My chin came up. Maybe I had been scared—terrified—of this woman at age fifteen, but I wasn’t anymore, and I was wearing my new, pretty earrings, so screw her. “I work with Amy Whitaker,” I told her. “The CEO’s wife. Excuse me, I need to go find my brother.” I nodded goodbye at Connor’s dad, my hands jerking around inside my coat pockets. Margaux Hayes hadn’t changed a bit in seven years. I wondered if she recognized me and this was all some kind of weird charade, or if she had managed to put me entirely out of her mind.
“Do we have any cookies left?” Jared asked me immediately when I climbed to his row. He looked excited and happy. Once again, the farther we got away from our neighborhood, the more relaxed he had become. I thought for the tenth time that day that we needed to move as soon as possible for his happiness and his safety. As soon as I could get the inside of the house fixed up a little, like better walls and no mice, and as soon as I could do the electricity and probably the water, we were going to.
I had talked to the contractor, Connor’s contact, but I wasn’t going to be able to wait for him to get the job done. I wouldn’t worry about the other stuff quite yet, like the foundation, repairing the holes in the roof, the stairs, the appliances. The house had held up for a hundred years; Jared and I could live on the ground floor and be fine. The blue tarps on the roof kept the snow and rain out and it would be warm soon enough in the spring and summer that heat wouldn’t be necessary, so maybe we could even do without a furnace.
But it was pretty cold in Toledo right now. I sat closer to my brother and he let me, so he felt it, too. “You ate the last cookie about ten minutes into the trip,” I answered him. “Sorry.” I watched Connor in an intense conversation with his mom a few rows down. After a moment he broke away, shaking his head.
“You should be a cook.”
I turned to Jared in surprise. “Like, a chef? Do you think so?”
“You make good stuff,” he said off-handedly. I swelled with pride and happiness. “Look, there’s Williams! Number twenty-two.”
I peered through the flakes at the field. It was coming down harder. “Which one is Connor’s brother?”
“The one with ‘Hayes’ on the back of his jersey. Number seven,” Connor told me, sitting down on my other side. I felt immediately warmer. “My mom is in a snit because Teddy insisted on staying with the team yesterday rather than going with her and my dad to a museum and dinner. I tried to explain that this is his job, he has to do what his boss says. She tends not to agree.”
“What does your dad say?”
“He says, ‘Yes, Margaux.’” Connor frowned. “It’s easier for him not to fight with her so he either backs her up or disappears.”
Another Amy, someone to walk right over, I thought to myself, but then felt bad. “What did you tell your parents about me?”
“Nothing much, just what she said to you. That you’re a friend from work.”
“Am I?”
“Aren’t you?” he asked, smiling, then shrugged. “There’s no need for me to mention how we knew each other before. She’ll just get riled up.”
“She doesn’t remember me?” I prompted. “She didn’t say that I looked familiar?”
Connor turned. “You met her at the hospital, you said? It was a pretty hard time for my family and I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t. She didn’t seem to recognize you.”
I shrugged, and the teams ran out onto the field. They flipped a coin for sides or turns or something but it got lost in the snow, and then the game started.
Of course I had seen football games on TV, because the sight had been unavoidable when I’d worked in Skokie’s, a semi-dive bar on the East Side where I had learned how to properly pour a beer. Up close, football was brutal and loud, with bodies crashing and crunching, men grunting and groaning, steam rising from their uniforms and once, blood staining the snow cherry-red.
Connor and Jared were totally into it, leaning forward and cheering. They talked to each other over my head about plays and strategy, and Connor did accurately predict his brother’s moves a lot of the time. I listened and learned, but I was getting pretty cold. And, honestly, a little bored. It was exciting when that number twenty-two caught it, because he always ran past the scoring line for points. “Into the endzone for a touchdown,” my brother corrected me when I said that, and rolled his eyes. But when number twenty-two didn’t have the ball, things tended to drag as neither of the teams could move it very far on the field.
I started to plan the inside of my house in my mind. This time, I went beyond just having the walls with no holes and tried to imagine furniture in the rooms. What would Amy put in a house? I thought of stuff hanging things on the walls besides my diploma. Maybe I could put up a little sign with the motto of Detroit on it: speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes. That was my motto, too, words I tried to believe were true. I sighed a little, considering what I had to do to get to the point that I could hang things on those walls.
“Cold?” Connor asked. He leaned back and put his arm around me. “Are you doing ok, Jared?”
“What? Yeah, I’m good. How many YACs do you think that Williams has? He’s amazing!” my brother answered. His eyes were big with hero-worship and I assumed he wasn’t talking about one of the players throwing up.
“He’s certainly making Teddy seem effective,” Connor agreed. “Get a good look at Williams today, because I’m betting he’ll move back up to the pros pretty soon. But we could go to one of those games, too. They’re indoor,” he told me. He tugged, sliding me on the cushion. “Sit closer and keep my side warm.”
I fully snuggled. It was such an odd feeling to have someone so near, kind of hugging me. I turned my face into his shoulder for just a moment and closed my eyes, imagining other things. When I opened them, I looked straight into Margaux’s face. She had turned around from her row and was staring at me cuddled into her son. But when I stiffened, Connor pulled me closer.
“Stay here,” he said, and I did.
“That was amazing. It was so fun!” Jared crowed as the game ended. The Junior Woodsmen had won by a lot. As both Connor and my brother had told me numerous times, the new receiver had been incredible.
“Go see if Nico Williams will sign your Junior Woodsmen hat,” Connor told him. “It will probably be a collector’s item when he gets elected to the pro hall of fame.” The snow was coming even harder and the lines on the field were covered as the players jogged over to the stands.
“Nico! Nico!” Jared yelled, and ran down the bleachers to find him.
“Be careful,” I called uselessly after him, and struggled to my feet, reluctantly pulling away from Connor. He had kept me close through the first two quarters and when we came back to the field after taking a break in the car during halftime. I shivered when the wind and snow hit me. I had been pretty protected by Connor’s body, and Jared had been protected by mine. He hadn’t minded snuggling with me a little, either.
“Come and meet my brother,” Connor said, and held out his hand to help me down the slippery, metal stairs.
As we got to his parents’ row, Margaux immediately stepped forward and started brushing snow off her son. “You need to get inside out of the cold,” she informed him.
He stepped back, away from her hands. “I’m fine. Let’s go see Teddy. He played a great game.”
“After you,” Blaine told me, and I let go of Connor to walk down toward the field. I had a terrible foreboding that I was going to feel Margaux’s hands in my back, giving me a sharp shove to get me down the rest of the steps a lot faster. She just had that vibe.
Teddy Hayes jogged across the field and talked to his parents for a while. Mostly he said things like, “Yes, Mom, I’m fine,” and “No, I can’t go to dinner. We’re going to try to beat the weather and get back up north.” Again and again, because Margaux was persistent. Blaine mostly seemed interested in his phone.
Connor slapped his brother’s big s
houlder pad. “Good game, man.”
“Thanks,” Teddy answered. He didn’t look very happy. “Did you see me go down in the third quarter? It was because I misread the defensive adjustment. I just didn’t see it when the corner…”
“Teddy. You won, give it a rest and enjoy the victory. How many have you had this year?”
“Yeah,” his brother answered. “Yeah, I should enjoy it.” He sure didn’t look like he was.
“This is Lia,” Connor told him, and pulled me forward.
“Oh!” Teddy said, his face lighting up like he had discovered something. “Lia. It’s a pleasure.”
I smiled at him, wondering why he now sounded so enthusiastic. “Good game.”
Jared skidded up to me, his tennis shoes sliding in the snow. “He didn’t see me,” he told us, disappointed. “So many people were yelling.”
“My brother, Jared,” I told Teddy, who put out his gloved hand to shake.
“Who did you want to meet?” he asked. “Nico Williams?”
Jared nodded vigorously.
“Come on, I’ll introduce you. He’s a good guy,” Teddy said.
“Teddy, Connor,” their mother started, but both of them said they would talk to her later, and Jared and I followed them across the snow to meet the big player already surrounded by a crowd of fans and media.
“This is the best day,” Jared told Connor as we walked. “Seriously, the best day.”
Connor turned and held out his hand to me again, and as I took it, I thought it wasn’t too bad, either.
Chapter 8
“Yeah, no.” He shook his head. “No.”
“You really want to stop? This car has four-wheel drive, right?” I asked.
“I can’t even see the road,” Connor answered. The snow was swirling, coming like white bullets at the windshield in the beams of the headlights. “I can’t see the car in front of us and we’ve gone about a mile in the last fifteen minutes. Yeah, I’m going to get off at this exit and see if there’s a motel.”
We had stayed too long in Toledo. Nico Williams had turned out to be a very nice guy, and had given my brother a bunch of autographs and talked to him for quite a while as the snow continued to fall. Teddy had continued to dissect each play of the game and every mistake he’d made, huddled under the shelter of the bleachers with Connor. Then Jared had been starving, so we had stopped to get something to eat, with Connor looking a little worriedly at the roads and the sky the whole time. Teddy had texted to say that the Junior Woodsmen had decided to spend the night in Toledo and were going out to celebrate their win, but we had thought we could make it to Detroit. But the snow just kept coming down harder, and after the third jackknifed truck that we’d passed, I was getting nervous, too.
“We’re going to stay the night at a motel?” Jared asked from the back seat. “Cool.”
Apparently, everyone else driving north had gotten the same cool idea. “Full,” Connor announced, getting into the car after our stop at the second motel off the freeway. “They told me there’s one more place about a mile west, but it’s not very nice.”
“Want to keep heading home? I can take a turn,” I said.
“No, the weather’s just getting worse,” he told me and we headed to the last motel. It was a dump, not much better than my apartment building, which said a lot. “They have a room,” Connor announced after he had run back to the car through the snowy parking lot, “but we’re definitely going to have to check for bugs.”
“One room?” I asked.
“Two beds. Let’s go, and then I’ll try to find us some toothbrushes.”
“And dinner?” Jared added. I groaned. We had eaten enough for at least two dinners. Three, probably.
Jared looked for something on the fuzzy TV channels while Connor went back out into the storm and I calculated how much I should try to pay him for all this. I had a feeling he would refuse to take anything from me, which should have been good, but made me feel a little funny. Whatever. He definitely had it to spend, so I told myself I should just take it. Take, take, take. The funny feeling increased.
Around midnight, my brother had finally eaten his fill and had stopped talking about football, Nico Williams, lacrosse leagues, and his computer game. He fell asleep in the bed next to me, wearing his t-shirt and underwear. Connor had also stripped down to that level, which was an arresting sight that I had tried not to ogle. He looked so cute in the clothes he wore to the gym and to play lacrosse, so high-fashion in the stuff he had on at work, so sexy all the time—but then it turned out that underneath, he wore these serious, old-man, plaid boxers.
“Do you care?” he had asked, gesturing at them as we got ready for bed. “I don’t think I could sleep in jeans.”
I had stared directly at the flap in the front before I wrenched my eyes away. “No, I don’t care.” And he was right, it was very hard to sleep in jeans, even though I was tired. I lay awake and thought about how much fun I’d had going to a football game, and how odd that was; I thought about moving; I thought about Connor’s parents; I thought about him being in the bed next to me, his hair messy from wearing his hat and getting snowed on. How he had kept me warm at the game with his arm around me and taken my boots outside the motel room to hit them together and get the snow off, and done Jared’s too. Every little considerate thing he did, I had catalogued away in my mind, and I went over the list now.
“Connor?” I picked up my head. Had he made that noise? The room was so dark I could only see a vague outline of his body on the other bed.
I heard it again: a moan. It had definitely come—
“No. No!” he said, his voice shaking.
I got out of our bed as quietly as I could and stepped across to his. “Connor,” I whispered, and put my hand where I thought his shoulder would be. Instead, I touched his cheek, my fingertips gently rasping against the stubble that had started to come in there. He jerked at the contact and moaned again.
“Connor, you’re having a nightmare,” I whispered. I sat on the mattress next to him. “Wake up.” I stroked his cheek and put my other hand on his chest. “Wake up.”
“What?” he asked, his voice groggy. “What’s happening?”
“Shh, it’s ok. It’s Lia. You were dreaming.”
I heard the sigh and felt his chest rise up and down under my hand. “God damn it.”
“Are you ok?”
He sighed again. It sounded tortured. “Every time I get under stress, I have the dream. I guess the driving tonight was enough to set me off.”
“What are you dreaming?” I asked, but I thought I knew.
“I dream about that night,” he said softly. “I can see everything as I come out into the parking lot, like remember how the light over the door flickered some? I can even see that. I hear the tires squeal and I know what’s coming but I can’t run. I can’t get away. And then I feel it again, the pain in my leg. I’d never had anything hurt so badly, like this horrible burning, like my leg was on fire. In the dream, they keep shooting and the bullets are so close.”
“They did keep shooting,” I said. “That was why I pulled you away. I felt them fly by my hair.”
“And you still stayed out there with me?” His hand moved over mine as I cupped his cheek.
“You needed me,” I said. I felt a rush of emotion, the same as when I looked at Jared asleep and I wanted to kill the guys in our neighborhood who would try to hurt him. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Connor, not ever. I had helped him once and I would always do it again.
“I don’t know when this is going to stop,” he said. His voice sounded different in the dark, not the strong, confident one he had when he explained how to put in the window glass, or the patient tone he used when he helped Jared with lacrosse. The laughter that often lurked behind his words was also gone. “What’s the matter with me, that I can’t get over this seven years later?” he asked. “I’m still stuck there somehow, stuck in that parking lot. Hearing the tires and the yelling, waking
up with you telling me to be quiet, feeling so cold and my leg hurting so much that I knew I was dying.”
“You didn’t die. The ambulance came before the police and they started working on you right away. I tried to go with you…” I remembered the sound of the doors as they closed and then the siren screaming away down the street. “I wasn’t going to let you die.”
“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” he told me in the darkness. “I think I see their faces. I know they’re not coming after me, I know that. But these dreams…I don’t want to remember it anymore. I need—”
I leaned down and kissed him in the darkness, my lips colliding with his, our teeth bumping as I misjudged the distance. I broke away but Connor’s hand came to the back of my neck and pulled me down again and this time he kissed me, his tongue touching mine. I twisted his t-shirt in my fingers as he went deeper and I pressed into him, trying to get closer.
Connor tugged me fully onto the bed, on top of his body, and then flipped us so that I was underneath. My legs splayed out around his hips and I circled them around him. He leaned on his elbows, his one hand caught in my hair, the other against my cheek. He pulled back and kissed me lightly on my forehead and nose and I strained my mouth up to his. I could hear my breath in the silence of the room, quick and heavy. He kissed me again and my tongue played with his, learning how to do this.
He shifted his hips, grinding them against me, and I felt how hard he’d become. I tilted mine to meet him, to feel the heady pressure there against the jeans that I really wished I’d taken off. Connor moved his hand from my cheek to my waist, beneath my shirt. He started to slide it behind—
“Stop. Please, stop,” I said, jerking my mouth away.
He did, immediately, rolling off me. “Lia. Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t be—you shouldn’t be, I’m not because it’s ok,” I tried to soothe him. I sat up too. “I kissed you because, it was, I was…” I couldn’t make my brain filter out the right words to explain it.
Fixing Lia Page 13
