Cold Hard Truth

by Anne Greenwood Brown

  Emmie wasn’t sure which one of them got to their feet the fastest, but Angie gripped the fabric of Emmie’s coat at both shoulders and said, “Emmie, please. You got to help me.”

  Once Jordy and Chris were on their way to the clinic, Max put his own boots on. He was done skating; he thought Emmie probably was too. Then he started jogging back to the warming house.

  He was as far as the upper rink when he spotted Emmie standing outside. She was talking to Marissa, except that…Max took a double take. Marissa was still skating with Quinn and the other guys.

  He jerked his head back toward the warming house. Whoever the girl was, she was wearing a torn green army jacket. No hat. No gloves. No skates.

  She reminded him of the guy in the lowrider. Jimmy Krebs. And then it clicked. She wasn’t here for the ice. She was here for Emmie. She was one of the people Emmie was trying to avoid, and this girl was right up in Emmie’s face. Her hands were on Emmie’s shoulders, and she was shaking her. Max felt the first tremors in his fingers.

  “Marissa,” he yelled. Pissed. “Are you paying any attention?” Marissa stared at him openmouthed. Max could tell by her expression that she was completely clueless. When it came to Emmie’s situation, Marissa knew less than he did.

  Max was moving. As he ran the rest of the way, he scanned the parking lot, looking for the lowrider. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but he knew that guy—the guy who interrupted the work crew, the guy who trashed Emmie’s car—had to be nearby.

  Max looked back toward Emmie and discovered the girl seemed to be dragging her toward the parking lot.

  Max ran over the hard-packed snowbank and down the side of the lower rink in a spurt of lung-burning energy. He’d never hit a girl, and he hoped he had enough control to be able to say the same thing tomorrow.

  “Get away from her!” Max barreled right up on top of the girl. He didn’t touch her, but he might as well have. The girl staggered backward and toppled off the edge of the shoveled walkway.

  “Max!” Emmie cried.

  “Uff,” the girl grunted as she landed in the slushy snow. She picked up her bare hands and shook them clean.

  “Stay away from Emmie,” Max snarled. He took two steps closer and loomed over the girl, who remained on the ground, crab-walking backward toward the snowdrift. “And you can tell whoever sent you the same thing.”

  “Stop,” Emmie pleaded.

  Emmie’s words didn’t register with Max. All that got through was the familiar sensation of the world closing in, darkness crowding his peripheral vision. His fingers twitched, and his lungs constricted until he couldn’t get any air. Shit. He was going to black out.

  In his moment of obvious unsteadiness, the girl got off the ground, then looked at Emmie. The dark makeup rings around her eyes were smeared, and black lines of tears tracked down her cheeks.

  Under any normal circumstances, Max would have recognized that she was terrified. But he was locked in gear and couldn’t shut his anger down.

  Emmie grabbed his arm and yanked on it. “Max, you’re being an idiot.”

  Max spun toward Emmie, losing focus on where his fury was supposed to go. What snapped him out of it was the expression on Emmie’s face. It took him by surprise. There was no fear there.

  As his mind started to comprehend that he was overreacting, Emmie’s face tightened into a look of annoyance. More than annoyance. She was mad, and getting madder.

  “Max,” she said stiffly, “this is Angie. Angie, Max.”

  Angie gathered her composure. She stepped out of the snowbank and onto the walkway. She straightened her army jacket. She didn’t look interested in making his acquaintance. Max couldn’t say that he blamed her. He pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to focus his eyes. They were useless. His head was pounding. He staggered to the side, the world pitching.

  “Thanks for the advice, Em,” Angie said without looking up. She drew her thumbs under her eyes to wipe off the moisture. “But I think I’ll take off now.”

  She turned and hunched her shoulders against the cold, her hands shoved deep into her pockets. Her hair hung in stringy ropes down her back. She hopped into a junker car with no muffler and drove off. Emmie crossed her arms, her expression stormy.

  By that time, Lindsey, Quinn, and Marissa had made it down to the warming house, most likely to see what had Max so riled up. They were now standing beside Emmie, getting a front-row seat to his humiliation.

  “Emmie, I—”

  “Save it, Shepherd. You can’t come bulldozing into my life every time you imagine a threat.”

  “I thought she was one of Nick’s friends,” he said, hoping she’d hear the apology in his voice.

  Emmie glanced nervously at the other girls, then back at Max with a new darkness in her eyes. He had promised to keep Nick a secret. He was already slipping.

  “And what if she was? They were my friends too. Angie came to me for help. If you hadn’t noticed, she’d already taken a beating today. You made it ten times worse, scaring her like that.”

  “I know. I—”

  “No, you don’t know. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me, and I don’t need some douchebag hockey player coming to my rescue every time a cloud passes over the sun. I can handle my own shit, Shepherd. I’ve been handling it for years. Long before I met you, and I’ll be doing it long after today.”

  She took a deep breath. It had been a long speech. She clenched her teeth, never once taking her eyes off Max. Then she said, “Come on, Marissa. I want to go home.”

  “Emmie—” Max said, reaching out for her, but she was already moving away, and his fingers grasped at the air.

  Marissa and Emmie went into the warming house to take off their skates. Max stood on the ice, frozen, waiting for her to come out again.

  “Should I go in there, Lindsey?” he asked.

  “Yeahhh, no. I don’t think so. Give her some time to cool down.” Lindsey turned Max around, and she and Quinn walked him back to the upper rink. And that’s what they were doing too. They were walking him, like a blind, old man, because God knew he couldn’t see well enough to know how to get there on his own.

  Max was still shaking from the rush of adrenaline, not to mention the lingering sensation of being about to lose consciousness. He still didn’t know exactly where he was. Each foot placement was purposefully negotiated.

  He glanced up, and the guys were leaning on the boards, watching the show from afar. From their body language Max could tell that—although they hadn’t heard a word—they’d seen this show often enough in the last year to know what was going on. He’d totally screwed up, and this time no amount of M&M’s was going to fix it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE GOOD WAY

  The wind blew a spray of ice crystals against Emmie’s bedroom window, creating a high-pitched rattle. The sound reminded her that no matter how warm she was, cocooned in her blankets, the day was not going to be so obliging. Flat out, she did not want to go to the work crew this morning.

  For a second, she thought about calling in sick. Going meant seeing Max, and the idea of seeing him actually made her feel a little queasy, so it wasn’t a total lie. But then, this was supposed to be punishment. Spending time with him would add to her misery. Maybe if she explained that to Dan, it would even knock a day or two off her sentence. A two-for-one deal. Or double credit for time served.

  She considered this possibility all through her shower, her drive to the sheriff’s office, and then the incredibly awkward van ride to the library where they were scheduled to shelve books. She did her best to ignore the weight of Max’s stares from the back seat of the van, the uneasy stiffness of her spine, and then the painfully silent walk from the van into the beautiful building.

  By the openmouthed reactions of most of her crew mates, she was one of the few who’d ever set foot in a library before. Her mom used to take her to this very one when she was little. There was a librarian who did story ho
ur with a Clifford the Big Red Dog puppet.

  The place was the same now as it had been then. Stained-glass windows flanking the front door. Dark wood. Wrought-iron railing gracing the wide, spiraling stairway. Worn marble steps. It always seemed like a castle to Emmie. It smelled like burned dust and felt like home. The good kind of home. Before all the mess.

  Dan McDonald made the assignments, and Emmie wondered if he intentionally assigned her to the first floor and Max to the third. Dan could be pretty perceptive. Or maybe Max had even confessed to Dan what had happened at the skating rink. Or maybe Max had asked Dan to assign him to a different area because he didn’t want to be near her any more than she wanted to be near him. Had she been imagining him staring at her before?

  The more Emmie thought about it, the more she thought that was it. She’d imagined the whole staring thing because she wanted him to still care, even when she was mad at him, even when she was at her prickliest. She didn’t recognize this version of herself. God, was she turning into that girl? She didn’t like it.

  Most of the guys, including Max, followed a librarian onto the upper floors, while Emmie and a guy who was new to the crew were assigned to the first. An older woman with a wary expression led them to a rolling cart stacked high with books of various shapes and sizes, all worn with loose threads hanging from their hard covers. They were haphazardly stacked on the cart and on the verge of tumbling to the floor. It seemed very unlibrarian of the woman to treat the books like that, and Emmie worried for their fragile spines.

  She took several books from the cart and looked at their labels, organizing them in her arms, first numerically and then by the authors alphabetically.

  “What are you doing?” the new kid asked. He was short, his face pushed in like a bulldog. He obviously had never heard of the Dewey Decimal System. A biblio-neophyte.

  “Organizing them so I don’t have to make so many trips to the stacks.” It seemed obvious to her, but she didn’t want to make him feel bad by saying so.

  He shrugged. “I’m taking the cart by the windows so I can sit in those chairs.”

  “You are not. Keep it in the middle so it’s between both our areas.”

  He shrugged. “Try to stop me.” And Emmie knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t have the energy for this. She let him go. He wouldn’t get far. The cart was heavy, and the wheels were sure to get caught up in the loose carpet.

  The stacks were comprised of metal shelves with open backs. She started shelving her armful of books, moving from aisle to aisle in a numerical, then alphabetical choreography: Religion to Literature to History. Dan found her a few minutes later.

  “How we doing here?” he asked with a too-casual lean against the end of the stacks. He rolled up the cuff on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and gave it a few turns. He did the same to the other, then checked to make sure they were even. Nick used to do that.

  “Good.”

  She went up on her tiptoes to slip a book into its spot on the top shelf, but she couldn’t quite reach. Dan took the book out of her hands and slipped it into place for her.

  Emmie shifted irritably. “I don’t need help.”

  Dan gave a weak little smile. He looked tireder than usual, with pale-gray circles under his eyes. Emmie’d heard Dan mention to the driver that he’d taken on some extra work crews, and she thought about giving him one of her father’s favorite warnings about not burning the candle at both ends, but she didn’t.

  “Everybody needs help,” he said. “That’s what this work crew is about: helping the community.”

  “Fine. I’ll try harder.”

  He gave her a small smile. “Just try a little. That would be a start.”

  “So,” she said on an exhale, “I suppose you got a call from my dad? He said he was going to talk to you about Jimmy showing up the other day.”

  “Yeah. We talked.” Dan shifted his weight to his other foot, then turned, leaving Emmie to her work. She put her nose against the edge of the book she was holding and inhaled the quintessentially bookish scent of it, a combination of warm wood pulp and mildew.

  It was something she used to do as a kid, and it had the desired effect. The tightness in her chest loosened. Strange, that. It wasn’t just the smell that brought back feelings of being young and loved. She liked the feel of the books in her hands, too, and the cover art. The work didn’t feel like work today. It felt like a vacation from everything she didn’t want to deal with.

  Maybe Max was enjoying his vacation from her, too, and that, she thought, might be good for both of them.

  So it was odd that she somehow convinced herself that he was nearby. She felt him. Possibly. She didn’t know if it was because she’d been thinking about him, or if it was a change in the temperature, or maybe a movement of air, but the back of her neck prickled with the sensation that he was close. Had he been reassigned to her floor? She stopped what she was doing to listen for his voice, but there was no sound. She looked up and down her aisle, but it was empty.

  Embarrassed by her overactive imagination, she went back to work, returning to the cart and reloading her arms, this time with fiction. She’d imagined it. She didn’t know why she bothered. It wasn’t like she wanted to see him. What would be the purpose of conjuring him up now?

  Emmie was about to shelve a book when she noticed that the books surrounding the spot were completely out of order. She set her armload on the floor and pulled the four offending books off the shelf. On the other side of the stack, visible through the hole she’d created, was Max. His head was bent down like he was studying something. Or possibly reading. Why was he down here? He was supposed to be upstairs.

  Max didn’t look at her. Maybe he didn’t know she was there. Thank God, because this could get all kinds of awkward.

  Emmie sucked in her breath and quietly slipped the books back the way they’d been, out of order, but filling the space. Forget the Dewey Decimal System. It was supremely overrated.

  Her heart pounded as she turned for the nearest bathroom. Before she could move, he spoke. “I’m sorry for overreacting toward your friend, Emmie.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. He shouldn’t be sorry. He’d only done what came naturally for him. Was it fair to ask him to be someone he wasn’t?

  “I thought she was going to hurt you,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  Emmie nodded, even though he couldn’t see her.

  “But you were right,” he said. “I need to stop rushing in, making all kinds of assumptions, overreacting like a…a…”

  “Jackass,” she said.

  “Good choice. It doesn’t excuse what I did, but I don’t like it when people touch you.”

  A beat of silence pulled out between them like taffy, growing long and thin while Emmie considered her response. Max’s words sounded like Nick’s. Nick didn’t like it when other people touched her either. It didn’t matter how innocent the touch might have been. Either they or she, or both, paid the price for the indiscretion.

  “You don’t get a say in who touches me,” she said. “I’m the only one who decides that.”

  “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I just panicked. Like I said, I thought she was going to hurt you.”

  Emmie tried to imagine what the scene last night must have looked like to him. She hadn’t let herself look at it from his point of view. That was a concession she hadn’t been ready to make. But now…if she took Dan’s advice and opened herself up to what others were offering, especially considering the last year, it was kind of nice for Max to feel so protective of her. It was over the top, definitely. But still nice.

  Max remained on the other side of the stacks. She could hear his weight shift on the old floorboards, but she couldn’t see him. Emmie imagined him running his hands through his hair in that way he did.

  “Work a little harder on that overinflated sense of vigilance,” she said, hoping he could tell that she was trying to be kind, “and maybe we can still be friends.”
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br />   The air stilled, and she heard nothing more from him. For a second, she thought he’d walked away, but given how she hadn’t heard the floor creak, that was unlikely. Maybe he’d realized that he was as incapable of change as she was, and her attempt at kindness had come off as an ultimatum he knew he couldn’t meet.

  “I don’t want to be just a friend,” he said, and Emmie could hear how much the words cost him. If she rejected him now, she was sure it would be one too many times.

  Emmie exhaled slowly, then picked up her books from the floor as she tried to reason out a response. She knew what he meant. She’d wanted the same thing—at least last night in the warming house she had. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  Emmie slipped a book on the shelf, moved to the back of her aisle by the far wall and shelved another. She wouldn’t ask Max to be someone he wasn’t, but after everything with Nick, did she really want to be with someone so prone to violence? Except that Max hadn’t actually touched Angie. And he was trying so hard to beat whatever monster was on his back. She wished she understood it, but were trying and wishing enough to make sense of the two of them together? Like an actual couple?

  Emmie shook her head. The answer was clearly no. Still…the promised heat of that kiss, that lost kiss, still lingered on the edges of her memory.

  When she could tell that Max had mirrored her movements in his own aisle and that he, too, had moved to the far end by the wall, she asked, “Why are you down here? Aren’t you supposed to be upstairs?”

  “Dan reassigned me. We were getting through things fast, and apparently the new guy down here has trouble with the alphabet. Dan’s got him cleaning bathrooms instead.”

  Emmie smiled, and she was glad Max was still on the other side of the stacks and couldn’t see it. I don’t want to be just a friend.

  “So what did that girl want with you?” Max asked. His voice sounded throaty.

  “Her name’s Angie. She’s trying to get out. Frankie beat her up pretty bad. Things are all messed up with Nick gone. I gave her Dan’s number.”