The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  “Well, you may be indom…whatever, but I am bigger, and stronger, and I was out of my mind.”

  “You were scared,” I said. “You were confused and scared, maybe even as much as I was. And anyway, you’re paying your debt to society with the community service, and you paid your debt to me with a big, fat check. So, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to worry about it anymore.” I looked across the car at his dark silhouette. He sat up very straight with stiff arms holding the wheel. “Will you spend Thanksgiving with your brother and your niece?”

  “No.”

  Really? I wondered if the Woodsmen game was somewhere else and that was the reason they’d be apart. That was something I should have already known, according to all the bar regulars. They had the Woodsmen schedule memorized down to practice times. “Well, what are you going to do, then?”

  Kayden sighed. “I don’t really know. I haven’t thought about it much. Even though that kid keeps asking me what I’m doing, too.”

  “What kid?” I questioned.

  “The community service I told you about, that kid. The one I’m mentoring.” He made the same sound, laugh/huff. “He told me about the green bean casserole they’re having and how much he hates it but how much he also loves sweet potato pie. How he and his mom paint turkeys on rocks every year.”

  “That’s so sweet! He sounds adorable!”

  “He’s supposed to be eleven,” Kayden said, and shook his head. “Adorable?”

  “Is that not allowed past a certain age?” I asked and he shook his head again. “What did you do when you were a kid? Did your family have any traditions around the holiday?” I bet that Kayden had been completely adorable himself. He was so handsome now it practically made my eyes bulge to look at him. He had a beard and his hair was longer than in his football pictures—slightly messier, too, which I happened to like. And as I looked at him while he drove, I noted his profile was still perfect. Straight nose, strong chin, sharp cheekbones. Yep, ridiculously handsome, and yep, my eyes were nearly bulging.

  “We didn’t have a lot of family traditions,” he answered. “Thanksgiving was like any other day. We watched football and tried not to make my father mad.”

  “That doesn’t sound very fun,” I stated, and I saw his shoulder shrug. “In case you were wondering about me, my mom and I used to have turkey sandwiches and start watching Christmas movies. She loved all the old ones but we also watched all the new ones, the Christmas love stories. Lordy, I can practically recite some of those movies by heart!”

  “That’s what you’re doing tomorrow, then? Starting Christmas early?”

  “No, I don’t have a TV. I don’t really have any plans.” I thought for a minute. “You could come over,” I suggested. “Since you’re not doing anything either, you could come over and have a turkey sandwich with me and Emma. She shouldn’t actually eat the meat. The vet has her on a very strict diet.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, not even turkey, and it’s low-fat and low-sodium. I won’t share with her at all,” I said, nodding.

  “I mean, you’re seriously asking me over for Thanksgiving?” he clarified.

  “I can definitely move things to make space for you and I bought a family-sized pack of deli meat. It was on sale because it expires soon.”

  “You want to have Thanksgiving with the guy who victimized you,” Kayden stated.

  I wished he would stop with calling himself a criminal all the time. “I wish you would stop saying that I should be afraid of you,” I told him plainly. “And if you don’t want to come, you can just say so.”

  “No, I do,” he answered quickly. “I do? Yeah, I really do.” Now he sounded shocked.

  “Good,” I said, satisfied. I was spending the holiday with someone now. A new friend!

  “What time?” he asked.

  I made a quick calculation of how long it would take me to clear the space I’d promised for him. “Let’s say four. You can bring dessert.”

  “Four? Uh, ok.”

  He really still sounded more surprised than revved up about this, but secretly, I was super excited. Maybe not too secretly, since I was smiling at him across the car. “This is going to be so fun!”

  “Is it?”

  “Sure! I think I got the last of the mushrooms off the walls, even! It’s because the air is getting a lot dryer with the heat on—”

  “What about if you come to my apartment instead? Bring the turkey,” he suggested.

  “Oh, ok. You do already have the bread.”

  “I don’t have any mushrooms, either. Not that I know of.”

  I laughed and he jolted. Like, his body jerked, and the car jerked a little, too. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” I apologized. “Maybe I should be quiet so you can focus on driving. I bet you have to concentrate very hard to do it well.”

  “You still don’t know how?” he asked.

  “It’s only been a few weeks since I last saw you! I think it takes years to learn.”

  “No. My brother taught me in a day. He came home and showed me how in the parking lot of our high school.”

  “That’s sweet!” I smiled, thinking of them being friends. “Maybe you could teach the kid you mentor, just like your brother did for you.”

  “The kid’s only eleven. He’s a ways from getting behind the wheel.”

  Sure, but soon enough he’d be learning. “You’ll be in his life for a long time, though,” I mentioned, but Kayden didn’t respond. “I wish I’d had a mentor who knew how to drive.”

  “I’m not going to teach you,” he said abruptly, and I turned, surprised.

  “I didn’t ask you to! I didn’t think you would. Did you think I was hinting?” He didn’t answer, which I took to mean “yes.” “I don’t hint,” I informed him. “If I want something, I’ll ask. Like I wanted you to come to Thanksgiving dinner, and you are.”

  “You’re coming to my house,” he noted.

  “That was your idea, not mine!” I shot right back. “I invited you, first.”

  “Yeah, you did,” he said, sounding surprised again. “You invited me to spend Thanksgiving with you.” The corner of his mouth quirked up.

  “But we will be at your place. It’s even between us because I’m bringing the main course.” I did find myself wanting to see where he lived. If Kayden’s car was this nice, what would his apartment be like?

  I found out the answer the next day, but I had trouble thinking of the word I wanted to describe it. I couldn’t remember anything from my vocab app that captured the exact feeling of his apartment once I was inside.

  Kayden lived in a new building in downtown Traverse City with its own covered parking lot and a guard watching the cars. “This is as fancy as I thought it would be,” I’d murmured to Emma when we walked in, and I even put a leash on her, which she really resented. Kayden had been a little surprised when we both climbed into his car when he’d arrived to pick us up, but it wasn’t like I was going to leave her alone on a holiday.

  So, right, the building’s lobby was also fancy, sort of industrial but still looking like it cost a lot, and the elevator was the same way, and so was the hallway outside his apartment. Then we walked inside and I saw where he lived.

  “Oh. This is it?”

  “I got apple pie,” he told me. He put his wallet on a table, where it was the only decoration. “The kid kept talking about sweet potato but the more he said, the less I ever want to eat it.” He turned to look at me. “What?”

  “You live here?” I asked, and turned in a circle to stare around the huge room. It was really big, it had that going for it. And it was mostly clean. Just a thin layer of dust over the furniture, so maybe Kayden liked things neat, but he wasn’t actually scrubbing, and I was sure I was right that he had lived with housekeeping services in his earlier life. It was…what was the word I was looking for?

  “Yeah, I live here,” he answered, and repeated, “What?”

  I was still trying to fi
gure out how to describe it. “It’s not like I pictured,” I told him. “Where’s your stuff?”

  “This is it.” He looked around, too. “Yeah, it’s nothing like your house. I told you I don’t like having shit all around.”

  “The annoying bread bag,” I remembered. Even one single bag would look out of place in this apartment—there just wasn’t anything. Even the motel where we’d hunkered down during a hurricane on the Gulf Coast had been homier than this! “It’s…” I thought for another second. “It’s sad! That’s what I was looking for.”

  “Sad,” he echoed, and I nodded.

  “I’m so glad I thought of that word. I was trying to put a name to the atmosphere here and it was starting to drive me crazy! Oh…” I continued slowly as I looked at his expression. “But I wasn’t very polite to say it to you. Sorry.”

  That PO’d frown on his face didn’t change.

  “I think I was imagining a place like your former house, where you lived when you played in Oklahoma. I saw pictures of it online,” I explained.

  “I did some photo shoots there,” he said, and shook his head.

  Yeah, I’d looked at those a lot. There were pictures of Kayden lounging on a giant purple couch and wearing only tight leather pants—pants that laced up the front! There were shots of him relaxing (shirtless) in a bubble bath in a tub that was easily the size of my great-aunt’s entire bathroom. There were also pictures of a party he’d had and he’d been wearing a plumed hair decoration, like a showgirl. It had made him look about ten feet tall and also like he’d be on stage in Vegas, where I’d lived only briefly but had gotten a lot of experience with the costumes. I’d been employed backstage, in charge of sweeping up the glitter and sequins and feathers.

  Today Kayden wore a very plain white shirt and jeans. I wondered if he still had the turquoise headdress tucked away in a closet, but I couldn’t even picture it on him now at all. “I wasn’t trying to insult where you live,” I said to reinforce my apology. “It just surprised me because it’s so different from your old place.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” His forehead crinkled as he scowled. “I don’t even know what happened to all that stuff. I guess it got sold or stolen. Or thrown away, like junk.”

  I looked at his unhappy face. This was a holiday! Time for some cheer. “It doesn’t matter because you’re here, now, and it’s fine. Live in the moment, right? This is for you.” I held out the turkey, which Emma had been trying to remove from my hand, and presented it to Kayden as a peace offering.

  “Thanks.” He accepted the deli meat gift. It was very similar to how I imagined the first Thanksgiving might have gone.

  Emma jingled, to remind me to remove the leash. I did and then we trailed after him into the kitchen. “It’s lucky they allow dogs in your building,” I commented.

  “Do they?” he asked. He bent to take something out of the refrigerator and I tilted my head to stare thoughtfully at his butt. Hm. It would have been great if he’d done a picture in those tight leather pants from the back, too. The front version, with his square rows of abs and the interesting bulge beneath the leather laces, had been quite nice and I’d admired it for a while.

  “I guess we should eat now,” he said, breaking me out of my daydream about those pants.

  “Sure, I’m hungry.” I tilted my head again as I heard a noise from the living room, and Em woofed. “What is that? A whistle?” I walked over to see a laptop open on a long white couch. I sat down on it, thinking how quickly it would become grey with a blanket of Emma’s fur, and looked at the computer screen. “That was a referee! I thought you said that you don’t watch sports anymore.”

  “I don’t.” Kayden walked out of the kitchen too, now holding a plate with a sandwich. He put it on the coffee table and flipped the screen closed. “I’m not interested at all.”

  “That was totally a football game! Was it the Woodsmen? I should probably know the score since everyone in the bar will be talking about it tomorrow. They act like I’ve broken some sacred trust or something when I don’t have anything to contribute to the discussion.” I reached for the laptop, but when he moved it farther away, I took the food he’d brought instead. “Ok, never mind about the game. Thanks for making the dinner. Where’s yours?”

  He stared. “That sandwich was…” His voice trailed off and he went back into the kitchen. While he was gone, I amused myself by opening his computer back up and finding a movie we could watch.

  “How did you do that?” Kayden demanded when he came in and saw me typing. “How did you know my password?”

  “It’s just a four-digit code. I tried one, two, three, four, and then I tried your birthday. I worked briefly for a kind of shady guy in Florida and he taught me a lot about how to break into devices.”

  “So you decided to break into mine?” He removed the laptop from my hands and looked at the screen. “What is this? What are you watching?”

  “It’s the film version of A Lady’s Naughty Christmas Wish, but they shortened the title to just Naughty Christmas. It sounds a lot riskier than it is.”

  “Do you mean ‘risqué?’ What is she doing running in that huge dress?”

  “Maybe risqué is what I mean. She’s escaping from a ball because someone said she wasn’t as pretty as her sister, which is lame, but I swear that it’s a really good movie if you stick with it.” This sandwich, however, was not good at all. “Do you have any mustard or anything?” I asked him.

  “Maybe,” Kayden said vaguely. He stared at his computer. “What’s happening with this woman now? Why is she going in the river?”

  “She dropped her shawl and it’s floating away,” I said over my shoulder as I went into the kitchen to improve my meal. “Your fridge is practically empty! Are you really only eating toast all the time?”

  “Shit, she just fell in,” he answered. “There’s no way she’s going to be able to swim in that dress. Once I had a party and everyone jumped into my pool, and a guy had to pull a woman out because her clothes were dragging her down. She was practically naked but this woman is wearing a giant skirt thing.”

  I did the best I could with the terrible Thanksgiving sandwich he’d given me. “They dressed large back then, but you don’t have to worry. A lone horseback rider will arrive to save her in just a sec.” I glanced up and saw what was happening in the living room and commented, “Emma just ate your sandwich. It’s totally not part of her diet.” My dog looked pretty pleased with herself, though. “I can make you another one but you have to be careful of her. The vet is serious about her dropping some pounds and getting healthier.” Kayden looked like he needed to put on some, himself, so I returned to the refrigerator and remade his sandwich, this one extra thick. While I did, I checked the Woodsmen score on my phone. “Your brother’s team is winning,” I commented, and gave him the plate.

  “I told you that I don’t care about football.” He took a bite of what I handed him and chewed without seeming to notice how bad it was. I should have been a little choosier about the deli meat I’d selected.

  “If you don’t care, then why were you watching it? And where’s the pie?” I asked, because despite the improvements I’d tried to make, I wasn’t satisfied at all with our dinner so far. Emma’s ears perked up when she heard me mention the dessert, so I told her, “None for you, sorry. Not even one bite!” She ignored that—she knew I’d share a little.

  “Maybe I was somewhat curious about the game,” Kayden admitted. He flattened a bread crumb under his thumb. “This is my brother’s first season as offensive coordinator and I want to know how he’s doing with it.”

  “Why don’t you call him, then? Oh, is he super modest so he won’t tell you the truth? Or is he too confident so you can’t trust his brags?”

  “The first one. He’s very modest. We’ve always been pretty different.” He smashed another crumb. “But we’re not talking right now, anyway.”

  “No, Em.” I pushed her paw off the cushion and she glared. “Sorry
, you can’t sit here. This couch is too new and white.” Now she huffed, very annoyed. “It sounded like you were close to your brother, like how he came home to teach you to drive. So why aren’t you talking to him? No, Em!”

  “I don’t care.” He patted the cushion next to him and Emma got partway up before I had to help her out. She curled next to Kayden, pushing him aside as she wriggled to get comfortable. He moved to let her and stroked her soft ears. “My brother and I got into an argument and we haven’t talked in a long time,” he said. “That’s why I’m not calling him.”

  “Not even on the holidays?” I questioned, but Kayden shook his head. “What was the fight about?”

  “How I always fuck everything up. It’s always bothered him a lot.” He laughed a short, angry sound that made it seem like he wasn’t actually jocful. “He was right, everything he said was true. He was furious because I…” But he stopped before he told me anything more.

  “What? What did you do? How do always you mess everything up?” This was fascinating information, much better than what was currently happening in the Naughty Christmas movie with Lady Saber. She’d been yanked out of the river and was now fantasizing about the baron, her rescuer, in his wet shirt and clinging pantaloons.

  “I’ll get the pie.” Kayden walked into the other room.

  No, no way was he getting out of that remark by offering me dessert! I did want the pie, though, and I followed him into the kitchen, where he’d already put away the bread and mustard that I’d taken out. “How did you mess things up? Are you talking about how you had to go to rehab? Or how you got forced out of football?”

  He had started doing something to the pie so I couldn’t see his expression, but I watched his back and shoulders tense under the white shirt. There was Emma hair on it now. “Yes, all of the above. I’m talking about me being a junkie and losing my job. Isn’t that enough?” He turned around to face me. “I’m so glad you came over.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. You may be surprised to hear this, but I don’t like to discuss how my entire life is shit.” He shoved a plate across the counter at me and I caught it before it fell onto the floor. On it was a piece of pie that looked like he’d hacked it out with an ax.