When I arrived for my shift two days later—my usual breakfast shift and not the midnight one, thank God—he was sitting at a two-top close to the wait station.
As I tied my apron around my waist and scrounged around for an order pad, I watched him. He had a coffee mug, a couple of books and an iPad in front of him, but his eyes were occupied with other things. His gaze skimmed the dining room, traveling from the big front window to the other tables—most of them unoccupied—to the kitchen door and over to the wait station before landing on…me.
When our gazes connected he smiled.
I felt my lips twitch in response. Our eyes held as he ran one of his big hands over the top of his head. The gesture seemed self-conscious. Similar to the crooked curve of his lips. Shy. Cute.
God. What was up with that word and my brain? And what completely messed-up instinct were my lips following when they returned his flirty smile?
As I took in the rest of his appearance—same as the other night, except this morning he had his letter jacket draped across the back of his chair—my fingers curved tightly around the order pad, hard enough to dent the vinyl cover.
I turned away, making a production of walking to the kitchen’s swinging doors and bashing through them. Dottie was standing by the line chatting with one of the cooks.
“How long has he been here?” I asked as I approached her.
Her penciled brows created half-moons on her crinkly forehead. “Why, good morning, Ray. How are you today?”
“Sorry. Morning, Dot.” I tipped my head at the cook, demonstrating I was capable of being civilized. “I’m just wondering about that guy at the two-top—the one who was here the other night with his drunk-ass friends.”
“Ah. The tall, polite one who asked about you, you mean?” Dottie gave me a speculative look. “You know he’s been in here before. Quite a bit, actually.”
“Really?” This was news. “Guess I never noticed him.”
“He sure as hell seems to have noticed you.” Dottie’s lipsticked mouth twisted into a teasing smile.
“Um, in a good way or a bad way?” After sharing shifts for a year, I knew Dottie agreed on the definition of creepy-versus-nice customer behavior.
“Well, if a polite, good-looking lug like him followed my every move with his dreamy-eyed peepers…” Dot waggled her eyebrows. “I’d call it a good thing.”
I snorted. “Dreamy-eyed peepers?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Ray Fayette.” Dot’s voice was as dry as the forgotten slice of toast sitting at the end of the serving line.
“Hey-hey. Someone’s got a crush on Ray-ay!” the fry cook—a stoner named Caleb—hooted in a singsong voice.
I flipped him off and he grinned big at me.
I never talked about my personal life with my co-workers. Restaurant employees tended to have more messed-up storylines than an MTV show. My avoidance of sharing drama made folks around here a tad zealous about trying to suck me into the Ellery Inn’s many sagas, but so far I’d been successful at not revealing any of my emotional crap. I didn’t like exploring that side of myself, so why should I expect my co-workers to delve into the deep, dark, soulless cavern that was my social life?
I cleared my throat. “Uh, I honestly never noticed him…”
Dottie took pity on me and patted my arm. “I know, hon. You don’t notice a lot of things lately. He’s been here since four a.m. or so. Farmer’s Plate, now he’s sticking to coffee. No funny business like with his friends the other night. Seems like a nice kid.”
“Oh,” I said. Those were words of high praise from Dottie. Getting repeatedly stiffed by Ellery students—serve me now, serve me good!—tended to make us folks in the food service industry a tad judgmental about the eighteen-to-twenty-five crowd.
After retrieving a couple of order tickets from her pocket, Dottie reached around her skinny hips and untied her apron. She walked by me, cackling as she shoved the tickets into my hand. “And now he’s all yours,” she said. “I’m off the clock.”
“Great,” I muttered.
As I walked into the dining room, I told myself I had two choices. I could either completely ignore Wyatt and assume he wasn’t going to need anything else in terms of food or drink, or I could stop being such a chickenshit, wipe off the greasy residue of my odd wobbliness from the other night and approach him right now, boldly, in-his-face and ask what he wanted. In other words, do my damn job.
Picking up a pot of freshly made coffee, I strode toward his table. I stood just close enough to reach his coffee mug. “Need more?”
His chin shot up. “Hey.” His lips curved into that shy smile again. “How’s it going this morning?”
I shrugged. “Fine.”
The stuff on his table snared my interest. Shiny iPad. A couple of thick paperbacks with econ and finance-type titles. It figured he would be studying money-related things. Ellery was famous for creating future lords of Wall Street, fresh-faced, soul-jaded and eager to screw with the world. I knew this because my dear old dad was an Ellery grad.
Dad always blabbed about how getting his degree at Ellery had been the highlight of his life. Ellery was where he’d met my mom (whom he’d left for a young, hot, blonde intern at his office when I was three—I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’s really quite true). Ellery was where he’d made the connections that had allowed him to achieve so many awesome (evil) things, where he’d laid the foundation (on the backs of suckers) for becoming “the man he was today” (a narrow-minded, workaholic control freak), the kind of man who “planned to work and worked the plan”. Yeah, my dad actually said shit like that. Not a ringing endorsement for him, or for a degree from Ellery College.
Wyatt held up his half-full mug. “I could use a warm-up.”
My gaze met his. There were gold flecks in the swirling greens of his irises—they gave off sparky vibes that made me want to keep staring.
Yep. He was flirting with me.
I looked down at his coffee. The idea that I might have served him before and been oblivious to his “dreamy peepers” was freaky. Because, God help me, I must’ve been completely out of it if I’d failed to notice the sparks this guy could create with a single look. Maybe, like Dot had suggested, I’d been buried under too many dark layers of life lately and I was finally coming up for air and noticing things. Maybe this morning my switch had been flipped because I knew he might’ve been checking me out for a while. Waiting for a chance to talk to me.
Because I’d been fooled by sparky vibes of all kinds before, I knew I needed to take a few deep breaths and play it cool. I paid attention to pouring coffee. Good thing, because his iPad would be the first thing to drown if I didn’t keep a steady hand. I filled the mug and carefully drew the heavy pot away.
“You do that well,” he said.
“Thanks.” I nodded, feeling pleased yet kind of like a dope for having compliment-worthy coffee-pouring skills. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
I was turning away when he said, “So I’ve been feeling weird about the other night.”
“Yeah?” Terribly curious about how he might expand on this statement, I stood still and waited for more words to come out of his mouth. His fingers wrapped around the mug and he looked down into the dark liquid like maybe he’d see one of those Magic 8 Ball fortune pyramids pop up to the surface.
Guess whatever he saw was inspiring because he looked up and fixed me with a clear, steady gaze. “Twenty bucks to cover for my buddy being an asshole…that’s kind of a shitty deal.”
I masked my surprise with a smirk. “For you, me or him?”
“All of us.”
“Twenty bucks and an apology is more than I usually get after being verbally assaulted.”
“That sucks,” he said, his tone of disgust sincere. Sounded sincere, anyway. I didn’t know him well enough to be sure. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. You really are.” Going for drama, I cocked my upper lip into a full-blown sneer. “Now get the hell out.”
His eyes went wide. I let the sneer stretch into a smile.
He laughed, leaning back in his chair, shaking his head. “Okay. That’s fair. Gotta work for it, right? You want me to show you how sorry I am. Actions speak louder than words and all that?”
I pressed my lips together, feeling the warm slide of the beeswax lip balm I’d applied earlier. Hmm. Now would be the time to make a witty remark. Or to return his flirty comment with one of my own. Or to meet his eyes and smile some more. Or to not be an idiot, take a step away and see about the other tables I’d inherited from the night shift.
I didn’t do any of those things. I stood there, holding a breath inside my bruised ribs.
“Nah, you don’t need to show me,” I said finally. “I’m good with the twenty bucks.” My conversation arsenal was depleted. Couldn’t defend myself properly with witty shit or flirtation, so it was time for a retreat.
When I turned away, his voice stopped me again.
“Hey.”
“Hey, what?”
“I’m glad we’re good. Because, um…” His voice had a nice rasp to it, husky with a hint of something southern—or maybe western?—in the way he lengthened his vowels. Not a New England voice. “I have something I want to ask you. A favor. You have time to talk?”
My fingers slipped against the coffee pot’s plastic handle. I shifted it to my other hand. I had no idea what he was going to ask, of course, but this feeling I had in my midsection was a lot like anticipation. The good kind of anticipation.
The bell over the front door jangled and a group of regulars stepped into the dining room—old guys who’d been meeting here on Monday mornings for about forty years. They’d want coffee the moment they sat down. Tension released some of its hold on my shoulders. The morning crowd would keep me too busy for any conversations with jock boy. He’d have to be satisfied with his econ books for company.
“Sorry,” I said. “Duty calls.”
“Maybe later.” He raised his mug to his not-boring mouth and drank. “Thanks for this.”
“You’re welcome.”
He hung around during the breakfast rush. Every now and then I could feel his eyes on me. I was too busy to be freaked out. Otherwise he likely would have seen me in my fine form from the other night—tripping over my feet, knocking shit over, sloshing coffee. The only embarrassing thing I did was make eye contact with him a few times—a him-catching-me-looking-at-him-while-he-was-looking-at-me kind of thing.
By the time I made it over to his table with the coffee pot, I was feeling very junior high. I really wanted to know what he wanted to talk to me about. Was he interested in me, as in interested-interested? That was the question that kept running through my head even though I felt stupid for thinking about it. And like a big, weird idiot for worrying about it.
I mean, I would totally say no if he wanted to hook up or something, right? Because this guy and me? Would never happen. Not in a gazillion, gatrillion, gabillion years as my little brother Dave liked to say.
The fact that I felt stuttery and nervous and unprepared as a human being to talk to the guy was reason enough to hand his ticket and the coffee pot off to someone else on the wait staff. I didn’t have to talk to him. I didn’t have to be such a freak either. He was just a guy. A guy like all the other guys who came to eat at the diner, a guy who had no clue about me or what was going on in my head.
I inhaled slowly and took the final step forward. He was looking at me now, smiling. Too late to back down.
“How’s studying going?” I asked by way of trying to make normal conversation. Not that being normal was super important to me. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t come across like I was bugging out.
“Um, not so good actually.” He put his hand over his mug when I raised the coffee pot. “No thanks. I’m already way too jacked.”
I rocked back on my heels and nodded. No need to comment on that one.
“Studying is kind of what I wanted to ask you about.” He sent me a sideways glance. His knee started to jiggle.
“Oh?”
“Are you a student? I’ve seen you here at the diner, but I don’t think I’ve seen you on campus.” His eyes said, I would have remembered you if I had.
“I was enrolled a while back. I’m kind of…taking a long break, I guess.” I was surprised to hear myself blurt an honest response. Usually I blew off those questions, not wanting to open the proverbial can of creepy-crawlies that came with telling the truth.
Yes, I had good enough grades and extracurricular crap to get into an “elite” school. Yes, my parents had enough money to send me here. Yes, I dropped out for so-called personal reasons. Yes, I was lame enough to keep living in this town despite my hatred of the preppy, overachiever, campus-dominated atmosphere and the constant reminders of my severe downer experiences when I was a freshman.
I held my breath, preparing for his questions.
“Ever take any gender studies classes?” he asked.
Okay. Not the question I was expecting. I swallowed. “Um, what?”
His laugh was short and kinda loud. “Gender studies,” he enunciated slowly, like there was a chance I’d never heard those words. He gestured at his tablet. “I’m working on a project on categories and identities. I’d like to ask you some questions as part of a survey.”
“A survey…”
“Prof wants us to dig deep into our own perceptions and biases,” he explained, speaking quickly, like he was worried I’d walk away. Which was a possibility. “Think about stuff we haven’t thought about before… Maybe do a little bit of field research.” He looked at me, eyes bright, expression easy, completely unaware that my brain had turned into something you’d find congealing on the side of a plate—syrup and mushy crumbs and maybe a melted butter pat.
Field research.
Gee. Did this mean he wasn’t gonna ask me out?
I was such an idiot. Field research.
Why wasn’t I laughing and walking away?
Why wasn’t I biting down on words likely to get me fired, like “fuck off” or “bite me”?
Instead of doing any of those reasonable things, I stood there and blurted, “Why are you asking me?”
It wasn’t a particularly cutting or clever question, but when his mouth flattened into a taut line and the crests of his cheekbones went slightly rosy, I realized it was a good one to ask. He was going to have a hard time answering without coming across as a complete ass. His eyes blinked rapidly before shifting back and forth between me and the iPad.
Mr. Easygoing was looking a little hard-pressed.
What? He’d thought that because I looked the way I did, I was ready, willing and able to talk about issues surrounding sexual orientation and identification and all that other bullshit at the drop of a dime? At work? As I served him and a bunch of other strangers breakfast and coffee?
“Well…” His knee jiggle slowed.
“Well?”
“Well, when I look at you…I think about sex.” His mouth tipped into a crooked smile. It was a shy and sincere sort of expression, not a leer or a smirk.
Okay. That response didn’t make him seem like a complete ass.
He cleared his throat. “The deeper, complicated parts of sex, I mean. Sex in all senses of the word.”
Um.
My lips twitched. More unexpected things had come out of his unexpected mouth and I was responding…unexpectedly. He licked his lips like maybe he was equally surprised those words had escaped.
I laughed. The noise gurgled and gusted through my throat in a very un-smooth way. Guess I hadn’t laughed in a while.
“For real?” I croaked, sounding like I hadn’t talked in a while either. “That’s why you want me to help you with your questionnaire?”
Now it was his turn to make a weird laughing sound. “Well, yeah,” he said. Another smile. Wide with lots of white teeth. Sexy. No way around it. “It’s the confidence thing you’ve got going, I think. You’re bold about blending gender. Kind of like a fuck-you to people who care about that kind of stuff. I like it. It makes me curious about the way you think about these issues.” He gestured toward his syllabus.
“Curious, huh?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not after anything super-personal. Uh… I mean, um.” His Adam’s apple performed a bob and dip. “This is an academic kind of an exercise.”
There was an excellent chance he was totally fucking with me in a way I wasn’t registering. Guys like him had been giving me a hard time since I was four years old. For some reason the ultra-boyish athletic-type kids had been the only ones at my snooty nursery school to get freaked out that I’d liked to play with the baby dolls and the ninja dress-up outfits, sometimes both at the same time. Even at age four I knew it was a dumb thing for kids to get freaky about.
Time to snap out of Nancy Nice mode and get back to being myself. “You seeing anyone?” I asked.
His head jerked and his fingers tightened on the iPad.
“Ever hook up?” I prompted. “Fuck?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Girls, guys…?”
“Girls.” His Adam’s apple did the bob thing again. “So far.”
His grin was more sheepish than smart-ass. I wasn’t gonna be charmed.
“Why don’t you ask one of your girlfriends to help with your questionnaire?” I waved the coffee pot toward the tablet, taking evil pride in making hot dark liquid slosh perilously close to the pot’s wide lip. “I’m guessing she might know more about your, um, sexual perceptions and biases.”
“Maybe,” he said. With a smooth shift of his muscle-y forearm, he moved the tablet away from the table’s edge. “But the professor said it was important to move beyond our comfort zones. To think about alternative points of view and how we react to those. Like…transgender or bi or pansexual, or, um, you know, one of those other things I don’t know much about. Yet.”
One of those other things.
A bunch of questions rocketed through my brain. Which one of those things did he think I was and why? Who was his professor? Would random people from his class come wandering in looking to ask me questions because they thought I was…alternative?
Oh, go ask that waitperson at the Ellery Inn about alt-gender stuff. He/she/it is obviously a freak.
“I’ll admit I’m clueless about a lotta shit…” He shrugged one broad shoulder and looked at me with his not-boring eyes. “But I’m pretty sure the girls I’ve been with have been absolutely satisfied being heterosexual women.”
He didn’t waggle his eyebrows. Or say “wah-wah-wah”. But his smile wasn’t so shy or sincere anymore—it was conscious. Knowing. Made me want to fuck with him.
“Well, whaddaya know,” I said. “I’m pretty damn satisfied being one of those too.”
The way his eyes went wide as they swiftly swept over my features and down my body was comical. Ha. Ha.
“Yeah?” He cleared his throat. “Is that, um, how you identify? What you prefer?”
His tone was suddenly all studiously academic and appropriate. His professor would be so proud. I bit the inside of my lip. Now I knew he wasn’t clever. He was just as clueless as I’d thought he’d been when he’d walked in here with his two Neanderthal friends two nights ago. I should have been one-hundred-percent relieved, but my relief was diluted with something that felt like disappointment.
“Hmm. Is that how I identify?” I pressed my forefinger to my chin and rolled my eyes toward the ceiling lights. “I dunno. Maybe I’m not sure. Maybe I didn’t check my underwear this morning.” I fixed my gaze on his, steady. “Maybe I didn’t fill out the questionnaire right. Or maybe I just don’t give a fuck.”
Those last words came out kind of loud. Loud and vehement. I cast a furtive look at the surrounding tables. Folks were still happily shoveling griddlecakes and eggs into their pieholes, apparently oblivious to the discussion of way too personal shit happening over here at table twelve.
Wyatt’s green gaze was riveted to my face in fascination. Okay, likely it wasn’t fascination. Horror was closer to the mark—as if my complexion had suddenly gone all Freddy Krueger. Or Frederica Krueger. I smiled easily, back on familiar ground now. “You want me to show you what I’ve got? We could go back to the john.” Tipping my head toward the hall leading to the restrooms, I winked.
“Shit,” he breathed. His pinkened cheeks glowed under his brown stubble. “I’m sorry. Really—”
“Shut up,” I interrupted, keeping my tone even. I sidled closer to the table’s edge and looked down at the tablet. “I’ll give you some material that will help with your class. And your life.”
He called up the keypad on the tablet, obeying without comment. His ears were crimson and he was back to tapping his shoe on the floor with a funky, offbeat rhythm. I’d fried his brain. He couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here. Good.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, poising his finger over the screen.
“Humans are fluid,” I said slowly, watching him type. “Labels don’t stick to skin.” He didn’t look up at me and roll his eyes or shake his head like I knew he wanted. He kept typing, being a good boy. “I don’t care how you or your professor or anyone else defines gender or sexuality—any relationship, any combo of genders, or orientations, or identities…” I spoke slowly, watching his fingers work. “Dick or a cunt. Suit or a skirt. Attitude. Whatever. It all changes…moment to moment, person to person. You don’t need a class or a survey or a PhD to figure the fuck outta that one.”
When he finished typing he kept his eyes down and flexed his fingers. His skin looked tanned under the diner’s bright lights and I wondered where he’d gone for the February break. I actually wondered quite a few things about his long, lean body, but all that was moot now. Had always been moot. I was too much of a mess to get involved in any way with a person like him—friendship, relationship, hell, even a conversation.
“Got it?” I asked.
His mouth quirked as he met my gaze. “Yeah, I got it,” he said, his voice raspy and dry. “Guess I kinda knew all that already.”
“Do us all a favor and fucking act like you know, okay?” I fished around for his ticket in my apron pocket. When I found it I set it gently next to his tablet. “Have a nice day.” I headed for the familiar comfort of the kitchen.
“Hey!” he called after me.
I turned back to face him. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know your name.”
“My name’s Ray.”
“Okay.” He sent me a tentative smile. “Ray. My name’s Wyatt.”
Nodding, I started to walk away again.
“Hey, Ray.”
I stopped, looked over my shoulder, my aching fingers clenching the coffee pot handle. “What?”
“You wanna hang out some time? No weird questions, I promise. Give me a chance to prove I’m not as big of an idiot as I seem and maybe—”
“No.”
Broad shoulders lifted and fell as he sighed. “I figured. Blew this whole thing, didn’t I?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay. You know…I’ll probably still think about sex when I look at you. In a good way.” His grin—the wide one that I’d liked so much earlier—made another appearance. I resisted the urge to return it.
“Cool,” I said with my best nonchalant Dean drawl and squint. I hunched my shoulders and vamoosed into the kitchen.
When my shift was over I walked home under sunlight as washed-out as my mood. I tracked muddy, salty slush down the stairs to my basement apartment, grimacing as I held an exciting debate in my head about whether to leave my boots outside the door and get my socks wet or take them off inside the door and get a big chunk of my freshly washed floor messy.
Mucking around with mud was a way of life around here. In fact, New Englanders say there are five seasons. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Mud. I grew up in Manhattan where there is no mud. I think the mud season concept is just a way for people to get over the fact that spring doesn’t actually happen this far north.
Example—it was the first week of April and my quiet residential neighborhood was covered with a good four inches of slushy white stuff. And, if the forecast was right, a bunch more white slushy stuff would splat Ellery, Vermont by the end of the week. My floor was going to be a wreck no matter what.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside my little cave.
As I held onto the doorknob, performing a funky one-foot dance to get a boot off, a familiar clump-clump sounded on the stone stairs behind me.
“Hey, Ray.”
I smiled, turning. “Hey, Dave.”
Dave is my brother. He’s eleven. Technically he’s my stepbrother. Or if you want to get really technical and muck around the motherboard of messed-up interrelationships that was my family, you could say Dave was my ex-stepbrother. He’s the offspring of my mom’s second husband, Tom, and Tom’s third wife, Inge. A few years back, Tom and Inge divorced, and Inge returned to her home country, Belarus.
And if that sounds confusing it’s because it is. On multiple levels.
My apartment was nestled in the bowels of the ginormous house where Dave and Tom lived. When I’d fucked up at school, Tom—who was on the Ellery faculty—had stepped up to “help” me. Actually, he was trying to score points with my mom and dad, who’d freaked out big time about my dropout situation. In the interest of peace and proximity, we’d all agreed I should move into the basement apartment at Tom’s while I sorted out “next steps and solutions”.
In the time I’d lived here, I hadn’t figured out much of anything other than that Tom was still a crap parent and that our living arrangement was way more about solving his childcare problems than about solving my so-called social and academic problems.
I didn’t mind being a chump in this situation because I happened to love the Dave-man. If Dave liked to hang around my cave, I didn’t feel particularly exploited. Hey, he was good company. Occasionally—using brass-knuckle coercion methods like sweet-as-hell smiles and/or M&Ms—he could even lure me up to the sunny and swank spaces of the house’s upper floors.
“What are you doing home this time of day?” I asked as I held the door open and gestured for him to go in. He kicked off his arctic-expedition-worthy pack boots—he wore them as if they were slippers, no socks, no laces—and leaped with admirable enthusiasm across my threshold.
“Teacher in-service day,” he crowed. He raised his fisted hand for a bump, which I happily gave him.
“Rock on.” I took off my coat and hung it on the hook beside the door. “You lucky dog.”
“I know, right?” He sat on the broad, low-slung piece of furniture—a monstrosity he’d dubbed “couch thing”—that served as both seating and a bed in the one-room apartment. His body bounced on the canvas-covered foam in a way mine never did.
I narrowed my eyes, scrutinizing his round face. His chin was smeared with his breakfast poison of choice: Koffee Kup devil’s food donuts. I wiped off the blob with the pad of my thumb. “Eating processed shit for breakfast every morning is gonna kill you, Dave.”
“For real?” His blue eyes rolled. “You’re gonna give me a hard time about donuts on an awesome day like today?”
I walked to the sink and filled a glass of water. I toasted Dave and gulped the icy liquid. When I finished I told him, “I’ve been serving up crap and being all polite at the diner for the last four hours. If you plan to hang in my humble abode you must bear the brunt of brutal honesty.”
He grinned. “It just comes busting out between us, right?”
“Hell yes. Truth is where it’s at.”
He’d heard the honesty line from me before. He lied to his folks all the time and even though I couldn’t blame him for it—they lied to him constantly too—I wanted him to understand the benefits of being real with himself and with other people.
Dave’s eyes met mine. They were the shade of blue and the sort of shape that seemed melancholy even when he was happy. Lately, Dave’s baby blues reflected a sadness that was deep and real. He’d been relying on me more and more to pull him out of spaces that got too dark, too cold. This was both good and bad. Mostly bad.
“Your dad upstairs?” I asked.
“Uh, I think he’ll be home later,” he answered with a too-casual shrug.
“You think or you know? Not okay for you to be by yourself, bud.”
“I, um, was supposed to be at Emma’s house but I kind of told Emma’s mom I was coming home to hang with you.”
I frowned, wondering what exactly he’d told Emma’s mom to get her to agree to let him come home to an empty house. “What if I’d had other plans? What if I hadn’t come home after my shift?”
He snorted. “You never have other plans.”
This was a sad fact.
“You’re not gonna be mad all day, are you?” he asked, peering up at me. “Because we could have fun if you’d just chill and let yourself.”
He had a point. Most of the adults Dave hung out with were mad most of the time. And, yeah, completely in need of chill pills.
“You wanna go up and play Mario?” he asked, working it with those baby blues.
I was tired of being in a crappy mood, so I said, “Sure.”
We slipped our boots on and tromped up to the main house.
Two hours later Dave had trounced my butt in Mario on his new Wii U—a Christmas gift from his bribe-junkie father—enough times to make him feel satisfied and me feel blurry-brained.
“Time for some exercise,” I said. I flopped back onto the wide seat of the leather sectional sofa and tentatively stretched my arms above my head. The room looked like the screwed-up, spoiled-as-hell love child of a ski lodge and a country club party room. It had a three-story fieldstone fireplace and walls paneled with aged pine planks salvaged from a three-hundred-year-old Northeast Kingdom barn. Some of the panels hid an over-the-top collection of tech equipment and a wet bar stocked with a pub-worthy amount of booze. A bazillion dollar’s worth of folk art—duck decoys, paintings of snow-covered hillsides, black labs carved from wood hunks, antique quilts—was displayed in strategic places.
Tom was loaded. He was chair of Ellery’s famed business school. During the four years he’d been married to my mom, back before he had taken one of the most prestigious positions on a campus overflowing with prestigious jobs, he’d been a CEO for a ginormous financial firm in NYC.
Tom also happened to be one of my dad’s best friends—they’d been frat brothers at Ellery—and even after many millions, two wives and two offspring, they still hung out together, sharing summer vacations at my family’s lodge in the Adirondacks and winter ones at the Perlmutter beachfront compound in Nassau. Tom and my dad had a small falling out when Tom married my mom, but now that both men counted her as an ex, they were back on speaking terms.
As far as this particular Fayette was concerned, Dave was the only Perlmutter worth knowing.
“You’re too injured for exercise,” Dave said absently.
He fiddled with the controller, playing one of the game’s bonus levels, one eyebrow cocked and his tongue poking out the side of his mouth. When he’d been small I’d thought his features were an endearing combo of sweet cherub and wicked elf. Now, at eleven, the endearing stuff was starting to transform into something more awkward. I was A-okay with the awkward, being familiar with both the look and the feeling.
“I might be too injured to jump around,” I said, “but you’re not.”
He snorted.
“Come on,” I cajoled. “We had an agreement, remember? Two hours of vids has to equal at least one hour of getting off our butts. Let’s go for a walk. Maybe over to your dad’s office.” And we can try to get him to act like your goddamn dad for once.
Dave’s rounded shoulders shrugged beneath his chocolate-smudged tee. He tossed the controller on the couch, defeated despite spending the last couple hours kicking ass on his favorite game.
“I don’t feel like going for a walk. He won’t want to see me anyway.”
Frustrated words formed in my throat, sludgy and flat, as if I’d taken a big swig from the warm can of Dr. Pepper languishing on the side table. I swallowed. Davey didn’t need to hear me badmouthing his dad. My arguments with Tom had begun to trigger a bunch of nasty anxiety in Dave, a big reason why I’d been sticking downstairs and avoiding Tom like the plague-y kind of guy he was.
“What do you feel like doing?” I asked finally.
He stood and tromped into the kitchen, a kid-shaped automaton, heading toward the stainless steel fridge that was nearly as big as the diner’s. For a second I was afraid he was going for another soda, but he ripped down a bright sheet of paper that had been taped to the fridge’s door and tromped back into the family room.
He dropped the paper in my lap. It was a flyer from the Ellery school system advertising intramural basketball leagues for kids.
“Hey, cool, check it out.” I skimmed the information at the bottom of the page. “It started last week, though. Might be too late to sign up. Maybe we could—”
“I did sign up. And I went last week.”
“You did?”
“Not that big of a surprise, is it? I mean, I love basketball—”
“No, no. Not a surprise. I think it’s very cool. Do you have a team assignment yet? Do you have to practice every day?”
“I have a team. And I like the coaches.” His sock-covered toe thunked at the foot of the coffee table. “I’m supposed to practice every weekday except Friday, but…”
“But?”
“But I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Why? You’re great with a ball, and the stuff you don’t already know you can—”
“It’s not that,” Dave interrupted with a sharp thump on the table. “It’s that I’m not sure I’ll manage the coming-and-going stuff. It’s a long walk from here to downtown. And Dad’s been busy and last time the coaches were getting all freaked out about these forms he still needs to fill out…”
“Excuses, man.” I gave him a slow headshake. “You know how to handle that stuff. The center might be a hike from here but it’s an easy walk from school. You could hang at either place until it’s time for practice—just let your coach or teacher know what’s up. And you know if you really want your dad to remember something the best way is to—”
“Send an email to his office address because that way his secretary will see it. I know.”
“So did you do that?” I gave his shoulder a light punch. “I thought you were smarter than a Goomba.” I made a silly face like a Goomba, one of his fave characters from Mario land.
“Um, no.” His lips quirked. “I mean, yeah, I’m definitely smarter than a Goomba. But I forgot about the email thing.”
“Do it now.” I tipped my head toward the iMac nestled in the built-in desk along the wall. “And then we’ll talk about how to get you to the rec center.”
“Okay.” He tromped over to the computer like he was on a death march, but I could tell from his expression he was masking a rare feeling for him lately—enthusiasm.
While he typed, I stood and rolled my aching shoulders. I stared at the duck-shaped wall clock. Did I want to spend my afternoon this way? Taking care of a kid who had a perfectly good parent who worked just a few miles away?
My friends Amelia and Lucy wanted me to come by their place this week. At the beginning of the semester, they’d moved into a very flair loft-style apartment a few blocks from campus. They were using their new espresso machine as a lure to get me away from my “little dungeon” as they called my own very un-flair apartment.
Sleep was what I was really in the mood for. It would be a good way to occupy my time this afternoon since I couldn’t seem to do it during the night any more.
Davey tromped over to where I was standing. He looked up at me with his perky-crazy elf expression. “We could take the Vespa. You know…if we wanted to make it there on time for practice today. I suppose.”
“We could, huh?”
“Yeah.” He shoved a hank of brown hair from his forehead. It flopped back immediately, covering one eye. Of course he was assuming that I—of all the adult-type humans he knew—would give up the rest of my day to do this with him. I’d trained him well over the past year. And he’d trained me well too.
“Okay. We’ll have to dig your helmet out of the garage.”
See? One long look from those sad blue eyes and I caved.
My hand came up, but before my fingertips touched Dave’s hair, seeking texture I knew would be rough and silky and cool and warm all at once, he grabbed me, tightening his strong arms around my midsection for something amazing—a Dave-instigated hug.
I stifled a gasp of pain. My ribs weren’t up for this much action but the ache was worth it. “Thanks,” he mumbled. He stepped back. A flush battled with the freckles on his cheeks.
“You’re welcome,” I said, keeping my voice easy. He was trembling. I knew he’d been really worried about me since the car accident. I knew his dad hadn’t been particularly forthcoming with the details of my hospitalization and recovery. I knew Tom had forbidden him to call me or come see me when I’d been gone.
“Go get changed into your workout gear,” I told him. “I’ll fire up the machine and wait for you outside.”
“Okay,” he mumbled. He moseyed slowly to the hall leading to the stairs. When he got out of sight I heard his steps pound rapid-fire up to his room.
Smiling, I went to find my boots, the key to my scooter and Dave’s helmet.
The intramural league used a gym that was a part of Ellery College’s athletic complex. Because we were already running late, I didn’t take my usual “long-cut” around the busy central campus circuit. I could tell by the way Dave’s hands tightened and then loosened around my waist that he was having a good time weaving and whirring around the heavy car and pedestrian traffic that continually circled the campus green. His breathy giggles were a clue too. I liked to drive fast.
I pulled up in front of the sprawling brick athletic center and set my feet on the pavement. “You go on in and join your group,” I told Dave. “I’ll park this thing and meet you later.”
He dismounted with a jerk and stood there watching me expectantly, fiddling with the chinstrap of his helmet. “You’re gonna come watch, right? It’s only an hour.”
“Yep. I’ll see you soon. Get your stuff.”
“For the whole time? You’ll watch for that long?” He bounced on his toes, fingers still fiddling.
“Yeah, if you really want.”
“I do.”
“Okay.”
As he trudged toward the entrance, I parked in the side lot. I took my time stowing the helmets and locking the storage box. Mostly because I wanted to give Dave time to find his way to practice on his own.
As I entered the gym’s side door, the smell of floor wax, rubber and sweat stung my nostrils. The distinctive squeak of court shoes on a shiny floor echoed from a distant hallway. I’d only been in this building a few times for some kind of rah-rah team-building activity during new-student orientation back when I’d been an Ellery freshman. I followed the sound and, after peering through a set of open doors, I saw a few groups of kids of varying sizes roaming in small herds around a series of basketball courts. I sidled over to the bleachers on the far wall, scanning the scene for Dave’s chartreuse warm-up gear. The bleachers were occupied by parental types who were wrangling toddler-aged siblings and/or phones.
I climbed to the top row and sat. Dave was in the group of kids closest to the bleachers. He had a half-smile on his face and he was balancing his bulk on the balls of his feet. His dad must have splurged on a new pair of basketball shoes. They were a bitching neon blue and they made Dave’s feet look like mini spaceships.
Grinning, I pulled my phone from my pocket. I needed to text Amelia and Lucy and tell them I wouldn’t make it today. As my gaze pulled away from Dave in all his cool-kid neon glory, it snagged on the tall guys who were standing mid-court wearing dark blue shirts with the word “Coach” printed in big white letters.
Oh hell. Really? Really-really?
It was Wyatt. Wyatt the “field researcher” and his ape friend, Mike. Looked as if my recent road trip to Crapsville was doomed to continue.