“That’s what I thought,” Knox said victoriously. “Now, focus. The toast is starting to burn.”
I smelled it a moment later. Rushing back to the toaster, I popped up the bread to discover that it wasn’t quite burnt. Nothing a little butter couldn’t solve at least. “So what are you studying?” I grabbed the plate Knox held out for me.
“Forensic science.”
“Wow, I’m impressed. I never would have guessed something with science in it would be what you were majoring in.” I went to the fridge to pull out a tub of butter. “Modern-Day Caveman must have been full.”
Knox turned off the burner. “I was thirtieth on the wait-list, so I figured a Plan B was in order.”
“And what made Forensic Science your Plan B?”
“Television shows made it seem cool.”
I raised an eyebrow at him as I buttered the toast.
“Would you be satisfied if I answered your question with passion?”
“Is that the honest answer?” I scraped on another layer of butter to hopefully mask the charred flavor.
Knox nodded.
“Let me get this straight. You’re passionate about forensic science?”
He nodded again. “I’m passionate about the irrefutable justice that comes with it.”
“Okay, now your passion is starting to rub off on me. Get ahold of your passion, for crying out loud. It’s making a mess.” My default seemed to be teasing lightness when Knox opened up another hidden window to me. I wasn’t sure if I did that for me or for him, but lightness wouldn’t get me behind Knox’s high wall of secrets. “Can I ask what transpired to make you so passionate about irrefutable justice and forensic science?” I bit my lip and waited, wondering how my attempt to dig deeper would go over.
Grabbing a couple more plates from the cupboard, he shrugged. “Life.”
I rolled my eyes as I took the plate of buttered toast to the table. “You do realize that could be an answer to absolutely any and every question ever asked, right?”
Knox looked at me with half a smile. “Why do you think that’s the answer I went with?”
I loved it when he looked at me that way, like there were no secrets between us—or if there were, none of them would make a difference anyway. It was intimate and wonderful and made me feel all warm and light. I reminded myself that I shouldn’t love, or even like, the way he was looking at me.
“So how do you afford this place?” I settled back in my chair while Knox heaped eggs onto plates. “I know living in the dorms isn’t cheap, but it’s a heck of a lot less than this place would be.” I glanced around the kitchen. Much like the rest of the house, there wasn’t anything extravagant about it, but it was still spacious, clean, and close enough to campus to be pricey.
“I don’t have a nine-to-five job, if that’s what you’re digging for.” He set a ginormous plate of eggs in front of me. Really, it looked like some egg-eating challenge on a game show instead of a Sunday breakfast. Knox must have noticed my eyes bulging. “Whatever you don’t eat, I’ll finish up. Don’t worry.”
When I peeked at his plate, which was almost teetering over with double the amount of eggs as mine, I guessed Knox didn’t have to worry about being protein deficient. “So what do you do then? If it’s not a nine-to-five job, what is it?”
Knox slid a fork and napkin across the table to me as he took a seat. “A little of this, a little of that.”
“And that translates into?” I paused with the fork in my hand, not letting him take the vague-and-obscure out.
“Mostly arm wrestling. Sometimes a little one-punch knock-out, drinking contests, fighting with one arm tied behind my back or blindfolded, or once, both arms tied behind my back. If people can compete in it and bet on it, chances are I’ve probably done it.” When he saw the look on my face, he cleared his throat and dug into his eggs. “But I don’t have to do that stuff too much anymore.”
My fork clattered to my plate. “Arm wrestling? One-punch knock-out? I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds menacing—not to mention lethal. What the hell made you get involved in that kind of stuff?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but alas, I was. But really, how many people would I come in contact with who made their living through college arm wrestling truckers and drinking rock stars under tables?
Knox finished his bite and took a drink of coffee before answering. “I was sitting at a bar drinking one night, and some guy even bigger than me lumbered up. He threw fifty bucks down on the bar and bet me I couldn’t hold him off for two minutes in arm wrestling.”
I blinked at him. He was so matter-of-fact that someone would have thought we were talking about how he lifeguarded at the local pool during the summers. “I’m just going to overlook the fact that you were probably in some seedy, motorcycle gang type bar—”
“The seediest,” Knox added.
“And that, since you’re only just twenty-one, you had to have been underage—”
“I was eighteen.”
I unfroze enough to shake my head. “And this other guy was looking to exploit a college guy’s invincible ego complex and take him for all of the money in his wallet—”
“He definitely thought he had my number.”
I stared at the eggs. They smelled good, and if you didn’t eat eggs hot, they were unpalatable, but how could a person eat while carrying on a conversation with Knox Jagger? “So what happened?”
“Well, since he bet me fifty bucks I couldn’t hold him off for two minutes, I bet him a hundred that I could beat him in one.”
My eyebrows reached my hairline. “And?”
Knox shrugged, shoveling another bite of eggs into his mouth. “I left the bar one hundred dollars richer and a profession was born.”
I picked up my fork and returned his smile. “What profession is that? Does arm-wrestling hustler slash better binge drinker than the competition slash one-armed fighter have an official job title? Because that’s kind of a mouthful.”
“Certified Badass is how I was planning on listing it on my resume. What do you think?”
I stabbed a forkful of egg and brought it to my mouth. “It does have a ring to it.” I forced myself to take a bite, and when I found Knox watching me a bit too purposefully, I actually had to remind myself to chew. Apparently, eating and sitting across from Knox was a challenge. “So how did it spread from there? Did you show up at the same bar the next weekend, just waiting for another dick in a sleeveless flannel shirt to fall into your trap?”
Grabbing a piece of toast, he sawed off a chunk, made a not too bad face, and took another bite. “I don’t know. Word kind of spread, you know? It’s a big city and all, but it’s a college town, which means everyone is all up in everyone else’s business. When word spread that some punk teenager had beat Big Al arm wrestling, every guy flexing his biceps down at the gym wanted a chance to show me up.”
“Big Al. That guy was so wearing a sleeveless flannel, wasn’t he?”
Knox grinned, finishing the rest of his toast. “Red-and-black lumberman checked.”
“So how did you expand from Arm-Wrestling Pro?” My gaze dipped to his biceps. Really, any guy who saw Knox’s guns and still challenged him to an arm-wrestling match was either mentally deranged or on a serious ego trip.
“Some guy eventually came up and bet he could knock me out with just one hit.”
Half of Knox’s eggs were already gone. My plate looked like it hadn’t been touched.
“I thought this chump must have had a screw loose if he thought one hit could take me down, so I took the bet, and then I was reminded what an idiot I really am.”
I paused with my coffee at my mouth. “Why’s that?”
“Because I didn’t think to specify that the ‘one hit’ had to be done with a body part. He took advantage of that technicality, and I got to experience what a crowbar to the middle of my back felt like.”
My mouth fell open. Thankfully, no eggs were inside. “Oh my God, Knox.”
“I had lots of time to ruminate on that while I was recovering from three broken ribs and a collapsed lung.”
My back gave a sympathy twinge just imagining what that had felt like.
“The upside to that whole experience was that I had an extra two hundred dollars in my wallet, and I learned to create little things known as conditions when someone else came at me with a challenge.”
“Wait.” I shook my head. “You didn’t fall to the ground and curl into a ball like a baby after getting pummeled with a crowbar? I am thinking of the right thing, aren’t I? About yea big”—I measured out about two feet on the table—“made of solid steel, double prongs on either side, looks like it could open a person up and be used to scrape out their guts? That’s what a crowbar is, right?”
“You’ve got the general idea, yeah.” He was back to staring at me with that amused expression.
Ha ha, I was the funny one because I was acting like a crowbar to the back was actually something to be taken seriously.
“And you managed to stay standing?” Maybe I was missing something.
Knox lifted his hand. “We’re not talking about solving the equation for cold fusion or finding the cure for childhood diabetes. We’re talking about staying upright when someone coldcocks you with a crowbar. Or getting some other guy’s arm down before he can get mine down. Or having one shot more than the guy next to me. Or swinging harder, longer, or most. It’s not that hard, Charlie.”
“It’s not that hard?” I hoped that when he heard someone else say it, he’d realize how insane he sounded.
Instead, all he did was offer another half-hearted shrug. He was down to his last few bites of eggs. He’d consumed no less than a dozen eggs in five minutes. I wouldn’t bet against Knox on anything.
“You’re telling me if I found the arm-wrestling champion of the whole world—if there even is such a thing—you could just lock hands and kick his ass because it’s not that hard?”
“I’d like to think I’d have a good chance at beating him,” he said.
“Do you have some kind of crazy mind-body connection where if your foot gets chopped off, your brain just tells your body, ‘No big deal, we’re going to be fine. Keep right on marching along with that bloody stump’?”
Knox gave me an all-too-familiar look as he headed over to the coffee pot. “Doesn’t everyone have a mind-body connection?”
“Well, yeah, in the sense that our minds tell our hearts to keep pumping, our lungs to keep right on filling, also known as involuntary body functions, but no, not everyone—in fact hardly anyone—is able to make a voluntary mind-body connection.” Was I really having this conversation this early on a Sunday?
“I don’t know why more people don’t do it,” Knox said as he refilled my cup, then his own. “It’s as simple as telling your body what to do, and it does it.”
“I’ll remember that next time I’m arm wrestling a guy named Big Al who is in possession of biceps the size of my head. But if I lose, I’m sending all the blame your mind-body connection’s way.” I poured some creamer into Knox’s cup first, then mine. Then I added a little more to his because pouring raspberry creamer into the coffee of a badass of Knox’s proportion was comical.
“So you used to take these kinds of bets all the time, but now not so much?”
Knox reached for another piece of toast as he sat down. “Not quite so much.”
“Why not?”
“Because I saved up a ton of money and don’t need to take just any bet some chump wants to dangle it in front of me.”
When he eyed my plateful of eggs, I slid his empty one over and heaped a mound onto it, leaving a normal person’s portion of eggs on my plate. “If you saved up a ‘ton’ of money, you shouldn’t need to take on any bets, right?”
Knox’s eyes creased at the corners. I smiled because I knew what that meant—which meant I’d been spending too much time around him . . .
“If money was the only objective, then no, I wouldn’t have to take any bets for a long time.”
“Then what’s the other objective?” I scooted my plate of eggs aside and leaned across the table. I wasn’t hungry, the eggs were getting cold, and nothing about this conversation was conducive to eating.
“I like the challenge—the rush of adrenaline I get right before, that moment in the middle when I question if this is the one I might actually lose, the release at the end when I feel everything that had been building up inside me drain away.” Knox waved his fork as he continued explaining. “It’s a high. My high.”
I knew what my “high” was—digging deep into research for a forthcoming article. I loved combing through information and evidence, grabbing hold of what the next person might have let slip through. We all had them—every one of us had our high. It was part of what kept us crawling out of bed in the morning. The difference between Knox’s and most people’s was that his hinged on violence.
“What are you trying to release?” I asked.
“Pent-up anger.” He looked out the window as he chewed the last of his toast.
“Pent-up anger at what?”
“Myself mostly,” he answered quietly, staring out that window as if he were seeing something I couldn’t.
“Which implies there’s something else responsible for your anger. What else?” I was so close I could feel my hand on the doorknob. I was about to open the door to the dark vast room holding all of Knox’s secrets, and just as I was pulling it open . . .
“I think I need a little more toast. What about you?”
He was halfway across the kitchen before I realized he’d leapt out of his chair. Taking a drink of coffee, I forced myself to shift topics. I wouldn’t gain access to Knox’s secret room by relentlessly pounding on the door. The only way I’d get inside was if he felt safe enough to open the door.
“I’m good, but thanks,” I answered, scraping the last bit of eggs from my plate onto his. A growing boy needed his one-and-a-half dozen eggs in the morning. “So what’s your record?” How many times have you lost bets? How many times have you won them?”
He definitely had a smirk on his face when he glanced back at me as he slid a couple more pieces of bread into the toaster. “I’ve won them all, so I guess my record is known as undefeated.”
“Aren’t we cocky early in the morning?”
“It’s not cocky if it’s the truth.”
With Knox’s back to me again, my gaze automatically skimmed down his body, then back up, and repeated. I was on my third revolution when I realized what I was doing, so I gave myself another sharp pinch. It was like some reflex that, whenever Knox turned his back, my eyes went on an ogling spree.
While the bread toasted, he turned and leaned into the counter. “What’s the deal with the shirts?”
Having him watch me made it more difficult to sexually assault him with my eyes, but the view in question made it so tempting I felt myself developing a twitch from abstaining. “You mean the ones I wear on a next-to-daily basis? The ones that trend toward offensive most days, poignant every day, and the self-reflection I leave in my wake? Those shirts?”
“Not exactly how I would describe them, but yeah, I think we’re on the same page.”
I shrugged. No one had ever come right out and asked me what the deal was with my shirts. Most everyone jumped to the conclusion that I was a closed-off, raging bitch, which, on certain days, hit the nail on the head, but that wasn’t the crux of why I wore them—or at least it hadn’t been when I’d started out. “It depends.”
“Now you’re sounding like me.” Knox padded over to the fridge to grab the butter, lifting a brow at me. “This house only has room for one person who answers questions vaguely, and I’m older, so I’ve been doing it longer—and better I might add.”
I crossed my arms. “It depends—if someone will let me finish a thought—on the occasion. If I’m at a party, like when we first met, I wear those shirts to keep the shitheads away.”
“Too bad it
didn’t work on me. I must be immune to them.”
I rolled my eyes at his wide grin. “But most of the time when I wear them, I don’t know, I’m kind of hoping—foolishly, probably—that people will read it, get the message, change their lives for the better, even if it’s only in the smallest of ways, and make the world a better place.”
Knox was still grinning as he buttered his toast. “So you’re saying your shirts are like a butterfly effect?”
“Pretty much, yeah. And when they hand me my Nobel Peace Prize in fifty years for changing the world, one snarky shirt at a time, I’m going to wave it in your face and chant ‘Told ya so’ about a million times.”
He laughed, but when he noticed my eyes narrow at him, he stuffed a fresh piece of toast in his mouth.
“What?” I asked as he fought to keep from choking on his toast from the laughter still rolling through him. “What’s so amusing?”
He took a drink of coffee to clear the toast then wiped his eyes. He’d actually been laughing so hard that tears had formed. “You think some college girl might read your shirt and reevaluate her whole life?”
Hearing him say it, in those words, made me realize I was definitely more on the foolishly-hoping end of the make-a-difference spectrum. “If there’s any justice in this world.”
“That’s a nice thought, and maybe in a different environment, those shirts of yours would actually get their message across. But the only epiphany college girls are waiting for is the one that comes from a tube of lipstick—like just the right shade will solve all of their problems.” Knox scooped some eggs onto his toast then smashed it all together to make a toast-egg taco. “If you’re looking to get a message across, you might want to reconsider your approach.”
“Brilliant. I’ll just open up my own cosmetic line and stamp a thought-provoking message on the bottom of each lipstick shade. For a shimmery nude, Stars Can’t Shine Without Darkness; for a luscious crimson, Birth Control: One is good, Two is better; for a dark purple, Stop crying about being a doormat and get off the floor already.” I tapped my chin in consideration. “Better sell magnifying glasses with those tubes of lipstick since no one would be able to read the ‘shade’ if they were that long.”
Hard Knox Page 21
