Do Over

by Serena Bell

  —

  It was a rainy Saturday in early December. We were, I don’t know, eleven or twelve, and Maddie and I were playing Wiffle ball in the street with some neighborhood kids, not giving a shit that our clothes were slowly becoming soaked. There were probably eight of us, mostly boys, but there were a couple of other neighborhood girls besides Maddie who were game for Wiffle ball or touch football, and they were probably there. To be honest, I don’t remember.

  I was pitching. Maddie was catching. I had just thrown a mean third strike past a boy named Jared when I saw my father coming up the street toward us. He was obviously looking for me, which was a bad sign. Having my father’s attention turned on me was never a good thing. I tried whenever possible to stay under the radar.

  It was different for Sienna. He wasn’t as hard on Sienna. He sometimes even praised her. But when my father turned his sights on me, my first instinct was to run—or burrow into the ground.

  “Jack!” he bellowed. “Jack, get your ass over here.”

  He was a big guy, almost two hundred pounds, barrel-chested, a little bowlegged. He was wearing a Seahawks sweatshirt and jeans. He needed a haircut and a shave.

  The other kids mostly looked at the ground or at the sky—the ones who’d never heard anyone talk to them that way—or winced sympathetically—the ones who got talked to the way my dad talked to me.

  I tossed the ball to the first baseman and made my way slowly over to my father. I could see he was riled up. He was breathing hard and the color was high in his face, his eyes hard and small. He grabbed my arm, too tight.

  “They just delivered the wreaths for the baseball fundraiser. And you fucked up the order. Jesus, Jack, how hard is it? All you had to do was copy the orders from the order sheets to the master sheet. Couldn’t you even do that right? And now we’re out sixty bucks for someone else’s fucking Christmas wreaths.”

  “I—”

  “No excuses,” he said, voice hard, fingers digging into my arm. “No excuses. No apologies. You’ll pay me back the sixty, and you’ll call the families and explain. That you’re a fucking idiot and can’t transcribe numbers from one sheet of paper to another. Jesus. You are so fucking stupid.”

  He dropped my arm as if disgusted with it and with me, turned around, and walked back toward the house.

  My face was hot. My whole body was hot, and shaking. I recognized the feeling as rage and humiliation. It was familiar. The whole scene was familiar.

  The Wiffle ball game had started up again during his tirade. I think the other kids wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. Someone else was pitching now. If I’d gone back and reclaimed my spot, I’m sure they would have given it back to me, but I couldn’t. I started walking away. Slowly at first, then faster, speeding up to a trot. I wanted to get far away.

  I’m going to run away.

  From home, I meant, but the truth was, I wanted to run away from myself, and the fact that I knew that wasn’t possible made me even angrier.

  “Jack.”

  I ignored her at first.

  “Jack! Wait up.”

  I slowed down and let Maddie catch up. She fell in alongside me. It was like we were jogging together, only with no particular destination. We ran for a long time, the rain getting heavier, soaking our hair, rolling down our faces.

  The rage softened and washed away. I was left with a numb hurt. We slowed down to a walk.

  “You’re not stupid.”

  She was fierce. She was almost as fierce as my father. I felt like I was caught between them, suspended between the way my father saw me and the way Maddie saw me. I teetered there.

  “Yeah, well, I fucked up the order.”

  “People make mistakes.”

  I’m sure it was something her parents had said to her. It was something good parents said to their kids.

  “I make a lot of mistakes. I don’t make anything except mistakes.”

  “That’s not true, Jack. You do the right thing a lot.”

  “Like when?”

  We stopped and faced each other. She thought about it hard. I watched water drip off the end of her nose, which was red from the cold. She wasn’t pretty yet. She was just Maddie, brown-haired and scrappy and the person I most wanted to be near.

  “Do you remember the time during the lightning storm when you held my hand?”

  I did. She’d been so scared she couldn’t catch her breath. She’d looked like she was going to crack into a million pieces, and I’d put my hand out without thinking about it. I just did. And when her breathing had slowed and her face had unfrozen, I’d felt like I’d won the lottery.

  It had never happened again and neither of us had ever mentioned it. Until now.

  I nodded.

  “Not all boys would do that. They would be awkward or whatever. But you knew I was scared, and you did the right thing. So see? You do.”

  She said it with so much authority that I didn’t know how to argue with her. And anyway, I didn’t want to argue anymore.

  I wanted to be who she thought I was.

  Chapter 9

  Two cool hands settle over my eyes. I smell lilac body wash, and a second later, a pair of tits whose epic proportions I’m intimately familiar with press into my back.

  “Long time no see,” a voice murmurs, close to my ear. “What are you doing later tonight?”

  I extricate myself from the octopus that is Lani Wellings and turn around on my bar stool. Henry and Clark and I are in O’Hannihans, watching the dregs of a college basketball game. It’s Saturday night. I offered to Maddie that if she wanted to go out, I’d stay home with Gabe, but she said she wanted to get him settled in and make sure he was okay, unpack a few basics. “Not that I’ll be here long,” she said quickly.

  I wanted to tell her she could stay as long as she wanted, but after what happened in my mom’s kitchen this afternoon, I wasn’t sure how good an idea that was. What I should be doing is chasing the kind of no-strings encounter that’s being displayed before me: Lani in a satin bustier and a barely there miniskirt.

  “Hey, Lani,” I say, working the eyes-up angle with some difficulty.

  “Hey, Jack, what’s up? Anything for me?” She swoops a piece of raven-black hair behind an ear and grins.

  Henry and Clark have drifted off somewhere, being too good friends to cock-block me.

  Lani is slot number one on my mental speed dial, the most consistently beneficial of all my friends. She and I go way back, nearly as far back as Maddie and me. Lani is the proud possessor of my virginity, actually, though the same isn’t true in reverse. She was two years ahead of me in school and may hold the distinction of having popped the cherries of more high school boys than any other girl to have graduated from Revere Lake High School.

  I am momentarily tempted by the onslaught of lilac and curves—not to mention Lani’s amazing mouth, which is slicked berry pink tonight—until I remember that Maddie is sleeping in my house. The icing effect isn’t so much the fact that it would be somewhere between awkward and impossible to bring Lani back there (we could always go to Lani’s place), but the fact that it’s Maddie. Maddie just makes Lani seem too gaudy, too obvious, too easy. But even that’s not the whole story. It’s more that thinking about Maddie makes it so painfully obvious that what Lani and I do is just the sexual equivalent of scratching a mosquito bite. Vaguely satisfying, but only very briefly. And yeah, sometimes you gotta scratch, but—

  “Aw, Lani, I gotta take a rain check tonight.”

  She pouts. “You seeing someone? It’s been too long, Jack.”

  It has been a while, actually. And Lani’s right: usually the only time we go this long without hooking up is when one of us is with someone else.

  “No,” I say. “Not seeing anyone.”

  Except in my midnight fantasies.

  But I don’t say that out loud.

  She swipes a finger gently across my cheekbone. “What happened here?”

  “Took a board to the face at w
ork.”

  She frowned sympathetically. “How’re things otherwise?”

  “They’re good. Gabe and Maddie are staying with me for a bit.”

  “Really?”

  She knows the outlines of the story. Obviously, that Maddie and I hooked up, that things went south, that since then it’s been somewhere between weird and outright awkward between us.

  “So that’s where you’ve been,” she says, raising an eyebrow significantly.

  “No. Not like that. They just needed a place to crash while they look for a new apartment.”

  One of Lani’s most charming traits is her total lack of jealousy. Usually, I tell her pretty much everything about my sex life, and she does the same in reverse—sometimes it’s even part of the game we play with each other—but tonight I’m not in the mood to share.

  She shrugs. “Just be careful, Jack. Roommates are tricky. I’ve fucked a few too many roommates, and it never ends up well for the rent getting paid.”

  That makes me laugh.

  “Okay,” she says, laughing too. “If you’re not going to ease my pain, I’m off to find someone who will.”

  “You do that, hon’,” I tell her, and she waves a chipper goodbye and sails across the room.

  Henry and Clark drift back.

  “A sure thing’s nice,” Henry says wistfully.

  “She’s in the market,” I tell him. Getting Henry laid is a perpetual pet project of mine.

  “You’re not taking her home?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve got Maddie staying with me.”

  “You what?” Henry is looking at me like I’m stark raving mad. Which maybe I am.

  “She needed a place to stay,” I say defensively. “Her boyfriend—dumped her.”

  “And you’re that place?”

  “She didn’t really have anyone else she could ask.”

  I’d been about to tell Henry and Clark the whole story, about Harris and Mia, but I just don’t think Maddie would want them to know. Not that she did anything wrong, but it’s humiliating, still, right, being in that position? I still get pissed every time I picture her walking in on that. I drain my beer to soak the anger.

  “That’s going to seriously fuck up your game,” Clark says, making a gesture to indicate the turning of the vise.

  I give him the finger. “At least I’ve got game.”

  “Past tense. You had game. Look at those three,” he says, and gestures across the room at a stunning set—a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette, just like a bad joke. “What’s your plan, man? The car? A motel? Or tell her your kid’s mom is at your place but she won’t mind if you two bump uglies for a bit as long as you keep the volume down? Or maybe Maddie will want to join in—”

  “Shut up, asshole,” Henry says, and I shoot him a grateful look. Even though Henry doesn’t know the whole story of what went down between me and Maddie, he knows enough to know that Maddie’s not just some girl I screwed and got pregnant. “How long?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She says she’ll get out as soon as she finds a place.”

  “Just as long as this doesn’t fuck up Phoenix,” Clark says. The three of us have plans to head down for the March Madness championship games. Clark has a friend who can lay his hands on tickets, which isn’t the kind of opportunity that comes along every day.

  “She’ll be gone by then,” I say, with confidence. “She’s looking at places tomorrow—”

  “You watching her kid?”

  “What the fuck, Clark? He’s my kid, too.”

  Clark shrugs. Henry looks amused.

  “It’s not funny,” I tell him.

  Henry loses the smile. And stares at me, eyes narrowed, for a minute. “That bruise on your ugly mug have anything to do with her and her ex?”

  I look away.

  He shakes his head. “You better hope she finds another place to live fast.”

  Truer words have never been spoken. Just before I left to come here, Maddie asked if I’d mind keeping an eye and an ear open for Gabe, who was watching Dora the Explorer. She wanted to take a quick shower.

  It wasn’t Gabe who was the problem. He sat quietly and watched his show.

  I was the problem. I couldn’t stop picturing her in there. Stripping off that clingy pink top and the lacy bra I’d brushed with my lips earlier. I could see her, reflected in the mirror, nipples drawn tight, dark against the heavy globes of her breasts. The slight, soft curve of her belly and the neat triangle of reddish-brown curls between her legs. Her pale, juicy thighs, squeezed together—because in my fantasy she’s thinking about me the same way I’m thinking about her.

  She steps into the shower and the water is sluicing over her, trickling between her breasts, between her legs, teasing her tipped-up nipples, and I step in there with her—

  And, cut.

  Maddie’s a good person, and no matter how things went down between us later, she deserves better than whatever it was I thought I was doing this afternoon in my mom’s kitchen.

  And she’s right. We are friends. We got past the ugliness in our past, and the way things are now, it’s more like when we were kids, before things ever got complicated. When I just knew, without it having to be said out loud, that I could count on her, and she could count on me.

  She’s definitely right that there aren’t a whole lot of people she can say that about right now. I don’t want to take that away from her. Which sex would definitely do. We know that from past experience.

  We can’t just screw around, then go our separate ways if things don’t work out. Between the two of us, we have to make things right for Gabe.

  That said, as long as Maddie is in my house, I’m going to die a little every time she changes her clothes, takes a shower, slides into bed…

  “Amen to that, brother,” I tell Henry, and order another beer.

  Chapter 10

  Jack comes into the kitchen, pours himself a steaming cup of coffee, and slugs about half of it down. It makes my throat hurt, watching him. He looks pretty wiped, like he didn’t sleep much, which—well, I know he didn’t.

  “Thank you for making coffee,” he says.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He’s wearing his usual morning attire, or lack thereof. It’s hard to look at him and breathe at the same time, so I avert my eyes from the expanse of tanned skin and busy myself with cleaning up the dishes from Gabe’s and my breakfast.

  “How was your evening?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Not as much fun as yours.” Then I’m annoyed with myself for letting him know that I have any idea when he came home or that I care at all what he was doing last night.

  I didn’t mean to keep tabs on him while he was out with Henry and Clark, but part of my brain refused to give up the ghost and go to sleep, so I know he came in around 2 a.m. I also didn’t mean to spend any of the time he was gone imagining what he was doing, but I kept picturing him the way he was in high school, surrounded by girls, grinning, holding court. I could see him, older and even better looking, doing the same thing at a bar, and then going home with one of them, holding her hand, whispering something sexy in her ear as they slipped out past the other patrons.

  It hurt my stomach to imagine it.

  “Just beer and basketball,” he says lightly. “Then a couple other guys showed up and we got into a darts tournament.”

  I am ridiculously relieved.

  Just like last night, when I heard him come in and pad past my room to his. Relieved, and then mad at myself for feeling it.

  It’s clear I have to find a new place as fast as possible. Because even though I was the one who put the brakes on at Jack’s mom’s apartment, I don’t trust myself to do it again.

  As soon as he put his mouth on mine yesterday, I started wanting things. The two of us naked. The two of us wrapped around each other. And I figured that it wouldn’t take long—based on previous experience—for me to start wanting the other stuff, too. The two of us snuggled up in bed. The two o
f us spending the whole night together. Gabe coming in to wake the two of us up in the morning. All of us living together as a family.

  It was like Jack’s kiss pushed a Stupid Girl button in my head that made me forget that none of that was ever going to happen. And I knew that if there was more kissing, there would also be more Stupid.

  “So,” I say, closing the mental door on that ache. “Janice is going to come watch Gabe so I can apartment hunt. I tried to see if she could watch him at her place, but her husband is sick in bed.”

  “Why’d you call Janice?” Jack asks sharply. “I can watch him.”

  I’m startled. “I—Honestly, it didn’t even occur to—” I’m most of the way through that sentence before I think better of it, but when I meet Jack’s eyes, he looks hurt. “Um, I just figured you’d be busy with stuff.”

  “Nothing as important as you finding an apartment,” he says. “I’ll watch him.”

  On one hand, this is a very nice thing for him to say. On the other, I feel a little pang of he wants me out of here as much as I know I need to get out of here.

  “Are your mom and sister still out of town? You could call one of them—”

  I’m trying to make it a little easier on him, but now he’s glaring at me.

  “Why, because you think I can’t handle him?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I watch him all the time.”

  Okay, Jack, enough self-righteousness. I know your game.

  I give him a stern look.

  “What?” Despite the tired eyes and disreputable beard shadow, he still pulls off puppy-dog innocence.

  “I read your mom’s Facebook account. Every time you have him, she posts photos. I know who watches him on ‘your’ weekends.” I air-quote it.

  To his credit, he drops the act with a shrug. “Yeah. Okay. So most of the time, I have help. But I did fine Friday. And you don’t have to pay Janice. Save your money for first and last months’ rent and security.”

  I’d be happy not to have to pay Janice to watch Gabe. That said, I have to do what’s best for Gabe. “It’ll be a long day, and he’ll be awake, not like Friday night.”