.

“Call your mother,” Hassan said and then
made it nearly impossible by taking her hand and crushing it. His
grip juddered as if plagued by a seizure.

As the daughter of the reigning district
attorney she had training for . . . mayhem, she and Hassan both
did. A rudimentary form of that tried to kick in.

“I’ll—I’ll call her in a second,” she
said.

Hassan pulled up to a stop sign, jerked into
park, and crushed her in his arms.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, baby.” He
pressed a kiss to her cheek, nose, eyelid, lips, and brushed hair
from her face. “I cannot lose you, Edy. Do you understand that? I
can’t—”

Belated tears stung Edy’s eyes. For all his
talk, he was the one Reggie gunned for; he was the one that almost
died. That image burned the back of her eyelids like an old photo
negative: Reggie and his gun aiming for Hassan. It would stay with
her always, like acid burns on the heart. No amount of tears could
bury that memory; no amount of therapy could soothe it.

The bona fide fear arrived too late. It
sloshed through her bloodstream. She saw it flashing in Hassan’s
too-green eyes. When high beams illuminated the Mustang from
behind, he shifted into drive and took off.

“Call your mom,” he said.

“Hassan?”

“It’s nothing. Just—call your mom.”

He exhaled when the car behind them hung a
right at the next intersection.

With no answer from her mother, they agreed
to head back to Edy’s place as discreetly as possible and wait in
her bedroom.

They found the house dark, clean, and quiet.
Edy knew as they navigated the shadows and climbed the stairs, that
they were practiced enough to bump nothing. Not that they worried
about being heard. Her father would have fallen asleep with his
reading glasses fogged and his academic journals having slipped to
the floor anyway. Her mother, if she had occasioned not to have
slept in her office, would have tucked into bed with a half dozen
assortment of sleep and pampering agents designed for absolutely
undisturbed relaxation. How did she know both were there? Because
both cars sat in the Phelps drive. Which only
kinda
explained why her mom wouldn’t answer the phone, no matter how many
times they called.

Once in her room, space evaporated, and they
found each other in an instant. Edy melted in his arms, dripping to
nonsense, lulled by his heart hugging apologies and a trembling
that plagued them both.

She shushed him. Under thin streams of
moonlight, Edy stroked the lump on his brow with two shaking
fingers. But Hassan claimed the digits in a fist and pressed the
tips to his lips with tenderness, gaze on her as he kissed them.
Heat bloomed low in Edy, curling and unfurling like a tease.

“I heal,” Hassan said and moved his mouth
lower, tracing the line of her jaw with kisses, trailing
appreciation down her neckline. It felt like heaven. It felt like a
thousand chances plus two. “Promise me you’re okay,” he whispered.
“Promise me you’re not hurt.”

Hurt was the furthest thing from her mind.
In fact, she needed a recipe for breathing that second. Edy managed
a nod and tilted her head back more, giving him better access. You
know, in case he wanted to go a little lower.

He returned to her lips with a smirk.

“Open for me,” Hassan said, and Edy
lit
, sure as a match dropped in an inferno.

Their mouths met in a spark of greed, in
hunger, in certainty—oh so much certainty
now,
with her
giving, validating again and again, until she ached and unraveled,
soldering up and into him, leg wrapping his waist, body writhing.
She craved what she couldn’t even name and willed him impossibly
close, bodies tangling till her remaining foot left the floor and
his arm tightened. They collapsed into the wall, then the
floor.

They giggled from the tangled little knot
they’d made, him with his arm still wound around her. Edy had no
idea how he’d managed to bear the brunt of their fall, but a
glimpse of his lips had her leaning in. The corner of his mouth
curled upward, shooting a thrill through her, sure as some drug.
They really had waited too long to get together.

His gaze dropped to her mouth, then drew up
again, teasing with tender deliciousness, drawing in steady
certainty, before a press of the lips had them hurdling toward
desperation once again. Slivers of hair trapped in her fingers as
she wound him in. They were pulling, arching, not bothering to
care; when that trembling whisper appeared in her head, demanding
to know how far she’d take this.

“More,” Hassan whispered and his lips left
hers, first to nibble on her ear, then taste her neck, burning her
with roaming hands until she let out a shudder that could have
singed. Whispers of love passed between them while air came in
great gasping gulps. In their white-knuckled, sweat-ridden embrace
he moved, they moved as if entranced. It occurred to Edy; she would
have to stop this. Even as she had the thought, she willed him
close, closer, with hands that clung and ran everywhere. He had no
coat and she tugged at his sweater. In between deep and desperate
gasps of air, he managed to get her coat in a series of careful
maneuvers.

“Really, Cam. I don’t think—” Edy’s mother
burst into giggles.

Edy and Hassan went still.

“I would tell you it’s late,” Edy’s mother
said with a modicum of softness, “but I know how persistent you can
be. No one tells you ‘no’, not even me.”

Edy got up and had a hand on the door knob
without knowing how it happened. She registered Hassan hissing her
name, then him, vice tight on her arm.

“No. Don’t even.” He shot a hand to the door
to block the exit. She knew it didn’t look like much, but the odds
of her getting out went to zero that second.

“Move,” she whispered. “You have no right to
keep me here.”

“Edy,” he said. “We can find out what’s up
with that call another day. But tonight, we either need to go to
your mom or the police.”

Edy flinched, hating when he talked sense at
her. She started after her mother again.

“Promise me,” he said and took her wrists
with both hands. “Promise me there’s an us when you’re done.”

Her heart wilted; frail as a bloom past
season, too content to be gathered up or undone by the moment.
Hassan reeled her in, so that they molded, and pressed a whisper of
a kiss into her hair.

“I’m going with you downstairs,” he said and
drew away from her.

~~~

Wyatt watched as Edy flung herself from the
Mustang. Anger goaded her into long and hurried strides until she
disappeared onto her front deck.

He hated the tendril of hope that burned in
his chest, flickering there where a heart should have stood. Never
willing to peter out or dim but scorch to the greatest inferno with
the promise of her nearness as his fuel.

Wyatt hated hope.

His stomach bottomed out; pain chafing at
his insides in great tangled knots, knots yanking at him always,
evermore toward
her
. Every part of Wyatt had been beaten in,
chopped off, or scrapped clean; the whole of his body rendered
forfeit in a series of high stakes bets.

The driver’s side door of the Mustang opened
and Wyatt’s body tensed. Air escaped his lung’s, flattening without
the promise of return. With the whole of his will, he ushered
Hassan indoors to his home, to his own bed, to his own life.

Hassan eased the car door shut and rose to
full height, shoulders tight, tense, weighted. Only when his head
snapped counter clockwise did it occur to Wyatt that he was
listening. He sprung, slick as a jaguar under moonlight, head low,
arms, legs, body, a perfect tandem of obscene gracefulness. He
leapt mid-stride for the lowest branch, swung up and disappeared
from sight.

Wyatt couldn’t understand. Edy knew the
truth: that no future existed between Hassan and Edy, that not even
their friendship could stand where it did, less all that they
cherished rot and fester.

But Wyatt couldn’t convince her. Why
couldn’t he convince her when the whole world stood against them?
Why couldn’t he convince her of the truth he knew? And his version
was the truth. He knew that because of the price he’d paid: the
depth of his pain, the wrenching loss he felt every time she chose
him, and she chose him every day anew. Wyatt was her faithful
friend. Wyatt loved her. There had been no summer of girls him.
There had been no cheerleaders to sample first. There would never
be another for him. Only Edy. He’d been truest to her.

She’d woven into his soul. Couldn’t she see
that? How could he make her know?

Time escaped in audible gasps. A fat,
mocking moon tip toed across the sky, unapologetic in its creep.
Stillness, darkness, nothingness met him in every window of Edy’s
house, until Wyatt’s steady breaths became pants, and his head fell
with a thump against a frostbitten bedroom window.

Do. No more thinking. Do something.

Guys like Hassan were men of action. Action
accomplished things. Inaction accomplished nothing. Wasn’t it
obvious?