The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “You think?”

  I realized that I had been speaking in a ridiculously fervent, little-kid-sure way. I poked back another curl, flustered. “Let me show you where the hole is.” I led him to my small bedroom.

  I blushed as he looked at my little mattress beneath where my leg had come through. I was back to feeling all Victorian novel-y, with a—gasp!—man in my boudoir. But maybe those Victorians had it right, because my thoughts had gone right to that. It was absolutely nonsensical, because just a few hours ago I had been furious with him. And now, I was imagining Gunnar in my little bed, filling every corner of it so that I would have to lie across him. Or I’d be intertwined with him, our bodies pressing together, his skin caressing mine. I thought about how the wash of whiskers on his chin would gently scrape my neck when he bent to kiss me there, and the blonde hair I’d seen on his chest would tickle against my bare breasts.

  Because, yes, I had imagined us naked. Now the room felt very, very hot, and Gunnar was very close. I looked up at him, wondering if he felt it, too.

  “That patch will hold temporarily, but it’s going to need a real repair soon. You need a new roof,” he commented.

  No. No, he didn’t feel it at all. “I’ll get to it,” I said.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked suddenly. “I am. We could go eat dinner.”

  “Really? You and me?”

  “If you’re not going to try to kill me with a fork over the table, then yes,” he said. “I’ll bring around my car so you don’t have to crawl through my yard again.”

  “Well.” I considered. Not too much earlier, killing him with a fork would have seemed like a fine plan. But now, eating dinner sounded better, and leaving this tiny bedroom where I was having scandalous thoughts about him sounded best of all. “Well, I will go to dinner with you.”

  “Neighborly of you,” Gunnar remarked over his shoulder, and I tried to pound down the wild hope that had sprung up inside me at his invitation. Neighborly, that was all it was.

  Unfortunately, I did as good a job pounding down my hope as I had on pounding down the rusty nails that still stuck up like cactus spines from my deck. “It’s good to look for the positive. Find the hope and grab onto it,” my dad had always told me, although he struggled with that himself. But I couldn’t do that with Gunnar. There was no hope for what I was dreaming about, and these thoughts would only lead to hurt feelings and a lot of tears. Mine, in secret, so no one would ever know what an idiot I was being, again. An idiot about a guy who was totally out of my reach.

  Chapter 7

  “Did you change your clothes?” Gunnar asked me curiously as I got into his car a few minutes later.

  I shrugged. I had put on a new shirt and a less grubby pair of shorts after I dug for a while through my closet for Gaby-approved items, and I had also tried to tamp down the ring of fire on my head. “I got dirty climbing in your moat,” I explained it away. I saw his eyes flick down over my legs, pale and scratched and bruised as they were.

  “How’s the ankle?” he asked, so I knew that his thoughts had been on my injuries.

  “Much better. I’m going to unwrap it tomorrow. I usually come back really quickly from sprains.”

  “And you would know, having had so many,” he mentioned.

  “Sadly, yes. How about you? Do you have any football injuries?”

  “I’m totally fine,” he said evenly.

  “Because Herb and Buzz keep saying that you got hurt a few times last year. Not just your back, but also your knee and your toe. Does a toe injury really prevent you from playing?” I asked doubtfully.

  “You should try it. Break your big toe and then leverage over three hundred pounds on it to throw yourself into another three-hundred-pound guy charging at you.”

  I turned to look at him. “I wasn’t trying to criticize. I really wasn’t! I just don’t know these things.” I hadn’t done a lot of research on injuries yet, but I decided to start tomorrow at the library when I went to email more résumés.

  “Yes,” Gunnar told me more calmly, “a toe injury can be bad in football. But that’s healed up, and so has my knee, and so has my back.” Unconsciously, he shifted in the driver’s seat. “I’m totally fine,” he repeated.

  “Well, that’s good, since the season opener is coming right up. Only one more preseason game this week, right? Then the Cottonmouths?”

  “Then the Cottonmouths,” he agreed. “They have a new starting quarterback this year who used to play for us. Good kid.”

  I asked more about his teammates, and he told me about them. “We’re pretty close friends,” he said. “Best friends, I’d say. Jory Morin plays on the other side of the QB from me, and he’s engaged to the head coach’s daughter. He’s from here, so I bet they’ll stay in Michigan. Darius will leave once he retires to be near his parents, but César Hidalgo’s wife is from around here, too, and she works for the Woodsmen, now. I’ll still see them.”

  “What do you mean? Are you talking about in the off-season?”

  “Yeah,” he said quickly. I narrowed my eyes. “Tell me more about your job,” he urged. “Did you start that tutoring?”

  “I did, a few weeks ago. It’s…ok.” I told him about Marley and how we had made incremental progress, both in academics and in getting along. “I’m not afraid of her anymore,” I mentioned. “That’s a big step.”

  “You were afraid of someone?” He whistled. “That’s saying something. You’ve never had a problem standing up to me.”

  “I’m afraid of a lot of people,” I admitted. “I get intimidated, still, even though I try not to let it bother me.”

  “Let what bother you?”

  “You know, like high school,” I explained. He shook his head, because of course, he wouldn’t know. “Like walking up to high school and seeing the people outside there, and you got a pit in your stomach because you’d have to go past them and you’d probably trip and they’d laugh at you.”

  “They laughed at you?”

  “I was kind of a joke,” I said. “I know I’m not, not anymore, but it lingers.”

  “You shouldn’t let what happened years ago bother you now.”

  “I know that. Didn’t I just say that I try not to let it bother me? But I still have a mirror!”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Gunnar asked.

  “I bet your sisters are all really pretty, right? Like, prom queen pretty?” He shrugged a little, but his own good looks hadn’t spring from a rock. I was sure he had a gorgeous family. “Think back to when you saw me at the bar, the Silver Dollar. Remember the women I was sitting with?”

  He frowned a little, thinking. “Vaguely,” he answered. “I wasn’t really looking at them.”

  Really? He had been the only man in the bar who wasn’t, then. “Well, they were all beautiful, thin and toned and pretty. I don’t fit into their crowd. Women like that still terrify me some. Just like they did in high school, and I wish I was over it.” We pulled up in front of a little restaurant set back in the woods.

  “Don’t let yourself be intimidated by anyone,” he told me. “That’s silly.”

  I was silly for telling him all that. “I know,” I agreed. “It’s very silly. Never mind.” I opened the car door. “This is the place you want to go?” I’d eaten here before with my grandpa, and it was ok—but more popular with people of my grandpa’s age than Gunnar’s. And if I recalled correctly, it was similar to a cave inside.

  “Is this ok with you? It’s small enough that there aren’t a lot of other customers,” Gunnar explained. “I get left alone.”

  I nodded, because invisibility was always fine with me, and the hostess showed us to a table. I quickly calculated that we’d lowered the median age of diners to about sixty, but it was a little hard to see the ages of the other patrons, because the murky darkness hid a lot. Like, for example, people’s feet, so I tripped on a few on the way in.

  “Does this mean I’m forgiven?” Gunnar asked after we’d ordered.


  “Forgiven for buying the bookstore? You don’t need my forgiveness. It doesn’t matter what I think or do.”

  “It does,” he said. “I don’t want to fight.” He grimaced. “I don’t like hostility.”

  “You picked the wrong career.”

  He laughed. “I don’t like it off the field,” he clarified. “Not between me and the woman living next door. I don’t want another hammer tossed in my direction.” He smiled over at me. “I know, I know, it was an accident. But I really misread the bookstore situation, because I thought you’d be happy about my offer. I thought it would be a load off your mind, having the building off your hands.”

  “Sure,” I said slowly. “It is a…relief, right. If the sale goes through, then that’s one more loose end tied up. Summer school finishes this week and then I’ll only be tutoring in the afternoons, so I can spend most of the day getting a new job and finishing up the repairs on the house.” I could make the money from the learning center stretch some, but not too far, so I would need that new job here ASAP to hold me over until something more permanent came through with all the résumés I was sending out.

  “Finishing up repairs, but not going on the roof,” he warned.

  “Sure,” I repeated. How else would I fix it, by throwing shingles up from the ground and hoping they stuck? “And as soon as I have the new job, I can go.”

  “Go where? Did you get an offer?”

  “No.” I sighed. “I’ve been applying all over the country, and I’ve had a bunch of phone interviews, but then they’re not interested.”

  Gunnar got an odd look on his face. “I don’t want to insult you…”

  “No, go ahead,” I urged, and waited, scowling.

  He first took the fork away from my side of the table, smiling again as he did. “Just in case,” he told me. “I was going to mention that you’ve said things to me that most people would consider rude. That I, in fact, considered rude. Hurtful, thoughtless,” he expanded. “Do you think you may have done that in the phone interviews?”

  I looked at a hole in the tablecloth rather than meet his eyes. “I know I’m socially awkward. Rude. My dad always told me to think before I spoke but I don’t, not always. I tried really hard in the interviews I’ve had and I don’t think I offended anyone. But who knows? That’s part of being a misfit, that I don’t even know when I’m doing the wrong thing.”

  “You’re not a misfit,” Gunnar said gruffly. “That’s not what I meant. I have no doubt that you were entirely competent in your old job, that’s the only reason I’m looking for something else that would have prevented people from hiring you.”

  “How would you know that I was competent? From the way I dropped my purse in a puddle or from how I fell off the roof?”

  He laughed, the sound that I liked so much. “I know from what my attorney found out about you. She said that, despite the mountain of debt you had looming over Holliday Booksellers, you did all the right things to save the business. Even Ainsley was impressed, which told me a lot, because she’s…mean,” he admitted.

  “Gaby said she’s tough,” I told him. “That’s important. I think I was, in my old job.”

  “Maybe, too tough? Did you rub anybody the wrong way there?”

  I thought. “My boss didn’t like me, but I was so careful around him. I thought we were ok but then right around the new year, right before I left and came home, I realized that he wasn’t a fan. I didn’t do anything,” I promised. “And I’m not bragging, but I did work very hard there. I was a good employee because I usually don’t fail at things. Work or academic things, I mean. I didn’t used to.”

  “Everybody fails at things,” Gunnar announced.

  “Even you? Like what?”

  He finished up what was left in the bread basket before answering. “I’ve failed a lot. I didn’t even make varsity until my junior year.” He looked around for the waitress and pointed to the empty basket, smiling at her so that she turned bright red and seemed to have trouble breathing. I nodded in understanding, because he made me feel the same way. “I grew a ton in high school and I was a string bean. The first time I was on the line, I got put on my ass so fast that I didn’t know what had happened. I asked the coach and he said, ‘You got owned, Christensen.’ He sent me to the weight room the next day and told my mom to buy protein shakes.” Gunnar laughed. “That was just one time in a string of failures.”

  “But you got back up,” I pointed out. “You got up off your string bean butt and went to the weight room, and you fixed it. I couldn’t fix Holliday Booksellers. And if I can’t fix finding another job, then I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Gaby keeps telling me…” I broke off.

  “What?”

  “I was going to say that Gaby keeps telling me to go work for this awful guy from our high school, but talking about her made me think that I saw her sitting at that table in the corner. I must be imagining—no, that is Gaby!” It was, but she was wearing a hat pulled down over her pretty face and she had on sunglasses, too, even though it was night and it was also black as pitch inside this restaurant. “What is she doing here?” I wondered aloud.

  Gunnar looked over. “Hiding,” he said. “That’s what I wear when I don’t want to be seen. You should leave her alone.”

  I craned my neck more. “Who is that guy she’s with?” He was older, a “silver fox” as Martha at the grocery store had been known to say, and he looked vaguely familiar. I saw him reach across the table to caress her hand, then he glanced quickly around the room, like he was checking to see if anyone caught him at it. I looked away just in time, before our eyes met. “That man looks familiar. He’s hiding, too! What’s she up to?”

  “Leave them alone,” Gunnar advised again. He thanked the waitress as she put down a huge plate of food in front of him, and she turned even redder. Then she looked at me in pure confusion. I understood that, too—it was also hard for me to believe that I was sitting here with a man like this, some type of Viking in the flesh.

  “I didn’t think Gaby was the kind of woman who kept a lot of secrets,” I said, trying not to stare at her and her date. I had thought we were friends, and did friends hide their boyfriends from each other? Because this guy must have been her boyfriend: she was now holding up a menu and they leaned across the table toward each other behind it. “If they’re not kissing, then I don’t know what kissing is!” I announced.

  “If she wants you to know something, she’ll tell you,” Gunnar noted.

  “Yes, ok. I’ll stop peeking.”

  “You’re not peeking, you’re rubbernecking,” he told me. I shrugged and picked up my steak knife and his eyebrows went up. “That’s for your food, correct?”

  I stuck out my tongue at him.

  “I guess it’s lucky for me that you get over your temper quickly. Or that you don’t hold a grudge,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m the most grudgeful person in the northern Lower Peninsula,” I told him. “By far. I’m still mad about not getting invited to A.J. Mayfield’s birthday party in second grade. I wasn’t ever high on the elementary school the guest list,” I admitted. “My social issues were already apparent, and word had also gotten around that I always gave books as presents. It was a little like I was the house that gives out dental floss on Halloween.”

  “If you can’t let go of your grievances, why aren’t you still throwing rocks at me, then?”

  “First, that rock really was a mistake. I’ve been having a raccoon problem,” I explained. “Second, you haven’t done anything for me to hold a grudge. You didn’t talk about the chocolate cupcakes with cream filling and bouncy house that you were going to have at your party and then not invite me. Still thinking of A.J. Mayfield,” I said briefly. “Sure, I hold a grudge, but I hope I’m at least fair about things.”

  “Good. I’m glad we can be neighbors who don’t want to kill each other.”

  “Did you want to kill me, too?” I asked him.

  “At times,” he admitted. �
��I’ve had my moments with you. But I’m not much of an angry guy.”

  “You’re not angry. You don’t like hostility,” I recounted. “Then, I don’t get how you play football. It’s so violent and mean.”

  Gunnar laughed. “Mean? I don’t know about that. Not everyone is always friendly, that’s for sure,” he admitted, “but I don’t think mean.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “I play well because I want to win.” He looked at me with his beautiful blue eyes. “Every time, all the time, I want to win. It’s not anger that drives me, it’s that.” He glanced across the room. “Your friend is leaving.”

  I turned around in my chair to watch the disguised Gaby hurry out. The man she was with sat for another moment paying the bill. He squinted at the paper in the dim lighting and put on reading glasses before laying out a wad of cash, and then following her through the door.

  “Did you just take his picture?”

  I turned back to Gunnar and shook my phone to make the screen show the image, but it remained dark. Also, a tiny triangle of glass fell onto the tablecloth. “I did, but I don’t see that it worked. I’m having some issues with this phone.”

  “From the rum and Coke it sat in?”

  “That couldn’t have helped. Also, it’s gone down with me a few times when I’ve fallen. I used to spend a good chunk of my salary on new screens, new everything,” I admitted. “It still works for calls. Mostly.” I swiped and jerked my finger back. “Ow! I need to re-tape.”

  “Let me see.” Gunnar held out his palm and I put mine into it. I held my breath. We were kind of, almost, holding hands. “It’s just a little cut, but you do need a new screen,” he said. “The tape isn’t enough.” He let go and I put my fists into my lap. “Stop trying to see them in the parking lot,” he told me as I craned my neck to look through the curtained window.

  “I’m just curious! If she has a boyfriend, that’s very surprising to me. Not that she has a boyfriend, because of course a woman like Gaby would, but that she’s hiding it,” I explained. “She doesn’t seem to have many secrets.”