by Lucy Connors
“My phone was dead. I wasn’t ignoring you. Don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”
On the other end of the line, she took a deep breath, and I sat on the edge of my bed, feeling sick that I was unable to comfort her.
“I had to tell him that I will never have anything to do with you, Mickey,” she said. “He was kind of nuts. I’ve never seen him like that—so cold. Completely emotionless about firing people. This hatred between our families . . . it’s not even normal how it takes over everything else.”
“I told my family the same thing, basically,” I admitted. “Ethan was here. The news about the firing is out, and it’s enough to start up the whole damn feud all over again. Pa thinks half the folks who got fired will end up working for Ethan and Anna Mae.”
“Anna Mae?”
“She’s the real mastermind behind the drug running,” I said, wondering what in the world Victoria would think about all this.
“What are we going to do? I don’t know how to fix this; it’s too big for us.” She took another shaky breath, and I slammed my fist against the wall in frustration.
“What was that noise?”
“Nothing. Hey, how’s your ankle?”
“It’s fine. A little ice and it was better the next morning.”
“Good to hear. Listen to me. Get some sleep, I’ll see you in school tomorrow, and then we’ll try to meet at the museum again. Nobody ever goes there, so we’ll be able to talk in peace. We’ll hash this all out then.”
Silence.
“Mickey, should we do what they all want? Just forget—just stay away from each other?”
No.
“I can’t make that decision for you, Victoria. I can’t tell you what to do, and I wouldn’t even try. But I can tell you that the only thing in the world that makes sense to me right now is you and me.”
Chapter 23
Victoria
I can tell you that the only thing in the world that makes sense to me right now is you and me.
My heart wrenched in my chest at his words; I actually felt a physical pain. I’d lived a life of reserved solitude—playing peacekeeper and sanity arbiter in my family had required a high level of calm to buffer me from all the crazy. Every year when they shipped me off to school, I’d added a layer of distance to the wall between me and the rest of the world, and I hadn’t even noticed when my hard-won serenity had turned into isolation.
Or when solitude had turned into loneliness.
But now, the first and only person I’d ever met who saw me for me was willing to defy everyone and everything to be with me. I could almost hear the cracking noise as the walls I’d spent years carefully building around my emotions began to crumble into dust.
“I feel the same way. It doesn’t make sense, and I can’t understand it, but maybe emotions aren’t supposed to make sense,” I finally said.
On the other end of the line, Mickey blew out a deep breath. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed.
Just when I thought he’d hung up, I heard his voice again. “Victoria? Take care of yourself, until I’m with you to do it.”
After that, I sat and stared at nothing, holding tightly to my phone, for a really long time. Mickey Rhodale wanted to take care of me.
Nobody else ever had.
• • •
By the time history class rolled around, my nerves were jangling underneath my skin. Everybody in my classes had been staring at me with varying degrees of hostility. The whispers had been bad, but the actual taunts hurled my way had been worse.
“Rich bitch, what kind of family does that to people?”
“Bet she thinks her shit don’t stink. Maybe we should teach her a lesson.”
And, worst of all:
“This will start up the feud again, for sure. Better watch out for Ethan Rhodale.”
Denise stomped down the hall next to me, practically daring anybody to get in our way, but she wasn’t all that happy with me, either.
“What the hell, Victoria? My friend Leila’s dad lost his job yesterday because your dad went nuts.”
“I know,” I said miserably, wishing I were anywhere else but in school today. “We tried to stop him, but he’d already hired new people. It was a nightmare last night.”
She shot me a look. “Well, probably more of a nightmare for the families who are wondering how they’re going to put food on the table, or pay their bills now, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t mean—”
But she was already dashing forward into class, leaving me behind to face the waves of anger and contempt from everybody in sight.
I breathed my first unconstricted breath all day when I walked into class and saw that Mickey was already there, but he was having a heated discussion with Derek just inside the door.
“Why would you defend that family? They’re going after yours,” Derek said hotly, but he broke off when he caught sight of me.
Mickey took a step toward me, but then he stopped when he realized everybody in the room was staring at us.
“Later,” he said fiercely, and his eyes gave me the message that the single word hadn’t. He was still on my side. We just needed to keep everyone else from knowing it, or this might explode into an inferno that could burn down the entire county.
Denise, eyes wide, reached out to touch my arm when I walked past her.
“Omigod, did Mickey just threaten you with retaliation? We have to figure out a way to keep him away from you,” she said. Amazing how a perceived threat from a Rhodale could win her back to my side. I appreciated the support even as I resented it, on Mickey’s behalf.
“Thanks,” I said automatically, even though I winced a little at the thought that everyone would naturally have taken Mickey’s terse “later” as a threat. The realization of what it must feel like to be a Rhodale, trapped under the expectation of bad intentions, suddenly added a crushing weight to the anxiety I’d been carrying around since the night before.
Would we ever be able to find a way out of this? I didn’t want to end up as a player in a Shakespearean tragedy I’d had no part in creating.
Mr. Gerard, either oblivious to, or ignoring, the tension in the room, droned on about Reconstruction and gave us a pop quiz. By the time I handed mine in, I realized I had no memory of what answers I’d written down. My stomach was churning so much I had no idea how I was going to face the cafeteria, either the smell of the food or the anger of everybody there.
Mickey brushed by me on the way out of class.
“Hang in there,” he said quietly. “Only a few more hours.”
His words gave me the strength to square my shoulders and follow Denise to lunch, but we’d only made it a few steps inside the cafeteria doors when the trouble started, in the shape of a large, scowling guy wearing a Wildcats letter jacket covered with football pins.
“Who the fuck do you people think you are?” He pushed Denise aside and got so close to me I could smell his morning breath. “My dad has worked for your family for twelve years, and now he’s out on his ass because my mom’s cousin is a Rhodale?”
He shoved my shoulder, and I stumbled back. Then suddenly someone lifted me clear up off the floor and to the side, and it was Mickey. I leaned back against him for a moment, breathing in his unique scent of fresh air, spring grass, and leather, and then he moved in front of me and confronted the guy who’d pushed me.
“Picking on girls now, Oliver? What’s the matter, Coach make you run too hard in practice, so now you have to beat up on a girl to feel like a man?”
I could see Oliver’s face twist in confusion. “What the hell, Mick? This chick’s family just fired my dad and a boatload of other people for the big crime of being related to Rhodales and now you’re defending her? Are you nuts?”
“I don’t care what her father did.
That doesn’t make it right to take it out on Victoria, does it? No more than it’s right to blame me for Ethan’s crimes or for defending my sister from those animals, but you didn’t bother to stick up for me either, did you?”
I realized that several other guys had started crowding around, and their mood was dangerous. All I wanted was to get out of there and take Mickey with me. I put my hand on his arm. “Mickey, let’s just go. We don’t—”
“Why would he want to go anywhere with you, bitch? Maybe we’ll take you out in the woods and teach you a lesson about fucking with people,” one of them taunted, leering at me so viciously I started shivering.
“Yeah,” Oliver said, his eyes lighting up. “Maybe we’ll take our turn to be the ones doing the fucking.”
“Over my dead body,” Mickey said, his voice low and razor-edged. “I don’t need you to fight Rhodale battles for me, Oliver. You want to go after her; you’re going to have to get through me first.”
“It’s not your battle, dickhead. It was my father he fired,” Oliver roared, bunching his hands into fists.
No. Not again. I wasn’t letting Mickey take the heat with everybody at school over this, like he had with my father over driving us home. I pushed forward and put myself in between them.
“No. Listen, I’m so sorry. I tried to stop my dad—”
I don’t think Oliver heard a word I said, or even noticed that I was there, because his gaze was locked on Mickey as he threw the first punch. Mickey shoved me out of the way, but Oliver’s fist was moving too fast. If the full force of the blow had struck me, it probably would have broken my jaw or cheekbone. As it was, even partially deflected, it sent me flying back and crashing into a table of freshmen girls.
Before I could move, or think, or even breathe, Mickey went after Oliver. He wasn’t as tall or as broad as Oliver, but it was like watching a panther tear into a sheep. Mickey knocked him to the floor in two blows and then yanked the bigger boy up off the floor and hit him again. When Mickey tried to pick him up again, some of Oliver’s friends got between them, but Mickey was fighting like a wild thing, his eyes blind with rage, and suddenly I knew exactly what had happened when those monsters had attacked his sister.
“Jesus, Mickey, I give up,” Oliver panted.
His mouth was bleeding, and one of his eyes was already swelling up, but I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him, because I could feel my own right eye trying to do the same. I ran up to them anyway and threw my arms around Mickey.
“I’m here. I’m okay. You have to calm down,” I told him over and over, feeling his big body shake in my arms like a tree caught in a tornado. He finally took a deep, shuddering breath and his eyes cleared, and I knew he’d come back from wherever he’d gone when Oliver hit me.
“Touch her again and I’ll finish this,” Mickey told Oliver, deadly calm.
I was quietly trying to keep from puking or having my head spin off my shoulders, so when Mickey tightened his arms around me, I gasped. I’d never been struck in anger before, and I fervently hoped it would never happen again.
Mickey caught my chin with one suddenly gentle hand and tilted my head, staring at the side of my face that had taken the blow. His eyes narrowed, and I could almost feel the heat of the rage pouring off his body.
“That son of a bitch. I’m going to kill him.”
I caught his arm before he could turn away.
“Please, no. I need—will you help me get out of here?”
The principal ran into the cafeteria—where had he been all this time?—and started yelling.
“Rhodale! Oliver! My office, now. You’re both going to be suspended for this, and I—”
He broke off when he caught sight of my face and winced, which didn’t make me feel any better. “Victoria, are you okay? Do you want to press charges?”
“No. I’m fine. It was all a misunderstanding,” I said, glancing at Oliver, who’d gotten up and was wiping blood off his mouth with a napkin.
“I don’t think so,” Principal Scott fired back. “The lunch monitor ran into my office yelling that you were all trying to kill each other.”
“She was a little off base,” Mickey drawled. “It was the food. Lunch is so bad today that you nearly had a riot on your hands.”
The principal narrowed his eyes. “Don’t give me any of your lip, young man. And let me tell you something. We will not tolerate this kind of violence on school grounds, do you understand me?”
The unfairness of it scorched through me. “He was only defending me!”
Principal Scott rounded on me. “Really? Why did you need to be defended from a misunderstanding?”
“She’s telling the truth. It was a misunderstanding all the way around,” Oliver said, backing my story, but he trained his hard gaze on Mickey the whole time, promising retaliation.
“Well, this kind of misunderstanding is going to result in a two-day suspension for both of you,” Scott said. “And you, young lady, are going to the nurse to get checked out.”
“I need to go home,” I said. I couldn’t face the rest of the day, and I wanted ice and Tylenol more than anything else in the world right at that moment.
Denise, who’d been hovering at the edges of the fight, handed me my backpack and volunteered to take me home. Before the principal could answer, Mickey scooped his backpack off the floor and took mine out of my hands.
“No. I’m driving her home,” he said flatly.
Principal Scott folded his arms. “You’re going nowhere, young man. We have—”
“You’re suspending me anyway, so it can start now. I’m taking Victoria to make sure she gets home safely,” Mickey said, sweeping his hard gaze over the guys who’d crowded around me earlier and were now pretending they’d had nothing to do with any of it. “You can take it up with my pa. You will, anyway.”
With that, he swung both backpacks over one shoulder and put his other arm around me and led me to the door. The crowd in front of us shrank back, nobody wanting to get in his way.
The principal called out after us. “Victoria, do you want me to call the police?”
I took a deep breath and turned around, facing him but speaking to the whole room.
“No, I just want to go home. I’m sorry for the trouble my father caused. I fought him on this, and I’m still fighting him. I don’t know what else to say.”
A surge of pain stabbed through my cheek and made me flinch, and Mickey pulled me back around and held the door open. As we walked out, I was already having second thoughts.
“This is a bad idea. When our families find out we left school together—”
“They can go to hell. They got us into this mess to begin with,” Mickey said.
I dug in my bag for my keys and handed them over, and then I leaned my poor bruised and swelling cheek against the cool glass of the window as we drove away from the school and all the unresolved conflict still seething inside.
“I’ll have to face them again tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow’s Friday. Skip school. Your face is going to get worse before it gets better,” he said grimly.
I made a sound—of denial or protest, I didn’t know which—and he glanced over at me.
“I’m sorry. Hell, I’m not good at words of comfort, am I? It’s the truth, though. I’ve been on the receiving end of a fist often enough to know that you’re likely going to have a black eye from this.”
“I can’t imagine that,” I whispered, closing my eyes.
“Having a shiner?”
“No. Having enough experience with being punched to diagnose what’s going to happen next. Your life has been so different from mine, in some ways. And so similar, in others.”
He put a hand on mine, and I closed my fingers around his almost convulsively, taking comfort from the same hand that had beaten Oliver so savagely and thoroughly
such a short time ago. I didn’t know how to reconcile the two Mickeys, and I was hurting too much to even try, but I knew he was only violent when he was protecting somebody he cared about.
We drove along in silence for a while, and when he pulled off the road and stopped the truck, I opened my eyes to see we were in the parking lot of a small restaurant called the Buckeye Diner.
“Buckeye? Really? Here in the heart of Kentucky?”
Mickey grinned. “He’s an old ex-Navy guy, and his burgers are so good that everybody puts up with his Ohio State origins.”
“I don’t think I can eat anything.” My stomach was tied in six different kinds of knots.
“Well, let’s at least get you some ice for your face and some Tylenol, and then see how you feel,” he said.
He unbuckled his seat belt and then leaned across to unfasten mine, and his breath feathered across my cheek and made me shiver. He stilled, and then he moved back and stared into my eyes.
“I won’t let anybody hurt you again, but I can’t stay away from you, Victoria. Please don’t ask me to,” he whispered, and then he kissed me, a gentle caress of his lips on mine, and I shivered again as an almost too-powerful sensation raced through me.
“I won’t,” I promised, and his beautiful blue eyes lit up with triumph, or joy, or simply intense satisfaction, and I had to force myself not to hurl myself into his arms right there in the truck, in a public parking lot, in broad daylight. It didn’t make sense, this fierce connection between us, but it was so intensely real that I didn’t even try to deny it.
“I—ice,” I finally stammered, and he grinned.
“Ice.”
Chapter 24
Mickey
Mr. Judson’s thick eyebrows came together when he saw me walk in. “Little early on a school day, isn’t it, Mick?”
“We got early dismissal, so I thought I’d bring Victoria by to try the best burgers in the state,” I told him.
She was hiding her cheek under the fall of her hair and staring at the floor, and I thought I’d wait till we got to the table to ask about ice so as not to attract any more attention than we already had.
