“When you’ve shown me that you are an adult, I will consider some flexibility,” he said.
I wanted—badly—to push back.
“I need the sixth of every month off” was all I said. “Other than that, I’ll do whatever needs to be done, Dad.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Fine. A day off, every month. Hell, make it thirty-six hours. It starts at midnight on the sixth, and it ends at noon on the eighth. I don’t want to know what you’re doing during that time, and I don’t want it to interfere with your work. If you do what you’re supposed to do, and abide by my rules, I’ll continue to pay for your education, and I’ll let you live here.”
I sighed with relief.
“One more thing, Joey.”
I tensed. “Yeah?”
“The girl who drove you here. You owe her your life. Try not to forget it.”
Present Day
Friday
Joey
“Shots, Joey?” asked a girl I didn’t know.
She was dressed in a tight black skirt and a hot-pink halter, and carrying two tiny plastic cups full of something blue and gelatinous. Jell-O shooters, I assumed.
I glanced down at my watch. Midnight on the sixth. On the dot. Perfect.
“Brought my own,” I replied with a purposefully winning smile and held up my bottle.
Her eyes widened. “You’re that guy.”
“Aw, damn. Does my reputation precede me?” I teased.
She tipped her head to the side thoughtfully. “My roommate’s sister said some dude with his own bottle of tequila took her home a few months ago and humiliated her.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Did she say whether or not she liked it?”
The girl suppressed a smile. “She called you a jerk, actually.”
“Jerk. Hmm. That’s fairly mild. Most of my…er…lady friends…toss around swear words.” I leaned down to whisper in the raven-haired beauty’s ear. “You can pour me a drink if you like.”
She downed the shots her in hands, then eagerly grabbed the bottle of tequila from me. She didn’t need to know half of the liquid gold was water.
I watched her with a smile as she traipsed off to the kitchen. She wasn’t my type, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate her assets. In a few seconds, she returned with an overflowing shot glass tucked into her cleavage and an expectant look on her face.
“Well…thank you,” I said.
I grabbed the drink with my teeth, tipped it back expertly without spilling a drop, then took a little bow. The girl clapped, handed me my bottle and waited.
“I’d like another,” I told her regretfully. “But I’m here with someone. And I’m a one-woman kinda guy.”
“That’s a lie if I ever heard one.”
“I’ve never said a truer thing.”
“You don’t come with girls. You leave with them.”
I made a wounded face. “I’m hurt.”
“Which one is it then?” she asked.
“Which one what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Which girl?”
“A…brunette?”
She handed me my tequila. “Which brunette?”
I laughed and grabbed a random girl as she walked by and nuzzled her neck playfully. She pushed me away.
“Stop that!” she said.
I chuckled as she took off in the other direction. She wasn’t my type, either, in her buttoned-up blouse and designer jeans.
“C’mon, babe,” I called mockingly. “Give me a chance.”
“Have another shot!” she yelled back.
“Talk me into it, why don’t you?”
I took an enormous swig of the watered-down liquor and whipped back to the Jell-O shooter girl. She was already gone. I slumped into a couch, and after just a few minutes, a smiling blonde put her hand on my knee.
“You wanna get outta here?” she whispered.
I gave her a quick once-over. Was she my type? I liked them pretty. I liked them vapid. I liked them to be so utterly self-involved and terrified of ruining their otherwise perfectly cultivated reputations that they wouldn’t give out details to their friends. Calling me a jerk was fine. Calling me an asshole was all right, too. All I wanted was a girl who did the name-calling without maniacal enthusiasm. I didn’t need my misadventures getting blown out of proportion and then getting back to my dad. Because that would ruin my own carefully cultivated reputation.
After a year and a half of operating under my dad’s rules, I knew exactly how to ride the just-tame-enough line. Taking one girl home every month could hardly be called excessive. So long as she was on board with the fact that all I could ever be was a one-night stand.
Would this girl be like that?
Impossible to tell in five seconds. In the smoky, party-dark room, I couldn’t even be sure if she was attractive. I decided quickly that I would take my chances. After all, my thirty-six hours of freedom would go by very quickly. It always did.
* * *
“You have to be super quiet,” she whispered. “The girls in here are ridiculous about men.”
A warning bell went off in my head.
“Ridiculous how?” My voice echoed in the stairwell, and the girl shushed me immediately.
“I said super quiet.”
“Sorry.”
“And my roommate might be home, so when we get up there, let me check before we go in.”
“And if she is home?”
“Then we have to be super-duper quiet.”
“Uh-uh,” I muttered
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t do group living situations.”
She turned to give me a coy smile. “Do what with them?”
“Anything.” We’d reached the top of the stairs and I gave her a bleary-eyed grin.
“Very funny.”
She dragged me into the hall, and I gave the line of doors a horrified look.
“So, I’m gonna go home.”
“You’re what?”
“Listen…” I blanked on what her name was, and struggled to find an endearment that wouldn’t lead her on. Not any more than I had already. “Kiddo.”
“Kiddo?”
Whoops.
Quickly, I switched tactics, launching in my favorite rejection speech. “Do you really want to be that girl?”
“What girl?”
“The girl who has a one-night stand while her roommate sleeps in the other bed.”
That was enough. Even in the dim light, through my tequila haze, I saw her face cloud over.
“Go,” she ordered. “And don’t you dare tell anyone you were here with me.”
She shoved past me and let herself into one of the rooms without looking back. I felt momentarily triumphant. Until I remembered that the girl—shit, what was her name?—had driven my truck from the party to the dorm, and my keys were still in her purse.
Damn. I’d screwed myself over.
“The Joey Fox MO,” I muttered to the empty hall as I settled down for the night. “Through and through.”
I debated on whether or not I should try to find a couch somewhere in a common area, then swiftly rejected it. I might be a bit of dumb ass sometimes, but I’m not so much of an idiot that I want to risk incurring the wrath of an entire dorm full of women. It was bad enough that the one who’d stormed off would complain to her roommate about me. They always did. Then the roommate would probably tell two or three of her friends what a jerk I was. Maybe one day I’d find the campus completely plastered with least-wanted posters featuring my lovely face.
I grinned at the mental picture.
Until that point, though, I needed to pull up a piece of floor and wait for the girl to simmer down and bring me my keys.
I slid to the ground, closed my eyes and did my version of passing out.
Tucker
I woke up in a panic, then lay there in the dark, trying to calm my racing heart and isolate the source of my worry. It took a few moments, but as my pulse normalized and my
sleep fog lessened, I was able to grasp it.
I’d been dreaming of my mother, and a promise she’d had me make when I was twelve years old.
I’d been holed up in the coat closet at our apartment while my parents argued about money, about unmet dreams and about God knows what else. I drifted in and out of doziness as the screaming went on, jerking awake when it finally reached its crescendo. My father stormed out, drunk and angry, with our grocery money in his hands, ready to hand it over to his preferred dealer. It had been very quiet for a few a moments after that, then my tearful mother had dragged me out of the closet and sat me down on the couch.
“Promise me,” she said.
“Promise you what?” I replied resentfully, not wanting to meet her mascara-smeared eyes.
“Swear that you will never settle for less than you deserve.”
“I will never settle for less than I deserve,” I repeated automatically.
“Tucker. Look at me.”
And I forced my gaze to her face. She looked feverish, and very nearly frightening.
“Okay, Mom,” I agreed.
And then she laid out a list. Her list of more. She made me repeat it until there was no way I could forget it.
Ten years from now, I will have gone to Europe at least once.
Ten years from now, I will have met the love of my life—a kind, smart, generous man. He will value me.
Ten years from now, I will have a successful career. It will be one that matters.
We never talked about it again, but the memory struck me sometimes, and when it did, it would fill me with the panic I was feeling at that exact moment. Because I was right on the cusp of my twenty-second birthday, and I had not accomplished a single thing on that list.
“Liandra!” I hissed.
She muttered an incomprehensible response.
“Liandra!”
“Tucker,” she groaned from across the room. “What do you want?”
“What if I never amount to anything?”
“You’re not even going to make it until morning if you don’t leave me alone,” she grumbled.
I waited, knowing that any second she would remember how many times she’d woken me up over the past year for things far less significant than a crisis of self-faith. She sighed resignedly.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
“I just thought I would have it all together by now,” I replied.
“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you’re turning twenty-two in three months?”
I nodded, even though she probably couldn’t see me in the darkness of our shared bedroom.
“And because you got that letter this past week, asking you to declare your major?”
“More like demanded it,” I told her.
She ignored my comment. “And because of what happened with Mark…an awfully long year and a half ago?”
“Are you trying to make me feel worse?” I asked.
“No,” Liandra said. “I’m just gathering all your points so I can accurately refute them.”
“And now you’re resorting to lawyer speak?”
“I’m not a lawyer.”
“Not anymore.”
“Tucker.” My friend sighed. “How old am I?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“I’m thirty-four!”
“I know,” I told her. “I was trying to soften you up so you’d be nicer to me.”
“Well, stop it.”
“Sorry.”
“How many boyfriends do I have?” Liandra asked.
“None.”
“None,” she repeated.
“But at least you’ve been married,” I reminded her.
“None,” she said a second time, this time heavily.
“But—”
She cut me off. “So. I’m a thirty-four-year-old woman with one failed marriage, one failed career, living off a student loan that I will probably never pay back, in some run-down, all-girls dorm with a self-pitying twenty-one-year-old who is sad because she has never been to Italy.”
“You are trying to make me feel worse,” I accused.
“I’m giving you perspective,” she corrected.
And truthfully, what she was saying did make me feel better about my situation. When I had come to Liandra, I’d been in the lowest state of my life, and she had helped me rebuild. She’d had her share of hard times, and she understood loss. In fact, it was often what she had been through herself that inspired me. She’d left those details out of her little rant, but my mind went to them immediately. I thought of the fact that she’d battled breast cancer for eight years, and that the radiation treatment had resulted in infertility. And how her boss at the law firm where she’d worked had also been her husband. And that he’d fired and divorced Liandra after impregnating his office assistant.
“Liandra?” I said softly.
“Is it working?” she replied.
“Is what working?”
“My evil plan,” she said. “Are you lying there thinking about my crappy life instead of yours?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
She chuckled. “Good. And you’re welcome.”
“Thanks,” I said belatedly.
She was quiet for a minute, and I wondered if she had drifted back to sleep. Then she leaned across the space between our beds and squeezed my hand.
“Your mom would be proud,” she told me. “I know it.”
My heart ached for a single beat, and I pushed the pain aside. I’d come eight-hundred miles away from home so I could put the past and all that pain that went with it behind me.
“Do you feel any better?” Liandra wanted to know.
“A lot.”
There was a pause, and I thought she might call my bluff, but instead she just said in a teasing voice, “Good. Now can we please get some rest? It’s 2 a.m.”
“Today is Friday,” I reminded her. “You don’t have any classes. And neither do I.”
“I know.” She yawned. “But you’ve got that rally thing in the morning, and work in the afternoon. And let’s face it, if you’re tired, you’re cranky. And if you’re cranky and tired, then you’re noisy.”
“It’s not a rally, it’s a business meeting! And now that I’m thinking about that, I’m all anxious again.”
“See?” she said. “Already cranky.”
I threw my pillow at her, and grinned to myself when I heard her responding squeak.
“Good night, Liandra,” I called out sweetly.
“Good night, Tucker.”
After a few more silent moments, my roommate’s breathing became even and slow, and I knew she had fallen asleep. But I was still wide-awake, thinking of my immediate future instead of my long-ago past.
The project I’d taken on was a big one, and close to my heart. In fact, it was the biggest thing I’d ever undertaken. And the most personal. This wasn’t just some cause I’d read about, or some park that needed to be cleaned up. This was about me.
A full year earlier, when I’d still been more or less picking up the pieces of my life after my parents had died and I’d left Mark, I’d heard that a local community center was being shut down. At first, I’d just felt a little sad that a place so similar to the one where I’d spent so much of my youth was going to be turned into high-rises and a mini mall. But the more I’d thought about it, the more it had upset me. And when I’d decided to visit it, I’d seen the number of kids there, and something in me had snapped. I couldn’t let it close.
So I did the only thing I could. I volunteered to fix the whole damned thing. So I’d started researching. I invested quite a bit of time looking over the details, finding out how I could save it, or even if I could. The city owned the land and the community center, but the building was old and expensive to maintain, and someone in the line of officials had decided it was no longer worth the amount it cost. So the bottom line came down to one thing. Money. Of which I had little.
I couldn’t buy the land, or eve
n the building. But I could bring it back up to code. If I could come up with the thirty-thousand dollars.
And then came the windfall, painful as it was.
A fifteen-thousand-dollar insurance settlement from my mom. The lawyers had originally told me that my mom’s policy had been voided by the arson, but further investigation revealed that it was still valid.
I couldn’t keep the money. Not for selfish reasons. But for the community center…it was just the bump I needed. Half the money I needed, ready to go. It gave me sway with the city officials and validated my proposal enough that they gave me a year to come up with the other half. Which led to the birth of my not-for-profit gardening service. With Liandra’s help, a generous grant and the assistance of many patrons of the community center, I was damned close to my goal of raising the other fifteen-thousand dollars.
And the whole thing was a bonus I hadn’t counted on. The work distracted me from Mark and all the pieces of my heart he’d left behind. I didn’t need him, or romance or anything but my own cause. I felt good about myself. I could be happy on my own terms.
Then, only just this week, I received a call that made me think it might all have been for nothing.
Some bigwig developer wanted the land. Whoever he was, he thought we needed something better. Something bigger. Something profitable.
With only six weeks left to raise the money, the city officials wanted to meet with me. Tomorrow.
* * *
I rolled over in my bed, found my phone squished under my face and realized immediately that my alarm hadn’t gone off.
“Crap!” I yelled, then clamped my hand over my mouth as I remembered what Liandra had said about me making a lot of noise.
She stirred, but didn’t wake up. I peered down at my phone. I was forty-five minutes behind schedule. And I’d done quite a number on my phone while I’d slept.
Sometime during the night, I’d acquired a new low score on my Bejeweled game, turned off my alarm and sent Mark a nonsensical text.
I’ll be paying for that one.
I got out of bed as quickly as I could, trying hard to keep quiet.
I struggled to get dressed in the dark, rushing as best I could while trying to prove Liandra wrong. I slid into the black skirt I’d preselected and attempted to button my blouse correctly. It was hard to be fast and silent at the same time. I cursed myself for needing to be right, cursed my roommate for making me feel that need.
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