Hard Knox

by Nicole Williams

  I glanced over to find his eyes forward and his forehead creased. Decked out in his typical ass-kicking attire, his expression matched the wardrobe.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “It means I can’t in my most out-there thoughts understand what you’re doing here all alone one week after someone roofied you. I mean, I’ve met plenty of not-smart girls in my lifetime, but you pulling this stunt might take the cake.”

  My shoulders stiffened. “The next time I want an assessment of my intelligence from the guy responsible for keeping the lingerie-store-that-shall-not-be-named in booming business, I’ll ask. In the meantime, I’ve got a job to do.”

  Two more couples were in front of us as we moved farther up in line.

  “You know, it’s a relief there isn’t any awkwardness between us,” Knox said. “You know, the kind that stems from you being overwhelmed with gratitude for what I did for you and not knowing what to say or how to act when I’m around because you now think of me as some kind of higher power or something. It’s nice to know you’re comfortable treating me the exact same way you were before I swooped in to preserve your innocence.”

  I felt the blood boiling in my veins. “I think your interpretation of innocence is a bit skewed if you think I fall into that category. Might want to check one of those heavy, hard things with a lot of pages inside. Also known as a dictionary, if you were wondering.”

  Knox cracked his neck, rolled it to the other side, and cracked it again. “All week, I couldn’t figure out why my life felt so peaceful, so almost harmonic, but I just realized why.”

  When a couple seconds of quiet passed, I sighed. “Get on with the punchline already.”

  “It was so peaceful and serene because you weren’t in it.” He thrust his hand at me.

  “So why don’t you get back to your blissful state and leave me and my cynicism alone?” When I flailed my hands around, Pop Prince thumped Knox’s leg. Neither seemed to mind.

  “Because your cynicism can’t pull you off the ground and protect you if you find yourself in another bad situation,” he said in a firm tone as we stepped up to the door.

  When the two guys manning the entrance looked at me and Pop Prince, they shook their heads.

  “The only stipulation was that we arrive handcuffed with something of the opposite sex. It didn’t specify that it needed to be one that breathed.” I wiggled the pillow and waited.

  When they shook their heads again, Knox exhaled. “Ah, what the hell.” He yanked the pillow out of the handcuff before opening it and slapping it around his own wrist. “Happy now, hall monitors?”

  “Excuse me?” I tugged on the cuffs, trying not to give too much credence to the knowledge I was handcuffed to Knox Jagger.

  “Not another word,” he warned, making sure the cuff was locked. I was a millisecond or less from opening my mouth in protest again when his eyes cut to mine. “Not. Another. Word.”

  Instead of words, I hit him with a potent glare, but that was all the fight I put up. The truth of it was that I was partially relieved I didn’t have to go to this thing alone. After last week, I wasn’t eager to step into another party where the person who’d drugged me could be hanging out. Having Knox at my side made me feel safe, and after my latest life lesson, feeling safe was something I’d never take for granted again.

  “The key?”

  Both of the guys were wincing as though they were waiting for Knox to pummel them into the ground, but the key requester looked closer to pissing his pants. Not that I could blame them because on a normal night, Knox could strip a person of their confidence and courage with one look. Tonight, he’d doubled up on his intimidating pills.

  Dangling the handcuff key in front of the guy, I dropped it into his palm. “Anything else?”

  The other guy grinned when he looked at me. Well, when he looked south of my neck. “Thirty-four E.”

  “Is that your future address at the trailer park?” I wondered if he’d failed to notice or just plain ignored the words stamped across my shirt. The “some people”, in this case, were his parents.

  “I’ve got an impressive record for guessing the size of a girl’s endowments, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing yours.” The guy was either semi-drunk or missing a few links in his genetic code because he wasn’t seeing anything other than my “endowments” —including Knox Jagger’s curled fists lifting his direction.

  “Craisins,” I said, driving my shoulder into Knox’s chest to stop his advance. Not only could I solve most of my own problems, but I could solve them with words instead of fists. When the guy’s brows stayed pulled together, I clarified. “You know, those little dried-up cranberry things? Smaller than a raisin but larger than the head of a pin?”

  “What the hell do Craisins have to do with my future motor-boating site?”

  Before Knox could flinch, I drove my shoulder deeper into his chest. “Nothing,” I answered. “They have nothing to do with your guess. Instead, it’s my guess.”

  “Your guess for what?” the guy said impatiently.

  Lifting a shoulder, I shoved by him. “The size of your testicles.”

  Knox was the only one chuckling behind me.

  “You’d better watch your girl’s mouth, Jagger. If it isn’t around some dude’s johnson, remind her to keep it sealed.”

  The crack came right after. It was immediately followed by the mouthy guy’s pathetic cry, and the crowd’s chorus of Fight! Fight! Fight! Glancing back, I saw the chest-guesser was sprawled out on the lawn and, other than rubbing his jaw, wasn’t moving. Kind of made chanting for a fight pointless.

  “Sorry. I was too busy paying attention to your mouth.” Knox flexed the fingers of the hand he’d just hit the guy with before dropping it back at his side. “Unless you want to feel that at full-strength, you’d better worry less about other people’s mouths and watch your own.”

  Instead of waiting for the guy to reply, Knox powered past me and practically pulled me inside the building. By the time we burst into the dark hall, my wrist already felt rubbed raw in a few places.

  “Anger management,” I said, my words echoing off the walls. Arrows pointed down the hall. I guessed the party was below us based on the vibrations I felt under my feet, but I wasn’t in a hurry to get there. “I’m going to look into a nearby group and see if they can run you through an intensive course—preferably before you break someone’s skull with your knuckles.”

  Knox blew out a sharp breath. “One less worthless piece of shit creeping around this planet is nothing to go all bleeding heart about.”

  “No, but one decent guy locked up behind bars for the rest of his life is.”

  Another sharp exhale. “The cops have been trying to lock me up and throw the key away for so long, I don’t think my life would feel quite right if they stopped.”

  My interest was piqued. I’d shown up tonight to complete a different article, but I wouldn’t refuse to walk through this door if Knox opened it. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean by showing up here all by yourself again?”

  “I had a job to do.”

  Knox was still a pace ahead of me, his arm angled back while mine was angled forward. Our wrists brushed every few steps, but he glanced back to meet my stare. “I could answer the exact same way.” His eyes appeared even darker than the hall we were trucking down.

  Clearly, he wasn’t going to add anything else, so I dove into a different topic. “What’s this all about, Knox? You swooping in to save me?” I waved my free hand at the handcuffs. “I can’t decide if I come across as insanely weak, helpless, and in need of protection or if I’m some kind of pet project or if this is a decent guy’s way of earning another badge or a bad boy’s way of turning around his reputation or—”

  Knox broke to a stop and turned on me. Anger wasn’t etched on his face, but raw emotion was. It was just as much, if not more, intimidating than the way he�
��d looked after hitting the guy outside. “It’s about doing the right thing in the present and trying to make up for doing the wrong thing in the past.” I let those words settle for a second before I opened my mouth, but before the first word could leave it, Knox’s head shook firmly. “That’s all I’m going to say about that. So don’t ask.”

  “All I was going to ask was if you’d slow your pace and remember your handcuff partner has legs half the length of yours,” I lied as I rubbed at my wrist, wishing I’d selected a pair that was velvet-lined. Saving myself the wrist pain would have been worth walking into the back entrance of Miss Kitty’s and permanently tainting my innocent eyes.

  Knox looked at me like he could see right past my lie, but then his eyes dropped to my wrist. “Shit, sorry about that.” His free hand reached for my wrist, inspecting it as he turned it over. “I forget that some people haven’t developed calluses from wearing these things.”

  As he rubbed a slow, steady circle around my wrist, the pain was forgotten. What took its place though unsettled me just as much. “Are you referring to the kind you wear in the backseat of a patrol car or the other kind?”

  “What other kind are you talking about?” Knox asked, his face giving away his innocent act.

  “Never mind. I’m sure I don’t want to know.” I tried to ignore my stomach sinking as I accepted that, in so many words, Knox had just admitted that he’d been in trouble with the law. All I heard was Neve claiming Knox wasn’t the misunderstood good guy I’d convinced myself he was.

  After a few more seconds, his hand wove through mine, the handcuff chain falling slack between our joined hands. Heat surged into my hand and spread up my arm. His hand was twice the size of mine, and I knew the power contained within it, but he held my hand so gently, almost carefully, I almost felt like he was holding a bird instead of a hand.

  He must have mistaken why I was staring at our hands because he said, “This way, the cuff won’t rub at your wrist so bad.”

  “Plus I can drive my nails into the back of your hand if you move too fast again.”

  He inspected my nails, which were short, unpolished, and pathetically unthreatening. “I’d better behave then.”

  As Knox led me down another hall and past another string of arrows, I discovered he was right—holding each other’s hand cut down significantly on the pain. It probably didn’t hurt that he was walking so slowly now a turtle could have kept up.

  “So you’ve been arrested?” I bit my lip, almost scared to look at him. When I did, I saw that, instead of the irritation or anger I’d expected to find, his forehead was creased in amusement.

  “Was that a question or a statement?” He stopped to pull open a door that led to a stairway going either up or down. “Because if it was a statement, I don’t need to answer it.”

  “It was a question.”

  “Well, in that case . . .” Knox shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve been arrested.”

  I swallowed, reminding myself that that didn’t mean he was guilty of what Neve had said he was. “As in, multiple times?”

  His expression answered my question.

  “What for?”

  The stairwell was dark too, but somehow Knox found the way, almost like he could see in the dark. For whatever reason, be it insanity or few-to-no survival instincts, I followed him. I’d just become the girl who’d jump off a cliff if the good-looking guy with a checkered past jumped first . . . Way to rise above the crowd, Charlie. Way to soar.

  “For crimes I committed. That is generally the reason people are arrested, in case you haven’t made it to that point in your journalism degree.”

  I shoved at his arm before I realized that was a bad idea when he was leading us down a dark staircase with our wrists chained together. My shove barely seemed to register though. “I’m a journalist. I can tell when someone’s trying to be evasive. Even if it’s only subtly.”

  Knox’s soft laugh echoed through the stairwell. “And I thought I was being obviously evasive.”

  “Knox—”

  He shoved open another door, and all of the sounds, smells, and sights associated with a college party assaulted me. As I’d guessed, the party was being held in the catacombs of the basement. With just a few black lights strung from the ceiling, the place was almost as dark as the hall and stairwell we’d just waded through. It definitely smelled worse down here. Mixed with the tang of cheap beer and body odor were the telltale basement scents of mildew and mold.

  “I’m not the article, Charlie. This is.” Knox waved at the scene before us. “Besides, it’s a party. Enough with the heavy subject matter.”

  I crossed the only arm I had available. “You’re right, enough with the heavy. So what are your views on regressive versus progressive tax laws?”

  Knox’s hand tightened around mine as he led me into the belly of the beast, through the heart of darkness. “I’m going to every party with you from now on. These things are way more interesting with you around.”

  We hadn’t made it more than a few strides before a pair of panties was stuffed into his back pocket. Apparently, being handcuffed to a woman didn’t keep advances at bay.

  “Yeah, these things have never been interesting for you before.” The sarcasm was thick as I spied another girl heading our way with something small and lacy dangling from her pinkie. My grade-A glare, followed by me pointing at the words on my shirt, stopped her in her tracks.

  “You want to hang out by the kegs again?” Knox guessed as he cut through the crowd in that direction.

  “Would I be found any place else?”

  Knox shook his head at me.

  “Beer and me, we’re like this.” I crossed my fingers and held them in front of his face.

  “Where’s the guy with the keys?” He rubbed at his head as though I were giving him a headache.

  As we wove through the crowd, just about every guy acknowledged him with a nod or a high-five or by calling his name—and a few other names I couldn’t quite make out. Most of the girls acknowledged him with a coy smile or suggestive eyes or by not-so-casually brushing their “endowments” against him. Since I was so close behind him, I received my fair share of unwanted boob brushes and ass shakes. Turned out the rumor on the streets was true—fake boobs really did feel fake.

  “I thought I knew what popular was, but then you came and made popular your bitch.” I shook my head as I inspected his backside. Somehow, both pockets were already halfway full. “These people have made you their unofficial god.”

  Knox inspected the crowd. “These people don’t like me. They don’t even know me. The only thing they know is that they don’t want to be disliked by me, which keeps them in their ass-kissing state.”

  “They aren’t your friends?” My brows pinched together. Not only did everyone seem to know Knox, they seemed to idolize him.

  “The kind who’d share a beer with me? Sure. The kind who’d throw me a rope if I was drowning? Maybe.” His gaze finished passing over the rowdy crowd. “The kind who would stand by my side no matter what? No way.” When his gaze landed on me, his head tilted. “But I can’t seem to figure out what kind you are.”

  I tried not to shift under his stare. “Oh, we’re not friends. Not even the surface kind who might share a beer.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. “Then what are we?”

  I shrugged a shoulder. “I was hoping for something more along the lines of fuck buddies.”

  Knox barked out a laugh that wasn’t over quickly. “Just when I think I’m starting to figure you out, Charlie Chase, you go and drop a ‘fuck buddy’ bomb on me.”

  By then, I was laughing with him. “Try to keep up.”

  Stopping beside the kegs, Knox turned toward me. “Even if I tried, I don’t think there’s any way I could keep up.”

  I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I knew enough to realize I shouldn’t ask. So instead, I shuffled a few steps closer to the keg and tried to pretend his hand around mine wasn’t bringing
me close to fidgeting. I leaned into the wall behind us. “Where have you been all week? I almost tripped over a tree root on Wednesday and was half-expecting you to swoop in and save the day.”

  Knox’s arm ran down the length of mine. “I had some things to take care of.”

  “Things like attending class, homework, and studying into the wee hours of the morning?”

  “You’re interviewing me again,” he said, nudging his chin forward. “I thought you were here to observe the kegs and the underage drinkers. Focus.”

  Biting my lip, I closed my eyes and repeated his suggestion. Focus. I couldn’t prove Knox was innocent if I scared him off. “You’re right. Sorry. Just trying to do a little double-duty so I can find out more about my future fuck buddy.” I tried playing it off with a dismissive wave.

  Knox’s face ironed out, almost going a shade lighter. But his eyes . . . they went two shakes darker. “Would you stop saying that?”

  “What?”

  His brow peaked.

  “Fuck buddy?”

  His eyes closed while his expression lined, almost like the words were painful. “That’s the one.”

  “Why?” I wondered why a guy who seemed to embody the word couldn’t stand to hear it.

  “Because when you say it like that, it makes me think about it like that.” Knox’s eyes stayed closed.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “Oh,” he repeated.

  “Come on though, Knox. Really? It’s not like you’re not thinking about sex every other second with some girl you’ve either already had, could have, or will have. You’re a twenty-something male. Me mentioning fuck buddies couldn’t possibly make you think about it more.”

  He winced again before opening his eyes. They opened right on mine, and what was in them served to stop both my heart and lungs. “I’m not thinking about some other girl when you say that. I’m only thinking about one girl.”

  “Miss January?”

  Knox turned until his body was perpendicular with mine, and then he turned again so his body was nearly pressing into mine. To look him in the eye, I would have had to arch my neck, but there was no way I was looking him in the eye. Partly because I didn’t want to see what was inside his, but mostly because I didn’t want him to see what was inside mine.