Hanging by a Moment (Keeping Score #2)

by Tawdra Kandle

  “Dude, where you goin’?” He’d slurred the words, as though he was still wasted. Which maybe he was.

  I’d paused. “I’m going home, Matt. Quinn—Quinn’s dad. He was killed. My mom was trying to get in touch with me, and I guess she finally called on your phone, and—” I’d shaken my head. “Never mind. I gotta get home.”

  “Dead? Ser’usly?” Matt had struggled to sit up. “Dude, that sucks.”

  Anger had swelled in my chest. “No, dude, it doesn’t suck. Dropping your phone into the toilet sucks. Missing a pass sucks. A man died. A man I loved like my own father, Quinn’s father, is dead. This is tragedy, Matt. It’s real life. God, sometimes you make me sick.”

  I’d seen the recoil of surprise on his face, but I hadn’t taken the time to say anything else. I’d stalked out of the house without another word.

  Now, though, I could almost feel Tate’s empathy, his understanding. I was suddenly ridiculously grateful that this stranger was the guy who’d driven me home.

  “Yeah. I know. I’d give just about anything not to have to go in, but you know . . . I have to. Me sitting out here isn’t going to change anything, is it?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t seem likely. You need help with anything?”

  “No, but thanks.” I hadn’t bothered to pack up my bag before leaving the shore house. Matt would get my shit and bring it home, or he wouldn’t—I didn’t really care. “Listen, Tate—thank you. For doing this.” I leaned up and dug into my back pocket for my wallet. “Let me give you gas money.”

  Tate put out his hand to stop me. “Nope. I don’t want it. Listen, I’m glad I could help you out. I’m sorry we met under these circumstances, but at least I could do this for you.” He twisted his hand around, presenting it to me to shake. “If there’s anything I can do, anything else, call me, okay?” He’d given me his phone number to text to my mom, so she’d be able to get in touch with us on our way home, since my phone had been charging as we drove. “Otherwise, guess I’ll see you in a month or so down south.”

  “You know it.” I opened my door and swung my legs out. “Thanks again, Tate. I mean it.”

  In one movement that was as fluid as I could manage, I swung out of the car, slammed the door and made my way to the front door. Quinn’s front door.

  I didn’t knock or ring the doorbell. I never had; Nate, Quinn and I had grown up going in and out of each other’s houses as easily as our own homes. I paused only a beat before I turned the knob, my stomach churning.

  The front hall of the Russells’ home led into a formal living room, which I couldn’t remember us ever using. But today, everyone was sitting there: my dad was the first person I saw, slumped in a deep green wing chair. On the sofa, my mother and Sheri, Nate’s mom, flanked Carrie, who seemed to have shrunk in the less-than-forty-eight hours since I’d seen her last.

  Quinn’s mom wore yoga pants and a huge sweatshirt. As I stepped into the hallway, I recognized the shirt as one of Bill’s. Her hands were lost in the sleeves. Her sleek black hair, always so neat and styled, was tousled and held back from her face by a clip. She didn’t look up or even react when my mother cried out my name and stood, her arms reaching for me.

  “Oh, my God, Leo. Thank God you’re here. You have no idea—” She bit her lip, casting a glance down at Carrie. “We were worried.”

  “I’m sorry.” The response was automatic. I knelt in front of Quinn’s mother and laid my hand on hers, which lay loosely in her lap. “Carrie, God, I’m sorry. I wish . . .” I stopped at that point, because there wasn’t any reason to go on. Nothing I could say would change the horrible reality of the situation, and Carrie wasn’t hearing me, anyway. She stared down at the carpet, her lips slightly parted and her eyes glassy.

  Next to her, Sheri sighed, the softest breath fanning Carrie’s hair. I looked at her and then at my mother.

  “Where’s Quinn?”

  My mother didn’t hesitate. “She’s upstairs. In her room. She hasn’t slept or eaten since—well, since yesterday.”

  “And Nate?” The last thing I wanted to do was get into a knock-down, drag-out—figuratively speaking, since I’d never hit Nate—with the guy who made up the third part of our trio. Not today. Not in front of Quinn. But I knew, too, that no matter what, Nate wouldn’t be pleased to see me.

  “I sent him home. Mark just drove him there.” Sheri met my eyes, hers full of understanding. “He hadn’t slept, either, and I convinced him that Quinn wouldn’t go to sleep as long as he was here.”

  “Okay.” I turned to the steps, taking them two at a time. None of the parents tried to stop me.

  The last time I’d been in Quinn’s bedroom, I’d snuck upstairs with her after Carrie and Bill had gone to bed. We did that sometimes, when we hadn’t had a chance to be alone together for a while. Climbing the steps with her hand in mine had felt, to me, like a preview of the future, a tempting glimpse of our eventual life together. Since she didn’t want to make her parents suspicious, Quinn would stick to her normal bedtime routine, and I’d lay in her bed, listening to her brushing her teeth in the nearby bathroom. And then she’d come back into the bedroom, smiling the way she only did for me, close the door behind her and crawl onto the bed, her eyes bright with desire.

  I paused outside her door now and gave myself a little shake. Now was not the time to let these memories interfere with comforting Quinn. Or whatever it was I was going to do once I opened the door.

  Turning the knob, I stepped into the room, my eyes going to Quinn right away. She was curled up in the center of her bed, but she wasn’t lying down. She was sitting up, back ramrod stiff and her arms wrapped about her legs as she stared straight ahead.

  At the sound of the door, she glanced up and froze. For a second, I thought she wasn’t going to react at all, that she was going to ignore me and pretend I wasn’t there. And then her face contorted into rage and her hands fisted.

  “What the hell are you doing here? Get out.” She hissed the words at me, rising up onto her knees.

  I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “Quinn. Mia. Baby, I’m so—”

  “Shut up. Shut up. Get out of here. I don’t want you. I don’t need you.”

  I chanced a step closer to the bed. “Quinn, come on. Let me . . . let me help you.”

  “Help me? Are you fucking kidding? Just how the hell are you going to help me, Leo? You going to bring my father back to life? You going to reverse time so he doesn’t get into the car to go get us dinner last night? Or maybe you’re going to make it so he leaves a little later, or a little sooner, just enough of a difference so that the truck that hit him is already through the intersection before he gets there? If you can make anything like that happen, then I’m willing to listen. If you can’t, get the fuck out of my room and leave me alone.”

  “God, don’t you think I wish I could change it? If I could do it, I’d make sure nothing happened to your dad. I’d give anything to keep him from being in that accident. Don’t you know, Mia, there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do to keep you from being hurt?”

  She sank back to sit on the bed, snorting. “Oh, really? Beg to differ, Leo. I happen to have a pretty good memory, and the day you decided I was in the way of your precious football career? Yeah, I remember that day. You sure as hell didn’t mind hurting me then.”

  I ventured nearer to her, moving until the front of my legs hit the edge of the mattress. “I didn’t break up with you because of my football career. I did it because—because I was already hurting you. I was forcing you to become someone you’re not, and I was afraid you’d give up what was important to you because you loved me.”

  “Break my heart then, or break my heart later. That was the choice, huh?” Quinn rolled her eyes. “Did it ever occur to you to actually talk to me about it? Did you think maybe if we’d discussed it, like we used to do everything, we could come up with a solution that didn’t fucking tear me apart?”

  I shook my head. “No. Because I kno
w you, Mia. Everything you do is for other people. You’d have sacrificed for me and never even blinked. You would’ve chosen me over you, and I couldn’t let you do that.”

  “You took away my choice. You walked away, turned your back on me, like I didn’t mean anything to you.” Tears filled her eyes and spilled over, rolling down her pale cheeks. “Like I meant nothing.”

  I dropped to my knees next to the bed and reached out my hand to find one of hers. “You are everything to me, Mia. You always have been. I was stupid and scared, and I listened—” I shook my head. I wasn’t going to blame anyone else for my own idiocy. “I regretted it every minute of every day.”

  “Then why didn’t you do something about it? I didn’t exactly disappear. Day after day, you walked right past me like I wasn’t there.” She dropped her forehead down to her knees, but she didn’t pull away her hand from mine.

  I gripped her fingers a little tighter. “Because for once in my life, I was trying to do the right thing. To do something for you, even though it was killing me.”

  Her shoulders shook. “He said . . . my dad . . . he said I’d probably find out someday you had a reason I couldn’t understand now.” Her words were barely discernible, gasped out between sobs. “He always told me . . . it was more than I thought.”

  I closed my eyes, choking back my own tears. “God, Quinn. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.” I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed her knuckles. When her fingers tightened around mine, I took a chance and climbed onto the bed, crawling to her. “Baby, let me hold you.”

  She hesitated, and for a minute, I thought she was going to push me away. And then she lifted her tear-streaked face to me, and her full bottom lip trembled. Sliding her hand free, she touched the side of my face before moving her fingers to my neck and curling them around, bringing me close to her.

  “Leo, I don’t know . . . I don’t know how to breathe anymore. I don’t know how to keep going on.” She bridged the short distance between our mouths, so that when she spoke again, her lips moved against mine.

  “Love me again, Leo. Show me how to keep living. Make all the hurt go away.”

  She didn’t have to ask me twice. I circled her waist with both my arms and tugged her against me, dragging her into my lap. Feeling her there again felt so right, as though I were re-attaching a limb I’d chopped off over a year ago. Her body shuddered, and I held her tighter.

  “It’s okay, Mia. It’s going to be all right.”

  She shook her head, her dark curls swirling around us both. “No. Nothing is ever going to be the same. I can’t—he’s gone. I’ll never see him again. I’ll never hear him laugh or call me kiddo or tell me how good his cooking is—God.”

  A fresh bout of tears erupted, and I wanted to cry with her. “I know. He was the best.” I stroked her hair back from her face. “Do you remember, when we were kids and we couldn’t wait for something to happen, and it felt like it was taking forever, he’d say, ‘Oh, you can—’”

  “‘—stand on your head for that long!’” Quinn gave a half-laugh that morphed into a sob. “And I used to tell him I couldn’t stand on my head at all.”

  “Your dad was always the first to come play with us if we were tossing the football around. Or the first one to volunteer to drive us to the park, when we were really little.” I swallowed. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but he said he was going to come see me play at Carolina.”

  She lifted her face to look up at me. “I know. I overheard him talking to my mom about it. He said he wasn’t going to mention it to me, but he just couldn’t imagine not going down to see one of your games.” Her fingers twisted into the collar of my T-shirt, damp with her tears. “He loved you, Leo.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded and buried my face in her hair, breathing deep to inhale her intoxicating scent as much as to stave off my own crying.

  “Leo.” Her breath swept across the skin of my neck. “I don’t know how I’m going to live without my dad. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Mia.” I tipped her chin up so that I could stare down into her eyes. “You don’t have to do it alone. And we’ll take it all one step at a time. I’ll be with you all the way.”

  She blinked once, so slowly that I thought she might be falling asleep. And then she leaned closer again, whispering so softly that I had to focus to hear her.

  “Make me forget. For just a little bit. Help me to feel better.”

  Before I could figure out what she meant, Quinn kissed me, open-mouthed and hard. There was nothing uncertain about her; on her lips I felt desire and desperation. Her hands tightened on the back of my neck.

  I knew that a stand-up guy, someone here to comfort his friend, would not take advantage of the fact that said friend was currently thrusting her tongue into his mouth, with her boobs, boobs that he’d been dying to touch again for over a year, teasing against his chest. He would not be getting hard and horny as hell, and he’d just hold her, so that nothing happened that she might regret.

  I was not that guy.

  With a sound that was combination groan and growl, I raked my fingers through her hair, holding her head in place. As hard as she’d been pressing her mouth to mine, I kissed her even deeper, angling her body closer against me.

  “God, I’ve missed your hands.” She covered my fingers, still deep in her hair, with her own hands. “Missed them on me. Missed you touching me.” Shifting, she wriggled one leg between us and swung it around until she straddled me. “Missed feeling you against me.”

  My aching cock was lined up perfectly with the heat between her legs. When she shifted to take advantage of the angle, I wanted to cry again, but this time with want. With her gaze glued to my face, Quinn began moving up and down, grinding herself against me with agonizing slowness. Madness bubbled up within me, and fumbling with the hem of her T-shirt, I shoved my hands underneath. Finesse and care be damned—I just had to touch her.

  Rational thought fled completely when I realized she wasn’t wearing a bra. The weight of her tits in my palms turned me ravenous. With my hand still under her shirt, I snaked it around to spread my fingers over her back, holding her steady as I pushed the cotton material out of my way and bared those gorgeous breasts to me.

  Quinn’s breath quickened, and she arched her back, presenting the rosy-tipped peaks to me. They were practically begging for my attention, and I wasn’t going to deny them—or myself. I closed my lips over one, sucking it into my mouth hard until Quinn moaned.

  “Too hard?” I skimmed my lips down the slope of her boob.

  “No. Never too hard.” She guided my head to the other nipple, cupping my cheek in her hand. “Just having your mouth on me again is—oh, my God.”

  Her last words were a gasp as I caught the other stiff tip between my teeth, letting my tongue tease it. I wanted to spend hours just worshipping her tits. I could’ve done it, if I weren’t afraid the real world might intrude eventually.

  But Quinn had other ideas, anyway. She slipped one hand between us, stroking my dick over the fly of my shorts. I was painfully hard, so aroused that I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t come right there and embarrass myself.

  “Mia. Baby.” I sat up a little, brushing her hair away from her eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this? I mean . . . I want you. But if you—you know, I can wait.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe you can. And good for you. But I can’t.” Rising up on her knees, she peeled off the yoga pants, fumbling a little to balance as she kicked them away. My mouth went dry and my heart nearly stopped when I realized she wasn’t wearing any underwear beneath them.

  Grasping one of my hands, she brought it between her legs, pressing my fingers into her folds. “Can you feel how wet I am? How much I want you? I’ve been dying by degrees for months, Leo. The rest of the world is falling apart around me. Let me have this. Let me have you.”

  There was no fucking way in any world that I could have denied her. I kept my fingers on her slick core, watch
ing her face in almost-drugged need as I plunged two fingers inside her.

  Quinn whimpered a little. Her eyes drooped to half-closed, and her mouth fell open. I could tell that every ounce of her focus was on the spot where my hand worked her. I fell backwards onto the mattress so that I could watch her come apart.

  With one fluid movement, she pulled her T-shirt over her head. I lay there for a minute, just taking her in: her arms and shoulders were tanned and toned, her stomach the same golden color and taut. Two pale triangles surrounded her breasts, where her bathing suit had covered them. I’d never seen anything so beautiful, so breath-taking, in all my life.

  She was panting now in time with the motion of my fingers, her chest rising and falling rapidly. I let her ride my hand for a few minutes before I pressed my thumb against her clit.

  With a sharp cry, she froze, bending her back and throwing back her head, coming against my relentless fingers, her tight channel squeezing them. I stayed with her until she began to squirm away, falling next to me on the bed.

  “Leo.” Her voice was muffled against my chest. I drew her close to me, and she wrapped both arms around my waist, nuzzling her face into my neck.

  “I got you, baby. I got you. I’m never going to let go.”

  Her breath warmed me, even as one hand slid under my shirt. “I think you have too many clothes on. I’m lying here buck-ass naked, and you’re still completely dressed.”

  I rubbed small circles on her back. “It’s okay, Mia. I don’t have to—it’s enough to be here for you. Why don’t you try to sleep now?” I thought of our parents sitting downstairs, and the fact that sooner or later, Nate was going to come back.

  “I can’t. Not yet.” Her fingers traced my nipples, and even though I would’ve sworn it was impossible, my cock got even harder. Damn.

  “You could try.” Being noble wasn’t easy, but for Quinn—I’d be fucking Sir Galahad. Or wait—was I thinking of Lancelot? I couldn’t remember. All the blood in my body was heading away from my brain.