Make It Count

by Megan Erickson

  “Mom—”

  She shook her head, cutting him off. “If he were here today, he’d tell you not to give up. I know it. So, if you really want her, go after her. Show her the kind of man you are. The kind of man I know you are. Your father’s son.”

  He opened his mouth and then closed it. His eyes burned behind his lids and his chest felt tight, like his heart was pumping too much blood.

  But he had a plan. He could work with a plan. And he wouldn’t give up. He strode to his mom and gathered her in a hug, running his hands up and down her back. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She sniffed loudly and he chuckled. When he pulled back, she took his face in both of her hands. Looking into her eyes, hearing her talk about her husband, his father, with love rather than grief was enough for him to know he needed to move on.

  “I’m not going to write to the parole board,” he said abruptly.

  Her smile faded and her eyes darted over his face. “What?”

  He shook his head to dislodge her hands. “It’s time to move on, Mom. MacEnroe is almost seventy years old now. I don’t forgive him, but I don’t have room in my head and in my heart to hate him anymore. I don’t have the energy for this all-consuming bitterness. I just . . . need to let it go. If he gets paroled, he gets paroled. If not, he can die in prison. I can’t care anymore. And I finally realized it’s not traitorous to Dad’s legacy to feel like that. From what I remember of Dad, and what you’ve told me about him, he wouldn’t want me to be this angry all the time. He’d want me to move on, fill myself with love and not all this anger.” He took a deep breath. “So that’s it. That’s my decision.”

  Tears streamed down her face, incongruous with the openmouthed smile. “Oh Alec.” Her thumbs swiped his cheekbones. “You really are a man.”

  “Mom . . .”

  She blew out a laugh. “My father used to say that you didn’t really grow up until after your parents passed. You were always an old soul, such a serious baby. And when your father died, you were such a little man, at five years old. You used to lie in bed with me and stroke my hair while I cried . . .” She hitched sobbing breath.

  “Mom—” he murmured.

  “You are a man, Alec. You are a wise, loving man and if your father could see you now . . . Oh!” She gasped another breath, her shoulders shaking now with renewed sobs.

  “Please, don’t cry.” He hugged her, tucking her head under his chin. He didn’t realize he was crying until tears splashed onto the top of her dark head.

  He didn’t know how long they held each other. Their tears slowly dried and his mom’s body relaxed beneath his hands.

  She finally pulled back and held his face in her hands again. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Go get your girl, huh?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, Mom. I’ll go get her.”

  He drove to campus and parked as close as he could to Kat’s building. When he passed the library, his swift walking turned into a jog and by the time he reached the campus suites, he was sprinting, his messenger bag slapping painfully on his hip.

  He tore up the stairs and banged his fist twice on Kat’s door, bracing himself with his other hand on the door frame. He sucked in deep breaths of cool air, his back heaving. When no one answered, he banged again, this time not letting up until the door swung open in haste.

  “Jeez, take it easy—” Shanna stopped talking when she caught sight of Alec.

  “Is Kat here?” he said between breaths.

  “Um . . . do you need a water or something? Or, I dunno, an inhaler?” Shanna eyed him like he was going to drop dead.

  “No. Is Kat here?”

  She turned her head back into the apartment. “Tara, is Kat here?”

  “No!’ came the shouted response.

  “Where is she?” Alec demanded.

  “Where is she?” Shanna yelled into the apartment to Tara, and Alec thought this was the stupidest communication system he’d ever been a part of.

  “No, she went home,” Tara said, coming out of the bedroom and walking toward Alec.

  “She went home?”

  Tara shrugged. “She was upset about her midterms. Said she was over it and needed to get away.”

  Over it? Like she was dropping out? Oh hell no.

  “I need her address,” he demanded.

  Tara raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  Alec nodded. “Yes, I need to talk to her. I mean, I need to see her. Please. I swear I’m not crazy, we—”

  “I know who you are, Zuk.” Tara smirked, then waved her hand and turned away from him. She was back minutes later, an address scrawled on a piece of pink-flowered paper. “Happy driving.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  WHEN HER PARENTS walked in the door after work, Kat was stirring the simmering feijoada, her favorite Brazilian dish, made of black beans, sausage and bacon. Her mom had prepared it that morning so it could stew all day, and the smell drove Kat crazy. She could barely wait to pour it over rice and dig in.

  But once the meal was served and her father perused his newspaper while her mother tapped away on her iPhone, Kat had had enough of holding her tongue.

  “So, I went to see Mrs. Ross today,” she said pushing around the rice on her plate.

  “Mrs. Ross? Your middle-school teacher?” her mom asked.

  “Yep, one and the same.”

  “That’s nice, minha flor,” her father said, then turned to her mother and pointed out some mind-numbing news on the day’s NASDAQ closing.

  “She mentioned something interesting, about how she thought I had dyslexia,” Kat said quickly.

  Her mom’s fork clattered onto her plate and both her parents stared at her.

  “She said she mentioned it to you when I was in sixth grade. I don’t remember anything about that.”

  Her mother glanced at her husband nervously, but he seemed suddenly enraptured with his burgundy napkin. “You were always a little behind when it came to reading and writing, but we thought it was because of moving from Brazil when you were young and growing up in a bilingual household . . .” Her voice trailed off and Kat’s parents exchanged a look she couldn’t decipher.

  “But Mrs. Ross mentioned this to you in sixth grade.” Kat said. “Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

  Her father took a deep breath. “We were concerned about you fitting in and we . . . didn’t want you singled out any more than you already were. You know, with special classes or a teacher’s aide or anything like that.”

  Kat gripped her fork so tightly, the metal cut into her palm. “I wish you would have told me—”

  “But honey,” her mom said. “You were eleven years old. We didn’t think you were old enough to make any sort of decisions—”

  “But this decision you made for me has affected me my whole life!” Kat struggled to keep her voice down. “You were worried about me not fitting in? It didn’t matter, because I’ve never felt like I fit in. Everyone around me could read their textbooks and write their papers and take their tests and then there was me—struggling to get through a paragraph about . . . I don’t know . . . the Revolutionary War that should have been read a month ago.”

  His father glanced at her mother’s pale face before turning to Kat. Regret was etched into the furrow of his brows. “But, Katía, you have so many other talents. You’re a beautiful girl, charming and funny with a huge heart. We didn’t think studies was one of your talents. And that’s okay.”

  Something in his tone, while loving, bordered on placating, and it shoved a steel rod in her spine. She straightened and jutted her chin out. “I’m sorry. But I’m . . . I’m not willing to accept that. I want it to be one of my talents.”

  Silence. The only sound was the refrigerator kicking on to fill the depleted ice-cube trays.

  “But Elijah—”

  “For God’s sakes, Mom!” Kat exploded, slamming her hands down onto the table so hard her
knife clattered to the floor. “I saw Mrs. Carter this afternoon. Elijah is interning this summer at a software developer. He’s graduating a semester early. He’s spending spring break in Vegas.” She hissed the last word. “Yeah, that label and that stigma really killed his future, didn’t it?”

  Her mom’s eye twitched, a tell that meant she was about to fracture.

  “I took a test online,” Kat said quietly. “I scored moderate dyslexia in all the areas.”

  For the first time in the conversation, her parents looked guilty.

  “Is there something we can do now?” her mother asked.

  Kat shook her head, ponytail whipping in her face. “No. Absolutely not. I’m doing this on my own. I have a meeting with the learning disability center on campus, and I’m going to find a way to get the help I need. And pass statistics.”

  “Well, if you need me to make a call—” her father started.

  Kat shoved her chair back and stood up. “I think it’s a little late for you to ‘make a call,’ Dad. You know, I know tons of kids who always complained about their parents’ high expectations of them. Well, parents having low expectations sucks, too.”

  She carried her plate to the sink, her parents murmuring quietly to each other in hushed, chagrined tones. Kat stopped at the kitchen table on her way back. “By the way, I’m considering declaring my major as education. I think I’d like to teach, like Mrs. Ross.”

  Her father nodded, looking like he was going to say something else, but she walked away before he could.

  Kat headed up to her room to do a little research on changing her major to education. But before her laptop booted up, her cell rang. She answered it without checking the caller. “Yeah?”

  “Kat?” Alec’s voice was unsure.

  “Alec?” Kat’s heartbeat sped up. She didn’t know how much more emotion she could take in one day. “Um, hey.”

  “Hey . . . uh . . . so . . . do you know where”—he paused—“Lucky Strikes is?”

  That was the last thing she expected him to ask. “The bowling alley? Yeah.”

  “Oh!” He blew out a breath into the phone. “That’s what it is. Damn, that sign is—”

  She waved her hand, even though he couldn’t see her. “I know. I know. The pin and bowling balls look like a weenis and balls. It’s an incredibly unfortunate sign. Although, the T-shirts are arguably worse.”

  Silence.

  “Alec? Still there?”

  “Did you just say weenis?”

  “Um . . . yeah?”

  “Kat, you are twenty years old and you use the word weenis. That is not okay.”

  “What? I don’t like penis because it sounds, I don’t know, medical. Like ‘let me insert the catheter into your penis,’ and cock sounds so . . . erotic novel-ish. Like ‘he stroked her feminine petals with his mushroom-tipped cock.’ ”

  More silence.

  “Alec?”

  “Is it wrong that I’m kind of turned on right now?”

  “Oh for God’s sakes. Why are you calling me asking me about Lucky Strikes?”

  “Um . . . because I’m here. In the parking lot. Sitting in my car. Because I ran out of gas.”

  That still didn’t make sense. “Why are you in Cross Keys?”

  There was a pause. “For you, Kat. I drove here for you.”

  Those words sent a flurry of activity in her belly that rose quickly to her head, sending her reeling.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she whispered.

  “I’ll be here,” he whispered back.

  BY THE TIME she reached the bowling alley, the threatening clouds that had hung around all day finally opened up and unleashed torrents of rain. When she spotted Alec’s car in the far corner of the parking lot, she wondered if they could reenact that scene in The Notebook where Rachel McAdams jumped on Ryan Gosling and they made out in the rain. It was pretty much the most romantic movie scene of all time. But when she pulled up alongside his car, his door opened, a jacket thrown over his head, and he quickly scooted into her passenger seat.

  Okay, so no-go on the rain make-out scene.

  “Hey,” he said, tossing a duffel bag in the backseat.

  “Hey.”

  He licked his lips, opened his mouth and then closed it, staring out of her windshield. She’d turned her wipers off, so the rain made everything outside a watery blur like they were in a watercolor painting. It was very isolating, the two of them in the car, the outside world unreachable.

  “You drove here to sit in my car and stare at the rain?” she asked.

  He snorted a laugh. “Shit, I had this whole thing planned in my head on the drive here but then my car ran out of gas and then that damn sign threw me and now I’m all screwed up.”

  His skin was pale, his eyes red and face pinched, like he was in pain. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”

  He laughed bitterly, the sound grating to her ears. “Yeah, something happened. Max happened.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Fucking asshole.”

  “What—”

  “I would have punched him in the face if I didn’t think I’d break my hand on his steel-beamed jaw.”

  She threw up her hands. “Alec!”

  “Max slept with Carrie.”

  Kat thought she could hear every single raindrop that hit the car, the sound reverberating around the car and into her head. Her deep breaths. Alec’s stomach gurgling. “What? When?”

  “Oh, you know, when she was still my girlfriend.”

  Kat felt the punch in her stomach, as she was sure Alec did. “Oh, no. How did you find out?”

  Alec audibly ground his teeth. “I overheard them talking and confronted him. Turns out he was the guy she slept with last summer.”

  “That’s . . . that’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”

  “And he had the fucking balls to give me guilt about you.” Alec clenched his fists on his lap.

  Hope bubbled in her belly. “So, you found out and drove here?”

  He turned to face her. “I went to your apartment and Tara said you came home. Kat, please don’t drop out of school. I can help you and—”

  “Wait, what?”

  “—we can make sure you pass this class—”

  “Alec, stop!”

  He snapped his mouth shut.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m not sure what Tara said, but I’m not dropping out. My statistics midterm was really hard, and I just needed a break from school.”

  He exhaled and leaned back in his seat, rubbing his forehead. “Oh, thank God.”

  Is that why he . . . “Is that why you drove here? To talk me out of dropping out of school?”

  He lolled his head, grinning. “Well, yeah. You’re my star student, you know?”

  Right. He didn’t come to her to declare his undying love. He came to make sure the girl he tutored didn’t drop out of school. Of course.

  He raised his hand and cupped her cheek, his thumb swiping her cheekbone, reminding her how little time she had his affection and how much she missed it. “I’m so sorry, Kat. For trying to be this stupid know-it-all who thought he could fix everything. For not owning up in front of Max. Just . . . fuck . . . for all of it. I missed you.”

  The warmth of his touch, the look in his eyes and his voice, his beautiful deep voice saying those words rasped along the raw edges of the hole in her heart. Marked by Alec Stone.

  Relief and longing pushed back all the other emotions fighting for attention. Right now, with the world outside a watercolor in the downpour, all that mattered was his possessive touch on her cheek. His apology and his confession that he missed her. She’d worry later about the doubt that still lingered in the flanks of her mind—that horrible, self-sabotaging emotion. The killer of hope. “I missed you, too.”

  The corner of his lips twitched, like he read her mind—because she was brain-naked in front of him—and he leaned in, brushing his lips still wet and cold from the rain right over hers. He pulled
back but she hadn’t had enough yet. Plus, she needed to warm up those lips. It was only polite, right? So she chased his retreat and mashed her lips to his again and he smiled against her mouth, then opened up so she could reacquaint her tongue with his. He felt the same and tasted the same—smooth, sweet Alec.

  When he pulled back the second time, she let him. “Wanna come home with me?”

  He laughed. “What else am I gonna do? Go bowling?”

  She smiled and started her car. But as she pulled out of the parking lot, that doubt crept in again. Fear clawed up her throat and her palms dampened on the steering wheel. Alec was about to enter her house. Her own turf. How in the heck was she going to protect herself?

  KAT DROVE THE dozen or so miles home while Alec fiddled with all the controls in her car. It fit her, a convertible in a cheery red color, and smelled like something called freesia according to a little plastic circle attached to her dashboard.

  Britney Spears blasted from the speakers but Kat didn’t sing along. In fact this was a subdued Kat, a toned-down, muted version, which bothered him. He wanted to ask about her midterm and her other classes. He wanted to ask a whole lot of things, but her posture was closed off. And he knew, if she threw up the sex kitten mask, it’d break his heart.

  When she pulled into her driveway, Alec stared out of his window at her house and wondered if they’d ended up at Hogwarts.

  He slowly opened his car door and stepped out, staring up at her large, three-story home. He slung his a tattered duffel bag over his shoulder as she stepped to his side.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “How come you never told me you’re, like, Brazilian royalty?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Brazil isn’t a monarchy.”

  “No, really. What do your parents do?”

  She squeezed his hand and bumped him with her hip.

  “What?”

  “Bonus points for not asking me what my dad does,” she said, her smile genuine, and it sped up his heart that he’d put it there.

  “Oh, well, you know me. Burning bras in my spare time.”