Hard Knox

by Nicole Williams

  “I think you’re on to something.” Knox held his breakfast taco out to me, but I shook my head. He added, “If you need financial backing to get you up and running, let me know.”

  “That’s right, money bags, and wouldn’t that article in Forbes be original? ‘Inspirational lipstick creator backed by money won from dubious bets made in seedy bars.’”

  Knox and I both laughed at that idea.

  “Come on. It’s the thought that counts, right?” I said. “Can I help it if college kids are shallow and read a message and only think about how it applies to a friend they have, instead of thinking about how it relates to them? Besides, I like them, and that should be reason enough for why I wear what I wear. Or advertise what I advertise.”

  “No, I get it. Really,” he added when I lifted an eyebrow in doubt. “But while the girls might not get the message because they’re not looking at your shirts, the college guys are definitely checking out your shirts.”

  “Really?” I said slowly, guessing a trap was somewhere in front of me.

  “Really. Although the message on your shirt isn’t exactly what’s catching their attention. It’s what’s beneath it that they’re ‘reflecting’ on.” Knox’s eyes dipped, but I had on an oversized bathrobe instead of my standard tee. “The only message they’re getting, however, is ‘HALLALUJAH!!!’” He threw his hands up, tipped his head back, and bugled, “HALLALUJAH!!!”

  So I tore off a chunk of his other piece of toast and tossed it at his face. “You’d think that with all of the food you’ve been shoveling into it, you could shut your mouth for a few minutes.”

  “Hallelujah.” This time, he whispered it.

  “Please. That is not the message guys get when they see my shirts.” I’d hardly left a praise-the-heavens chorus in my wake.

  “To prove it, I didn’t even realize you had stuff written on your shirts until I did a load of laundry last night.”

  Knox’s eyes were gleaming, so I wasn’t going to give him anything else to amuse himself with. Time to turn the conversation tables on him.

  “So what’s the deal with the whole bad-boy vibe?” I asked in the same tone he’d directed at me about my shirts.

  “It’s not a vibe. This is who I am.” When he held out his arms, his cross shifted, catching the light coming through the windows and almost blinding me. If that wasn’t either some higher message or an epic coincidence, I don’t know what was.

  “Really?” I wasn’t letting him off with his standard few words and a shrug. “What about the truck and motorcycle? Are they just ‘who you are’?”

  Knox made a face. “Can you really see me driving a souped-up Honda Civic?”

  Point in Jagger’s corner.

  “The ass-kicking boots?” I fired off.

  He huffed, shaking his head. “Yeah, because I could so rock the latest trendy sneaker on my way to basketball practice.”

  Two points—Jagger. Zilch—Chase.

  “And all the girls who flock to you like moths to a flame?”

  A slow smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Rumors spread fast in this town.”

  “And what do those rumors have to do with women harkening at your heels?”

  Knox looked at me as if the answer should have been obvious. “I’m a man.”

  “And good for you for learning something new about yourself every day, but I’m not connecting the dots here.”

  Knox leaned across the table, that smile curling a bit higher. “A man doesn’t make love like a boy. He knows reciprocity in bed makes for happy customers, and happy customers make for repeat business.”

  Everything south of my navel contracted right before a certain tingling sensation had me gripping the edge of the table. In an attempt to distract myself, I tapped my foot and bit the inside of my cheek. Those measures weren’t too effective. “But you don’t ‘date’ college girls.”

  His brow rose as he stacked my plate on top of his empty one. “But they don’t know that.”

  Shaking my head, I groaned. “I can’t decide whether to be impressed by your industriousness or repulsed by your scheming.”

  “It’s not scheming. At least not intentionally. This is who I am.” Knox motioned at himself as he rinsed the dishes with a scrub brush—yet another thing I’d never pictured Knox Jagger doing.

  “You don’t ‘date’ college girls, but you let them think you do by not telling them otherwise, and then you proceed to let them drool themselves to sleep every night fantasizing about being the next partner to further the happy-customer rumor?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re a schemer and sick.”

  “That one part’s not a rumor though—the happy customers part. I’ve got references, if you don’t believe me.”

  Before I thought to censor my answer, I replied, “I believe you.” My eyes did that reflexive inspection of his body, and he caught me doing it.

  “It appears you do.” He popped his brows at me a few times.

  I glared at him before turning my attention to my coffee. “How you can fit every single stereotype and yet not be the stereotype is beyond me.” I knew that, even before Knox had so dutifully explained it to me, nothing about him was an act.

  “What can I say? This is who I am.” Wiping his hands with a dish towel, he winked. “I was born bad, baby.”

  “And the bad one-liners are when I cut out.” Standing, I considered heading to the sink to wash my cup, but Knox was right there, and really, keeping a safe distance from him was something I needed to keep a priority—both physically and emotionally. So, I decided to take my cup back to my bedroom, finish the final dregs, and wash it when Knox wasn’t mostly naked a foot beside me. “I’ll let you hop in the shower first since you obviously need it.” I so did not need to give him yet another once-over. His sweat was mostly gone now, but that didn’t make him any less distracting.

  “Thanks, but I’ll take one when I’m through.” He was already heading toward the slider.

  “What? There’s more? How many more times are you going to hit that thing before you break or bust something?” Through the kitchen window, I saw the tire punching bag. It seemed so still and imposing, it was hard to imagine it swinging and flying the way Knox had made it.

  “That was just a warm-up.” He started jumping up and down—I guess in an effort to warm his body back up.

  After what he’d just eaten, I felt my stomach twist in sympathy for his. “Anyone ever mention you might have something of an anger problem?”

  He did giant arm circles, first to the front, then to the back. “It’s only a problem if I don’t find some way to vent it.” He was apparently done with his warm-up and ready to go back to beating the shit out of an inanimate object, but first, he made a detour at the fridge. My hand went to my hip as he winked at me, smiled, and jogged out the door.

  “That’s a beer you just grabbed,” I hollered. “In case you were shooting for a bottle of water and missed.”

  “I didn’t miss.” Knox twisted off the cap, took a long swig, and held his arms out wide. “My body is a temple.”

  “If in no other way, I’ll give you that it’s the size of one.”

  He fired another wink at me as he ran out the door, leaving me to wonder what strange new path had opened up in my life to put me across a breakfast table from Knox Jagger, in his underwear, while I sported a robe, rat’s-nest-like hair, and bad breath, while we discussed things like pasts, presents, and futures . . . then repeated. What a strange turn my life had made, but it was one change I couldn’t even try convincing myself to regret. So instead, I let myself enjoy it. I gave myself a free pass to savor and enjoy and covet and long for things that had been off-limits weeks ago. That was how Knox found me standing—almost blissful with a smile on my face as I leaned into the sink—when he poked his head in a minute later.

  “Oh, and by the way . . . Good morning, Charlie.”

  My smile stretched as I studied him, one intricate puzzle to which
half of the pieces were missing and the other half didn’t give any indication what a person was supposed to be seeing. “Good morning, Knox.”

  TIME FLIES BY, not only when you’re having fun, but when you’re shacked up with Knox Jagger as well. I wasn’t getting the real benefits of “shacking up” with someone, but being with Knox seemed to make time shrink. What had felt like a day now spanned a week. What had felt like an hour was now a day, and what had started out as “We can solve this thing in a month” had turned into we couldn’t solve it in two.

  We’d hit up the frat party scene almost weekly, suffering through one drunken, lame event after another, and we’d narrowed down our suspect list from the male population at Sinclair to the jackass male population at Sinclair . . . which wasn’t much of a narrowing down. For whatever reason, whoever was targeting me had abruptly stopped, and—according to Neve—so had the sexual assault reports. Which meant our villain was temporarily playing nice, or he was biding his time while he schemed and planned for some coup de grace we wouldn’t see coming.

  Knox was as frustrated as I was, but he had a tire punching bag to take out his frustrations on. The only outlets that depressurized me were hopping in the shower for a good frustrated cry, immersing myself in the evidence Knox and I had compiled, or a new habit I’d developed over the past two months—going for a pavement-pounding run. But since Knox was like a junkyard dog about protecting me, I never got the luxury of going on a frustration-diffusing run alone. He claimed the neighborhood was a sketchy one or our perpetrator could be waiting for a situation like me running alone to attack again or a lot of aggressive dogs ran free on the route I liked to take or what if I tripped over a tree root and rolled my ankle or what about a million other things. Knox had an objection for everything, so it was easier just to let him tag along.

  And really, it was nice having him along. I did feel safer, and Knox and I never seemed to run out of things to talk, laugh, or sigh about, and once, he had managed to save whatever part of my body a crazed-looking Rottweiler had been after. No hits, kicks, or mace had been involved; all it had taken was Knox buttressing himself in front of me, lowering into a semi-crouched position, and barking and growling like he was twice as crazed as the frothing-at-the-mouth Rottweiler. The dog skidded to a stop, cocked his head at Knox, and turned and curled what tail it had between its legs. It put the burners on when Knox chased it, still howling like a mad man. The poor dog would be scarred forever, and I’d come dangerously close to wetting my pants from laughter.

  Setting aside averted dog attacks and me being roofie-free for two months, Knox had become indispensable to me . . . though it wasn’t only for his protection. There was something else—the something else. The something else topic he dodged as fervently as I did. Ever since that night in his truck, he’d kept his hands to himself, and I’d held myself back from jettisoning over his lap, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t had our fair share of misses. The tension between us had become so thick that I could almost feel his ache from wanting to grab me and pull my mouth to his. And there were times when his eyes would lock onto mine, and I knew he felt the same pull of desire I did.

  So we walked on our fair share of eggshells, trying to give each other a wide berth in case being too close to one another resulted in a moment of weakness followed by another followed by a tumble into his bed . . . which I hadn’t been fantasizing about at all. The few times we’d gotten lax on the unspoken “wide berth” policy had resulted in . . . the creation of more tension and even more attraction.

  Like the time I’d come to an abrupt stop running because I’d noticed my shoe was untied. Like the shadow he was, Knox had been right at my heels, scanning the surroundings, and hadn’t noticed me stop until his chest had rammed into my back. His arms snapped around me in a protective embrace to keep me from falling, but after the danger had abated, his arms weren’t quick to unwind. Instead, he seemed to pull me harder to him, until I felt the sweat from his chest mingling with the sweat on my back. I felt his breath so hot at the base of my neck I trembled. It was that, that tremble, that severed the moment, and he transformed back into my dauntless protector. Knox was like two men with me, and I couldn’t decide which one he truly wanted to be and which one was acting.

  My head wished for one version of Knox, while my heart yearned for the opposite one, so I guessed, at the end of the day, I liked both versions.

  As for the school part of the last two months, not much had changed. I was still earning A’s like a boss and, other than Harlow and Knox, being socially outcast by the rest of Sinclair. Other than the scornful glares I received on a daily basis from Knox’s groupies, and a few nods of acknowledgement from some of Beck’s frat brothers, I’d really become Sinclair’s Hester Prynne, just like Knox had mentioned months ago.

  Not that I really gave a crap. Two solid friends who would do anything for me—and vice versa—were worth more than a thousand friends who gave me a bunch of lip service but wouldn’t raise a pinkie to save me from a train barreling down the tracks.

  Neve, of course, had been her usual pushy, Knox-is-the-devil self. She’d been insistent about seeing what research I’d compiled, as well as what I’d started on the article, but I’d held her off again and again with the excuse of not sharing my work until it was completed for fear of the dreaded journalism jinx. That had held her off so far, but wouldn’t much longer. She wanted Knox’s head on a plate, and try as I might, I couldn’t find a scrap of evidence to support my belief that Knox wasn’t guilty.

  If I didn’t get something soon, I would run out of time, which was the reason I was waddling across campus in a giant white sheet, heading to my second frat party of the weekend. One party a weekend wasn’t cutting it, so I was doubling up.

  I’d wanted to go to this one on my own, minus one two-hundred-and-change shadow who could squash the average-sized frat boy in his hand, but as soon as I’d tried lying to Knox about my plans for the night, he’d seen right through my shifty eyes. He not quite, but almost, demanded to know what I was up to. When I spilled that I was off to a Valentine’s Day toga party at Kappa Kappa, Knox had shared a grumble with me over the toga part then told me to wait for him before going.

  He had to “go to work” —aka he was off to some hygienically challenged, dark, smoke-filled bar to arm wrestle a guy called Bull. Correction, he was going to arm wrestle Bull left-handed. Apparently, this Bull character worked on an oil rig in the Gulf, his chest was so wide it spanned two counties, and he ordered his T-bones raw. He had Knox by ten years and a hundred pounds and was arm wrestling Knox with his dominant arm. To me, that sounded like Knox was kissing his five hundred bucks good-bye, but Knox had just shrugged and said it was all mind over matter.

  When he’d said that as he tugged on his boots, something had flashed through his eyes—something that made me wonder if Knox didn’t only apply that principle to his not-so-on-the-up-and-up bets but to other areas of his life: the area pertaining to him and me. His whole body might have wanted mine, and his entire soul might have longed for mine, but his iron-will mind controlled the reins for both. Mind over matter . . . I’d been as guilty as Knox was when it came to keeping us apart.

  Before he’d fired up his motorcycle and gone in search of arm wrestling glory, he’d asked that I wait for him to get back before I left for the party. I’d answered him with a smile and a maybe. It didn’t make him happy, but he’d figured out a while ago that ordering me to do something resulted in my doing the opposite, so he locked his jaw, sighed in frustration, and jetted off with a wave and an I’ll be back soon.

  Maybe he would be back soon, but I was leaving sooner. Knox and I together were getting us nowhere, but on my own . . . at a frat party . . . I wasn’t looking to get roofied again, but I was looking to flush out the culprit.

  After Knox left, I’d tied, cinched, and folded a giant white sheet as quickly as my hands could move. I grabbed the keys to the truck before the exhaust from Knox’s motorcycle had cleared
the air. I was lucky if I had an hour on my own, so I put the pedal a bit closer to the floor than I normally would have, ran a couple more-red-than-yellow lights, and made it to campus in record time. I tried to find a parking spot as close to Kappa Kappa as possible because the way I’d secured my toga was more like a kimono, which made walking challenging.

  So after shuffling through the parking lot and down a few sidewalks, I was in front of the Kappa Kappa house . . . which only made me want to turn around and head in the opposite direction. After the number of parties I’d suffered through this year, one would have thought I’d have built up a tolerance by now, but the opposite seemed to be true.

  There was nothing playing out before me that I hadn’t seen before, but I couldn’t help wincing and cringing before I forced one foot in front of the other. The porch running around the house was littered with toga-wearing students, although where this girl had pulled a sheet from her bed to make her party-garb, the rest of the girls looked to have gone with pillowcases instead. Who would have known a person could get so inventive with a rectangle of fabric?

  Like me, the guys had gone with the sheet thing, but theirs were dangled so their not-so-glorious pecs or maybe-two-but-not-six-packs were on display. Of course, I saw the standard red Solo cups and keg stations, and bad music flowed through the house like class and style had taken a vacation from this part of the world.

  “The dress code is toga, not muumuu,” were the words I was greeted with.

  “And you’re going to be the gatekeeper still trying to bar me from entering at our ten-year reunion. Rhetorically speaking, of course, because I’d rather have my skin boiled off than make that hellacious journey down memory lane.” I settled my hands on my hips the way Sydney had hers, and I lifted an eyebrow. “’Fess up. You’ve already picked the theme for our big ten-year reunion bash, and you already know exactly what song’s going to be played when Beck doesn’t finally come around to digging the queen of heinous bitches.”