Shooting the Moon

by Brenda Novak

  ONCE THEY WERE HOME and outside at the pool, it wasn’t difficult for Lauren to put the uneasiness she’d felt at Mt. Marley behind her. There’d been no message from her father, which enabled her to continue ignoring the fact that she’d have to deal with him at some point. And in such familiar surroundings, she felt safe and in control again.

  Harley was wearing swim trunks and a T-shirt, and sat on the lawn chair across the pool from her, blowing up a beach ball he’d stopped to purchase on his way over. Brandon kept calling him to watch while he showed off this dive or that, picked up a quarter on the bottom of the pool or did a handstand.

  We’re all just having a little fun, Lauren told herself. There wasn’t anything to worry about. Even Brandon’s trouble at school seemed to be more minor than she’d first feared. According to her nephew, he and his friends had had a misunderstanding of some sort about their morning soccer game. It had led to raised tempers and eventually come to blows, but he’d promised it would never happen again. And with his impeccable track record, Lauren didn’t think it fair to punish him too severely. She had talked to him about the need to have patience and treat others kindly, and she’d stressed the importance of excelling in school, but that was about it. Since they’d arrived home, Brandon hadn’t been able to focus on anything besides Harley. He was too taken with having his father around, too eager to spend every moment with him.

  Lauren felt herself relax even further as she watched Harley plug the ball and toss it into the pool. A lawn-mower hummed in the distance, bees flitted about the flowers along the fence, and a gentle breeze swayed the trees. It was so warm outside—a perfect, clear spring day. She had her mister, filled with cool water, on the table beside her, but she wasn’t ready for a reprieve from the heat. Soaking up the sun felt so good. She smoothed a mild sunblock on the skin her bikini didn’t cover, then settled her sunglasses farther up her nose and adjusted her visor so she could lean back and rest. She wasn’t going to watch Harley when he took off his shirt. She didn’t need to see his bare chest again….

  She heard his chair scrape the cement and knew Harley had stood. He was probably lifting his shirt over his head this very minute, she realized—and opened one eye.

  Sure enough, the shirt was off. She watched, refusing to succumb to the appreciative smile that was tempting her lips, and admired the view from behind the safety of her dark lenses.

  Brandon, if you look half as good as your father does when you’re an adult, you’d better carry a stick, she thought as Harley dived in. Then she closed her eyes and would have drifted off to sleep if not for Brandon.

  “Aunt Lauren! Aunt Lauren! Have you seen my dad’s tattoo?” he asked, blocking the sun and dripping all over her.

  She sat up to give Brandon the attention he wanted and to avoid the cold drops of water, moving her sunglasses to the top of her head. She’d seen a blue mark on Harley’s shoulder blade when she’d been admiring him a few minutes earlier, but she’d been feigning indifference and didn’t want to admit she’d noticed such a small detail from across the pool.

  “No, I haven’t,” she lied. “I didn’t see any tattoos.”

  “Well, he has one. Guess what it is.”

  Lauren shrugged. “A Harley Davidson logo?”

  Her nephew smiled broadly. “Nope. Guess again.”

  “An anchor? Hearts and flowers? A rose? I don’t have any idea,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Dad, show her,” Brandon urged.

  “She’s resting right now,” Harley told him from where he was floating on his back in the water. “She can see it another time.”

  “Come on. I want to show her,” Brandon rejoined.

  The muscles in Harley’s arms flexed as he flipped over and hoisted himself out of the pool. His suit was now wet and clinging to every curve and bulge as he approached, and Lauren quickly covered her eyes with her sunglasses again so he and Brandon wouldn’t notice the difficulty she had in looking away.

  “Where is it?” she asked, to distract herself as much as Harley and Brandon.

  Harley turned and gave her a closeup of the blue mark she’d seen on his shoulder blade. It was a name and a date: Brandon, 11/92.

  “When did you get that?” she demanded, surprised.

  “As soon as I heard his name,” Harley said.

  “Which was when?”

  “Audra stopped by my mother’s place just after he was born.”

  “So you’ve had it for ten years?”

  He nodded.

  Harley had no other tattoos, at least none Lauren could see. Just his son’s name, permanently etched into his skin. That told her Brandon’s birth had meant something to him from the very beginning.

  “Cool, isn’t it?” Brandon said.

  Lauren didn’t know what to say. Meeting Harley and reading her sister’s journals were changing everything she’d believed about what had happened ten years ago. “It’s cool,” she agreed.

  “Hey, what about you?” Brandon asked her. “Will you put my name on your back, too?”

  “Sorry, kiddo,” Lauren said. “I love you, but I’m not the type to get a tattoo.”

  “Come on, Aunt Lauren. It’d look awesome. You don’t have to put it on your back. You could put it on your arm or your ankle or somewhere else.”

  Harley stepped closer. He didn’t have the benefit of sunglasses, so Lauren could tell exactly where he was looking—and it wasn’t at her face. “I think it would look good right here,” he said, his finger grazing the indention just below her collarbone and leaving a drop of water that rolled down between her breasts.

  Goose bumps immediately pimpled Lauren’s flesh and, judging by the grin twisting Harley’s lips, he noticed.

  “Forget it, guys,” she told them. “Nothing’s going to mark this body.”

  They finally went back to swimming and Lauren’s goose bumps disappeared. But she grabbed her mister. It was definitely time to cool off.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT BOTHERED HARLEY that Lauren wasn’t swimming. He and Brandon were having a good time, but they’d already played with the beach ball, dived for plastic oysters and competed to see who could swim the fastest, float the longest and swim the farthest without taking a breath. Meanwhile, Lauren hadn’t said a word. She’d stayed on her back, then rolled onto her stomach. That was it.

  Harley didn’t understand what anyone saw in tanning. He could nap for a few minutes, but then he had to get wet and cool off or do something.

  He regarded her for the hundredth time, gauging the chances of waking her with a well-launched splash. Wasn’t she ready to join the fun? How much longer could she sleep?

  “Doesn’t your aunt ever get in the water?” he asked Brandon.

  Brandon was busy blowing more air into the beach ball, which was already going soft from an unfortunate landing in the rose bushes. “Sometimes,” he said. “Mostly she just lies in the sun and watches me.”

  “How exciting,” Harley said.

  Brandon shrugged, taking his words at face value. “I guess that’s what girls like to do.”

  “What if we threw her in?” Harley asked.

  A devilish glint entered Brandon’s eyes, but then he shook his head. “We’d better not. I’d rather have you stay for supper.”

  “Right. Better to stay and eat,” Harley agreed.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” a male voice called from the front yard.

  Flinging his wet hair out of his eyes, Harley started toward the steps to see who it was when Damien Thompson let himself through the gate and came into view.

  “Hi, Damien,” Brandon said. “You want to play volleyball with me and my dad?”

  Judging by his tailored suit, tie and expensive loafers, Damien hadn’t come over to swim. He shot Harley a look that surprised him, one Harley didn’t quite understand or appreciate, considering they’d spoken like friends only yesterday.

  “Not today,” Damien told Brandon.

  “Did you kno
w this is my dad?” Brandon pressed.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He has a tattoo with my name on it.”

  “Good for him,” Damien said, and turned to Lauren, who was finally sitting up, rubbing the towel impression from her face and righting her sunglasses.

  Obviously, she’d been dead to the world. Harley might have been ultra-conscious of her, but she’d tuned him out completely, which, he decided, wasn’t particularly good for his ego.

  Not that his ego or anything else mattered. He was here to see his son. Brandon was a great kid—warm and loving and bright—and Harley had nine years to make up for. He began a wrestling match between them and pretended to let Brandon overpower and dunk him, again and again, but it wasn’t long before Harley’s attention wandered back to Damien and Lauren.

  Damien was sitting close to her chaise, too close in Harley’s opinion. Tank’s brother was crowding her, and he was speaking in low tones, as if he didn’t want Harley or Brandon to hear what he was saying.

  For her part, Lauren didn’t appear pleased. She wore a frown above the fabulous swimsuit that revealed her stunning figure. Harley would never have guessed she hid a body quite like that beneath her conservative clothing, and he didn’t care for the way Damien’s eyes kept flicking over it.

  “Want to have a diving contest?” Brandon asked, wiping his swimming goggles and interrupting Harley’s growing irritation.

  “Sure,” Harley said. He tried to ignore Damien and Lauren as he climbed out of the pool, but Damien started running his fingers up and down Lauren’s arm and leaning even closer, as though trying to convince her of something. She shook her head and pulled away, but he grabbed her arm again—and Harley did a cannonball.

  When he surfaced, he found Damien glaring at him and brushing water droplets off his suit. “Do you mind?” he snapped.

  “Sorry,” Harley said without any real effort to sound sincere.

  Damien shook his head in apparent disgust, but returned to his conversation with Lauren, so Harley encouraged Brandon to try his best cannonball. When his son’s splash didn’t travel nearly far enough, Harley showed Brandon how to tuck and jump for maximum water displacement and succeeded in drenching Damien again.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Damien demanded, coming to the side of the pool to confront Harley as soon as he broke the water. “This happens to be a two-thousand-dollar suit. Maybe you could be a little more careful.”

  “And maybe you could go back to work,” Harley told him, lifting himself out of the water to sit on the edge of the pool.

  “This isn’t a public pool, Harley,” Damien said, standing over him. “For your information, you’re not even supposed to be here.”

  Harley gave him what he hoped was an infuriating smile. “That’s funny. Seems I remember being invited.”

  “Damien, please go,” Lauren said, getting off her chaise and coming toward them.

  Damien ignored her. “If you were invited, it was only because Quentin Worthington isn’t here,” he retorted. “As soon as he gets back, you can kiss your visits goodbye. Tank and Lauren might think you’re an okay guy, but Quentin and I know the real story.”

  Harley felt a muscle twitch in his cheek, but the way Brandon was watching the confrontation gave Harley the incentive he needed to resist the anger building in his blood. “And what is the real story, Damien?”

  “You left Audra holding the bag ten years ago. Now you’re trying to see if you can get in her sister’s pants.”

  “Damien!” Lauren cried. “Brandon’s here!”

  It was easy to tell that Damien wasn’t too concerned about Brandon. Hands clenched into fists, he kept his eyes riveted to Harley. “You’re not going to get anywhere with her, you hear me?”

  “Unless you want to take a swim in that suit you like so well, I suggest you listen to Lauren and go,” Harley said. He made no move to get up, but something in his voice must have convinced Damien he was serious. After another tense moment, Tank’s brother jerked a hand through his hair, released his breath in a huff, and stalked off.

  “Wow,” Brandon breathed in the echo of the slamming gate.

  Harley looked at Lauren, who was standing with her hands on her hips, frowning. “I didn’t know Damien was such a pleasant guy.”

  “He’s usually not so bad. He’s just convinced I’m making a big mistake,” she replied, sounding resigned.

  Flashbacks of ten years ago assaulted Harley’s mind. Quentin, fired up because he’d just caught Harley meeting Audra outside the Hillside gates: “What the hell do you think you’re doing with my daughter? You’re not even good enough to carry her books!” Audra, laughing: “I didn’t take my birth control pill today. Don’t you love living dangerously?” And Mrs. Worthington, weeping when she ran into Harley and Audra at the mall: “How can you do this to us? Why won’t you just leave my daughter alone?” He even remembered Lauren walking with her head down, moving through the halls of Oakmont High unnoticed, or almost unnoticed. One of his friends had once nudged him to remark about how odd it was that Audra was such a fox while her sister was a brainy nobody, but back then Harley hadn’t thought enough about Lauren to decide whether or not he considered her a nobody. Other than her connection to Audra, she simply wasn’t part of his universe. But he would’ve been amazed to know that in ten years, he’d find her one of the most attractive women he’d ever met.

  Picking up a plastic oyster on the edge of the pool, Harley tossed it into the water. “Do you think you’re making a mistake?” he asked, hoping somebody in the Worthington family might finally show a spark of faith in him.

  Lauren held his gaze. “I don’t know.”

  LAUREN FOUND Harley’s voice soothing. Brandon had read the first chapter of Holes by Louis Sachar and grown too sleepy to continue. He’d asked his father to read, then proceeded to doze off on the bed between them. Even though Brandon was asleep, Lauren wasn’t in any hurry for Harley to close the book. She was full of the Mexican food he’d bought them for dinner and her face still tingled from laughing when she and Brandon had teamed up to beat him at darts. He’d rallied during the second and third games, but Lauren was still quite pleased with herself, pleased with the evening as a whole, in spite of Damien’s surprising visit at the pool and his insistence that she stay as far away from Harley as possible. He said she should think about what her father would want and everything they’d already learned through Audra’s experience. But it was difficult to feel the necessity of keeping a safe distance from Harley when she was enjoying his company so much—and Brandon was enjoying it even more.

  “Are you asleep?” Harley asked softly, lifting his head to peer at her over Brandon’s sleeping form.

  Lauren gave him a lazy smile. “Almost.”

  He retrieved the folded quilt at the foot of Brandon’s bed and started to cover her and her nephew, but Lauren sat up. “I’ll walk you to the door,” she said, helping him tuck Brandon in.

  “Are you sure? I can find my way out.”

  “That’s okay. I slept enough in the sun today. I’m not in any hurry to turn in. I was just relaxing.”

  He nodded, but he was looking at Brandon, gazing down at him as though he was afraid his son might disappear. “You’re such a great kid,” he murmured.

  Lauren stepped into the hall to give him some privacy but couldn’t help turning at the entrance to see what he might do. When he brushed back Brandon’s hair and kissed his forehead, she thought, “Damien, you’re wrong,” and for the first time since Harley had arrived in Portland, the knot of worry in her stomach completely eased. She was letting two people who loved each other be together; she was even chaperoning them. What could be so terrible about that?

  Moving beyond the portal, she waited for Harley to join her, then snapped off Brandon’s light and led the way to the living room.

  When they reached the entry hall, she found herself strangely reluctant to say goodbye. “I had a nice time tonight,” she said, ope
ning the door.

  The porch light came on automatically, and Harley stepped outside, then turned and grinned at her. “I never dreamed you’d eat that entire combination plate at La Mision. I was kind of hoping for a bite of your tamale.”

  “You should’ve said something. I ate it because I didn’t want it to go to waste.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “So tonight was an exception and you normally have a petite appetite?”

  Lauren laughed. “Okay. The food was good and I stuffed myself and I loved every minute of it. But I would’ve shared.”

  “I know you would.” The levity was gone from his words, and Lauren knew he was referring to something deeper.

  Smiling at the compliment, she almost reached out to squeeze his arm. She would have, if he were anyone else. A little pat or squeeze was a natural gesture of friendship. But she was feeling more than friendship for Harley and because of that, she didn’t dare touch him at all. Odd thing was, she’d stood at this door a thousand times with Damien, and her heart had never beat so hard.

  “You’re nothing like Audra, are you,” Harley said, studying her.

  Did that mean he found her lacking? Probably. She’d been passed over a lot of times in favor of her sister and had mostly taken it in stride. She’d countered the disappointment by focusing on all the things that were so much more important than looks, like achieving her goals and developing her talents. But it bothered her that, as far as Harley was concerned, she was still the homely little bookworm she’d been in high school.

  Trying not to wince, she leaned against the doorframe. “No, I’m not,” she admitted, hoping she appeared casual and unaffected. “I’ll never be like Audra. She was the swan. I’m the ugly duckling.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, but then he lifted his hand and ran a finger over the curve of her cheek. “Not on the inside,” he said, “and not anymore.”